3,628 karma · joined January 21, 2009
If you go down the rabbit hole of looking at nearby stars and want a jumping off point, I mused some similar observations on another thread here:
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
A manager can instruct their reception team to only let people in with an ID Badge, and they already know they need to follow their manager’s direction, but when someone smooth persuades their way through they’re going to give a reason like “he said he was building maintenance and it was an emergency”.
In the past I’ve had some video files designed for eg 5.1 that worked poorly on headphones (potentially addressable with media player settings) but it seems this is becoming an unavoidable problem on some streams. The closest we get now is installing plugins that allow us to boost the volume beyond the normal laptop max (why is this not standard in the laptop?) and do some basic equalisation.
I’m unsure why there isn’t a standard for this with OS/TV layers ensuring consistent listenable sound levels, preventing uncomfortably/dangerously loud levels to your preference, avoiding the super loud ads/explosions and whisper quiet dialogue problem etc.
Especially when increasingly viewing platforms are a laptop in bed or even phones.
And because it hasn’t been in practice widely adopted in history (unlike e.g. liberalism or Catholicism) the rubber hasn’t hit the road to allow us to understand how it would work practically. I think some other good ideas suffer the same problem/preemptive attack. Indeed any social progress seems to be attacked by a sort of whataboutism or false slippery slope attack.
To your question on basic principles, I think they’re caught in exercises like the trolley problem or the psychological experiments of the 60s: people on the whole don’t want to be responsible for causing harm, they don’t want to see people in their influence of control harmed, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves, they don’t want to be judged/punished by others - even if convinced it’s for the greater good. I’m not saying some people won’t take a fiercely rational or ideological lens, but on the whole people are influenced by some common psychology. And I think actually this is probably good: as much as it hinders “utopian” ideas being realised I think it ensures humanity moderates ideology.
I think without this a strict utilitarianism, eg a robotic approach, would lead to kinds of harm that I wouldn’t support, even if justified to some sort of ends that itself is subjective. But I think with it, an elevation of the greater good would probably be better than many approaches today. For a practical example I think we should permit more people to consensually enrol in promising but risky cancer research and treatments.
To reiterate that same point I think that in practice those factors would probably allow most systems to be successful, and some/many might be better than what we have now.
I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems.
I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.
I’m not entirely sure why the US even borrows at all other than “that’s the way it’s always done it and our system is configured accordingly”.
The primary purpose of US Gov borrowing seems to be to ensure the stability of the currency both against its own expenditure in excess of tax and other receipts and at times to shift the balance of trade with other nations, i.e. borrowing being effectively the US Gov paying some other party not to spend US dollars for a term so that the US Gov (or economy more broadly) can spend instead. The underlying assumption here seems to be that the inflationary impact will net out (with the nominal expectation there will be adjustments for changes in the time value of money via the interest on borrowings).
However, in the first instance there are other ways the US Gov could achieve the same outcome (either other ways to influence the ways other parties use/spend the currency, or other ways to offset the inflationary impact of its own actions). So why is borrowing better than those alternatives and how often do we revisit that argument, particularly given how much both the currency and economy have changed in the last 50 years.
In the second, I’m not convinced that this necessarily nets out the inflationary impact or that every dollar is the same as every other dollar. My sense is it matters more whose hand the dollar is in if we want to model how it will impact the economy. For instance, if the US Gov spent $1tn on Defence contractors or the same on “helicopter money” the former is likely to exacerbate wealth inequality while the latter is likely to exacerbate inflation. But they’d “borrow” the same either way and we’d say that had netted out. Equally the “other party” spend you’re trying to stop by borrowing money out of the economy is not always equivalent: selling T Bonds for the retirement accounts of people who weren’t planning to spend that money anyway is going to impact the economy differently than encouraging young families to buy war bonds instead of new TVs just as selling bonds to foreign banks and governments is going to land differently again.
I feel like the obsession with surplus/deficit and national debt, together with unnecessarily overcomplicated financial jargon, means there are too few first principles discussions about the purpose of currency, the nature of the economy, and the policy levers we choose not to even look at, yet alone pull.
That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management.
We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal.
Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally).
