cs137

Funny enough, I have about 50 Youtube videos in my browser that I've been meaning to watch "some time" but haven't. The problem is that, unlike a book where you can skim for content quality and decide whether or not to read for real, these long video essays are very hard to audit for quality without getting engaged ("hooked") enough to spend significant time. Some of them are fantastic, some are mediocre but good when you don't feel like thinking too much... and a lot of them are 17 minutes surrounding 12 seconds of information. Videos have a similar discoverability problem to novels--it takes time investment to get a sense of whether the content is worth your time at all--but, with video, you can get a sense of quality (if a flawed one, and maybe an outright misleading one) based on pictoral production values.

The terrifying thing isn't shouting into the void, and it isn't being visible to everyone. It's the adverse combination of the two. When you need to be heard is when your status has taken a dive or something bad has happened... at which point, people just want you to go away because you're depressing them. On the other hand, every little thing you write that could one day be attributed to you is available to any authoritarian government or employer (the euphemism we use for authoritarian private governments) on a three-second Google search... and, since these people have bad intentions, can only be used against you. HR people don't Google you because they think you're a fascinating person; they do it because protecting the company from someone with internet dirt is one more scalp to display at annual review time.

Also, when I had a successful blog, I found that a lot of my best posts were ignored, whereas the good stuff that really deserved to get exposure barely got noticed. It feels like influence but it really isn't because people stop listening as soon as you say something that makes them uncomfortable.

I enjoy writing but the percentage of people who will gain anything by doing it in public under their real name, in this time of belligerent capitalist authoritarianism, is very very low.

Capital wins under the current system because the bad guys control your reputation and career, but capital will win under a pseudonymous work system too because careers will cease to exist (or, in any case, will be difficult to assemble) and the commoditization of labor will be complete.

I'm a very "out" antifascist, and I've lost jobs due to my public not-liking-fascists, so I'm sympathetic to people who'd benefit from pseudonymous work, but fiverrization is not the way forward.

The solution is to have aggressive right-to-forget, anti-blacklisting, and anti-discrimination laws, and not only to enforce them vigorously but to go forward on the presumption of employee innocence (that is, innocent until proven guilty).

Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this.

Very few people want to "consume gas". They want to be able to live decently and have meaningful jobs. Unfortunately, in today's market, that usually means a shit-ass load [1] of driving.

----

[1] You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence.

This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-old Millennials dropping dead of preventable causes. The American healthcare system has already killed millions, but it's also killed future millions.

> I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds.

... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them?

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.

There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources.

The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.

In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year just to do the search.

Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2 years at IAS or MIT before taking the position at a place like UCLA or Michigan (which are still excellent, just not as highly ranked). Then it became something you had to do, before getting any job--mandatory low-wage labor, another rung on the ladder. Now, it seems to be going out of fashion, as the prize loses its appeal.

I'm surprised this didn't happen 10 years ago. The academic job market has been a toilet for 30+ years--and this change is a good thing, by the way--and I had expected bimodalization to come much quicker.

You're absolutely right on the "labor shortage" bullshit. There isn't one. The working class has been fully depleted and there isn't any more give. People are shutting down. Workers who can't afford gas are forced to live off other people (either through illegitimate labor or by dependency.) This is the turtle at the bottom burping. About fucking time.

Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook".

Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win.

Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either.

In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon.

In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

We think readers should be a smarter crowd--and, thus, more upscale in their choices--than TV watchers and popular music listeners (as both groups comprise, roughly, the general population). This is possibly the case, but it seems to be cancelled out by the massive time investment involved in seriously reading a book: eight hours for a typical novel, as opposed to an hour for a TV show or 3 minutes for a pop song. The high cost of exploration means that the book world has the same problem and, unfortunately, the processes and people who are trusted to filter for quality, quite frankly, don't. Traditional publishers follow the market and "book buzz" is built from the opinions of highly influential non-readers.

Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low quality but because discoverability is a huge problem, even in today's world of recommendation algorithms and the like. There are a good number of "famous" writers who live in poverty, because the percentage of books that sell well enough to live on is so small.

