thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
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User ID: 1131
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.
I'm not sure if "liberalism turning everything into a samey globalist liberal soup" is actually a thing. I'm suspicious of it because we hear about it from both the left and right; the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.
So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup? (I love this label, by the way). I'm not sure.
Yes, it allows people to cross cultural and geographical boundaries to engage in a similar activity, eg. teens from all over the world can play Call of Duty together. But does that mean they grow detached from the culture that immediately surrounds them? There appear to be specific flavors of camaraderie among gamers of different nationalities. In the same way, people are afraid of "cocacolization", but wherever I've traveled around Europe and the US, I've seen a lot of local flavors, even local coke knockoffs.
Stepping away from my own subjective experience, it looks like, if anything, the world is undergoing fragmentation. Famous SV venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote a little bit about it some years ago. And, if anything, it seems like this process is the fastest and most powerful in the liberal west--people sorting themselves out by beliefs, music, age, interests, lifestyles (eg. monogamy vs polygamy), etc. Which makes sense, because there being no culture-enforcement in the form of a church, a government, or a tradition, people will find values that bind them, creating more diversity instead of less. Actually, thinking about over the last 50-100 years, the period of solidified nationalism, it was the pre-globalist world that looks like samey soup: top down, church/government enforced beliefs and rituals.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.
And we've seen this play out since the dawn of the Internet. The vast majority of online spaces were rich in cliques, flamewars, relentless trolling, and corrupt moderation that never shied from using the banhammer for personal gain. It's why such a high number of online communities follow a predictable path of eventually becoming echo chambers and later imploding. Perhaps it would even be fair to say that the vast majority of people who take on the mission of establishing and running a community have little or no knowledge of basic coordination mechanisms, some dating as far back as ancient Greece.
Themotte and some rat-adjacent spaces are the only ones I know that have avoided imploding while maintaining the ability to generate novel, interesting discussion. I can see no other reason than the fact that these places have not only enshrined rules that encourage civilized argument, what Karl Popper labeled "the rational unity of mankind", but also ensured that moderation is done in the spirit of those rules.
As evidenced by the broader culture war, the majority of people are fine with tribal warfare, whether it's online or offline.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
I'm confused by your premises.
You describe puritans and the founding of the US as if to imply these are strongly related, one flowing from the other perhaps. But if we look at when the Mayflower landed--1620--and when the Constitution was published--1787--there's over a century between those two dates! I'd expect the people and the norms and ideas to have changed much in the time in between.
Admittedly, I know little about early/Puritan America, but looking at the Consitution, it seems to strongly lean toward individualism. The Bill of Rights establishes a framework where the individual is the basic unit of society and seeks to protect the individual from the Government. I know that in reality this didn't always work out this way because people were constrained by customs and norms, especially as seen from our vantage point, but compared to what was and had been going on in Europe back then, it was an incredible leap forward away from collectivism.
These towns were not morally relativistic and policed behaviour of their members.
But this policing was done according to norms that, back then, were revolutionary! Like, in contrast to much of Europe, women were allowed and supported in attaining an education. I don't have sources at hand, but I also believe men were punished for beating women. And again, this sounds conservative now, but back in the day, this was some holy shit progressive thinking and if I were to go out on a limb, many European conservatives of that era would have labeled allowing ordinary women to attend school as something disgusting and upsetting to the perfect, God-ordained order of things.
What I'm trying to say, I think, is that modern conservatives would find issues with how liberal both the Puritans of the 17th century and the Enlightened "Spirit of '76" crowd of the 18th century.
(Though my understanding of modern US conservatism is rather fuzzy, so I should spend more time reading through this thread.)
What many conservatives actually want is to enforce their values, norms, and culture on society.
When I naturalized some years back, I signed up for the Republican party. In my mind, this was the party espousing the values of 1776 (and 1787). Markets, individualism, responsibility. Friedman, McCain, Schwarzenegger. But since then, I noticed the same pattern you point out here, cut my ties, and having no other options, marked myself as independent.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
I mean look how happy these people are. An MTGA (Make Tech Great Again) movement is uprising!
My subjective perception of this is that there is a huge silent majority who just wants to code things. A large part of that group just wants to go to work, do stuff, and get money. A small part wants to hack away on cool shit, have fun, and talk shop with like-minded people. I think this way because the amount of eye-rolling and sighing when anything DEI-related comes up is becoming more and more visible (& audible). It's why so many people stayed at Twitter.