I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control.
With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.
What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study?
In particular, their study says: "The specific claim of the “linguistic niche hypothesis” that grammatical complexity should reduce with an increased number of nonnative speakers is not supported by our results." (from the source https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704).
If I'm reading their study correctly, they seem to suggest there was a somewhat arbitrary mix of complexity in root languages, and that modern languages just carry on that same complexity mix based on the languages that influenced them, which doesn't do a lot to explain why languages differ in "complexity" (except perhaps to argue that maybe it doesn't matter: any old language will do and people just speak like the people they learn from).
I find it interesting to your point how even the way we make sense of something like this brings its own contextual baggage. Even "complexity" as a word can be good ("more powerful, developed") or bad ("more fragile, inefficient, and complicated") depending who you ask in what context.
Take this study: it seems to be exploring a hypothesis that societies that have more adult learners of a language tend to simplify that language to make it easier to learn. It seems quite interesting, and it gives us perspective on something we generally take for granted every day. It also seems to cast doubt on that original hypothesis.
But if this same study was called a measure of grammatical complicatedness, with the "more complex" languages instead called more complicated, and the "less complex" languages instead labelled more efficient or streamlined, we'd likely interpret the information differently.
So taking the summarised posted article. A quick glance reads to me as "some languages are more complex than others, and the hypothesis is that languages tend to reduce their complexity to allow non-native speakers to learn it". This to me, in the Western Enlightenment tradition of the march to progress where "the more something has been built upon and developed, and the more function and capability it has, the better it is" doesn't necessarily read as a positive thing at face value. But we could just as easily read it as language adapting and knocking down barriers to allow people to create connections and feel welcome in ways they were excluded from previously. Or as supporting international trade and being more efficient. Or as you've highlighted that perhaps they've altogether misunderstood the complexity of other languages by interpreting them in terms informed from their understanding of the complexity of their own native languages.
Conservatives in the Burke/Tocqueville tradition (as a quick tangent, a tradition that in my view at its best is like programming aka Don't Reinvent the Wheel, Don't Rewrite from Scratch, Refactor Respectfully after Learning Why it Is How it Is, but at its worst and sadly most common comes across far more as a romanticised and overglorified appeal to return to a time of greater privilege, exploitation, and ill-gotten misused power) would probably bring in another angle arguing that if the hypothesis were true it demonstrates a decay of civilisation: that there used to be these "great" languages that we're losing/lost.
I think you make the great point that there's so much subjectivity in this: that different languages can be useful in different ways without resorting to value comparisons.
We could apply the same lenses to memes and/or emojis: some argue they're a sign everyone is getting dumber and less articulate in the Idiocracy tradition, while others argue they're exciting and creative new culture, or an expression of increased global connection, or something else altogether.
Reflecting on English itself, we historically have seen a bit of both/and to the original hypothesis: a "simpler" more utility style of English that can selectively borrow on more "complex" words. The simpler English appears to have been used as much by locals who were not educated in the language of their new rulers as for any trade/migration reason, and accordingly has been heavily influenced by the older Saxon roots (an interesting outcome given oppressors, including the English, have at other times inhumanely erased the language of those they've conquered), contrasted with the French influence of upper-class conquering Normans whose words are usually considered in English more "complex" and perceived as more refined/intellectual by virtue of them being the language of power. Managementese is probably a modern incarnation of the same idea.
Looking at this differently and taking the "language can be useful in different ways" point, English seems generally still more likely to lean on its Germanic roots in describing practical matters, and French roots in describing aesthetic ones. Indeed its ability to borrow on different traditions is in my view one of its great strengths.
I'd probably argue the more language the merrier as long as we can all express what we want to express and understand each other, but there is probably a risk to entrenching stratification, whether it be of class or race or some other lens (i.e. everyone can speak a common English everyone understands, but the way in which it is spoken and the words selected reveal elements that can have social connotations, and those are often used by those in power as tools of status and judgement). American English seems to have some commonly explored lenses in media in which different styles of speech are heavily culturally and historically influenced and clearly reflect group membership (e.g. contrast Valley Girl English with African-American Vernacular English). We even see a similar idea across generations with slang. And then on the other hand there's the idea of "hidden transcripts" where an oppressed group inverts this model and develops and uses language and/or action (e.g. theatre, music) in a way to communicate in code without tipping off the oppressors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Domination_and_...).
