Corvos
1yr ago
I generally find there's a one-day lag between sleeping well/badly and feeling energetic/tired. For example, I can sleep for only four hours and be chipper the next day, but then I'll wake up half-dead the day afterwards even if I got eight hours good sleep. Conversely, getting me up to peak energy seems to require several days of good sleep in a row.
Does anyone else get the same kind of lag?
Corvos
1yr ago
Keynes thought we'd all be working 5-15 hour weeks at most by the 70s yet that was obviously wrong.
It's entirely possible that many of us (especially in white-collar jobs) are indeed working 5-15 hour weeks spread out over 40 hours. Competition is tight, and nobody wants to look like they're not trying hard, so we go easy on ourselves rather than visibly negotiating for reduced hours. Various companies have experimented with four-day weeks and they don't seem to have resulted in big productivity drops*, suggesting that the same amount of work could potentially be done in fewer hours if the will was there and pressure was applied.
*Obviously difficult to measure and prone to biased reporting. Notably companies don't tend to keep four-day weeks once the experiment ends, although this may result from inertia or a desire to look competitive in the market.
https://gizmodo.com/four-day-work-week-work-from-home-return-to-office-1849562791
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-microsoft-japan_n_5d77c236e4b0fde50c2dec9a
Corvos
1yr ago
Two reasons:
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Usage of finite resources. Farmland, minerals, etc. Sheer space - being able to look out of the window and see nothing you don't own appeals to people. I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's Solaria, a planet where people have lived on vast estates for so long that physically perceiving or interacting with another person repulses them.
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I think people like controlling other people. They want to make sure everyone thinks and does Good things, and refrains from Bad things, regardless of whether this actually affects their own interests.
Corvos
1yr ago
Good cases make bad law. Common law is meant to develop organically and so be optimised for the general case. Setting up specific test cases to force it in the direction you want is very much against the spirit of the thing.
Corvos
1yr ago
Sure, but my point is that ‘need’ and ‘want’ are two very different beasts and ‘want’ is capable of expanding pretty much indefinitely.
Or to put it another way, in your scenario it’s Bezos and his buddies who decide what they need, not the breakaway group, and I bet they’re going to disagree.
Corvos
1yr ago
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that you need a ladder of successful cases to get you up to the point where significant precedents can be made. Your final case functions as the lynchpin of a long campaign, and you should therefore choose it meticulously. Is that about right?
Whereas my (idealistic) conception of common law is that low-level cases arise stochastically as the law meets the public. Precedent is therefore slowly formed, and the law slowly shaped, by the real effects of that law in relation to the broad mass of humanity. Cases at the higher level then codify and rationalise this consensus. In this conception, deliberately forming test cases is a sin because you are biasing your training data at the lower levels and distorting the results at the higher levels.
(I speak mostly in relation to the UK, which has no formal constitution.)
Corvos
1yr ago
But I think real world examples of groups with massively disparate technology levels are illustrative. For the most part, Exxon does not steal subsistence farmland unless there's oil literally underneath it. Modern industrialized humans generally don't seek out resources useful to monkeys just for the heck of stealing them.
That’s fair, I hadn’t thought about it like that. Big aristocratic estates have historically been a thing - maybe our conception of what’s valuable changed, or the social acceptability of chasing it to the last drop. I’ll have to think about it.
Corvos
1yr ago
Thanks for the detailed explanation! My knowledge isn’t nearly as in-depth.
Corvos
1yr ago
It’s possible. That would imply that you shouldn’t be able to do difficult things on those occasions, even when you feel fine. I’m not sure whether that’s true for me; I do get slower and clumsier though.
Corvos
1yr ago
And nobody wants that except the old people who want to be able to set those traditions and duties. This is why conservatism can never really attract the young.
I don’t think this is the case. In my experience the trad right is mostly young, pushing back against older conservatives who are economically right-wing but socially liberal. The traditions in question are also more likely to be those of dead ancestors than current elders, and in practice there’s nothing preventing the young from interpreting those as they please.
