Surely we can escape the collective groupthink a little to share some of our most unpopular opinions and theories?
I've got a few of my own so I'll kick it off in the comments --
- Mutual credit is a superior monetary system to our current one in every way: An elastic money supply, no bank runs, access to credit for everyone, no inflation, decentralized with no central bank, no moral hazard from seigniorage.
- Advertising is a wonderful sustainable business model that benefits both the consumer and business. There is no privacy issue that causes anyone harm from advertising.
- Business with large or complete market share is not bad at all or harmful to consumers, and the only true monopoly comes from government legally protecting a business from competition.
I'm feeling your other points too. It's funny how wrong we can be about such fundamental issues.
http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm
Also, the "famous" TED talk on educational paradigms that you may have seen or at least heard referenced
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_educatio...
The vast majority of parents are lazy, feckless and incapable of educating a child. Not to mention the character benefits of socialisation, conflict experience and discipline that might be met at school.
I also refuse to believe that something as ancient as group schooling isn't inherently positive. There is a school in England that has been in active operation for 1400 years
That one is supposedly not allowed in American schools any longer.
The mainstream media is often more factual and less biased than alternative media.
The modern web is superior by almost any objective measure, including quality of content, to the web of the 90s. Yes, this even includes content on services and social media.
RMS got what he deserved.
Significant whitespace is just a slightly messier form of brackets using non-printing characters. The elegance is an illusion.
Languages which compile to javascript are just linters with delusions of grandeur.
Firefox > Chrome
Lisp has syntax.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
As for RMS from what I just looked up it seems he was making one of those computer scientist arguments like "all the aliens in the room are green" (because there are zero aliens in the room) type of no true scotsman arguments about an issue way too soon.
Again with LISP -- people can't get the syntax so they assume it can't be got.
(f u c k (t h a) (h a t e r s))Hahaha nice!
Most people are kind and feel bad about harboring prejudices; they actively look for evidence to dislodge a prejudice, and make excuses to dismiss evidence supporting the prejudice. Those prejudices that remain in circulation are those for which the supporting evidence prevails nonetheless.
Actually it's good because if you find yourself stubbing too much you may be hiding complexity in your code.
It's like when we emphasize the work over anything it's laying the foundation for toxic behaviours whereas then we emphasize the attitude that goes into the work the whole culture changes.
Most people will probably never experience it in their whole lives.. But they'll go to their deaths in uncomfortable outfits, yuck.
The main reason startup culture sucks people up and spits out their bones is because we've taken the worst parts of corporacy and left all the best ones to rot.
If a manager doesn't understand the importance of dressing up at least a few days a week he doesn't deserve the responsibility and most of the problems in this corporate world are down to young men who haven't discovered themselves but are willing to sacrifice all their energies in proving they're the best at something they know very little about.
Dressing up for work is value signalling. "oh, a blazer? They are important." When it comes to client interactions, depending on the culture of the industry, being more professionally dressed is important. First impressions and all that. Self-confidence can be boosted by your appearance and that can help when interacting with folks. I've seen it work for folks that talk on the phone to customers. The other thing that helps boost confidence? Actually knowing what you are talking about :) I may not trust an investment representative as much if they are in their sweat pants compared to a suit. But for knowledge workers, I think there is a boon to being comfortable.
As a hint I'd like to convey that the blazer is actually a dress down apparel compared to the outfits it replaced and the suit is designed as the ultimate comfort and convenience garment so if you can't feel comfortable in a suit and assume therefore it's impossible to for anyone to be comfortable in one, maybe you just haven't found the right tailor you know?
Which goes to my point that people don't understand what dressing up even means let alone how to do it.
I don't think you can't be comfortable, I just think they're less comfortable. No one spends a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch watching TV while wearing a suit, if they were more comfortable than other clothes this would be common. Either way your solution of getting better suits or a tailor is an unnecessary expense I can do without.
As far as signalling goes it generally means the opposite of it's intention to me, if I see someone in a suite I'm more likely to think used car salesman, mormon or boss. I'm immediately much more skeptical and defensive because they'll want to sell me something or control me.
Nobody cares what anyone wears at home we're talking comfort at work.
And again, a suit is ultimately a dress down garment requiring less care to put on than a track suit.
In all this discourse nobody ever bothered to ask what dressing is even defined as and we're supposed to call ourselves software engineers.
Another hint: wearing swag is not equivalent to dressing up.
Comfort is independent of location, the only difference is that at home we prioritize comfort and that translates to not wearing suits.
> And again, a suit is ultimately a dress down garment requiring less care to put on than a track suit.
In what world? Track pants you just pull on and maybe tie up if there's some weight in your pockets, dress pants you have to pull on zip/button up and put a belt on. Some with the upper half, it's easier to pull on a T shirt than button one up. Neither are hardly arduous (hence my surprise that some people take "pride in their appearance") but a suit is definitely not the easiest option.