Fascinating space given how much we take it for granted!
How are we 2023 and there still not legal protections against this sort of thing. It’s basically the tech version of peeping tom.
This seems like an incorrect summation of both the research and one of the researcher's quotes.
I believe this is the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04053.pdf
The researcher quote I presume inspired the article headline was: "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower ... If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second—but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.
From what I gather, the researchers have applied a novel measurement of 190 quasars monitored over two decades, and have formed the view that the photons received on Earth have experienced time dilation on their journey to us due to consistent redshifting of wavelengths. It appears there has been some debate in previous research about whether quasar photons were consistently redshifting as expected and/or whether redshifts were caused by time dilation or other causes. This has in turn placed some doubt on cosmological expansion theories. The researchers feel their analysis confirms mainstream theories.
This relies on the argument that:
1) Time has run at the same local speed for the universe's history (for all physics equations, t today is the same as t billions of years ago) - this is the opposite of what the phys.org article implies to me as a reader
2) Light has run at the same velocity for the universe's history (aka c has been constant)
3) Quasars act today as they did billions of years ago
4) The light from more distant quasars is redshifted consistent with expansion and relativity theories
As a bit of an aside thinking about this, I'm wondering if anyone can help me understand an erroneous interpretation I have.
If the observable universe is estimated at around 93 million light years in diameter, or around 28,500 megaparsecs, and the expansion of the universe is estimated at around 73.24 ± 1.74 (km/s)/Mpc, then the most distant objects are moving apart from each other at something like 2,087,340 km/s. Surely that should mean that any light emitted from those two objects never reaches the other as this is well above the speed of light. Or to frame it another way, surely that means we should only be able to see in our light cone around 4,096 megaparsecs of universe, with anything further than that expanding away from us faster than the light emitted from it can travel. Which should mean the most distant objects are constantly disappearing from view.
This article tries to explore the issue: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/dark-energy-myth-dis...
It reasons, due to dark energy:
1) There are parts of the observable universe that we are still yet to see (that as the universe expands new objects will enter our light cone for the first time)
2) That there are objects we will never see (that never will enter our light cone, and because of expansion will be prevented from doing so)
3) That any object we see we will continue to see indefinitely.
However I feel like #1 and #2 goes against my understanding of the Big Bang where all objects were once upon a time really close together (so share a common light cone), and I feel like #3 is hard to understand for the reasons I've outlined above.
How do I patch my understanding here?
When I saw the play+earn (an area the author says they have less examples for) I was picturing more freelance advisory consulting - dabbling in fun pieces of work with dream clients - than crypto trading but perhaps I’ve not quite got the framework on the first read.
In AU some fix all or part for 2-5 years (typically 3 years or less, with discouraging rates for the longer term relative to current rates at the time to factor for risk) but it’s not universal. For example, as of mid 2022 only 5% of loans were taken as fixed.
As a result most who did fix recently did so during Covid low rates for 3 years and are coming off now facing hikes from maybe 1.89-2% if they got the best fixed rates (at a time when the cash rate was 0.1% and variable was around 1%) to around 6% variable and 7.8% if they want to fix again.
I know the US system is a little different with long-term fixed mortgages, but for much of the world on variable interest rates, central bank decisions have an almost next day impact on income (and a fairly near term impact for those able to lock-in rates for a couple years).
It’s not quite as active as the government seizing assets, and I agree from a liberty perspective in governments not doing that, but from a purely rational perspective if I was presented the option of “once off wealth tax to erode the savings everyone accumulated during Covid (or even better put them into a long-term bond that will be released during a future deflationary period)” and the situation we have right now where they’re netting the same outcome slowly, in the process enabling privileged parties along the way to benefit through siphoning off as the policy levers squeeze, I’m given some pause.
The common narrative seems to be our modern capital and corporate system encourages risky investment through the promise of upside return (and limited downside liability) for those who take the risk, then encourages competition that will eventually erode away that profitability for the ultimate end benefit of lower cost and higher quality for consumers.
