insanejudge

Gaining access to vast quantities of raw information while as the same time losing the addition of analysis by experts, verification of sources and empirical facts, and the context those can provide (rather than complementing them) is in most respects a large net negative to real knowledge in a society.

Over half of people get information from algorithmically driven and typically anonymous human-curated feeds of stories and opinions, and for a major portion of them, this has displaced journalism entirely -- with the notable exception of anyone claiming to blow the whistle which in itself has been perverting incentives.

Expecting people to read beyond the headlines has always been a tall order, but the practice is currently facing extinction while media quality is in a race to the bottom competing for the same attention.

One could for instance be dedicated to events and anecdotes by or about the dozens of people struck by lightning every month and present a credible-seeming case that lightning strikes are escalating and now an eminent danger to people at large. The reality of this has been happening across the board for even much rarer events in the last few years, in a way that some might say exploits confirmation bias.

Maybe it's a pendulum swing that will return, but at the moment the long term trend is towards a return to oral tradition and a pre-telegraph level of shared common knowledge of current events, recent history, and so on.

You'd imagine if it was very predictable, that long term population projections wouldn't radically swing by billions and decades of trajectory every few years like they do.

As far as I can tell, this narrative has been pushed by prominent EA'ers and such to try to counter the calls for research/investment in renewables and responsibility over the data on climate change with culture war fears demanding short-term growth.

Addressing the largest stated reasons for not having children (affordability and child care), or physics-defying carbon capture machines, What could actually exist in 30 years I wonder?

fully agree on the failure of the rollout. There's also going to be issues with rolling anything out involving medical treatment into our gutted public health system and fragmented private system, so it has to be done through a lengthy (and apparently trivially abused) system of private organizations applying for the money, but the new treatment infrastructure should have been at least somewhat in place before changing the laws.

Also agree on the unintended consequence, and that in retrospect a carefully worded law about the degree to how public of drug use would be decriminalized would have had a drastic impact on opinion.

In contrast to the blame being assigned to Measure 110 (much before it was even implemented), and even with the problems rolling out treatment, by the numbers the impacts of decriminalization have been better than expected. 911 calls have not gone up, in terms of deviation from previous (and national) trends OD fatalities have not gone up, big administrative savings you pointed out, etc. So what did change? Visibility.

The wider impacts of this are very real with hotel bookings, conferences, tourism, etc. down because of this perception, and that is causing harm to businesses and residents here.

It's decently likely because of this that 110 will be rolled back rather than iterated on, and nothing substantial will change, but without the specific political focal point we'll likely hear about less it as its own issue but rather it will get rolled back into the general narrative funneling blame for the problems of urbanization.

IMO the bigger thing the measure 110 whiplash is showing is how completely social media has supplanted news and data in particular in shaping people's view of the world. The visible drug use is 100% a problem, but this time around personal experiences are serving as confirmation of everything they've already been seeing online more than anything. There are enough cameras and enough people to fuel very lucrative social media accounts drip feeding incidents of any particular issue every day (with very questionably accurate attribution) to and from a global stage. I live here and regularly hear about it in unrecognizably hysterical terms from family and people I interact with for work across the country almost daily.

kind of the same deal with spooky SQL queries and verifying your where clause with a select first

I've operated by and described the concept of Chesterton's Fence countless times, so that's a great name to learn. It's such a regular thing working with new grads, etc. that they see some "old legacy crap" and their first reaction is to want to tear it out or scrap the whole thing start over.

On some occasions it can be worth the lesson to let them try but it's a good thing to remember that the people who came before us weren't all complete idiots and there is generally a reason why they did what they did.

Sometimes it is gross old code that needs to be replaced, but even then it often still contains a hard fought record of all of the corners and edge cases you need to understand and handle to build anything in that domain.

If only there was some sort of organization, beholden to the people by democratic election, which was obligated to protect and provide what does not particularly align well with a profit-driven model (military, roads and public transportation, fire & police services, sewer and water systems, GPS and weather reporting), to provide this other thing that does not align particularly well with a profit-driven model... hmm...

everywhere it's been done universally and not under/defunded for electoral reasons, the combined economy of scale/standardization, removal of $100Bn+ middleman industries and cheap proactive preventative care saving on expensive emergency treatments more than completely negate the "people going to the doctor for funsies" cost

Yeah a lot of these government programs do bear the hallmarks of 40 years of management dependent on people sworn to defund, dismantle and obstruct any efforts to improve or reform them, who promised their constituency they were dysfunctional and whose (re)election campaigns depend on failing programs to hold up and point at.

Would you invest in a company where half of the board was filled by people who swore that the very existence of companies like that was immoral bordering on tyranny, and that they were going to shrink the corporation down to the size where we could drown it in a bathtub? That sounds like a stock with a pretty poor long term outlook.

The religion right now kind of goes the other way: Government by democratically elected representatives is evil. Government by autocratic CEOs beholden only to an elite group of investors is good.

It's weird seeing so many (former? ostensibly?) freedom loving people suddenly swearing things like the country is going to die unless we take the right to vote away from people and give it to property (landowners).

Germany like many other Europeans would absolutely be considered a socialist country by most US standards (holding no distinction between socialism and social democracy).

This is a big part of the confusion, intentional as far as I can tell, generated by people trying to eliminate taxed, regulations, and worker protections in that they can flexibly do things like point out how Sweden is wonderful and has no minimum wage, so we should do that too, when the reality is inverted with successful universal collective bargaining guaranteeing everyone much better wages -- something that would probably get the national guard rolled out if US workers pushed for presently.

The winning formula that seems to work without fail for personal productivity is crystal meth (not overdose or paranoia/psychosis or permanent heart and brain damage of course).