My own bet for the industry is that, in the short term, it will divide itself into companies where this silent majority can do what it wants and companies that continue to engage in ritualistic bureaucratic diversity. There are quite a few good engineers in the latter camp, but over the longer term, I think more engineers will gravitate toward the first group.
The big unknown quantity in this view is what are the younger, newer engineers, the ones just graduating, doing/thinking/planning. They're the ones most susceptible to listening to the loudest voices and may come in with a skewed perception and self-filter into the second (DEI) camp thinking that's the norm.
Also, if not for the 80h weeks, I would be applying to Twitter yesterday.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.
You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.
None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.
Change is unavoidable and constant.
That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]
So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.
But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:
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multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.
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multiple instances of planned downtime.
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a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.
Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:
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multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.
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at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)
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almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.
Let's see what happens!
[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.
Good point. I'll be more careful about the curse of knowledge in the future.
I don't have access to my notes, but wikipedia does a good job summarizing what I've found myself (source):
The whole-word method received support from Kenneth J. Goodman who wrote an article in 1967 entitled Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.[127] Although not supported by scientific studies, the theory became very influential as the whole language method.[128][129] Since the 1970s some whole language supporters such as Frank Smith, are unyielding in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all.[130]
Yet other researchers say instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness are "critically important" and "essential" to develop early reading skills.[131][132][133] In 2000, the US National Reading Panel identified five ingredients of effective reading instruction, of which phonics is one; the other four are phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.[134] Reports from other countries, such as the Australian report on Teaching reading (2005)[135] and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report 2006) from the UK have also supported the use of phonics.
Furthermore, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology compared teaching with phonics vs. teaching whole written words and concluded that phonics is more effective. It states "Our results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words".[138]
The National Research Council re-examined the question of how best to teach reading to children (among other questions in education) and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children.[286] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature).
In 2000 the findings of the National Reading Panel was published. It examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S.[288] The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire. I've only skimmed the wiki article on him and on his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I think I need to dig a little more.
Both you and the wikipedia article on him say that he's been hugely influential on the US education system. How is this impact measured? I'm reading the City Journal article on this and it mentions that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is assigned to teachers-in-training very often--but does it actually change how teachers teach?
I can imagine that some more fiery educators will have done the heavy lifting and baked in some of Freire's ideas into curricula. But going off my assumption that most Marxist teachings are very abstract (almost postmodern), then most teachers would highlight a few juicy quotes and later forget about these ideas. My other assumption comes from going through a few grades in the US system and I'm struggling to find anything that would have a noticeable taint of Marxist thought--but then, I only did a few grades, and that was over 20 years ago.
(It's too easy to find low hanging fruit of a few teachers refusing to teach math because it's oppressive. I'm looking for more subtle but broader effects of Freire's thought).
One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.”
I find this interesting because it seems like nothing new. I've met before with the constructivist theory of education, which seems to have begun assembling into a coherent theory somewhere in the early 20th century, though its roots go back to the mid 19th century. It's amazing to me that someone could take this idea, which, in the right hands, could produce so much good, and then cover it in Marxist nonsense.
“Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do.
I think my emotion wasn't around the disconnect between their goals and actions, because it's pretty clear that whatever "good" they say they aim toward is subordinate to their real goals. Rather, it was about how openly they disdain science, reality, and human discourse as a tool for pursuing truth. While writing my post, I had a look at the Calkin's institute page and most of the messaging their is, indeed, about DEI stuff. So yeah, 100% WYSIWYG.
Anyway, I have more reading to do.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
In short: no.
In long: in the beginning, he seemed not too different than other politicians. Lots of smiling, hand-shaking, and declaiming the other side as evil ne'er-do-wells. With time, though, and the demands of the office, I came to see him as a person far out of his league. Not a good administrator. Not a good leader. Not a good engineer. Great at speaking to a certain sort of crowd and turning up the emotions, but that seems to be his only skill. I also found his denial of election results disgusting.
For an example, read the Paris Climate Accord speech. He starts it off by talking about how great America is doing, how many jobs he and his party have given Americans, etc. Off topic. Worse, a cheap shot of flattering his audience, almost insulting. Then he goes over the reasons for getting out of the accord. There he gives some good reasons, but fails to put them together into a well constructed argument. The average themotte user could do better here. I mean, he makes claims full of pathos, without much backing. He loves the American worker. He loves the coal miner. They're his people. So we should mine coal (what about the country's energy policy? Why can't we have nice, dense energy production like nuclear? Why is the coal miner better than my children and grand children, who could have much better lives if we switched to clean, abundant nuclear energy?) And then, throughout the whole piece, you have little snarky remarks about the blue tribe. He and his tribe are working hard to help the American, but the other tribe isn't doing anything, just standing around with their hands in their pockets. Come on, this is high-school-level mockery--at least hit them with something that matters, I mean it's not like the blue tribe doesn't do stupid things.