In short, I think conservatism in the sense of keep-doing-what-we’re-doing-now skews elderly but RETVRN style rightism is inherently riskier and relies on youthful zealotry.
As I understand it, we’re talking about whether such ideas can appeal to groups other than old people. I would say the existence of the online trad-right is proof that they can.
Moving on to the substance, you’re largely correct. To get personal, I’m currently working far from home, I’m not married, I don’t manage to go to church very often, etc. This bothers me.
I would say that the core insight of the trad right is that modern society inherently conspires against living a good life.
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You can’t keep a sense of community if everyone half-intelligent has to choose between leaving home or committing career suicide.
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It’s hard to marry when many jobs are effectively gender-segregated and most romance takes place on the Tinder meat market.
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If you do, you have to choose between being childless, working long hours to afford childcare, and career suicide for at least one parent.
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Et cetera.
Now, you may feel that this is all whining but the reality is that even if driven individuals can push back against this stuff, it’s too hard for most of us to swim against the current. I think the stars re: loneliness, celibacy bear this out.
In short, I predict that if we do see a return to trad conservatism (which frankly I doubt) there will be a generational gap where trad ideas are popular but the necessary reforms and innovations aren’t yet there for the majority to live according to those ideals.
This is mostly shooting in the dark, though. I would be interested in discussing previous successful traditionalist movements - I have a hunch that the Meiji Restoration is one, and the Great Awakening in America might be another.
Corvos
1yr ago
I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.
I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.
What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:
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Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)
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Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.
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Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.
In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.
Corvos
1yr ago
Let’s say you’re JRR Tolkien and you’ve written the Lord of the Rings. It’s your unique creation and without you no copies could exist.
From my perspective, that means that you have a right to own the creation as a whole in perpetuity. This is why the argument that because copying doesn’t remove any given physical iteration of the work nothing has been taken from the owner never made much sense to me. This is also why I don’t think you should be able to buy or contractually obtain (as opposed to lease) copyright from someone. You are attempting to appropriate the rights of creatorship without being the creator.
(This is the maximal scenario for me. Lots of circumstances can reduce the author’s rights morally and in practice. For example, if the work was created by many people cooperating, like a TV show, if you take TLoR and just change a couple of the words, if the author is dead and the copyright is held by their great-grandchildren who despise him, etc.)
Corvos
11mo ago
I think that one of the ideas you are trying to get at is the difference between 'reality + imperfect methods for dealing with that reality' vs. 'the world as pure social construct'. Thus the distinction between 'you can't do this because the law says so' vs. 'you won't do this because you don't want to defy the law right now'.
To me it makes sense to see this on a spectrum. For example, as you move from rural to urban, the amount of your experience that is 'raw' reality unmediated by human systems decreases compared to the amount that is determined by social systems. The same is true for (most) startups, where you are very close to bankruptcy at any given time and exposed very closely to the needs of your client, vs. a large entrenched bureaucracy like the civil service or the (peacetime) army.
I've long had a theory that as America becomes fuller and more urbanised, the population whose day-to-day experience is very highly socially mediated will continually increase and that American society will consequently become more European, with a more entrenched class system and more complicated systems of deference. So far that theory seems to be holding up quite well.
Corvos
10mo ago
Precisely. If you try to associate an idea with villainy, you run the risk that the audience keeps the idea and rejects the attempted association. If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanHasAPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedWrongness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire
Corvos
10mo ago
I think the steelman is this:
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We (the review site) know that audience trolls attempt to manipulate ratings in various ways. (Review bombing, stanning, reviewing without seeing the film).
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Either we let this stand, and users see audience-manipulated scores, or we attempt to correct for this and give a good idea of the real sentiment of good-faith reviewers.
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Time passes.
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We're already filtering out trolls who are review bombing because Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is the wrong shade of green, why not also filter out people who give bad reviews because the mermaid is the wrong colour?