> In all this discourse nobody ever bothered to ask what dressing is even defined as and we're supposed to call ourselves software engineers.
Because we all have a functional shared understanding of what it means, if you have a definition that differs or constrains this general understanding then it would be much more useful to state it rather than vague hints.
Weren't suits and shirts designed with XIX-century England in mind? I.e. very little hot summers, cold indoors (17 C was considered normal room temperature back then).
Human beings rely on signals to communicate efficiently, especially in larger groups.
In the absence of well defined signals people will use what they have on hand and the results will be arbitrary at best and unhelpful in all likelihood due to propensity for misinterpretation and misrepresentation, especially since they may rely on inegalitarian mechanisms like gender or hair style or age or other intrinsic characteristics which may be gamed or are inaccessible to all.
By dismissing corporate culture so egregiously we have also done away with most established signalling mechanisms without offering any new substitutes.
The definition of dressing up in this context is in reference to establishing and manifesting visible and unambiguous signalling cues for such things as rank, status, team membership, privilege or clearance and other relevant metrics.
Since we're so sensitive to traditional methods it's difficult to convince anyone to put on a shirt and tie and quit acting like children but nobody has offered any better alternative than a printed T which in my professional experience and opinion is an all-too-naive solution that fails the military grade requirements after which we've modelled our private corporations.
Imagine you're a new member on a team looking around the floor for someone with an admin override. You need to ask six people before you get referred to Joe who has the keys to production. If Joe had a stripe on his jacket you'd be able to tell right away.
I can understand the value in certain circumstances of having a dress code or uniform, particularly with things like police, emergency, and military organisations. Soccer is also a good example. The goalkeepers have different uniforms and the captain wears an armband. So certainly uniforms can provide a functional purpose. But I can't quite see how wearing a tie fits into this.
I think that in a lot of environments clothing is used and has been used historically to signal superiority at a time when social rank was deeply tied to function. Consider in medieval times (and later) that it was normal for people to spend a third of their yearly income on clothing to distinguish themselves from the peasants, and there were all sorts of laws to make sure people dressed according to their position. Everyone knew their place and this order was enforced with violence.
So I don't think dressing up really helps to make visual signalling more egalitarian, if anything I think we're conditioned to equate appearance with ability. So I think we would do a whole lot better as a society if everyone made an effort to not judge or rank people according to visual characteristics. This is what makes and made places like HN, usenet, and BBS's so great. There is no visual signalling and all you have to go by are what people write. I believe that dressing down in tech is now sometimes a way for the tech industry to signal its superiority over other industries. It's a declaration of "we don't have to follow your primitive rules and customs anymore."
Western society has moved away from that level of formality except in the case of very special occasions. It's also perfectly normal to not shave everyday now. Both my father and grandfather shave nearly everyday because they've been conditioned to feel scruffy if they don't.
I can understand how it's important for a sales team to look sharp, because they can use people's conditioning against them to manipulate perception in order to influence customers. The nice suits and shoes are a tool. But I don't think this sort of image management has any positive value amongst a team of engineers working together to build something. What positive effect would wearing a suit and tie have over t-shirt and jeans? I ask that sincerely rather than rhetorically. And is that value high enough where it would be worthwhile for the corporation to absorb the monetary and time costs related to it rather than forcing the employee to absorb the costs?
It's incredibly complex and a lot of the evidence is circumstantial and layers of cultural cruft have certainly confused things but I'll say this --
People in the past didn't do things because they were stupid simpletons relegated to history books, they did a lot of things for real reasons and if we were born in those days we'd probably see the truth in spending a third of our income on clothing befitting our rank.
We ought to know by now the difference between an intractable argument and one we just can't understand yet, we seem to believe just because we can't understand something it can't be understood.
In my view people back then were very much worse off and struggling much more between the throes of life and death with sincere passion.
Having good clothes actually somehow conferred an advantage to the wearer that went way beyond societal perception or even shallow cultural biases to the core of their ability to live day to day.
You'd think we would've invented fast fashion earlier, but we've been wearing all sorts of costumes for millennia.
In the modern age our vehicles and electronic devices have taken over the cultural status symbolism perhaps but we've let our clothing sense lapse dreadfully into what I consider neo-renaissance pomp mixed with dark ages peasantry.
Anyway tl;dr - people in the past were struggling to survive yet still found some reason to invest a lot of their income in clothing.. Maybe there is something we've missed?
I've practiced that a few more times until I stopped feeling uncomfortable just because I took it as a personal flaw that clothing could make me feel either bad or good. Anyway for sure I've missed something I just can't seem to figure out what exactly.
Hardware engineers tend to be less corrupt than software engineers.
