But when I hear someone moaning "it's not fair — I'm just as good at my job as he is, but he'll work for cheaper!", all I can think is "oh, well then he deserves the job more than you."
I'm not saying this is always wrong, but it is the incantation that summons Moloch.
Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.
A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.
In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.
If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.
Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.
Elsewhere on this site, we have @faceh lamenting that every tech product eventually enshittifies and tech innovators build Skinner boxes rather than finding a way to monetize that doesn't wreck user experience. And one of the primary reasons this happens is that people expect a reasonably complete product with a certain amount of polish these days, and the moment you start looking for funding to do so you meet a VC who say, "well, I could fund you, or I could fund one of the 10,000 startups who aren't pre-committing to leave money on the floor". (There are other reasons, including the fact that every founder believes they should be a multi-millionaire if their startup is successful).
And this attitude is slowly poisoning the entire tech market. Customers are skeptical about trying new products, expecting the rug to be pulled from under them. Entrepreneurs are pressured to only start buzzworld-laden unicorns (because that's all that gets funded) and pass over serious attempts to build useful things. There is no slack to take risks, and quality slowly declines as more and more individually-ok but collectively-damning savings are made. It's not just that outsourcing leads to cultural externalities, or even that these devs are necessarily worse. But the attitude of "I can find someone cheaper than you" undermines the spirit that is needed to produce genuinely high-quality products.
There is also the more hard-edged point that paying American salaries is (or should be) the price of having access to the rich American market to sell your product, which is sustained by American workers living in America paying American prices. If you want to situate your company in Vietnam, hire only Vietnamese workers and sell only in Vietnam for Vietnamese prices, nobody will stop you.
Corvos
24d ago
Apparently. Was going off general semantics, sports analytics not really my area!
Corvos
24d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_ice_cream
Where there's a will...
Corvos
25d ago
Probably means ‘someone as good or better’, such that you could replace him without it being obviously a terrible idea.
Corvos
26d ago
Similar to the Southport Riots, I think - mass arrests, dogs, anyone who expresses any support online goes straight to jail.
Corvos
27d ago
I would put it like this:
- If somebody is a victim, they must have victimised by someone or something.
- It would be odd to put more blame on the victim than the person or thing who made them a victim, and without whom this presumably wouldn’t have happened.
- And then it’s a hop, a skip and a jump for a motivated reasoner to go from ‘ultimately, a lot of blame must also go to X’ to ‘well, it’s not really his fault’.
Corvos
27d ago
Right? There’s a mess of heuristics going on under the hood.
For example, many people see a strong moral difference between ‘doing X’ and ‘not preventing X’ as you say.
Then we seem to see a distinction made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ values. People can relatively easily trade off profane dilemmas like ‘I could finish up my uber job for the day, or I could take another few passengers and earn enough to have a nice burger on the way back home’. But then they point-blank refuse to trade off ‘sacred’ values like not shooting children against any ‘profane’ sum of money.
And of course different people seem to have different sets of heuristics. Some people just don’t seem to see any moral difference between action and inaction, for example, and then those with and without the heuristic get baffled or angry when they try to debate each other.
Did you ever come across Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations theory from 2010ish? His book was called “The Righteous Mind” and it goes into his research trying to identify the different moral foundations that people seem to use (harm, caring, purity, etc.) and the fact that different people seem to use different sets.
Corvos
27d ago
I keep meaning to dig up the source but in some famous treatise on Unix (the original manual?) written I think before Endless September, there was a chapter on Usenet, which spends a long time kvetching about the constant flame wars, schisms, and dogpiling.
Corvos
27d ago
The Commonwealth doesn’t have any legal say on the matter AFAIK. There’s always the issue of whether they would accept William or demand that another country’s leader gets to be head of the Commonwealth, but that’s a separate matter.
My impression is that Charles is generally quite well-liked, at least in Africa, since he cares a lot about commonwealth and he’s quite internationalist. William is probably something of an unknown quantity.
Corvos
27d ago
Context has some effect, but I’ve always been very struck by the (Greek?) phrase: Men travel to escape from themselves, but it does not work. For wherever you go, there you are.