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Some of the trolls have got wise to this, and give bad reviews for plausible reasons, even though actually they're racists who hate the film for having a black lead.
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People who criticise films with a black lead should be filtered out, even if (especially if!) they have legitimate points.
This is the same logic that has played out in every part of social media over the last 15 years.
Corvos
10mo ago
Oh, sure. But this is how Twitter / Facebook / Rotten Tomatoes and all the other ones talked themselves into their current policies, or got pushed into them, or justified them to skeptics. If I remember correctly, one of the big turning points was when social media companies realised that they were the linchpin of Isis recruitment efforts, complete with execution videos.
If you’re serious about building something which supports free speech, you therefore have to recognise that a fraction of your users are going to be trolls and bad actors. Another fraction will use the existence of the first faction to push their agenda, and you have to have countermeasures for both.
As countermeasures go, this site’s rules do pretty well, I think, with the caveat that it relies on the good will and restraint of a handful of mods to function.
Corvos
10mo ago
Yes, it has to be near-hegemonic to work. It can, though, I think. All the stories I’ve heard indicate that people really were much more sexually sheltered in the 30s, or even the 60s, compared to now. It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution spread through society in the late 60s that knowing a lot about sex became the default rather than the exception.
Corvos
10mo ago
I think there’s a lot to that. Makes me think of Brandon Sanderson. The Mormonism gives him somewhere to stand and serious (now also vaguely countercultural) principles to conjure with, but aren’t so restrictive that they force him to be dour and po-faced.
Corvos
10mo ago
Wouldn’t work. Trump’s ego is too big to work with genuinely competent people long-term. Same problem with Boris Johnson: ultimately he couldn’t bear to share the stage with Cummings. (Other problems too, but that was a biggie.)
If you want to work with good people, I think you have to be able to give public credit where it’s due, and you have to tolerate some genuine pushback from your advisors.
Corvos
10mo ago
He wasn’t that smart but he was certainly smarter than Boris.
Getting more general, I think that having a charismatic showman front for intelligent advisors is often proposed as the ideal combo but rarely works because the love of the spotlight that produces showmanship doesn’t allow you to recognise that your advisors know better than you.
Corvos
10mo ago
Note that both of your examples are prior to 2016, ie pre woke.
And yes, maybe appropriation by white actors is bad, depending on your philosophy, but it wasn’t self-aware. It was the natural consequences of films being made by a mostly white film industry in a mostly white country for a mostly white audience. What makes my blood boil is when all the same people who came up with concept of appropriation and wrote articles like the above turn around and carefully, deliberately do exactly the same thing. And now it’s okay because it’s the right people being erased.
My manager swears by ‘Making of a Manager’, if it helps. It’s a pretty good book.
But I think it mostly boils down to is the fact that you are trying to fix management problems as an engineer rather than as a manager. It happens to pretty much everyone. But your job isn’t to fix stuff anymore (or automate it). It’s to arrange matters so that things get fixed.
That means that if people are ignorant, you have to arrange for them to get trained or fired. If your sysadmins don’t think that their role covers stuff you want them to do, you have to sit down with the relevant authorities and decide the correct boundaries of their role. Maybe that means hiring or reassigning somebody to handle the gap between these guys and your users, maybe it means making clear that their job does in fact involve dealing with users and they can lump it or leave it. Maybe it means assigning people to do the automation work you’re doing now. But as their manager your reports’ attitude/competence problems are now your problem and you have to fix the problems at their root.
I hope this is helpful and not too harsh - you’re managing a larger number of people than me. This is mostly based on advice I’ve got from the people above me.
I think you may be seeing people trying to apply pure conflict theory in an environment where only mistake theory is socially acceptable. Somebody made a comment here a long time ago to the effect that "I tolerate anything except intolerance" in fact allows you to vilify anything you like, provided you link that thing to intolerance in some way. This produces tendentious, distorted arguments similar (I think) to "Russians/Democrats stole the election".
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