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thomasThePaineEngine

Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

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thomasThePaineEngine

Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

0 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 11 16:24:53 UTC

					

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User ID: 1131

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It's a Vibes-based World for Us

The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.

Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.

But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?

The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.

According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.

The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.

Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.

Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:

Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.

Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

Standford posts about its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI), HN Reacts

Links to EHLI source: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf / http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli

Link to HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816

Note: my intent in linking to another forum isn't to create a in-group/out-group dynamic. My intent is to comment on how this is a sign about a broader cultural shift. Moderators, if this skirts too close to the offending the spirit of themotte, please let me know (or just delete it).

HackerNews is an online watering hole where a large number of Anglosphere people congregate to talk about startups, programming, and entrepreneurship. There is also no lack of plain old geeking out about cool tech, especially of the DIY variety that relates to drones, 3d-printing, or, more recently, AI.

The group skews somewhat left of center politically speaking. Over the past decade that I've been lurking it, it skewed a little bit more, in the sense that moderators became more accepting of openly political content that was aligned under the "21st century American progressive" label. I witnessed an influx of posts and comments about topics like coops, the evils of capitalism, etc. although, thankfully, that never became the main object of the community.

However, the thread I link to above has accumulated over 1200 comments in under 24h, which is a rare occasion--the death of a great contributor, a major shift in the industry, etc. More importantly, from sampling the first two pages, the overall sentiment appears to be negative toward what Stanford put out.

Before going deeper on the reaction, here's a taste of what Stanford posted:

Grandfather: This term has its roots in the "grandfather clause" adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks.

Red team: "Red" is often used disparagingly to refer to Indigenous peoples, so its use in this context could be offensive to some groups.

Blackbox: Assigns negative connotations to the color black, racializing the term.

Brave (do not use): This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.

This kind of political weaponization should all be familiar to experienced Culture Warriors on themotte. But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.

I have no idea what it's swinging towards, especially since in reality the pendulum is a 4d object zigzagging through multiple political dimensions. Still, it's a welcome sign that at least this flavor demagoguery is losing its bite.

I don't think the Culture War is in any danger of dying down. But I suspect (and hope) that the reaction on HackerNews is an omen of the CW shifting directions, so at the very least we'll have something new and exciting to debate about.

Edit: Some people have remarked in the comments that this isn't that astounding since HN has always been more grey-tribe aligned and more likely to react negatively to woke overreach like this. I find myself needing to readjust map.

The way the Russian government is handling the war in Ukraine strongly reminds me of the Kursk incident.

As a brief reminder, the incident featured a Russian nuclear submarine that experienced a fatal malfunction: the explosion of a torpedo that then triggered more of its torpedoes to explode. The blasts killed most of the crew and the few that remained alive sheltered in the tail end of the submarine, which dropped to the bottom of the Barents Sea. The incident received international attention in August 2000 because of a seemingly endless series of mishaps during the rescue operation:

  • the Russian Navy was accustomed to frequent comm equipment failure so it didn't take any action when the Kursk failed to check in.

  • the Navy's rescue ship was a former lumber ship and could only operate in calm seas.

  • the admiral in charge of the military exercise that Kursk was part of informed the Kremlin of the incident about 12 hours after it it took place.

  • the next day, the same admiral informed the Russian press that the exercise had been a resounding success.

  • one of two Russian submersibles used for the rescue operation collided with the Kursk and required repairs.

  • the second submersible was used but failed to locate the Kursk.

  • the next day, the first submersible was fit for action and sent to attach itself to the Kursk, but it took too long and it ran out of batteries. There were no spares, so the rescue operation had to be put on hold until the batteries was recharged. Meanwhile, the weather got worse and the operation had to be held off until the next day.

  • the first official report of the incident to the Russian media stated that the Kursk had experience a minor technical difficulty.

  • Russian officials first stated that the problem was a result of a collision, most likely with a WWII mine.

  • the second submersible was damaged again while being it was being prepared to be lowered for another mission.

  • the second submersible was repaired and made two attempts to attach itself to the Kursk, but both failed. As it was being picked up by its ship, it was seriously damaged.

  • a few days into the operation, the Navy was reporting that from the evidence it had obtained there had been no explosions on the Kursk. (This despite the first two explosions being serious enough to be heard by other vessels taking part in the training as well as seismograph sensors operated by multiple other countries.)