It's popular these days to dismiss negative consequences for all sorts of things as fake, but side effects need to be confronted and actually dealt with, not just waved off. Would you let the 'communism has never been tried actually' people off the hook?

re: societal trust

Really feels like we need a massive exercise wherein folks have to repeat back what they heard someone say before responding to it, something they have people do in couples therapy.

In the last few years everyone's filters have gotten to the point where it seems like they really cannot even perceive what others say accurately -- literally substituting words -- and continually reframing arguments to the extent that a good portion of fighting online is over things nobody has said.

I mean heck even in the comments on this article, someone mentioned at the end of another comment that they thought this article was "irrelevant" which given this is ostensibly a tech news site that sounded fair (but also: so what?), and the person arguing back said they were "not our arbiter of acceptable content". Relevant... acceptable. The conceptual rift is massive, leaving the second person arguing against a point which has not been made (and then someone else makes a defense of the misconstrued point and so on and so on).

That's a clever abuse of data but, though this may come as a surprise to you, very few people actually die by means so traumatic (crushing, incineration, explosion) that it's impossible to determine which organ or necessary biological system failed critical to their death.

This same process would determine almost nobody has died of cancer, gunshot wounds, drowning, smoking, etc. as they lead to parts of one's body no longer functioning which in turn causes death, as opposed to some sort of central and essential death descending upon them.

You may even recall how this exact same handful of cases were used to "demonstrate" that doctors were just making it up as they couldn't explain the cause of death. May I refer you to the 1979 film The Jerk, as the main character exclaims "there's something wrong with these cans!" when they were, in fact, being shot by a sniper.

Thank you for listening to my TED talk

The data in SF is pretty clear (https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/ , "District Attorney Actions on Arrests Presented" for example), and as the trend appears to be everywhere else, arrests are down and rates of charges filed are similar or even higher. In the SF case rates have been higher in the last two years than all of the previous data there back to 2011. Similar story in LA where filing rates did not appreciably change.

Weird, I've only encountered the exact opposite.

Seems like for a 'longtermist' something like climate change is such an insignificant blip (and one that will 'inevitably be solved by technology once it becomes a problem ') that it doesn't even bear thinking.

I think that's sort of the point though, it makes you sound super duper intellectual and you can do weird stuff on behalf of the 10 million year view while hand waving away responsibility for the near term with futurist fiction.

I mean, they say they're a libertarian (and other libertarians are fake libertarians, which is possibly the most libertarian thing to say) and expressed agreement with the culture war issues like the "death of men" so the comfort zone sounded more like being around a crowd like that. There are loads of different PTSD support groups (veterans, service industry workers, family trauma, just flat out for men) to the extent you almost need to willfully choose to seek out a domestic/SA group where they aren't comfortable with men.

Otherwise it read like a pretty run of the mill review of the politicans' public personalities plus some "centrist" appeals to the golden mean fallacy which are generally used as a pry bar to keep stretching the overton window to the right. Should we engage libertarian age of consent abolitionists for the good of open discourse and reach for 'not a black-or-white' answer there?

what a wild single standard

> Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc. If you look for the worst mass crimes in history, you will find this idea at the core.

Do you have anything other than the jordan peterson paraphrase to back this as a cause, as opposed to the actual dangerous ideologies? One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.

This idea is a straightforward false dichotomy presenting the only alternative to absolute individual liberty as complete subjugation of free will, and used to provide some truly absurd explanations for things, such as 'honor' being the actual problem in this case, not the 'killings'

size, vm-itude, etc. aside, i've seen (albeit very high end) laser printers that can render text on paper faster than this scrolls. yikes.

your description of "grafting in" consul and vault _is_ exactly what it feels like to do that with kubernetes, and it happens rather often.

Using industry standard components like consul and vault is not really a second thought for k8s in production, leaving you with duplicated hunks of infrastructure to step around, where the idea of tacking on kube-dns and kubernetes ~secrets~ onto something else is rather laughable. This, again, is the point which was being made -- you're forced to bear the brunt of kubernetes' NIH.

I'll assume by the contrived situations of inventing some wacky custom mousetrap to bind nomad to dns rather than using the "slapped in" (https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/configuration/consul.html) consul integration for dns, or writing config update/logs/rolling deployment code rather than using the core nomad scheduler features to do that, that you don't actually know, and this is FUD?

The thing the 'there's a ready to go helm chart' folks always seem to skim over is that outside of an absolute startup position where you can curlbash to hello world heaven, you will have integration to do, often huge amounts of customization (read: complete rebuild) to do to take a toy helm app configuration to a production configuration, and I've never seen even so much as a nascent k8s (or nomad, mesos, etc.) buildout leveraged in a preexisting environment without quite a bit of pipeline, acl/naming convention and ux glue.

The proliferation of operators, CRDs, things like k3s and the growing ecosystem of vendor distributions makes 'stock k8s' an increasingly nebulous target.

Interesting (well, interesting to me) note on the nfs case, on modern linux, `umount -l` should be able to unmount pretty much anything. You'll often still be left with a pile of processes stuck in uninterruptible sleep depending on the scope of the 'random share', but at the very least it can staunch the bleeding and let you move around.

TBH I get rather claustrophobic when I can't `w` with aplomb.

weird to see someone unironically bragging about inventing the humblebrag.

There's a huge difference between a "no shaming" culture and a "don't be ashamed" culture.

It's critical for people to be able to be open and transparent about their mistakes and the process leading to them without fear of being put through the ringer for it, but that's not mutually exclusive from an environment where the type of appropriate embarrassment/remorse necessary (usually in the form of a thorough postmortem) to truly learn from one's errors is expected.