dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
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.
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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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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.
The LGBT stuff wasn't more than I would expect from a cyberpunk open world game. Probably a bit less than expected? In fact if you gave your male character no dick he could never have sex with any character, IIRC. Bold!
Also whenever you played as Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) you were always doing straight sex/straight womanizing. I wonder if he specifically refused to do queer stuff or they just didn't want to go there since he's supposed to be a macho anarchist punk rocker.
OTOH the sheer volume of badass girlbosses and best hackers/netrunners being girls was quite overwrought.
I'm surprised because I thought ICE's deportation orders are not the big swinging dicks of arrest warrants, which is why they say stuff like don't answer the door for them if they knock and they can't deport you. If an illegal alien's roommate can refuse to let ICE in and it is not obstruction, then why is what this judge did obstruction?
I think it is distasteful for the judge to interfere in a law enforcement activity to be clear, just not sure how they found her guilty.
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?
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.
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