Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems
conversationswithtyler.com
conversationswithtyler.com
"I have an ebullience and love for it in a way that people in our social class in the United States are aggressively socialized out of having ebullience and true love for anything. I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects, that it is magical. It is an encapsulation of the best things about our society that is also tremendously, instrumentally useful in making all the good things better and ameliorating all the problems over sufficiently long time scales.
It seems naturally to me that this is extremely important. This is extremely valuable, and it seems extremely underrated by almost everyone, including people who would consider themselves great fans of the internet but say, “Oh, I’m a great fan of the internet, but I’m a great fan of penicillin, too.
I think, in aggregate, the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by many orders of magnitude. Is it more important than medicine? I will bite that bullet. The internet is more important than medicine, the entire institution of medicine, from time immemorial to reasonable extrapolations of what we can do right now. Is it more important than writing? You couldn’t have the internet without writing, so writing was very important to get to the development of the internet. That might be one of the most important things about writing, that writing got us to the internet. That sounds like a little bit of . . . I know people will take that full quote and say, “Oh, this crazy, nonintellectual person,” but I think that there is a reasonable case for it."
Having zero medicine but the internet would be a very very different world, with people dying left and right from infections, broken bones would not be set crippling quite a few, accidents would be a lot more fatal (also because there would be no understanding of effects and causes of injuries), no wounds would ever be treated, etc etc. It would be a truly bizarre world where humans wouldn't care one bit about damage to and problems with their bodies (but would have highly optimized advertising systems).
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Maslow%2...
Medicine is great because it helps save lives (there is “non-medicine” which also achieves some good outcomes here). The internet, the instant exchange of information, is great because it magnifies humanity’s greatest power: mass collaboration. With the Internet, medicine could emerge. At least in the form of exchange of ideas and data, and subsequently spread its positive impact faster. The world’s greatest physician scientists working together.
Also I am guessing the ads bit was hyperbolic but like, common, Google is a verb for a reason. We’ve never had access to information like this before. And this is just focusing on something abstract like “information”.
And so, I disagree.
The added benefit of the internet for mass collaboration isn't that much in the data... why hasn't productivity exploded upward? Why hasn't medical progress gone through the roof? Scientist collaborated long before the internet. Quite strong progress was made without it.
Life expectancy at birth before the WWW started (1989): ~71 years
Life expectancy now: ~75 years
> ‘… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today. Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men and 73 for women.’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/
It seems the only real change modern medicine has had with regard to life expectancy is maternal mortality (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/table/t... from the same article)
Life expectancy at 20 was also substantially different to today for males (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde..., second graph)
However, that is still a world with a lot medicine in there (just take simple things like sutures, inoculations, or setting broken bones). Very difficult to say what life expectancy for adults would have been with zero medicine in the world.
Like we have today in all the anti-vaccination guys esp. in better-to-do households that are responsible for measles outbreaks even though it was deemed extinct. People from areas where it was common to have all these kids' diseases, we are not afraid of are much more pro vaccinations...
I can remember a time without the internet and while I really think it is great in many ways, humanity could do fine without it...
This is a problem with trying to name One Most Important Thing. It's usually the synthesis of multiple innovations that makes the revolution.
The wikipedia page also credits it with speeding the process up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#History
>> " Its genetic sequence was published on 11 January 2020, triggering an urgent international response to prepare for an outbreak and hasten the development of a preventive COVID-19 vaccine.[182][183][184]"
I haven't checked the citations, but I would expect an edit war if that were controversial.
"Since 2020, vaccine development has been expedited via unprecedented collaboration in the multinational pharmaceutical industry and between governments.[185]"
And for that matter the early Internet is nothing like the current day internet in terms of access. So what's the point in comparing the two?
We ran the reverse (medicine then internet) and it took a long time to get to the internet.
The quote also is including all medicine, not just modern. Cold starting medicine then feels very hard.
Btw, early modern medicine was pretty much unencumbered by regulation - so there would be little change.
> Btw, early modern medicine was pretty much unencumbered by regulation - so there would be little change.
Not so; the early work was encumbered by rules against graverobbing. There were some famous advances made by .. someone who's name I do not recall, but he'd have been in trouble if people knew what he was up to.
