most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey
This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.
Well, I think that sort of thing trickles down to the normies, too. If there's this ambient level of crazies constantly spouting "Trump's insane, Trump's going to kill us all, Trump's going to usher in a second holocaust, Trump cheated his way into the presidency", at some point the normies start to believe it. It has become truth to anyone who doesn't pay really really close attention or at least have some source of information that doesn't fall in line, because of this onslaught of one-sided information coming from sources that were considered reliable prior to Trump's presidency. Like, my cousins are those sports news people, and they are pretty checked out of world events, but even they believe Trump is the complete worst, tacitly.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
You may be right, I'm not certain. Is there an explanation for Reagan?
Also, if you are right, then my next worry is that to get elected as a Republican anymore, you basically actually have to be as erratic as Trump! If that's the case, then I worry about whether things will ever stop moving left as fast as they are today.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
It sounds like part of what you're saying is that undercurrents are more powerful for change than the currents themselves. This is very interesting, and if true, speaks to some sort of profoundly strange with our world or our culture. I feel like this could be worthy of someone writing some kind of political science thesis about this. I'd love to know more about why that's the case, has it always been the case, are there nuances, what things work better for undercurrents vs overcurrents, is it because of our unprecedented online culture, and what this means for how future political movements should be trying to accomplish their ends.
A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.
I've never been subject to being publicly screamed at, or witnessed it the new local farmers market when someone wears a BLM slogan.
Well-put. This lines up very well with my set of experiences, too. TBH, I really do think that Scott's recent theories in The Psychopolitics Of Trauma are pretty spot on, for better and for worse.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Thanks! I kept thinking of The Pyramid and the Garden and kept combing through it to try to find it, but it is funny that it's actually from Scott's post about this exact topic!
haroldbkny
2mo ago
One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist.
I hope you're right! But I've always viewed the crazy COVID response itself as being because of leftism. I remember the leftists in my life talking about how COVID was Trump's fault and saying they need to take the pandemic response into their own hands. And people did this, making everyone think that COVID was the most serious illness ever that was going to destroy our country, which caused businesses to have everyone work from home because they didn't want to seem like they were uncaring. And before you know it, we had 3 years of lockdowns. I think that if a disease as non-deadly COVID happened 20 years prior, it's possible we wouldn't' have locked down like that, it was maybe only because the leftists had such groundswell power.
The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged
That's what I keep thinking, but they keep proving me wrong!
haroldbkny
2mo ago
From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.
I don't have much comment about how the right is handling this, probably because I live in a very progressive area. If the right whines about things, I don't hear about it, and I don't get bothered by it. Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.
?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?
I didn't say anything about Biden, I was talking about how Trump's presidency played out.
Well, consider "whiny" is perhaps an understatement, or a proxy for other things. What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality? As an example, I really can't trust any news source for anything that is said about Trump. They can basically say whatever they want, because half the country is ready to believe it, and they have tons of precedent to draw on from other new sources doing the same thing.
And the same thing happens in my everyday life, too, when dealing with all my friends and loved ones. It's a complete uphill battle for me to try to communicate to anyone that they're being a conspiracy theorist crazy person, and ultimately I end up sounding like the conspiracy theorist because I'm going against the grain. It's hard enough to argue against a Gish gallop, but even worse when there's precedent for the Gish gallop, and everyone dogpiles on board, and there's a whole industry devoted to that one Gish gallop.
edit: I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.
I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.
Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.
Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in?
Well, the "I'm 18" filters are annoying, but until just now, I didn't know it was only a new reddit thing.
Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly?
I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?
No
haroldbkny
2mo ago
IDK, for some reason I like the white space. Less congested. It's just like if someone dumps a lot of text without using paragraph breaks, I find it much harder to read.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Man, I just don't understand why everyone likes old reddit so much, maybe because I didn't get into reddit until after old reddit was over and done with. Why do people like it?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Are you certain? How many people do you know who have died who can attest to this?
If you have founded your own company, you probably have some leadership ability. Should you apply as a manager, or even a program manager? Even if that's not what you want to do long-term, it'll get you in the door.
Almost everyone has only intermediate-beginner, non-specialized skills. For a long time, that was enough to make sure you are well-paid in software. The industry runs on the ability of managers to take fungible engineers and turn them into productive engineers who they can apply towards their specific ends.
With the recent landscape changes (both the recession and chat GPT maybe starting to replace people), maybe that level of skill isn't enough anymore. I can't say but I haven't yet seen that trend personally.