However I’m not convinced that’s working as intended in the recent era where capital returns seem to be made as much by financial manipulation, “optimisation” of costs/quality, and market capture/lock-in as they do innovation. Meanwhile we have prisoner dilemmas of competition in which the big players innovate just enough to build a moat from disruptive competitors and enable customers to rationalise away planned obsolescence while keeping a stable peace of two or three major players to maintain the pretence of the free market and maximise return without overcompeting or facing regulatory backlash.
It feels like we still pretend the customer is king and the children of the enlightenment are in charge - narratives that once served us, now being used to protect a new and quite different system they’ve given birth to - while the evidence tends to suggest increasing ossification and rent-seeking as reflected by corporate strategy being lure, capture, then turn up the dials.
I’d agree we probably don’t get the iPhone and MacBook Air without the investment incentive so I’m not opposed to free market fundamentals. But when I read, for example, that the average US household generates $2700 annually in revenue for banks after risk costs, I do wonder whether a different model could achieve the same outcomes and maybe leave $300bn in the economy for consumers to allocate elsewhere. Then again maybe it’d just end up in the pockets of whichever other utilities have the most leverage over consumer budgets.
Though out of fashion, the various power laws of Bragg, Richardson, Armellini building on the Titius–Bode rule come to mind, namely that there may be physical reasons to see orbital patterns emerge consistent with some sort of power law.
Below data includes candidate planets/disks still being verified.
Our Sun: - Mass 1 M - Inner Planets: 0.39 AU to 1.52 AU - Inner Disk (Asteroid Belt): 2.1-3.2 AU - Gas Giants: 5.2 AU to 30.06 AU - Outer Disk (Kuiper Belt): 30-55 AU
Formalhaut: - Mass: 1.92 M - Hot Disks: 0.21 AU to 1.08 AU - Inner Disk: Around 8-12 AU - Outer Disk: Previously around 133-158 AU but now suggesting around 120 AU? (Surrounded by a larger halo)
Vega - Mass: 2.135 M - Planet: 0.05 AU - Inner Disk: Around 8 AU - Outer Disk: Around 80-120 AU (Surrounded by a larger dust halo)
Epsilon Eridani: - Mass: 0.82 M - Inner Disk: Around 3 AU - Planet: 3.48 AU - Potential Additional Disk: Around 8-20 AU (and may revise inner disk & planet) - Planet: 40 AU - Outer Disk: Around 35-75 AU
Proxima Centauri - Mass: 0.1221 M - Planets: 0.03 - 0.05 AU - Hot Disk: 0.4 AU - Inner Disk: 1-4 AU - Planet: 1.5 AU - Outer Disk: 30 AU
HR 8799 - Mass: 1.43 M - Inner Disk: Less than 16 AU - Planets: 16.25 AU, 26.67 AU, 41.39 AU, 71.6 AU - Outer Disk: 135-360 AU
Beta Pictoris - Mass: 1.75 M - Planet: 2.7 AU - Inner Disk: 6.4 AU - Planet: 10 AU + Potential Planetary Belts: 14/16, 28/30, 52, 82 AU - Outer Disk: 130 AU (Surrounded by a larger disk/halo)
55 Cancri - Mass: 0.905 M - Planets: 0.01-0.7 AU - Speculated Planets: 0.9-3.8 AU - Planet: 5.9 AU - Disk: Around 40 AU (Would be interesting if a second disk around 4 AU)
Tau Ceti - Mass: 0.783 M - Planets: 0.1-1.334 AU - Planet: 3-20 AU - Disk: 35-50 AU (Would be interesting if a second disk around 3-5 AU)
You’re completely right about still being stuck with the low yield paper at the end of the year and the relatively high (to the paper) interest rate in the meantime (my read is that the banks continue to hold the paper and get the yield over the year rather than handing it over to the Fed, partially offsetting the interest cost, but I’m uncertain if that’s correct).
For that reason my speculation is the BTFP will be rolled over to keep kicking the can down the road at least until the proportion of debt sitting in long-term low yield held to market assets decreases (basically via the bank version of dollar cost averaging as they buy new treasuries/MBSs over time) or interest rates drop sufficiently that the haircut on their current low yield assets meaningfully reduces.