Traditional publishers don't bother to invest much in a book unless they are sure it would sell without them (i.e., the author has 4,000,000 Instagram followers). The typical budget for marketing and publicity is about $300. The thing is, trad-pubs don't have to be better. They're inundated with unsolicited manuscripts ("slush") and even though very few of those are excellent, at least 5% are in a state where a competent editor could turn it into a book as good as any other commercial bestseller. They have all the power and, to them, authors are a fungible commodity. Oh, and if you think a literary agent is going to help you navigate this, well... unless you went to prep school with an agent, you won't even get _read_. You'll sit in a query pile, possibly get a glance by a 19-year-old unpaid intern, and get a form-letter rejection 18 months later.

You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... and while you probably won't be able to afford a publicist you'll be competing against people who can--and non-writing efforts will take up at least a hundred hours of your time--some people find the marketing aspect fun and if that's you, great, but most writers don't, which is a big part of why so many of them pursue traditional publishing even though it's abusive if you're in the bottom 99%.

Allowing big-name authors to supercharge their apparent productivity by hiring teams of "co-authors" who do the actual writing exacerbates this problem. I don't see a good way to fix it, and what Patterson does probably shouldn't be outlawed, but it still sucks. The book world, in which name and "author brand" matter far more than literary quality, is already pretty moribund... and this kind of stuff doesn't help.

The thing is, executives measure themselves by how quickly they get promoted into the next role, so no one cares that good management might reduce turnover in the next 2-3 years--in fact, the executive mindset is that it could just as easily increase turnover (what if we invest in their careers, and they leave?)

Sadly, this is absolutely true. Manage or be managed. Capitalism invariably becomes corporate (if unchecked, monopoly) capitalism which invariably becomes managerial capitalism, in which people are assessed by their position in the tree structure rather than anything they do, and 0 reports |= loser.

Unfortunately, if you think you can take on a middle-management role and also do technical work, you're probably wrong. Middle management isn't hard but it's super time-consuming, if you do it right (that is, if you care at all about the people you're managing, although you won't have much ability to protect them as you might hope for, because PMs). You'll barely know what the people under you are doing (most managers'll admit this in private) because so much of your time will be spent on meetings and political bullshit.

People leave because the job sucks. I don't mean that programming sucks; I quite enjoy it. Computer science is still an engaging field worth studying, and research programming isn't bad at all. Corporate SWE is pretty awful, though; you get paid far too little and treated far too shabbily to justify spending hours dealing with bugs and bad decisions that exist not because you're working on hard problems (after all, I've generated my share of bugs and bad decisions) but because of inadequate processes, mindless cost-cutting, generic incompetence, and an overall lack of care, especially at the top. All of this, to make a barely middle-class salary while people who are already rich and connected make millions off my work? No thanks. 2.25/5, would not do again.

This problem already exists in the bottom reaches of the self-publishing ecosystem--the AI-generated scammy "books" don't sell very well, but they take no effort to create--which could lead to a resurgence of traditional publishing's flagging prestige, but that would be short-lived, because New York publishing is probably no more than 10 years from getting Sokal'd in a high-profile way.

The problem with "speaking truth to power" is that the shitbags in power already know the truth (that they're shitbags, and that in a just world they would be torn down and humiliated, if not destroyed). What you do by "speaking truth" is reveal to them that you also know this. By doing so, you make yourself dangerous to them. Sometimes, this is what you want. Sometimes, it is not. It is not an easy, one-size-fits-all decision. Your enemies, but also your friends, start to see you as an instrument of war.

Also, with regard to "algorithmic demons"... it's not "algorithms" that are the problem. It's (a) the complete lack of transparency, (b) that the algorithms are often tailored toward objectives other than content quality (which leads to gaming, hence the perceived need for opacity), and (c) that the data now available about us is invariably used against us by bad actors (and that a lack of influence / platform will also be used against us, so I don't know if there's a way to win).

The algorithms themselves aren't so bad; what's worse is that these companies often slip shit into the algorithms that punishes people or ideas they dislike, and of course (a) this is completely unregulated, (b) it's impossible to prove, and (c) you'll often damage your reputation if you point it out (since you sound identical to a crazy person who failed organically and is lashing out at "the algorithm" with unprovable assertions).

The stakes may or may not have been lower, but they felt lower. Today's world is one where if you make a mistake at 18, you're stuck with it for life, and it's not because the university administrators will be out for your head (they probably won't be) but because the internet never forgets. The regulatory apparatuses we need to put between employers/governments and all the information (unreliable as it is) about us that's out there is... 20 years, at least, behind where it needs to be. You can't burn down your past and create a new story anymore, and there's a sense among the young that every minute not spent "hustling" (whatever the fuck that is) is a minute in which the competition is getting ahead and they aren't.