  • initial offers of international assistance were denied. Only 5 days later were they accepted.

  • another admiral of the Russian Navy stated that the incident occurred because of a collision with a NATO submarine. Other officers backed up this report, although no evidence was produced. They kept to this line for nearly two years after the incident.

  • after the wreck was lifted from the sea floor and transported to Russia, an investigation found the incident to have been caused by (get ready) torpedo explosions. It is suspected the root cause was a faulty weld. Also, the automated recording system was disabled along with the rescue bouy.

(For others like me who accidents fascinating I recommend reading the full wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster. Spoiler alert: the remaining Kursk sailors died within a few hours of the accident. The wikipedia entry contains some quite disturbing details of how they died, eg. "(..) abdomen was burned by acid, exposing the internal organs, and the flesh on his head and neck was removed by the explosion.")

What stands out to me here, just from the perspective of incident response is:

  • ineffective incident management. Awful communications. General lack of understanding of the problem at hand, what to do, etc.

  • ineffective rescue equipment. Outdated, unmaintained.

  • numerous human errors: the rescue submersibles were damaged multiple times by their operators!

  • lack of transparency with public. Numerous false statements eg. calling the incident a "minor malfunction."

  • blameful-postmortem. Blaming WW2 mine, at first, then trying to sell a completely made up story about a collision with a NATO vessel.

From where I stand, I see all of these patterns replaying themselves in the current war in Ukraine.

  • Frequent painful logistics problems. Problems with supplying front-line troops with food, water, even adequate clothing.

  • Ineffective, outdated, unmaintained weapons and vehicles. No air superiority. Foreign-made drones that don't work well in cold weather. Not being able to defend bases hundreds of kilometers inside the motherland from a suicide drone strike. The infamous analysis of truck tires from the beginning of the conflict showing that regular maintenance was not done.

  • Bad management. Awful communications. Changes in leadership. Risking and losing high-value equipment like the Moskva.

  • Lack of transparency. 3 day "special operation" that has been going on for 300+ days. The need to mobilize 300k civilian men to fight what was supposed to be a simple little conflict.

  • Lies. Painting the conflict as fight against nazism, Satan, or NATO (ironic to pull the NATO card again after the "collision with NATO submarine" during the Kursk incident). Even starting the conflict by staging a military exercise that, allegedly, even the participants didn't know was the first step in the war. Reassuring the Russian public that Russia will bear no economic pain from being cut off from various trade systems. Repeated threats of using nuclear weapons. Threatening Finland and Sweden.

Note that I'm not touching on the moral aspects of the war, just on the operational ones. In both of these stories, the salient patterns appear to be corruption, inadequate training, lack of management, and constant lying and bluffing that serves to create internal confusion.

If these patterns reflect reality, then the future doesn't look good for the Russian government. I can see two probable ways this can end: a long, drawn burn that ends in the eventual "suffocation"--lack of basic resources to continue the conflict--or a quick, short ending meant to stop the hemorrhaging of resources on a futile conflict. Either is catastrophic or nearly catastrophic for the Federation.

Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.

Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.

While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.

That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:

By my [Ryan Bourne's--thomasThePaineEngine] calculations, of all the panel [at the American Economic Association--thomasThePaineEngine], paper, and plenary sessions, there were 69 featuring at least one paper that focused on gender issues, 66 on climate-related topics, and 65 looking at some aspect of racial issues. Most of the public would probably argue that inflation is the acute economic issue of our time. So, how many sessions featured papers on inflation? Just 23. . . [What about] economic growth - which has been historically slow over the past 20 years and is of first-order importance? My calculations suggest there were, again, only 23 sessions featuring papers that could reasonably be considered to be about that subject.

The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.

Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.

While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.

This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.

https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/

According to our data, almost half of HR people and recruiters got laid off, as compared to 10% of engineers and only 4% of salespeople.

This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.

But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.

If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).

Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.

Happy National Day of Mourning, fellow Americans!

