site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

New research paper attempts to quantify which professions have to most to lose from the introduction of GPTs into the larger world. From the abstract:

Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

The results vary by models but mathematics and math-related industries like accounting have the highest risk. The researchers overall found that "information processing industries (4-digits NAICS) exhibit high exposure, while manufacturing, agriculture, and mining demonstrate low exposure" (pg 15) and "programming and writing skills...are more susceptible to being influenced by language models."

I find myself wondering if "learn to code" from however long back will shortly become "learn to farm" or some such.

Jobs don't get replaced and the ones that do don't matter.

People, however can get replaced when their job skills get suddenly hard capped. Case in point - for many, many years, you could have a decent-to-good job in IT as a SysAdmin. You didn't know how to code per se and certainly couldn't call yourself a Software Engineer, but you were needed to keep the infrastructure of the system running. Low(er) on the totem pole but, in 2023 dollars in a major metro, you could hit $100k with a decade of experience.

Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge. Within about 5 years, an old school SysAdmin was pretty much out of any job that wasn't working on legacy systems in a non-tech-primary organization (think banks, other big-and-heavy old industrials etc.)

And, before someone says "well, yeah, but if you still know COBAL you can make $500k because NOBODY has that skill and it still runs the NYSE." Wrong, you have to know COBOL ... and also understand all of the legacy gotchas of the NYSE. (This is a toy example, but it applies to similar stories).

LLMs and whatever other AI we can reasonably predict will wipe out the folks who just can't keep their job skills at pace with the tools. Those who can adapt will be fine to holy-shit-I'm-rich.

Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge.

And we ended up paying those sysadmins that learned to rebrand themselves DevOps or SRE even more.

Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge. Within about 5 years, an old school SysAdmin was pretty much out of any job that wasn't working on legacy systems in a non-tech-primary organization (think banks, other big-and-heavy old industrials etc.)

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-systems-administrator-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,24.htm

?

SysAdmins still do fine. I'd say a good chunk less than half of all businesses have any modern automation at all in their infrastructure and a tiny fraction have serious, heavy-duty IaC deployments. You're not going to be making dreamy six figure salaries with guaranteed growth throughout your life-long career, but that was something no SysAdmin ever really got outside of the majors. $60-65,000 a year is a really good salary in most of the country.

Yeah, maybe the person you're responding to is in the tech bubble, but "non-tech-primary organization" are a vast majority of the economy. It's not just industries with a reputation for being conservative with IT: the vast majority of businesses that aren't specifically high-tech and front line of IT sector (ie, not FAANG) are still struggling to manage the move from on-premise virtualisation to SaaS or IaaS, like 2 or 3 "paradigms" back from what we're told IT is about now, and that's WITH the boost the pandemic gave to those modernisation efforts. They are nowhere near orchestration, PaaS and infrastructure as code, if they could even envision a benefit from those.

And I think it bears repeating, it's not just IT-conservative industries like banking, hospitals, etc... It's every non-tech-startup small business. It's farms. It's almost every company at any scale that works with industrial machinery, warehouses, etc...

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats