0x4d464d48

"But what I've found is that a lot of the toxic positivity types still hold a lot of negative emotion. However they can't express it without some justification. That justification usually comes in the form of attacking someone who has committed a transgression of expected kindness."

I notice that too. It seems some people look for a social hedge or 'permission' before they'll say something disagreeable to save face.

I'm not so sure I buy the idea that holding back disagreeable opinions or observations is an act of "kindness" per say. To me it seems more like trying to navigate social relationships with tact. I can loosely see how holding back the urge to "let that son of a bitch know what I really think" can be construed as such but I don't really believe that fits the bill either.

There's a massive difference between the idea of kindness coming from a place of understanding where you're letting people know you see their struggle and genuinely believe in their inherant worth and ability to overcome or cope with those struggles vs subtle or overt manipulation for the sake of being socially placating.

Are you referring to smarm specifically?

I don't really believe there is such a thing as toxic kindness when that kindness is genuine. Smarm, on the other hand, is disingenuous by definition and can be extremelly toxic.

I have a couple of years on the author, but he's right. I think it's similar to what happens on reddit or any community that seems to attract the "my IQ is north of 125 and I know it" crowd. I'm guilty of generating some of that toxicity too.

There are still tons of gems on HackerNews and I usually try to limit my interaction to engaging with that content and bypassing the comments altogether. HackerNews is at its best when it's sharing useful content with people and at its absolute worst when you try to engage with that person who's wrong on the internet. Aside from stroking one's own ego there's nothing to gain by engaging with people to try and set them straight.

In sum. Sharing is caring and that asshole on the internet is still wrong.

I prefer to think of it as "express your contradictory opinion only if you're absolutely sure this is the hill you want to die on."

...

Most of the time it's not such a hill.

Then it sounds like she's found balance in her career. She also has several valuable skill sets she can leverage to attain another position if her current employer does not adequately value her contributions.

It's hard to argue a person with technical competence and good interpersonal skills isn't going to be in higher demand than a person with the same level of technical competence and mediocre to poor interpersonal skills.

A chance to hone her soft-skills while becoming a more productive engineer.

It does a lot more good for her career prospects than doing the bare minimum and relegating her scope to code monkey.

Been a software engineer for about 5 years now.

One of the best roles I ever had for my professional development was as a sales engineer.

Working in a different role at a MAMAA now with less customer interaction. Yet, learning soft skills like understanding who stakeholders are and their pain points increased my efficacy by orders of magnitude.

I didn't go into this line of work with the intent of capitalizing on my people skills but there's only so far technical competence can take you.

Solving problems is the easy and fun part of the job. Focusing your energy on solving _useful_ problems while developing the listening skills and humility to understand what other people view as problems and managing stakeholder expectations is the hard part.

"Any pressure I've had to lose weight or whatnot has come from me. All female partners have said that they don't care about my weight, and some actually like some belly to rest on."

Same.

I work out as a hobby and for psychological hygeine, i.e. to keep myself disciplined and just feel better.

Oddly when I started dating my current girlfriend she thought my lack of a 'dad-bod' might be too much of a red flag.

Doesn't seem to be the case almost 5 months later.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I support the jobs the methane will provide

"I think that for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, perhaps it may make more sense to end up a situation more like newspapers, where you have more reputable papers like the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ that have stricter rules, and then you also have the National Enquirer or other random outlets that have little to no standards."

Don't forget, media outlets can get the pants sued off of them for knowlingly publishing false and defamatory information. I think we're well past the point of websites being held liable for the content they host, user generated or not, and make public/promote algorithmically.

Then came the internet echo chambers and that authority shifted.

Manipulators tell you how special, wonderful, deserving and smart you are.

The socially conscious tell you how weak, falliable, unspecial and prone to folly you are.

The socially conscious have a really, really tough sell. At worst it becomes an exercise in catering to someone's pride in being "more woke" than those other dullards.

Robert Greene really hammered the point home in his opus "The Laws of Human Nature". People, all of us, need to cater to our vanity. We aren't well equiped to accept the idea that we can do stupid things or even just be stupid.

It's far easier to fool a person than to convince a person they've been fooled. The great struggle of our time isn't telling truth to power it's telling truth to our own communities...

"But what if at some point they decide to be as "open" as OpenAI (ie., not)?"

Aisde from some of the academics and the "gain and share knowledge for knowledge's sake" types they hire why would they care?

For the record, I don't like the idea of scientific research becoming proprietary. At all. But is there anyone credulous enough to think these organizations would willingly risk their bottom line for principles like "openess" and not just play the PR games to make themselves appear open and concerned?

In other words "Don't LOOK evil but do evil when no one's looking".

The Frances Haugen already shows how damaging such openness can be.

"I’m hoping for the best, too, but let’s not continue the tradition we’ve had during the pandemic of saying “you’re worrying too much” and being wrong."

The problem is anything that works will always look like an overreaction.

But it doesn't really matter anymore. With all of the fatigue and the failure of public health professionals to set public expectations around vaccines which are looking like they're going need to be taken seasonaly now the only poltically feasible course left at this point is "let's fuck around and find out."

Hehe, nice.