As a naturalized American, and out of curiosity about recurring public rituals, I decided to spend some time this morning to research this holiday. The historical parts, what with it being rooted in Anglican religious tradition and carried over by early English settlers as early as 1610 make for a charming story: I imagine a group of people, all unfamiliar with the new land they've settled, and right on winter's doorstep, giving each other support over a feast. Forgiving past grievances, reaffirming existing friendships, renewing familial ties--all in an age when cold, hunger, and even minor accidents lead to death, death, death.

This spirit resonates with me despite my utter disbelief in any higher power. There's something very potent and healthy in expressing gratitude, though I can't quite put my finger on it.

However, my curiosity turned into bafflement, then into distress upon getting to the Criticism & Controversy part of the wikipedia entry.

Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England, a protest group led by Frank "Wamsutta" James has accused the United States and European settlers of fabricating the Thanksgiving story and of whitewashing a genocide and injustice against Native Americans (...)

Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin is somewhat harsher: "One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting."

The way I read this and other parts of that section is that modern day Americans should, instead of giving thanks, focus on exploring their guilt and practicing atonement for the wrongs done to Native American nations. In other words, Thanksgiving should revolve around guilt instead of gratitude.

It's utterly baffling to me. Why should I feel guilty for anything as a newly-minted American? What part did I take in any of the violence that happened centuries ago? In the same vein, why should the majority of contemporary Americans, whose families immigrated here hundreds of years after these sad events took place, feel any guilt?

(I'm not very well versed in history, so perhaps I'm wrong, but it appears that the great immigration period ("After 1820, immigration gradually increased. From 1836 to 1914, over 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States.") began at the tail of the great Native American termination this appears to have fizzled out around 1850 (eg. Trail of Tears))

All this guilt has to me a definite, Old World flavor: Christianity. The original sin, the sin that one cannot cleanse oneself of, the sin that one must regularly and harshly atone for. What's baffling is the paradox that this reactionary agenda of mourning and atonement for the actions of one's ancestors is pushed by left-leaning individuals that would often identify as progressive and usually want to have nothing to do with religion or tradition.

Once, at work, when I raised my point, I was rebuffed by a coworker who stated, more or less, that White Americans should be guilty because they benefit from the fruits of the violent extermination of Native Americans. But isn't this a slippery slope? Who decide where this stops? Should I also feel guilt about Roman conquest? Or, going farther, the many petty conflicts that occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates?

All in all, this whole line of arguing for guilt seems not only like a sloppy argument, but also an inelegant weaponization of guilt to exert control. I'm sad that in my professional circle of East Coast tech workers, even wishing "Happy Thanksgiving" is frowned upon.

But enough sadness. Here's what I'm grateful for right now: the opportunity to share this unique virtual space with so many people whose opinions are so radically different than my own, and who adhere to an uncommonly high bar of discourse. Being here is intoxicatingly challenging and mind-expanding.

Tonight, at dinner, I'll drink a quiet toast to you all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A while ago, @anagast replied to one of my comments with:

(...) 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. (...) source

There was something in that image that made me feel confused. Later, I realized what it was: to me, liberalism and turning everything into samey globalist soup are a non sequitur.

Consider what is probably the epitome of liberal globalization: New York City. Out of the roughly 8.5 million people who live there, 37% are foreign-born. With over 800 languages spoken there, it's also the most linguistically diverse place in the world. And while the city is easy to characterize, and often is, as politically and bureaucratically a American-Democrat stronghold, it's not really how it looks like on the street.

There's a ton of conservatism here. Walk around long enough and you'll bump into a wedding or funeral or some other celebration that's done in a beautiful traditional style. Or, talk with enough people, and you'll learn that while they put on the right face for the DEI training at white collar job, they're against abortion and other markers of leaning right.

It's hard to describe all of it unless you've had a few week to live here. The city is a patchwork quilt of hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups, some taking up a single block while others, like the Chinese or Hasidic Jews, basically run whole neighborhoods. Walking in a straight line for maybe an hour feels like traveling through half a dozen countries.

Now, all these people, at least most of them, enjoy the fruits of globalization. They drink coke. Eat pizza and sushi. Browse reddit. But overall, their primary cultural identity is unaffected. I suspect it's because liberalism creates a free market for ideas, allowing people to pick and choose, which strengthens good ideas and causes weak ones to fade away.