The most ethical and meritocratic, and the least racist, group of people in America is the military.
The F-4 was the best fighter-bomber ever made. The A-6 was the best close-air support aircraft ever made.
ANSI C is the best commonly-used programming language. Python is a distant second. Rust is fun only because of its complexity.
1) the value of their consciousness (how overall good or bad it feels to be them) 2) their expected instrumental effects on the nature of all expected future people's consciousness.
Because of the vast numbers of future people which could exist, and the uncertainty of this due to the landscape of existential threats humanity faces, the magnitude of the value of most people's expected instrumental effects vastly outsizes the value of their qualia.
This either makes the typical person's life overwhelmingly valuable, or overwhelmingly deleterious. It's either one, but it's not easy to confidently say which, as it's not perfectly clear whether your average person net adds or substracts to humanity's net risk of extinction. Unfortunately, most people display rather abysmal epistemology and are adding more to technological progress then they are philosophical/epistemic/coordination progress.
This makes it plausible to me that their lives are net-harmful.
Non Political:
- There is no saving the media/journalism, and it's best not to try. Newspapers/TV news/radio news/etc is dying and it won't come back.
- Advertising isn't that bad. Without it, small businesses/new creators would find it harder to compete, not easier.
- Robots will never replace humans in all jobs, even if they can do them better.
- The last series of Doctor Who wasn't all that bad.
Political:
- The left shifted focus from economic issues to identity issues due to powerful forces realising poor/unpopular people made better scapegoats than billionaires
- Tech companies shouldn't be trying to police the internet, and it's deeply disturbing how easy 'deplatforming' someone is now
- Government responses to COVID-19 weren't as bad as people make them out to be, and were flawed because of misguided optimism rather than malice.
Software Engineers are idiots hiding behind numbers. No real progress is made through software itself and the world would be better of with advanced social behaviour then faster servers.
Open Source is a marketing term to lure more people into software development so corporations can exploit more people for cheaper.
Capitalism is currently just exploiting the dumbness of people. If you would have the time and mental energy to learn basic finance, the whole system would work better.
White people don't have culture and envy black/asian culture.
That's not unpopular, that's racist. And I cannot understand how can one seriously say that there's no white culture. Just look around you?
There are multiple cultures within each "race". You could see Irish and Polish traditions and cultural differences if you have family on both sides.
So your response itself is racist too.
- COVID-19 is just a dress rehearsal for something even more deadly.
- Since there is no apex predator for humans, viruses will likely rise to become the leading cause of death
- Modern society is, by definition, carbon positive
- The one time that society allowed young people to explore their interests, to not work (the 60s), the establishment was so scared at the revolution they never wanted that freedom to ever be available again
- Universal healthcare in the US would cause massive economic shock due to the unemployment
- Affordable college education would also cause massive economic shock with unemployment as this would mean removal of government backing for student loans
- Racism is a cultural disease sort of like cancer that has many forms, mild and severe. It is individual and cannot be cured.
- Those who lack money problems always have problems. Humans need drama in their lives to feel alive.
- The attention economy that Facebook started is destroying normal human behavior year by year
- To be a producer in the new visual economy (IG), it helps to be conventionally attractive. But that if not enough, you also have to demonstrate that you are not perfect, whether fake or human
- Political correctness and its evil twin Virtue Signaling are dividing all of us, perhaps on purpose
- Everything is faked or polished to be better than it really is at some level. Technology has been good enough to do it for a while to do it offline. Lookup Melodyne for singing. Now technology is getting to the point where it can do it live
- We may not make it past the Great Filter
- Smartphones are actually dumb phones because they make us dumb
- Time is everyone's most precious resource, yet we give it away sometimes like it were free "Do you have a minute?"
- Using headphones in an office to concentrate is training your brain to require headphones to concentrate
- Caffeine is the most successful drug
- Capitalism is the only economic model that works because it gives people something to aspire towards
- You cannot have capitalism without personal debt.
- Capitalism is unsustainable as you cannot expect to grow X percent a year and not eventually run out of Y.
- The Pareto Principle can be applied to anything. For example, how many people in a company actually do useful work (20% do 80%)
- Education is the most powerful force
- Sex doesn’t just sell. Sex is everything.
- Happiness is biologically meant to be fleeting. Otherwise we would eat once, have sex once... and then die.
- Companies spend large sums of money to create controlled, temperature controlled environments to make people focus on work called offices
- Some people think they are wealthy. They are not. You are only wealthy if you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without having to work.
- Monogamy is a cultural construct
- Without biological or technological adaptation to combat radiation in space, long-term space travel is impossible
Do you have any links or references, I'm particularly curious about how society allowed young people to not work & pursue their interests. Was there some sought of Universal basic income? A few more details will be greatly appreciated.
> "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.
> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."
> "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," he concluded, according to Baum.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...