If we're talking about providing cheap entertainment, he's your man. But if we're talking about leading the country through the tumultuous beginnings of a new century? Bah.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
It's just a bunch of pretty well off people trying to signal that they're not in league with the "evil" well off people.
As I mentioned before, these are my coworkers. Yet, if I were to believe many of them literally, they're simple, humble, working-class folk who are just as fed up with "the system" as the everyman. Thus, they're part of the collective suffering, because unlike the evil well off people, they're not doing cocaine off of sex workers' genitals on a yacht, and so it's only natural that once the promised revolution comes, they will be part of the proletariat, helping overthrow the bourgeoisie.
Eh, snide remarks aside, I'm astonished by the jaw-dropping power of the meme that Marx and Engels gave birth to. It's amazing how it splices itself into feelings of compassion and goodwill and proceeds to corrupt the victim.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
That doesn't address what I said. I said that Serge put forth a claim about American production capacity and then supported it by linking to a piece that has absolutely nothing to do with American production capacity.
That's shoddy writing. Worse, it's shoddy thinking--bold claims, no evidence. Why the hell would I trust the guy after this?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Thanks for sharing your pov.
He's very right about ephemeral online activity having very real opportunity costs. Most online happenings are nothingburgers, and they detract from purposeful socialization which disproportionately happens in person or, at least, though legacy, meatspace-centric networks such as one's professional community or political organizations.
I see this too, but I think I also see the mounting cultural counter-reaction to this. When I think back to the late 00's and early '10s, when the Internet was becoming really simple to use (compared to the late 90's/early 00's) and was getting flooded with SaaS apps and the iphone came out and all that, I saw non-tech people around me consume it all as if it were magic. There was joy, as if the possibilities of checking timetables on to go was just a step away from living in the sci-fi future of AI. There was also a lot of naivette, much to the frustration of all the crusty web users. I think the epitome was the Arab Spring also called (if I remember correctly), the Twitter Revolution--people really thought Twitter would usher in a new era of democracy in the middle east!
But today, the growing backlash against big tech has a very personal flavor to it. People around me are ditching their Alexa's and Siris and pushing their kids to have more fun the park. Not all people do it, since software has seeped so deep into our lives, but I guess I sense a broad sense of distrust that translate to people still using apps and online services, but at least, perhaps, trying to use them less often. Or maybe giving meatspace experiences more chances.
In a gist, I think our culture is developing an immune response to the attention-stealing gadgets we've been producing for the past 10-15 years. If my view is correct, where "correct" exists on a spectrum, we should start seeing these cultural artifacts bubble up into explicit things like regulations (eg. age limits on social media use) or customs (parents getting good at parental controls on tech) in the next 5-10 years.
I will admit that I'm completely blind to what people between 10 and 25 are doing with tech. I don't know anyone in this range. Some signals I'm getting are worrying, some are astonishing in a positive sense.
A solo console cowboy who can have a multi-year career running circles around major players of his economy (albeit knee-deep in the muck of the underworld, living on the edge of ruin and poverty) is a blindingly heroic image today, when Hackernews regulars are all employed by big tech, cultivate their CVs and race to affirm woke rhetoric of their HR betters, just like any other disposable blue collar serf – despite their ludicrous compensation packages and apparent prestige.
This is an interesting point. But I think you're contrasting two very different things. Hackernews, despite the name, has little to do with actual hacking. And, being a regular lurker for 10 years now, it feels to me that the spirit of hackernews has turned decidedly away from its start-up'y roots and toward boring everyday tech news. Sure, there are still stories about startups and sometimes interesting announcements (like Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters"), but more often it's a piece about a new nuclear reactor or something for a bored, 25-45 yo techie to read on their break. Maybe we've all gotten older, started families, and aren't just interested in stories of pizza eating and late night coding.
But, what I'm getting at, is that there is still very much a wild, interesting coding scene. Absent from this scene are these highly paid Google and similar employees because, well, they're the people who opted to go corporate, to get regular, comfy pay for jumping through very tight hoops. I've dipped into this scene a few times, and every time I was astounded by how smart these people are... but also how well-socialized. I would describe their vibe as people who still think they're in school, aiming to get high scores, play within the rules, collect all the medals, etc.