Put another way: if you try to enforce culture in a top-down way, you'll get a lot of "coverage", but most adherents will be on board just because everyone else is. Their identity is weak, ripe for the taking by the next guy who takes over. But if you allow people to sort themselves out on their own, the feeling of ownership creates a much deeper, stronger sense of belonging that's not going to be changed by a coca cola advertisement.

That's how I explain to myself why so many cultures in NYC have integrated but not assimilated. Integrated, because they follow the common, basic set of rules: mind your own business, treat others with respect, do your job. Not assimilated because despite living here for >1 generations, they've not become part of some bland, uniform uberculture. If anything, the need to exist alongside so many other tribes has made them work on distilling the best parts of their culture to make it appealing and strong to outsiders and a source of pride for the insiders.

Also, what I think all these rather conservative immigrants bring to the table in the city is that they keep the politicians and bureaucrats honest. No ooey-gooey feel-good diversity--no, they're gonna get the real thing, they're gonna get respect for the culture and community. In a way, I suspect they're the ones responsible for the success of liberal ideals in the city.

(There's some parallel here between how marrying the state and the Church led to calcification of religion in Europe, whereas the freedom of religion in the USA led to an explosion of it, but I'm not familiar with history enough to use that as an argument).

That's why I think that liberalism and globalization don't lead to creating a samey globalist liberal soup, but just the opposite--they lead to differentiation, fragmentation, and and constant evolution and improvement of culture.

And the reason why both sides of the political spectrum are afraid of this (lefties crying about dying languages and indigenous customs; righting crying about the death of tradition) is because they are afraid of the creative destruction that liberalism brings to bear against their ideas. But in doing so, they are actually restricting the growth and refinement of their cultures.

(cough All hail Tzeentch cough)

Techno-pessimism as Agency-Depletion

Note: This is an exploration of what techno-pessimism feels like. I don't think there's an argument I'm making here. Perhaps it's more a reflection on how deep my techno-optimism goes that it's so difficult for me to entertain the idea of techno-pessimism. The connection to the culture war is that techno-pessimism seems to be deeply embedded in the political dialogue of both the left and the right.

Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 classic "The End of History", spends a few pages describing techno-pessimism. It's been a while, but I think he put it as a belief that technology doesn't solve man's problems and may, in fact, make them worse. The flavor we're experiencing now has its source in the meat grinder trenches of WW1 when people were confronted by a mechanized, assembly-line conflict that was optimized for turning real live humans into ground meat.

For a long time, I didn't give this idea much thought. It was a useful label for a cluster of ideas I'd come upon time and again; a useful bucket to put people in to better understand them, nothing. But today, I read a piece that triggered all my "angry uninformed person ranting on the Internet" alarms, and instead of closing the tab, I spent some precious work-time to read it.

At the end, I was blown away. Not by any new points or ideas, but by being, for the first time ever, shown what techno-pessimism looks like from the inside. Suddenly, these two words stopped being merely a label, but also a lens through which to view the world. And I'm still shocked by seeing something so completely alien to my own perception.

I write code for a living. I have a general idea of how computers work and how different types of software works: payments processing, flight controls, video games, social media, VR, point-of-sale systems, etc. I also licked a little bit of physics and information theory, so I kind of see how all the machinery around us operates, at least on vague level. In the world, I feel... comfortable. I can fix a change a door lock, fix a leaky faucet, install an outlet, change a car tire, etc. It's all just machines of different sorts.

I hope this doesn't sound like bragging. I'm no genius. I can't fix most things and I'm more than happy to hire an expert when I can. I don't understand how most things work. Just enough to get the big picture, the relationships, the constraints.

Reading this the above linked blog post showed me a world where I know non of this. A world where I have some vague ideas about simple things like a squeaky hinge and the like, but anything above it is black magic. I mean, computers have inserted them into every facet of our lives. They record, update, store, delete, connect, calculate everything about us: our bank accounts, our working hours, our taxes, our retirement funds. The distance to the store, how busy a coffee place is, how to send flowers to your mother on Mother's day. Even if you're relatively disconnected, over half the world's population is plugged in; over 3bn people have Facebook accounts. TikTok has 1bn users; so even if you're disconnected, the majority of the people around you are plugged in, dancing to the rhythms created by man and machine together.

