paulorlando

This piece reminded me, of all things, of Gandhi's essay "Hind Swaraj." He was pretty anti-technological-driven change.

He was anti: - Machinery replacing handicraft (skill disappeared and poverty followed) - Labor-saving machines replacing human workers (workers became expendable) - Doctors replacing consequences (people lost self-control) - Railways replacing constraint and slowness (harm spread faster)

But he loved the sewing machine.

Gandhi’s test for whether to accept tech-driven change was whether it satisfied primary needs. Interpretation of those needs was certainly not universal. As he wrote: "...it is not the primary need of man to traverse distances with the rapidity of a motor car. The needle on the contrary happens to be an essential thing in life, a primary need.”

That's the airplane in this post. Excitement or fear of the AI airplane is either judged as helping mathematicians (sewing machine) or doing something not quite right (the above machinery/doctor/railway)...

One of the books I'm reading now is Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, by George Ewart Evans. Set in 1957 Suffolk county, England. I often read in a theme and this theme is about cultural and technological transitions.

If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.

My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?

That last line: "...to demonstrate fiscal and HR dexterity for stockholders..."

And here I've just been using pen/paper for outlining and notes and then GoogleDocs for mine.

Good to see.

Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.

This came up in a few responses below as various roles have been replaced by machines (gas station attendants, printers, travel agents...) so I'm responding in a new thread.

When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking.

There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine.

Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.

But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods.

Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers.

The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.”

I'm due to update this, but I've been keeping a running list of examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype...

There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.

In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.

Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.

But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.

Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).

Yes, it's not part of the daily fear and considerations people take anymore.

No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.

Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.

Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...

It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.

In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."

In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.

This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.

In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.

Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.

I feel for the guy who wrote this. I feel this myself at times. But it's also not a productive feeling, as cruel as that sounds.

There's a Chinese idiom: 生不逢时 "to be born at the wrong time." The story was about a man who, when young, lived in a peaceful kingdom (they needed older men then). Then, when he was old, he lived in a kingdom at war (they needed young men then). You can't choose when you are born or what environment you are born into.

I also wonder what it would be like to be this age in, say, the year 2226 and to think "hey, I could have been a great mathematician if I had been born 200+ years earlier!" Or to think, "hey, if I had been born 500 years earlier I would have been a great explorer."

Do what you can with the time you are in. It will go by just as fast.

From the results I can see that I am somehow living as a radically messy desk creator. Even my books are not color coordinated or nicely arranged. I will try to do better.

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?”

That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".

Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

Nice... Would be interesting to connect this to pancakebot.com

I remember years ago movie theaters in Hong Kong allowed smoking. If I remember right, it wasn't in the back, like on planes, but the seats to the one side of the center aisle.

The Casual form of Goodhart's Law... https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...

That is fascinating to me. Especially in English composition. The flip side is if it's an adjunct prof making $4k per class (English typically pays poorly) then she's doing the hourly rate calculation and thinking that AI is going to help her with the students. So, a potential solution to this is for the universities to have the willingness to pay their professors and ask for no AI (at least in this type of class) in exchange.

Profs can push back on this if they want. Not all of them want to (or want to justify pushback given their pay).

For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.

> the bar for signal quality is just really low During the Covid-era when money was flowing more readily I worked with a series A startup founder on improving their unit economics. They were spending a lot on customer acquisition but after my analysis I realized that they were losing money on each customer. It didn't matter how long you ran the timeline, with churn they never broke even on new customers. When I recommended cutting marketing spend, they told me that they needed to show topline growth -- because that's what investors were looking for. And they knew from experience that the investors didn't dig into the numbers enough to realize they were growing themselves broke.

Sorry to say you can't take my class.

I like this. Related, this semester I've been using handwritten quizzes in class. A simple change that's been one of the best things as it changed students' expectations of class prep. Kind of do the readings and sort of prep and you can coast in class. But if you need to write out quiz answers you're forced to know the material better as well as maintain the ability to express yourself.

I also use low-point bonus questions to test general knowledge (huge variation on subjects I thought everyone knew).

Yes. I while back I posted an initial list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...) but have gone way beyond this now.

For me this is an example of when you become aware of something you see it all around.

I'll writeup a fuller list and what I learned along the way.

I'm researching Luddite-style examples from around the world. That is, examples of when people rebel against new technology that they see as harming their livelihoods.

I've been research Luddite movements around the world. Agreed that the topic is timely.

A closer comparison to Sam Altman might be Edmund Cartwright (inventor of the power loom that automated weaving). The Horsfall and Altman situations differ in that Horsfall was a factory owner but didn't create or organize the teams that built the stocking frames. There was also an attempt on Cartwright's life as he was out riding. But like Altman and unlike Horsfall, he wasn't killed.

Yes, that's right. You work your way up to bigger and bigger potential rejections all while realizing that maybe you're asking too little.

Forgive me because I'm maybe reading in too much, but it doesn't seem like you're asking how to be alone. It sounds like you might be asking how to deal with your new situation, which must be very difficult. If that's not out of bounds, one suggestion is to try what's called "rejection therapy." That is, make it a daily goal to go out and get rejected at something. It shifts something mentally and I hope it might be helpful for you.

"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."

Best quote: "When Alice doesn't need "a neighbour" but needs that neighbour, the one who watched her kids that time, the one who knows she's allergic to peanuts. The relationship is specific, and specificity is the enemy of fungibility."

The memory of what the community was or had eventually vanishes. Jane Jacobs (referenced in the article) was the reason that I learned that the sidewalks in NYC's West Village weren't always so narrow. They were made narrow to accommodate more cars, which in some ways don't help geographic community strength.

This is great news, knowing that I have until 2034 instead of just 2027.

The chart you listed is for the years before the CCP won the civil war in 1949. But agreed that many of the problems overcome were also problems that were created after the war.