Maybe the reason why we see fewer console cowboys these days is because the whole group of coders has grown, mainly filled by people drawn by the good pay & benefits. Because of this, the people producing wild and cool work are that much harder to make out in the crowd, their signal getting lost in the noise.
Careful, that Patriot Visa might pull in a hundred million new Americans if you don't add a cap to it.
Semi-joking. I've met a handful of fellow immigrants who would probably qualify. It's amazing how Hollywood/games/books can somehow pass on certain values that hook a person on the other side of the globe. Though perhaps not so amazing when you consider how so many cultures fall on the other side of the argument about "does a citizen belong to a state?" and similar.
Twitteratti Visa - To apply, one must show proof of the ability to serve as a mook in the CW. The applicant is graded according to how much time they can spend on Twitter, how good their skills are at finding low-quality, unreplicated social-science papers that prove their point, and finally, how long (in minutes) can they sustain a righteous anger.
This is a time-limited visa for two years. If the applicant is able to earn 250k retweets, the visa can be extended for another two years. After those two years, they can apply for a Green Card, but only if at least 500 other mooks swear on the logins that the applicant has never indulged in both-sideism, logical thought, or education.
edit: It appears I hit the wrong "reply" link. Meant to reply to the OP.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Perhaps it's a case of the observer changing the experiment through the sheer act of observation?
I too don't think of this as a big deal. If things go well, Twitter will get better, only to be unseated by another platform within the next decade. If things go badly, Twitter turns into zombified wasteland or folds completely--and nothing of value will be lost.
But because Twitter is the terra firma of the Culture War, people are willing to give up their lives over VR hamburger hills, as if the platform itself was a low-res, text/image-based alpha version of the Metaverse. Put differently, all those emotions that twitter evokes, whether it's anger or jealousy or surprise actually help turn it into an almost physical presence. Some have suggested Twitter and other social media sites be turned into public utilities because it feels that real.
Musk entering the picture threatens the existence of the very soil upon which the Culture War is waged. That makes all the tribes nervous--any shuffling of rules will break an uneasy equilibrium and who knows who will end up on top. Or, worst case scenario, MuskTheGod destroys Twitter before there's a suitable replacement and culture warriors scatter to the four corners of the Earth. That's bad because each warrior's energy level depends on the size and complexity of the mob around they/them, which means that The Scattering would turns each one of them into merely a shadow of their former selves.
I can imagine some old SJW or angry /pol/itic, twenty years from now, telling their grand kid something like, "Them flamewars ain't what they used to be...."
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
70.3% of all human resources managers are women, while 29.7% are men.
https://www.zippia.com/human-resources-manager-jobs/demographics/
I imagine it's harder to get this kind of scheme to work in private industry, but I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be at least a minor component. In my own experience, most HR folks I've talked to were women who were also heavily into a certain flavor of politics. I wouldn't put it above them to invent work, then use that to argue for increasing headcount and hiring more comradettes. But I don't think this is a large force. More like upper single digits of % perhaps?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
But boy, is it dull. How do front end devs do it?
Not exactly your target audience, but for me it's realizing that webdev allows me to deliver something to someone. Whether it's a blog post or a cool little service, even a simple flask site gives me a lot of options of putting it in front of anyone with a browser.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
If there is agreement among Christians about anything, it is that the initiated Christian (however one understands initiation) no longer need worry about original or ancestral sin, but only their own.
Well I'll be damned. Maybe my memory of Christian theology is not as strong as I thought. Admittedly, it's been quite some time since my teenager years when I did most of my exploration. I'll have to revisit this branch of knowledge at some point so that I don't make an ass out of myself again.
Thank you.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Sometimes I think there are parts of a culture that are not communicable unless a person spends considerable time inside that culture.
This is a subjective and completely anecdotal take: the amount of lying that happens in Eastern European cultures (and others too, probably) is difficult to imagine for someone from a high-trust society. It's just hard to imagine that people could lie for almost no reason at all, I guess. It's somewhat similar in that way to corruption: many of my American friends think they live in a corrupt society. I grew up in a society where my mother, just before ejecting me from her womb, had to present a 'gift' of cognac to the doctor, the head nurse, and the receptionist. A society where lying is as common as asking "How ya doing?" or talking about the weather is in the US.