That's a terrifying. I can't imagine the frustration this guy has to feel. He can't troubleshoot his router, apart from pushing a paperclip into the little hole to reset everything. He can't make his own website (that doesn't look like templated shit). He can't figure out the right steps to get the car computer to reboot correctly after the battery ran out of power. Jesus, the sheer alienation must be terrifying--you can't really affect your immediate environment in any meaningful way. You're at the mercy of these beeping, monitoring, distracting machines all around you.

Now I understand that, perhaps, WW1 was the moment when people realized they built a grand machine that they only pretend to control. A machine with tendrils leading into every house, every room, every other person. And while in the first half of the 20th century any clever farm boy was likely able to mess around with a car, this isn't true today. There's a lot of layers of abstraction. So many interconnected systems. (Though I believe that taking a beginners course in programming would dispell like 80% of ignorance about machines).

How much agency is lost because of the aggregate effects of modern technology? Sure, the world of yesteryear wasn't some primitive utopia. But even within the strict confines of tradition and feudalism people had agency in the little things. Now, people like the author of that blog post I read are left without even the little things--their "smart" coffee machine will calls the cops if he tries to insert off-brand coffee pods into it.

Collectivization of Suffering

Disclaimer: This might be better for the Fun Thread, as there's no deep point here, just an observation.

I've become aware of a vibe among my circle of professional peers: collectivization of suffering.

Look, for example, at this comment to an article about decreasing worker productivity on hackernews, a news aggregator site that's popular among techies, especially US ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468735

When did it become popular to upload your emotions to a shared cloud? How does that even work? Like, when I eat a donut or stub my toe, does the collective feel a pang of pleasure or pain? This commenter and others in that thread bring up war, the pandemic, social upheavals, etc. It's like they're trying to say that these things affect them deeply... despite 99.99% of them being completely uninvolved. It sounds... preposterous: that most likely a tech worker that's most likely situated in the US of A is somehow suffering as much as a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas or a woman protester in Iran.

This reminds me of a great collectivist, Hegel, who picked up Rousseau's idea of the national spirit, and molded it around the idea of the state. People who declaim being part of a great collectivized suffering sound to me like folks that are yearning to become ants in a great colony, extensions of a single organism, like what fingers are to a person.

I worry that people like this are ripe for exploitation. They just need an ideology to forge them into something violent--the poster writes as much: "I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval".

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.

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.?

Meat. How do you know you're getting the good stuff and not some ultra-processed slop filled with cheap, rotting bits o' this and that?

It seems like this choice is a spectrum.

On one hand, you have the raw stuff: steak cuts, chicken thighs, pork chops, etc. Things that look like meat. Here, you can discern quality by figuring out the origin.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

But what's in between? Like, if I buy ham at the store, how can I discern whether it falls more into the ultra-processed category or rather into the raw stuff category?

(I'm trying to be more systemic about my diet and part of the equation seems to be minimizing ultra-processed foods. This is easy with stuff like chips, sweets, soda, etc. but not so much with meat.)

Edit: My thanks for the excellent advice!

The crisis of the 90s escaped Poland, but was shared by the rest, after which Ukraine lagged behind its neighbors in development. We can say that this is due to such factors as Poland's membership in the EU or the presence of oil in the Russian Federation, but a noticeable lag even behind Belarus shows that this is not the sufficient explanation.

I think this is an important part of your argument but it's based on fuzzy culture ideas whereas we have access to less fuzzy economic policy history.

After the fall, Poland enacted far-ranging, unpopular economic reforms--the Balcerowicz Plan--the essentially transformed the economy from a state-run one into a "free government w/ some government intervention" type. Similar reforms were attempted in Ukraine, but leadership balked in face of how unpopular these measures were. As a result, Poland economy was able to grow at a higher rate than Ukraine's, so the two became less alike as time went on.

Without a doubt, Poland joining the EU had a big impact on the Polish economy, but that became reality in 2004, when Poland was already on a nice growth path. Another way to look at this that I found helpful was that Poland, among other post-communist countries, can be categorized as a "Sustained Big Bang" transformation, where Ukraine falls under "Gradual Reforms" (Russia falls under "Aborted Big Bang").