The interest rate charge by the Fed right now is effectively making the bank realise the haircut on their paper over that year while keeping up the illusion that their assets are still worth par value. This gives the banks the liquidity they need without having to write down the value of all their HTM assets as they would have to do if they actually sold any. In reality this also means those balance sheets, assuming conditions continue rather than return to ultra low inflation (or deflationary) conditions, are overstated.
The FDIC suggests this is by around $620bn for US banks which is smallish compared to the total US banking assets of $23,245bn but sizeable when you consider the sector has “only” $2,175bn residual assets after liabilities and imagine the distribution of unrealised losses against net positions across different banks.
With that said, the interest payments of leveraging the BTFP will presumably add to liquidity pressure, while even banks not using the facility but holding low yield HTM assets will be feeling the squeeze of needing to pay depositors current interest rates backed by a portfolio weighted down by low yield paper. For that reason if things worsen it wouldn’t surprise me if the Fed dropped the interest rate fee for BTFP towards the average yield of the pledged paper, effectively turning low yield paper into current yield assets and pretending 2020-22 never happened while shoring up the profitability of banks that managed their way healthily through this saga.
What I find a little confusing is how commentators seem to think there’s no problem because banks can hold/could have held these assets to maturity and get back the par value then - that the problem is simply that people wanted their money back at the wrong time. I guess that’s true in the strict sense of “why now” but unless conditions change again the unrealised loss will be realised eventually - either in one hit by conversion to today dollars or over time by inflation. The only way I can see this not being a problem is if banks were going to keep paying depositor interest rates as if it were 2021 until these low yield assets came to maturity, but the challenge of doing that without bailing in depositor funds over that time window when someone down the street will otherwise pay something closer to the current Fed rate seems obvious. It seems like the only game once yields rose was spinning plates and wearing the loss slowly hoping their portfolio sufficiently turned over in the meantime.
As I see it in the simplest sense, a bunch of banks have traded 2021 dollars for Timeline A 2051 dollars, where Timeline A has 30 years of extremely low inflation. People have now asked for 2023 dollars back. But it turns out we now live in Timeline B where we’re looking at moderately low inflation over the next 30 years, and the value of a Timeline A 2051 dollar in 2023 dollars is around 80c.
Pretending they can sit on their low yield paper for 28 years while slowly wearing the loss against the current Fed rate, yet alone inflation, is somehow okay because they’ll have the same numeric dollars at the end seems a fallacy unless we’re assuming a hugely deflationary environment from peak population that is not current priced in by markets (i.e. speculating that we’re actually in Timeline C).
I assume given the consistency of commentators saying there would be no issue if the assets were held to maturity means I must be overlooking something.
But there seems to be a premise in this thread that the US Gov needs (as in has no other possible choice, even via legislative change) to sell treasuries in order to fundraise.
I accept that’s sort of how the current system works in that effectively the US Gov creates capital/spend in the financial system via various programs and investments and attempts to offset inflationary effects / currency deflation effects by taxation and other revenue before finally encouraging other parties to allocate capital out of the system in the form of treasuries to make up the shortfall.
Effectively as I see it a treasury is then a promise not to spend capital for the term in exchange for the promise you’ll get the expected present value of that capital returned at the conclusion of that term (or in the case of TIPS/I-Bonds, the best approximation of the actual present value of that capital at that time).
Amongst other features, this neatly “allows” the US Gov to allocate an equivalent amount of capital to a purpose it considers appropriate while theoretically lessening impacts compared to simply spending that money without the offsetting treasuries.
But I’m not entirely sure there’s some sort of fundamental rule that the US Gov with the support of the Fed “needs” anyone to buy treasuries - together they could, as an example I’m not necessarily advocating, provide a safe haven facility for anyone who wanted it and continue to influence the monetary system and zero-risk rate of return (eg by the Fed paying interest on reserve accounts as they have since 2008) while otherwise having the Fed simply create the currency the government requires for deficit expenditure (eg by directly buying treasuries from the Gov if we perpetuate the illusion) and using other fiscal policy to control the inflationary/distortion effects of this spend.
