dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.
I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?
It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.
Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.
I see the point of Scott's article as an appeal to give the status to the first kind and not mistake the second kind as status worthy.
One of Scott's best recent works is a deep dive on the modern embrace of slave morality and he explains a lot of social and artistic trends that have been bothering him.
Matt Yglesias Considered as the Nietzschean Superman
you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2. But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world.
...
Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package
He doesn't use the word "wokeness" in this post but you can read between the lines.
Warning: it is long, even for a Scott post.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
It's amazing university endured for any length of time as a useful signal in the first place.
If you told me your business was to give paying customers certificates for good grades that they need to get good jobs and denying these certificates for bad grades causes paying customers to get mad, well we all know what's going to happen.
lol
I just remembered that part with the Van Eck phreaking (spying on someone else's screen through radiation) and they end up exfiltrating an excessively detailed document about the guy's leggings fetish.
Pargin is hilarious. I didn't realize I was a fan of his until I connected him to some articles he had written for Cracked, originally under an Asian sounding pseudonym.
Favorite: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
I would love to send this link to mopey crybaby friends who complain about The System or society or whatever but I don't have the balls.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
What's the funniest part? I could use the nostalgia!
I read a bunch of his books like 25 years ago. I recently re-read Snow Crash and chuckled pretty regularly. Hiro was my favorite first read through, but now that I'm older and wiser, it's Uncle Enzo that speaks to me the most.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
Crystal Society (trilogy?)
I just started it. I originally put in my Kindle library a few years ago and then forgot about it. I don't even remember what attracted me to it.
Written from the perspective of an AI embodied in a robot coming online for the first time. The book is ostensibly about a society with no privacy and how it leads to dysfunction, but I haven't gotten there yet.
I've been on both sides of interviewing. For better or for worse leetcode style stuff has become the standardized testing of hiring. Generally better since you can't really grind leetcode enough and still pass tech interviews if you have a <100 IQ. But it also rewards smart dorks who mercilessly study it but are otherwise shit developers.
You definitely lose people sometimes because they brainfart during one of them, or they get anxious and underperform. More experienced interviewers know this and get a sense fairly quickly if you're going to actually get the right answer if you have more time and lower pressure. The best companies use these very quantitative measures as foils to have more qualitative deep technical conversations and see how well you work together. People get hired all of the time even though they thought they failed the coding interview since they didn't get the right answer or they only wrote out an O(N^2) solution but were clearly on the right track in discussions for an O(N) one and they thought you were cool and reasonable.
Maddeningly, you never truly know why you fail most interviews. Try not to read too much into it if you do.
A buddy of mine who's hiring (but is not allowed to hire in the US) gave me a mock interview and basically told me even basic competence is rare, and the technical interview for a normal company is basically testing to make sure you aren't a complete fraud. Some of the stories he told me about fraud in the hiring process blew my mind with their brazenness.
Yes, there's an adverse selection problem. The people looking for jobs tend to be terrible. (Also if a job opening exists, it probably sucks: good people fleeing a shit show or because incompetent hires were fired.)
Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.
I still think the most preposterous and unbelievable parts of the game are not the wokeness or girlbosses or most of the tech, or that huge parts of SF have become the Tenderloin, but that SF has significantly more mega skyscrapers by 2077.
I had no idea that day cares received subsides for enrolling low income families. I send my kids to a fairly expensive one and am surprised by how many hippie star children that clearly don't have normal jobs can send their kids also. I just assumed they were blowing an inheritance or something.
What's the search filter for excluding these?
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