Now, this still leaves the question open of why Poland decided on bold free-market reforms while Ukraine didn't? Sure, I think your general argument about corruption was a component here, but I'd wager that a much bigger component was that Poland was much more separate from the Soviet Union than Ukraine was, meaning, it the influence of Russian corruption and neglect was lesser. Look at how eager Poland was to join NATO and the EU--after independence, it was clear to Poland that the optimal direction to align themselves with was "the West", especially the US. In contrast, Ukraine seems to have been more skeptical toward aligning itself with Europe/US, which is evidenced in the slow rate of reforms and its close ties with Russia in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Why and what will change or has already changed in 2022, which has not happened in the history of this country?

A few things appear to have happened to Ukraine since 2014 that haven't happened to it before. For one, there has been a crystallization of the Ukrainian national identity. Another is the massive migration to and out of the EU, which I think entails two things: first, real-life experience of life in "the West" that forces the question of "why can't we have the same?" This was a huge undercurrent in Polish culture that led to a lot of emulation of not only things like food or music, but also management and leadership practices. (There is also the curious pattern of early Polish emigrants staying abroad, whereas much of the newer emigrants return to Poland. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern will play out or is already playing out among Ukrainian emigrants). Second, is the realization that there is no reason to look eastwards. That way lies only corruption, humiliation, and death.

Of course, I wouldn't expect positive changes to come fast. Poland is still struggling with its communist legacy--corruption, lack of civic engagement, watered down national identity, etc.--30 years after becoming independent. If anything, Ukraine is much earlier on a similar path, so we should expect to see the corruption you describe. But, if we compare Ukraine with Russia, which in all aspects appears to be in a state of stasis since the early 90's, Ukraine is changing, which creates opportunities for something better to come about.

The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or elide facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.

I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more toward Scott's assessment that this isn't lying, as in knowingly transmitting false information. I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.

What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?

Given how people communicate around me, I'm not sure. It often feels that when people talk about politics around me, they often reuse the same rhetorical techniques they heard on a show without much thought. But I'm not sure they're doing it all consciously.

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.

Anyway, as someone who has identified as a liberal for most of my life, actually hardcore leftist, anti-authoritarian socialist, etc, I'm curious how many other folks are in the same boat. Essentially on board with the project of the left, until the last 5-10 years when trans ideology and pronouns took over the movement. Perhaps there are others who have realized that this is one specific issue they just can't accept for the greater good of the leftist cause.

I think I'm in a similar spot and the way I explain it to myself is that it's a divergence between the ends, with which I am in agreement with the left, and the means, which I find myself disagreeing with more and more.

Particularly, I strongly disagree with a growing authoritarian and collectivist strain of leftist thinking and the popular uptake of it. (This doesn't actually seem like anything new, but it feels like it has been gaining strength during my lifetime. ) To go with your example of pronouns, I have really have nothing against a person asking me to refer to them using a non-default pronoun, but I despise that pronouns are being forced on me from above (eg. DEI training, Chief Diversity Officer, etc.) with an implicit threat of violence (conform or be fired), all of it broaching absolutely no discussion, all of it couched in insultingly primitive corp-speak produced by the bottom of the barrel of "generic bachelor degree holders."

That said, compared to you, my reaction isn't limited to trans ideology and pronouns; rather I see it as a small part of a growing respect for authoritarian means.

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.

I wrote a comment for the general CW thread, but noticed this dedicated thread here, so I'll just post it here:

This little bit of news made it through my feeds recently:

We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness that in contrast to all previously reported episodes is spread solely via social media.

A mass sociogenic illness is later defined as "a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness, but without an identifiable cause, that occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to those symptoms"

The symptoms of this illness present like those of Tourette syndrome:

(...) patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen.

However, when diagnosed by an experienced professional, it turns out that these symptoms are only a shallow mimicry of Tourette syndrome:

(...) Third, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities. Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.

So, in other words, what we're seeing is a memetic infection, aka infohazard.

What other memetic infections are floating around us? It would be too easy to point to grand political or religious ideas. But what about something smaller? Could things like "black pill", "gender dysphoria", "trad-life", "degrowth" be examples of sociogenic illness?