Those health freaks would do the right things why? Why would other communities not seek to stop or block them from doing what they are doing (these experiments would have at times pretty dire consequences)? Why would there be zero rules for what those health freaks are doing? There is just no reason to assume this would just work out.
Why hasn't the internet brought insane advances in science if it is such a force multiplier for it?
It's research and rediscovering a field. Of course they'd get a bunch of stuff wrong. That is how medical research works; people try things that don't work all the time.
And we're imaging a world with presumably no antibiotics. Nobody cares if people are accidentally killing themselves, death lurks behind every shrub.
> Why hasn't the internet brought insane advances in science if it is such a force multiplier for it?
... have I dropped into an alternate universe? The rate of scientific progress is unreal right now. We're progressing at a pace that is unparalleled in human history at a global scale. There is even a risk we'll obsolete the human mind this decade. Something has been force-multiplying scientific progress.
I suppose I should say technological progress rather than scientific, technically science has been slowing down since they've discovered most things. Maybe that was the point of confusion here. But the rate of knowledge dissemination is resulting in massive quality of life improvements that mean outcomes on the ground are improving in unreal ways. Look at the dissemination of things like iPhones for example.
What technical and scientific progress at unreal rates? The amount of information and data increased, but a lot of other things are highly incremental at best. If the progress is so great, why hasn't productivity increased a lot or life expectancy? Parallel universe indeed.
The idea that we discovered most things has quite a lot of hubris in it, given the vast sways of things we only have a poor grasp on.
Not sure the iPhone is an example of improved quality of life as the effect varies quite a lot between use cases.
so no, the internet may be good for lots of things, but it would by no means replace the groundwork required over centuries to come up with modern medicine...
Luckily these sort of nonsense one or the other positions don’t work in the real world. Clearly it would be much easier to recreate modern medicine with the Internet available than it would be to recreate the Internet if we just had medicine.
I find the view that recreating modern medicine being clearly easy with the internet dubious. Even more, we did create the internet while having medicine before, not the other way around. Without modern medicine we might not have any internet to start with as the struggle with human diseases and illness might have led to very different time attribution of efforts.
Also, the quote is for all of medicine, not just modern.
I like google but google is only as good as the stuff out there, and then finding useful content (that is not popular) is hard, and getting even harder the more content is produced.
greed in the form of ads also don't help much...
Medicine, on the other hand, was responsible for removing an immeasurable amount of pain and suffering from humanity, including having our loved ones (and ourselves) around for much longer. I find hard to believe people would give back antibiotics for anything we have from the post-Internet revolution.
now that I have kids, I grow increasingly conscious towards the effects this has on them.
Without the internet, I'd have vastly reduced choice in entertainment.
I'll take the medicine. By many orders of magnitude.
Now if we focus on "sufficiently long time scales" perhaps the internet is going to be the human invention that enables us to get where we need to be. But that's a guess. Perhaps I'm dim but I don't see how the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by orders of magnitude.
In the long term, people will look back and say that although medicine did develop first, it only really got serious traction when the Internet and related technologies appeared.
> Without the internet, I'd have vastly reduced choice in entertainment.
This is facetious. Do you really believe that current medical care does not benefit from the Internet at all; that it's only used for entertainment?
Looking back, I don't think we'll look at it like "the internet allowed us to create technology X and Y", but rather "the internet turned our tech development rates, across the board, into hockey sticks steeper than we'd ever seen before".
I doubt that the Covid vaccine was developed so quickly because of the internet. The internet might have shaved a little bit time off, but it wasn't instrumental in the vaccine developement as far as I understand it. The development was a huge effort between governments, corporations, and science sitting atop decades of research. Did it make certain communications easier - for sure, but I struggle to see that as anywhere as big as changed processes in testing and roll-out.
HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99.
History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet...
There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine.
The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.
Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet.
M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus.
Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc.
And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc.
It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale
People managed huge coordination efforts before the internet (just take the US in WWII with half the GDP dedicated to war efforts). So claims about the effect of the internet from better coordination there need a lot to substantiate them.
Many people may use a significant portion of their electricity and lights on watching... whatever. But the statistical majority of use cases does not define the medium.