In my experience, I would say that one’s own personality is somewhat more malleable than one realises and also far, far less.
Edit: the specific phrasing is more recent, but I’m sure I read something to that effect in Seneca or some other classical source.
Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed.
I do, and intellectually I could be argued into some kind of non-aggression pact on pragmatic grounds. But you seemed to me to be expressing confusion or annoyance that people don’t instinctively feel sympathy / offer clemency for someone who has something embarrassing leak online, and this is my explanation as to why.
For the sake of clarity, I don’t feel particularly strongly about sending dick pics to people who are reasonably likely to enjoy getting them. My understanding is that there are a considerable number of recipients who don’t, however. More, I am someone who has a chip on my shoulder from following all the rules re: girls and not getting anywhere for it, and I get very irritated by the idea that the golden age of the internet involved horny lying chads strip-mining a generation of girls and ruining it for the rest of us.
Corvos
27d ago
That’s very interesting, thanks for explaining.
I always wanted to try studying Japanese history in the original, without preconceptions, but my la gauge ability didn’t really develop fast enough to make that viable, so I’m more ignorant than I’d like to be.
Corvos
27d ago
Onshape is good. Though might teach you some bad habits if you're moving to big standard platforms.
Corvos
27d ago
In economics, people keep trying to collapse things down into a single monetary dimension and get annoyed when it doesn't work well. Yes, you can sort-of do this: e.g. how much money would I need to offer to get you to eat a dog turd, for example. But then you find out people agree that it's silly to spend more than 10m to save a child's life from cancer (so child's life is worth 10m max), but they wouldn't accept 20m to shoot a child (so child's life worth greater than 20m??? wat do).
So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net. I am reasonably proud of my Motte posting, and have positive feelings towards most others who post on the Motte; those feelings are reversed for those who send dick pics, which it would never occur to me to day. Meanwhile I am moderately ashamed of my search history and can see myself as part of the rather awkward Band of Brothers on that issue.
Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.
Corvos
27d ago
Sure, I would happily cheer for King William V!
Prince Harry the heir I wonder about. I think his constitution is just a bit tricky innately - I kind of assume that somebody who lets themselves be led around like that has a sort-of innate weakness of spirit that will manifest in one way or another. Maybe he would have been a slave to popularity, or in thrall to certain courtiers, or who knows, but I don't think he would have been a good king even if he hadn't been the spare.
Corvos
27d ago
I would respect the King for doing this, though as a general principle I think you need to wait long enough for them to be a reasonably known quantity. Certainly not younger than maybe 35. If the throne had been passed to Prince Harry ten years ago, you could have had the entire monarchy being led around by the nose to please a Californian socialite with a grudge.
[Old age abdication was common for Japanese Emperors, but they were never ruling monarchs]
Sort of? AFAIK it was considered a big thing when Emperor Akihito abdicated in 2019 (since the emperor is also anointed by God, or possibly is a god, I forget) and nobody had done it for 200 years. I'd be interested to hear more background on this.
Corvos
27d ago
Er, no, I was just making those up to point out that there are entirely different categories of scandals and people who do 'Forbidden Thing Category A' may have lots of patience for other 'A' enjoyers whilst advocating zero tolerance for 'Forbidden Thing Category B'.
Meanwhile, in the real world, MAGA won the popular vote (that is, the absolute majority of Americans) and some of its most fervent supporters are people who fled the third world and are appalled to see America sliding back into it.
It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.
And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!
Right, but this is why people started demanding that everything be public and making awful apps like Tea. The time before banking regulations used to be great for speculators but it was terrible for everyone else, which is why we now have banking regulations. "You used to be able to get away with anything" is usually going to be said in the past sense because the majority of people do not see this as a positive. It's no different from the glory days of Soho, 1960s mixed-sex accommodation, or Sodom. These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.
Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one.
But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.
We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them.
Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.
Sorry you're having a bad time. Milk might be a good place to start - it's nicer than Huel, has more good things in it and it's cheaper. Get some apples for fibre to prevent gumming yourself up and ideally some decent-quality bread and cheese.
Less delicious than McDonalds of course.
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