That is, I’m not sure it’s the case that the US Gov exactly needs the banks to borrow treasuries because it could not afford them not to. Rather, the value of treasuries is as a measure to absorb excess liquidity, provide safe haven, and adjust risk behaviour in the financial system.
My open question is whether the current system is the only way, yet alone the best way, to practically achieve this goal?
Does it? Or is this just how the system is currently designed?
50 years ago we might have asked who will provide the Fed with the gold it needs to issue enough currency to avoid deflation as the population grows exponentially.
Agree with you on the challenges of finding issue-free appliances (feel the same on vacuums, stick blenders, and probably a half dozen other examples).
It's also helped me work out a corollary in my mind that has puzzled me for a bit.
My sense, in the Marxist tradition, is that modern organisations are dependent on the extraction of value from highly capable technical resources and, especially outside the tech bubble, they largely resent this dependency.
Let's say developers are an example of a highly capable technical resource, though I am by no means limiting the scope.
This results in a series of mechanics that lead to developers being alienated:
- From the product of their development (ownership of IP and the resultant value of their code, distance from seeing the positive impacts of their work or talking to those it helps)
- From the act of developing itself (by its reduction to commercial use and control over how it is done, approval gates, arbitrary coding standards, ticket systems, scrum processes, project managers and product owners, Jira, timesheets etc.)
- From their fellow workers (stack ranking, power dynamics, labour competition, structural organisational tension)
- From their human nature and natural talent (by the reduction of their humanity and passion and capability to a mere "developer" or "engineer", use of stereotypes, reduction of humanity to output/LOC/story points delivered, corporate gaslighting at questioning this state of affairs etc.)
My sense of this is that what developers can bring to the modern world is the closest humanity has got to magic. And this dependency is resented. And this resentment leads to workplaces in which this resentment is externalised in the form of debasement (e.g. caricatures and other forms of ego compensation - "they're just the boffins, they don't have people skills!"), control ("the boffins can't really be trusted - better add some process and oversight, and given they don't have the people skills better make sure they aren't anywhere near management/clients!"), and dependency inversion ("sure the boffins can do their coding stuff, but they'd be nothing without us to help babysit and organise things, they don't get the way the world works, clearly it's they who actually need us!"). And this environment in turn leads developers to internalise this systemic resentment as a resentment of themselves, their capability, and their work, aka burnout.
But one question has been bubbling away for me for a while.
How do so many organisations arrive at a system in which it's almost a badge of honour to not be one of the doers? That those who can't do, should, as a moral claim, oversee, and manage, and lead? And we should keep adding more of those people until the doers can't possible do. Even when that produces lower tangible results.
Maybe at one point I internalised the Office Space / IT Crowd idea - the non-doers are "people people" who didn't spend decades at their PCs honing their craft but instead went to wild parties and focused on normal people stuff (the implication of course being that developers are lesser than normal people). Maybe the developers really can't be trusted. Maybe they do need to be managed and watched and distanced. Maybe the code monkey caricature (before being reclaimed by those it was used to demean) is right.
But now I wonder.
What if those people are empowered by the systems into positions of power over developers because in the first instance they affirm the original resentment: what if putting non-doers in charge safely perpetuates the idea that the developers belong at the bottom of the pyramid and affirms the extraction of their labour in support of the salaries and profits of those above relying on it? Or to put it another way, what if the code monkey caricature is effectively a justification of Marxist exploitation?
And what if the second order effect here is that some, let's call them the senior management class - leaders of the Second order of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy in the example above - are more conscious of these dynamics and consciously perpetuating them. What if they are knowingly hiring more non-doers to help keep this balance and control. What if it's not accidental, or people skills, that means non-doers are in charge? What if the very reason they're there in the first place is to be in charge even in positions outside of formal leadership (or at least indirectly support the power of someone else who brought them in for that reason) - after all they're not there to do.
So to close out a long post, a corollary to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: in any bureaucratic organisation the ability to be able to contribute to the goals of the organisation will be an insurmountable barrier to having influence or control within it.