\m/

"We're trying to avoid that hell here, and you pushed this thread straight into it."

Was it I who pushed this thread into a flame war or the other commenters?

I only intended to point out that education, by its nature, changes people which inevitably leads to friction with other people who don't like that change or what that change enables which is not new. The origin of the word "erudition" highlights that point quite well.

"An idea only worthy of medieval scholasticism."

If that were so there wouldn't need to be education in the first place.

Change comes kit and parcel with learning and experience. Just learning _how to learn_ to truly grasp arcane and rigid topics is difficult in it's own right. E.g. learning to challenge your own intuition and recognizing when you're using heuristics to take cognitive shortcuts.

Buffing out the rough edges to ones thinking and practice of a skill is exactly what education is designed to do which is why I find Rorty's writing here lazy and uninteresting. The question of "how much education should be required to function in a society and what should its content be" is more than fair. Its the tone of thos piece as if the discovery of education presenting a friction point for others is profound and paradoxical which I find vapid.

"The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like: “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envision merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.”"

What else is new?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/erudite

Yep.

Because an array is an object which has a 'truthy' value '![]' evaluates as 'false'.

Simplifies to a statement similar to 'false == false'.

A little useless arcana for those interested.

Well, not so useless if your expecting '!someEmptyArray' to evaluate to 'true'. Use '!someEmptyArray.length' instead.

Say what you will about JavaScript...

I use it constantly not because it's well-designed but because TINA (there is no alternative).

[] == ![]; // true. Go ahead. Run it in your console...

"Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet."

God I wish that was true...

It's not that the language is necessarrily bad. It's the sludge of legacy code I've had to deal with and teams treating it as the hammer for every problem that they think they must treat as a nail.

Efficency be damned.

"PhD's with sales skills..."

Sounds expensive.

"Helicopter Ben"

I think you mean Papa Jerome "Money Printer goes BRRRRR..." Powell.

At least Bernake had a cap on the balance sheet...

"Given that Japan is mysteriously inflation-proof, why doesn’t the government take advantage of that by monetizing the debt?"

It incentivizes moral hazard along with policies that could trigger hyperinflation or inefficent allocation of capital.

Why bother evaluating a project's risk if that risk can be magically waved away by printing fresh money?

Thats not to say that doing so guarentees these things _would_ happen in the same way that walking into a pride of lion's with pork chops hanging on your ears means you wont be eaten but there's precedent that such schemes don't work well in the long run.

E.g. Weimar.

Good read.

This is from 2008 and hindsight is 20/20 but theres a couple of disturbing omissions that have started making themselves apparent.

The piece emphasizes how all of this "cogitive surplus" is going to promote sharing and in the hands of good actors that's fantastic.

E.g.

"Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring."

But now for the other side of the coin. What happens when the people providing and sharing content are _bad_ actors?

E.g.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

Further, you're always assuming the provided data is accurate. It mandates a level of trust with the data provider. Sure, there may not be much incentive to provide fake data to a simple crime map but this can change quite readily when commercial interests are involved or some coordinated group of malicious actors. My mind jumps to small business owners being 'brigaded' on Yelp and state funded troll farms.

One final piece that I found particularly disturbing.

"Media that's targeted at you but that doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for."

It's hard to argue that finding a niche for oneself is bad but I don't think that there are many intelligent people left that would argue media bubbles are a force for good. That's not to say the author would disagree but this is not an endorsement it seems to border on sympathetic.

I don't learn and grow from media that targets me. If anything it's antagonistic to that. Media that targets me makes me feel comfortable. It promotes narrative formation over reality testing.

Media not targeted for me, or that doesn't include me on the other hand, requires analysis. It requires comparison and contrast to my ideals and beliefs. It requires assessing why that media _doesn't_ target me and understanding who it's intended audience is and why _they_ consume it.

/rant

Felt the need to work on my writing this morning.

"When is that coin coming our way?"

My guess is around the time central banks start issuing it.

Won't somebody PLEASE think for the children!

"... I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt."

This is not said often enough and it is a shame.

Universities are not intended to be vocational schools. They're research institutions where the value they generate is the knowledge they discover. The knowledge discovered is often frivilous and arcane with no real use outside of a very specialized subsection of a field of study. However, there's also the knowledge which is 'useless' at the time of its discovery but changes the world later on as its studied further and applications are discovered.

E.g. https://math.berkeley.edu/~gmelvin/math54f12/math110su12_gra...

I don't think there's much more to add than Turchin's ideas of "overproduction of the elites" and it rubs me the wrong way when I hear intelligent people gripe about how university credentials and research have marginal vocational utility. The problem's with a culture that celebrates credentialism and gets people to take on crippling levels of debt to avoid an impovershed future, not scholarship.

"freed from vim."

... Does not compute.

"That gives the team a sense that it’s a process that is evolving to meet their specific needs, rather than evolving to meet a dogma."

In my experience the most dogmatic organzations tend to just cargo cult their methodology.

There's no real deep understanding for "why" it works for whatever MAANG they're trying to mimic. There's just a hollow pursuit of vanity metrics and busy work.

There's value to be had with good work methods but it's almost always when people craft it to serve the unique value their organization creates rather than blindly doing whatever it is that Google does.