Maybe a less controversial way to say it is "global communication is more important than medicine," but I still like the way patio11 said it.
Someone else I put in this group is CGP Grey, the YouTuber, specifically his early podcast episodes. That guy's ideas changed my life in a lot of ways as a teenager in ways I think I can't fully describe today.
Suppose an angry reader is looking for a reason to form a mob against you. If you write in simple sentences, that makes it easy for the angry reader to process your statements and go after them. But if your sentences are more complicated, the angry reader needs to decode them logically before they can justify their anger. Angry people tend to be poor at logic. So when they run into this kind of writing, they often get bored before they have a chance to get outraged. You get your message across, and the angry reader moves on to the next tweet in their feed. Everybody wins.
This doesn't work 100% of the time. But if you do it right, it cuts down on a lot of negative virality. I'm not saying this is or isn't Patrick's intentional strategy. I have no idea. It's just one among many consequences of this communication style.
I do think that precision in writing is useful for defending one’s prior claims (and for other reasons!) but I think that’s orthogonal to defending one’s self from mass action on today’s internet.
Some people do not enjoy my writing style. That is fine; it’s a big Internet and there are writers with many styles on it. Some people think my style is poorly considered or unnecessary. I invite them to attempt writing a few million words. It will give one a very considered view on one’s own style.
I have spent half my life working in a foreign-to-me language and so I feel for non-native speakers who try to read my writing. That said, all choices in life have trade-offs. Many publications in the U.S. target a fifth to eighth grade reading level. You likely would have little difficulty reading those publications, much like I have comparatively little difficulty reading Japanese aimed at 5th graders. However, people rarely associate those publications with dense, insightful, textured prose on complicated technical and interdisciplinary subjects. (If some HNers do, awesome; stuff you’ll love is available at the obvious places on the Internet.)
In case you needed any encouragement, here's some: Keep going, you're amazing!
> I invite them to attempt writing a few million words. It will give one a very considered view on one’s own style.
That it will! I recently went from [not writing many documents] to [writing a ton of documents], and it turbocharged my reflecting-on-style background process.
Thanks again for your documents over the decades!
...and as a quote in HPMOR put it:
> Apparently people who were in books actually sounded like a book when they talked.
The concision you're looking for in his work is one mark of successful writing, but not the only one. You can compare his writing to that of, say, the Rationalists, who have never found a narrative they were unable to pulverize into a half-finished wiki page. There's research, and the choice of which details to make prominent. B.A.M. succeeds in part because it tells interesting stories. That's good writing, regardless of stylistic choices.
I think you're being too glib. This could have been a much more interesting discussion.
What bugs me is the blithe assertion about the quality of his writing, because like it's just demonstrably false that he writes badly. He has different writing goals, different subject matter, a different audience, and a very different style. It's easy to see how any or all of those things might not be your cup of tea. But his writing is effective, which is really the first and most important thing you want to ask for from what he's trying to accomplish. Just as important (to me, nerding out about this) I don't think he'd be more effective if he tried to write more like you do.
The context of this subthread is a non-native speaker asking if the fault here lies with the writer or the reader, and I gave my honest opinion. Arguments about effectiveness and success are neither here nor there; don't make me drag Kenny G into this.
This is not about sticking up for Patrick, who can stick up himself just fine (he has more readers than either of us). It's about my understanding of what "good writing" is.
I knew a guy whose brother worked as a chef on the Charles de Gaulle (France's only aircraft carrier), and I bet the cooking there was incredible. The thing probably has a dedicated wine deck.
One of my weird qualifications is evaluating text complexity. Most of Patrick’s writing is simply highly accurate and precise erudite language. Frankly, compared to other writers at a comparable level of erudition, his writing is downright economical rather than convoluted.
His texts tend to be very information dense in a way that I’m not sure all readers appreciate or value.
>. or if he is simply careful about using the proper terminology
Yep. All that.
> and my English is just not good enough to follow him like a native speaker would.
Probably (not sure about your English proficiency level), but that’s not a knock on your English.
Note that Patrick’s writing is very high level, and I think many native speakers don’t read his texts with a high degree of fluency. Specifically, they simply don’t make it through the text, they don’t understand what he wrote, or they are not able to identify the preciseness and accuracy (and sometimes artfulness) with which he communicates his ideas.