The change of attitude is definitely noticeable. Whether it's a change of social actuality is leass clear. The thing is, bad things still happened to young people who made small mistakes, if they were of low social class. They just disappeared and fell (back) into regular working-class oblivion. And today, the rich kids are still invincible because they'll hire PR firms to fix up their reputations if things go against them. The "feel" (for lack of a better word) of our society is distinctively more oppressive, but I'm not sure if the thing itself has actually changed that much over the past 30 years. I suppose I'd need more data.

I don't have anything against most Stanford students. (I mean, the startup bros and spoiled legacy kids can choke, but I imagine many if not most of them are normal people.) However, he's describing a college culture that is racist, classist, and misogynist... and I'm happy to see it get crushed. And sure, the crushing is being done by neoliberal authoritarian capitalists, who aren't my favorite people, but if a side effect of this is the next generation hating neoliberal authoritarian capitalists for whitewashing and degrading their college experience, then I'll take it.

Nostalgia is a powerful disinfectant. The people who pulled off the pranks of yore risked getting in serious trouble as much then as they do now. It's just that hindsight changes one's view of things: the misbehaviors one got away with are now seen as harmless... and this is especially pronounced among people whose social class means they get away with almost everything.

I'm not saying that the average cult member--and here I'm talking about actual cults, in the sense of being abusive and coercive and separatist, not NRMs in general--has good critical thinking skills. Obviously, there's something wrong there. I'm only saying that, from everything I've read, the typical member is above average on the IQ scale.

Trust me, there are plenty of high-IQ people who believe in absolute nonsense. It's not even rare.

I don't think a "robot uprising" is remotely likely. We've spent the past 5,000 years forcing humans to become machines--that's what forced labor, from classical slavery to modern labor-market wage slavery, is--so the probability that we'd intentionally create human-like intelligences (if it were even possible) out of machines to do our robot/slave work is... close to zero, in my view. I do view it as very likely (probability approaching one) that malevolent humans using AI will do incredible damage to our society... it's already happening. Authoritarian governments and employers do massive amounts of evil shit with the technical tools we have now; imagine what hell we're in for if capitalism still exists 50 years from now.

What's scary isn't the possibility that LaMDA is sentient. (It's almost certainly not, and the only reason I qualify this with "almost certainly" is that I can't prove that a rock isn't sentient; it could in theory have subjective experience but no mechanism to convey it.) What we should be afraid of, rather, is that we already have the tools to fool people into believing in artificial person and that it's way, way easier than most people think.

We're all suspectible to this. The more time you spend with something, and the more time you spend wanting to see things, the more likely you are to catch a pattern that isn't really there. Have we achieved anything close to AGI? No, of course not. Are more and more people going to be fooled by what we have achieved? Yes, absolutely. The so-called Turing test is actually shockingly easy to pass.

I don't think Lemoine s an idiot. Maybe he's mentally ill; maybe he's not, but has been taken in for other reasons, just as people without biological mental illness are still susceptible to being taken in by cults.

The idea that we understand what physical matter really is, how it works, whether it can produce qualia, et al, is simply off the mark. Of course most physical systems can be reasoned about macroscopically and are relatively deterministic--we can understand how computers work because the functionality is almost entirely classical--and we know that quantum mechanics is both mathematically and experimentally valid, but we not at all gotten to the bottom of this.

In fact, one can argue that physics as we understand it can't be used to explain qualia. Physics requires symmetries (translational, rotational, spacetime) and asserts that there is no "privileged" reference frame that defines, say, the "objective" origin or x-, y-, z-axes. If you have two pure kilogram spheres of iron--of course, nothing macroscopic is actually 100.00% pure in practice, but it is physically conceivable and possible--they are exactly the same. One is a perfect substitute for (or copy of) the other. Consciousness likely violates this. We believe (although, without proof) that a perfect physical copy of a person would harbor a separate consciousness and that they would in fact diverge. This suggests that consciousness is a product not of the physical state--structural equality--but is driven by something more like pointer equality. The question is what it's "pointing" from. And, of course, we have no idea; we can't even prove that this is the case.