Think about it: faux-Tourette syndrome is an aesthetic that plays out as a social behavior. The things I listed above are often played out as aesthetic-based social behaviors--anecdotally, I know of few people with similar "lifestyle" beliefs that adhere to them as a result of deep self-reflection and research.

Looking toward the future, what other sociogenic illnesses can we expect given that social media is worming its way deeper and deeper into society?

Yeah, that's a point that's made as well.

Which is pretty damning, because it invites teachers to use a suboptimal method just because it feels good.

One should understand that Europe's and even America's production capacities have atrophied badly over the decades.

This seems like the crux of the prediction.

However, scanning through the overview you linked, I'm finding little sources to back this up. For example:

Furthermore, the United States has taken new, unprecedented steps to supply Ukraine with shells. Just in the past week, they have dipped into its stockpiles in Israel and South Korea, amid reports that American stocks are so depleted that they will take more than a decade to replenish.

If you click on the link in that paragraph, you're taken to a reuters article where a European ammo manufacturer predicts it will take 10-15 years to replenish ammo stocks; he also describes his difficulties in ramping up production. But Serge's paragraph is about America and American stockpiles--so why link to a piece about European supply issues?

Now, with that being said, at this point it does not appear that NATO wants to give Ukraine main battle tanks. At first it was suggested that tanks from storage could be dusted off and given to Kiev, but the manufacturer has stated that these vehicles are not in working order and would not be ready for combat until 2024.

Again, the paragraph speaks about NATO, but the linked article focuses on German difficulties in getting tanks ready for any sort of transfer. (The article itself then links a piece about the UK sending a handful of tanks to Ukraine).

I think, in general, the problem I see with the linked piece is that it goes into technical details about Russian anti-artillary or into grand strategy theorizing, but gives very scant evidence about "the West's" production capacities, even though that seems like one of the more important if not the most important parts of the theory.

Edit: Also, Serge provides no evidence about Russian production capacity. If this is a war of attrition, it seems like a crucial piece of information to bring to the argument. It doesn't matter if NATO stockpiles are running low if Russian ones are running low faster.

How to acclimate myself to working at a mid-sized corporation after working at small shops forever?

I recently joined as a software engineer a company whose employees number in the low thousands. I'm finding it hard to get used to it. Everything's pretty impersonal. Things move slowly--what would normally take me a week takes three instead--which extends feedback loops to a great extent. It's uncomfortable: I feel like I'm failing to deliver, even though my manager and onboarding buddy say I'm doing great.

(It's not completely a huge-boring corporation; my sense of contrast is likely tickled by it being a big change for me.)

A friend of mine recommended I think hard about what my manager's scoring function is and to optimize for that. (I would like stay with this gig for 2-4 years). He also recommended I read The Prince.

Has anyone else made this kind of move? Or, if someone here has spent considerable time at corporations, do you have any advice/reading material (preferably less theoretical and more practical)?

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.

That's a good point, and I think it explains part of what's happening, but not all of it. Eg. the numbers are disproportional: firing half of HR and firing only 10% of engineers means that the HR-to-engineer ratio was heavily skewed toward HR if you get tilt it back and still be ok.

Also, a small, anecdotal data point: a friend's small tech company that employed about 30 engineers fired about 20 HR people. The whole company employed roughly 100 people. So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.

Nice work there.

What strikes me about the whole ordeal is how eager people are to consume this type of content, how eager they are to be lied to in just the way the suites them. Also, I'm surprised that we don't see more of this type of content produced. Given the demand, it seems there's a some good money to be made here, especially if you use something like GPT-3 to just generate twitter reports like this.

To add to this, there's also the element of betting.

Humans, even rationalists, have to make decisions without the time to obtain perfect knowledge. It's only prudent to place bets if you think the upside might be big and the downside small. In other words, there were probably rationalists in the OP's sample that donated/took money from SBF while thinking this is all likely going to blow up in their face. This isn't the case of conflicting beliefs--it's playing the odds.

Plus, the characterization of "rationalists" seems to me a faulty generalization. There are probably very few people who make their life revolve around rationalism. But rationalism isn't some monastic order that stamps out mentat-like Rationalists, so in the real world, "rationalist" describes everyone from hyperlogical baysian wizards to folks who like a good argument and enjoy eating popcorn while watching the Culture War eat itself.