327 karma · joined April 4, 2011
And narratively I think it works amazingly. The idea of forcing someone to prove that they're sufficiently inhuman ... shudder.
Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.
All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?
Some of the AI-generated art is nice though, so more power to him on that.
But I think it's also possible to have pro-social taboos, particularly if they're attempts to correct for some indefensible (but maybe cognitively appealing or historically convenient) past error.
So for example, imagine a society that long practiced infanticide against the neurodivergent, and state-backed violence, disenfranchisement, and murder against the merely socially awkward. After intense and often violent social struggle, this society now affords them (us) formal equality, but big gaps in wealth and power remain, and a revanchist minority (with a terrorist fringe) openly wishes for a return of the old ways.
That society might develop strong taboos against "just asking questions" about whether shy people really had it so bad, or whether society should worry about whether they're treated fairly, or whether there isn't some innate biological difference that accounts for their relative lack of success. That would probably be a good thing!
There's some amount of epistemic deadweight loss you would happily accept to be extra guarded against backsliding on the core ethical commitments. You might even come out ahead epistemically, where there would otherwise be strong but subtle cultural biases, pressures of ideological convenience, and cognitive-scientific artifacts around in-groups and out-groups that make _false_ claims about the shy, awkward, or neurodivergent more appealing than the objective facts merit.
Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling with the effects his memo might have had on such a complex environment, or even sticking to pursuing the empirical facts about his claims, he decided to pursue a career as a right-wing micro-celebrity, only engaging with conservative activists and alt-right trolls. And he's been stuck there ever since, with his fellow culture warriors clapping each other on their backs about what brave heretics they are, instead of getting back to building anything interesting.
The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary sanction." Have the threateners been reliably identified in, for example, press accounts? It seems very possible that in some communities on campus "everyone knows who it is" without the administration actually knowing, or being able to reliably prove, who it was.
Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.
If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be around making a bad but much less expensive version of something that's already possible offline, but that requires lots of lawyers to set up.
When you have a market like that, it often makes sense to pursue growth as an end in itself, well past the point of profitability, because the reward for coming in first place (a durable monopoly) is way higher than a linear projection would suggest. Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) gives an especially clear explanation of this logic in Blitzscaling: https://www.blitzscaling.com/
> First of all, I want to take a moment to say hello and thank you to all of our Soylent friends out there who have helped turn Rob’s vision into one of the most talked about and fastest growing brands in the food and beverage industry!
Like, why not just publish a version of the famous Joel Test (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html), but for management incentives compatible with long-term thinking? Then companies can submit to voluntary review (maybe with a nominal fee) by your Long-Term Business Bureau, and you can issue certifications for ones that meet certain standards. Your go-to-market strategy is the same - you can target mid-sized startups that are looking to differentiate themselves and hoping one or two of them grow into norm-setting behemoths, but you don't have to ask those companies to jeopardize their (and their investors') liquidation strategies.
Big data!
What about the passengers they accosted? The no talking norm on public transit isn't meant to protect the shy from having to initiate conversations, since that's easy not to do. It's to protect people from strangers who want to but in. I'm sure every loudmouth who tried to strike up a conversation seated next to me on an airplane thought it was a fine idea, but I would have been happier to be left alone.