roystgnr
5d ago
fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it
Well, damn. I didn't upvote you originally, but I have now. I'm less likely to upvote long comments, because the longer they are the more imperfections they have, and if something highly-upvoted isn't 100% good then there's too-often someone who picks out the worst small aspect and says "Look what TheMotte agrees with!!!" ... but I hope it's clear that, even when people disagree with you, we're very glad you're here.
I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable?
"Harry Potter had replied ... it was not a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.
Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss." - HPMOR
One of the lessons of that fan fic is that even the smartest characters aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, but here I think Harry is intelligently expressing the correct attitude and Draco is intelligently expressing the natural attitude. If you're in a fight, then to win you want to express your side's Correct beliefs, not undermine each other. But if you want to have correct beliefs rather than just Correct ones, then exposing your beliefs to challenge is barely even the first step in the process toward the ideal of being both the believer and the challenger.
there isn't really anything the company can do about it except hire another braver woman first (or I guess hire three women all together) because I have options for companies that aren't 100% male programmers and I go for those instead.
This is so sad to read. I'm old enough and naive enough to still think that 90s-style "just be blind to race and sex and everything else irrelevant when hiring and it'll all work out fine" is the ideal way for society to operate, but it turns out that that plus a little hysteresis is enough to make whole companies indefinitely segregated even against their own desires? You're making a good argument for company-level affirmative action programs, and an even better argument against disparate impact lawsuits.
roystgnr
5d ago
When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation.
Hence all his military choreography looks like it's being acted out by aircraft, not spacecraft.
His trench run didn't have inherent verisimilitude because spacecraft really need to keep thrusting forward to maintain a constant velocity, it had relative verisimilitude because essentially none of the audience has an intuitive feeling for Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum, so "why don't Luke's wingmen just spin around and shoot back?" isn't a thought that we find unavoidable.
I wonder if some modern lack of relative verisimilitude is simply because we're a more culturally fractured society now. You still don't have an astronaut in the writers' room because there just aren't enough astronauts, but there's also lots of other occupations and activities and demographics that the writers room wants to write about (because they're interesting to watch), has no expertise with (because these days people with relevant experience are less likely to be acquainted with scriptwriters), but now gets burned by mistakes about (because lots of their intended audience is acquainted with those experiences).
It gets to the point where a little bit of realism can become a fun trope subversion in itself. When Sterling Archer has tinnitus or we see a montage explaining why Hawkeye is going deaf, seeing the reminder that guns and explosions are actually cripplingly loud is amusing, even to people who go to gun ranges and always wear ear protection, because seeing Hollywood get it right in fiction is a pleasant surprise.
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
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