Lying about big things. Small things. And that gets you accustomed to not relying on anything anyone has said. Did an online merchant say they sent you the item you paid for? Or did the clerk at the store promise your construction materials will be delivered by eod tomorrow? Or perhaps your employee called out sick? There is no way you could know for sure. The only way to increase reliability is to increase the effects of retaliation--hit people where it hurts--meaning, their long-term social standing. So you get to know the other party's friends and family so when an occasion for renege on a promise, the cost of doing so involves shame, perhaps even some ostracism if the stakes are high enough.
In contrast, while you still have a bunch of lying going on in a high-trust society, the happens sporadically enough that it's effective to bet that the other party mostly truthful most of the time: most business concludes in a predictable way.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Yeah!
I used to hate twitter because of how its Algorithm was a constant pressure to turn my brain into mush, but now I actually have hope that it will evolve into something better, a little closer to the better boards on 4chan. And I'm glad that chaotic neutral Elon came around and gave the overton window a solid fucking kick.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
What do you think about the concept of the Global North and South?
I never payed much attention to this way of looking at global economics. I don't know anyone from South America or Africa and only a handful of folks from Asia. My only economic reference comes from Fukuyama's "The End of History", where he spent a few pages describing dependency theory and then refuting it by showing how poor Asian countries were able to grow while South American countries, despite being in a similar situation, were not.
A few days ago, I had a chance to meet some people from South America. I believe they were from Brazil and Venezuela. Both worked for NGOs. They quickly turned the topic to colonization, blaming it for all the problems in their countries. I know their countries are not doing too well, both in terms of civic freedom and economics, but I was surprised by how strong their views were--they basically said the Europe and the US are to blame for the bad situation their countries are in. Europe, for colonization and "mass rape", and the USA for the Monroe Doctrine (and the associated string of interference) as well as extracting wealth from South America.
I didn't have time to query them for more details. I'm ambivalent on the question of colonization. I haven't studied it much nor thought about it. I can easily imagine that US interventions have had a destabilizing effect on SA, but I can't imagine how big of an effect that would be. I remember reading Noah Smith's piece on Cuba and how its failure is not the fault of the American embargo, but rather of obviously bad economic policy. I can't help but think that this is the case for other South American countries as well.
How much merit do you think there is in accusing US and Europe for inflicting poverty on the global south? What should I search for if I wanted to know more--thinkers, articles, etc.?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
How familiar are you with Polish history and culture?
I recommend adjust your priors about this man to "slightly crazy." Not that that's the only thing about him--he's great at forging relationships and leading the group of people who voted for him, but this is a guy who, during an interview many years back, when asked what he sees his life's goal as, replied, in a non-joking manner, that he sees himself as "the redeemer of the nation."
I believe that, ultimately, remarks like this will destroy the thing he's building because they destroy the mask he's built up over the years--of a professional man, interested in one thing only: the good of the people.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
But what they can do, in order to relieve this sense of pressure about being part of the problem but not part of the solution, is to participate in it. They are suffering too! They are thinking about poverty and injustice and feeling bad! They share all this to reassure each other, and be reassured, that they are in fact not the bad guys, they're one of the good ones.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
For many, I suspect there's also an element of selling out.
Nerd culture, especially the US flavor, has a strong countercultural streak to it. By talking about these topics, signaling support, and wearing a hoodie, it's probably possible to mask (from yourself) the fact that you're making a boatload of money, writing design documents, and talking about KPIs, quarterly goals, and securing wins.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Thank you! I always thought this phrase describes a single "bookend."
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
I've experienced the same feeling.
I read The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion when I was a teenager. It was addictive, like being kidnapped into a whole new living world. When I reread LotR about a year ago, the same feelings came back--but this time enriched with an awe of Tolkien's language. I didn't even try watching ROP because I don't think it's possible to capture that magic in the medium of a TV series.
From his newer things, I've read Children of Hurin and loved it. Would you recommend the other "new" works as well?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
As a big fan of Neal Stephenson's works, I've thought about phyles a lot.
The question remains: what sort of shared identity could people found a network state on?
The issue disappears if you consider people adopting a set of identities, some minor, some major, maybe even a single dominant one. This would allow multiple ideologies to fill in the empty space in peoples' hearts, perhaps enough to allow them to park themselves in a nice comfy spot on some nice, white-picket-fence social graph somewhere. This would fall in line with what I think Srinivasan describes (haven't read his book), a world where everything is negotiable and subject to change.
Can you name a place where you think things do work? Put another way -- a place where that isn't struggling with some form of large scale, systemic coordination problems?
This isn't meant as a counter to your post. I'm seeking clarification about your pov.
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