On a personal level, I am a big fan of his writing — it’s just a delight to read material on a complex topic with a high degree of confidence that what he says is extremely accurate.
Another author who I think writes at a high level is Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex and astralcodexten (or wherever he writes these days) — very high brow style on complex topics. It’s not for everyone. Fwiw, I’ve had to read (and reread) some of Scott Alexander’s pieces in small chunks with breaks to process what I had read — sometimes it’s just oozing with intellectual goodness.
For someone who writes in finance in a more casual style, I recommend Matt Levine and his newsletter Money Stuff (free).
The salary negotiation article really doesn't come off as that formal and high level, to me; the tone is rather casual, although it requires knowledge of some advanced vocabulary like "fungible" and "administrativia". I'm not saying this to brag about my reading level; I'm genuinely a bit confused.
I had been expecting something like the preface from the second edition of Jane Eyre[3].
[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
[2]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/
[3]: https://victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/janeeyre/pre...
1. Some topics are easier to write about than others — certain types of complexity will not add to the quality of communication. I agree that the salary negotiation article of Patrick’s isn’t particularly complex.
2. High level texts don’t have to be inaccessible. One of the best high level texts that I’ve seen was a Turkish article that ostensibly looked like a sports story on football/soccer but was actually very high level political commentary. Some of the stuff that African story tellers do is absolutely mind-boggling in its ability to communicate on multiple levels.
3. The salary negotiation article may be simple for you and for many folks on HN, but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve sent this article to (with purpose) who didn’t even finish reading it. Specifically, I think the structure is longer and more involved than some folks like. Some of the (important, imho) topics also can put people to sleep — fully-loaded salary costs comes to mind.
4. I’m not sure what the view on the salary negotiation article is now, but it was an eye opener to many people when it was written. The way salaries are decided in tech companies is quite a bit different now than it was in 2012, and I think this article played at least a small part in that cultural change.
5. Even in an article on a relatively mundane topic like salary negotiation, Patrick comes up with gems like this: “If you have a kid brother who majored in Flemish Dance and got a modest full-time job at a non-profit, his fully-loaded cost is still probably $4,000 a month or more.” There is a lot of cultural load in that one. It might be easy for HN folks to parse it, but it’s not that easy for large swathes of the population, especially if non-native populations are included.
If I run into any of Patrick’s writing that showcases his some of his higher level stuff over the next 24 hours, I will reply here. It’s a busy day, so I’m not sure I will have the time.
As a fun side thing, here is a high-level text from Obama when Seinfeld ask him what sport politics is most like:
“It’s probably most like football. A lot of players. A lot of specialization. A lot of hitting. A lot of attrition. But then every once in awhile, you’ll see an opening, you hit the line, you get one yard, you try a play, you get sacked, now it’s like, third and 15… you have to punt a lot. But every once in a while, you see a hole, and then there’s open field.”
A reasonable comprehension question to ask on a text like this would be something like “Based on Obama’s comment, what are some specific occurrences in politics that might have conceptual parallels in [American] football?”I assure you that this passage is basically like Klingon to non-native speakers who have not immersed themselves in American culture.
> 3. The salary negotiation article may be simple for you and for many folks on HN, but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve sent this article to (with purpose) who didn’t even finish reading it. Specifically, I think the structure is longer and more involved than some folks like. Some of the (important, imho) topics also can put people to sleep — fully-loaded salary costs comes to mind.
This is also a good point. I think it's because a lot of people, even college-educated people, just don't read much, so most won't read a very long article, even if it's written in a casual tone, particularly if it's boring. Partly, I believe that reading has to be practiced and maintained, similar to maintaining a muscle. If you don't read articles regularly, reading a long one will be very mentally taxing. Even if you do, if an article is longer than what you're used to, you'll feel mentally tired after you're done. And it's harder to read long articles when they're about a bit of an unexciting topic, like salary negotiation.
We've got an early leader in the clubhouse for the 2024 Accidental HN Slogan Contest.
Is that typical?
Cowen probably puts in more research than any other interviewer. His style is pretty unique, but the interviews never become rambly and the guests get to showcase much more range.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-bentley-ha...