Also, I think maybe the issue could be trying to get by on just your engineering skill. Technical ability is great, but if you're not a genius then it may not be enough to make you stand out. But having middle-level technical skill and reasoning ability combined with ability to lead, communicate, and make transparent decisions will make you much more marketable. As I said above, from your startup experiences, you probably have the leadership and communication, so you should leverage it. Apply to roles that will use that, and think about what experiences show off that ability that you can write about on cover letters and talk about in interviews.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I probably have similar feelings. One thing which I've been thinking about lately is that the reason I try to do well at work, and the reason I'm afraid to get fired has more to do with wanting to avoid making a mistake and also to avoid the shame of it, as opposed to actually fearing that I won't be able to get another job. I also fear a spiral of self-blame and shame that could lead to me being unemployed and unemployable.
Also I have what I expect might be a similar feeling in my heart/chest when something occurs to me that could be big and impacting. This could be for things like having a (maybe true or not) realization that if I screw up a particular project or even a meeting I'm in, that this could be the start of the end for me at my job. Or it could even be different, like when I used to be single and would realize that I was in an opportunity to make a move on someone I was interested in.
I think for me, a lot of it is about that it's much easier to deal with life if you don't think about it as real. I lament the fact that I'm not living in a video game where I can just undo bad mistakes, I hate the permanence of it all. It's stupid of me, but that's just the way I feel, and I'm much better able to deal with making decisions if I put it in a sandbox, and think as if it's just something I'm trying out, that is not life affecting. I'm fortunate that I live in a part of the world that affords me enough disconnect from some harsh realities of life, that this strategy is doable. Also, SSRIs help me with this, too. Without them I'm a wreck who is always feeling the harsh reality of permanence, and I'm paralyzed.
Also, if you don't mind me asking, what sort of investments do you deal in that have the potential to make millions on over a few years? Are they real estate investments, or stocks, or something else? How does one learn to get into that sort of investing? All I do is index funds, because that's all I ever was taught about.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I think you're asking an interesting question, and I look forward to reading the answers. Just wanted to add something
Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s?
It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6).
To the extent that I've heard blue-tribers be defensive, it's in relation to the dominance of 2000s era Bush-style evangelicals. I know many who at least claim to still live in fear of those folks, the religious Right, thinking that they'll come back and totally rule the country at any moment.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I also didn't think that c++ was a quant trading thing. I remember actually that I had a friend at Jane Street that talked a lot about OCaml.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Well, I don't know too much about switching, then, but I do know that I've seen previous coworkers make the switch, and at least one switched via some sort of special program designed for taking engineers and teaching them what they need for quant trading.
I myself would be very interested in whatever findings you come up with!
haroldbkny
2mo ago
If you're in FAANG, don't you already have finance people messaging you every other day on linkedin trying to get you to switch already? Context: I have been in FAANG for 8 years and I personally have these recruiters constantly messaging me, and have had this since year 3 in FAANG.
I assume that when you're talking about getting into finance, you're talking about getting into the software side of quant trading. If that's not what you mean, then maybe it's harder to do than just taking the recruiters up on their offers.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
To this day, I see people saying things like "Trump separated families at the border" and "Trump puts kids in cages".
I haven't really checked in on this issue in about 5 years, but I had remembered back when this happened, hearing conflicting reports about whether this was the Trump administration's policies, or if this was something that (like so many other things) had been going on for a long time before him, but for which he got saddled with the blame because of TDS.
I wanted to find out the truth about what happened, and if Trump is uniquely to blame. Quite frankly, I don't really trust anyone or any source (from the left or the right) other than this forum to be honest about the veracity of the accusations, because TDS is so powerful.
haroldbkny
3mo ago
Oh yeah, you should also check out I am the Walrus and Tomorrow Never Knows. Those would be like if Revolution 9 tried to be a little more like music.
haroldbkny
3mo ago
Cool, I'm glad you gave them a listen!
haroldbkny
3mo ago
but it's 4/4 pop-rock
That's such a mischaracterization of the Beatles. If you think that, then you simply haven't listened to the full span of their music, and I'll guess you're missing out on both middle and mid-late Beatles.
Quantitatively, they did so much stuff besides sticking to common time all the time. For examples of well-known Beatles tunes that do weird things from a metric perspective: She Said, Good Morning, All You Need is Love, Two of Us, Rain, We Can Work it Out, Revolution, Across the Universe. Even Here Comes the Sun, which you mention, is not just 4/4, listen to the part that goes "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes".
As far as it being "easy listening" is concerned, my god, some of their stuff is so experimental, it's even barely listenable to! Revolution 9 comes to mind. And there's every point in-between, as well. Listen to Sgt Pepper, and tell me that's easy listening. Mr Kite is haunting with eerie sound experiments. Sgt Pepper and Reprise really rock. Fixing A Hole is wistful and thought provoking. A Day in the Life is downright depressing.
I guess not. But I don't exactly respect them, either. But I do sympathize with some of their frustrations.
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