psi75

For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.

We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.

The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.

It's easy to hate capitalism, but it's hard to be a legit leftist. Our ideas are morally correct, but need a lot of work and have been implemented poorly so many times--and, of course, if we grew up in the US, we were trained to be hypersensitive to the negatives of "socialism" and to exaggerate the failings of (in fact, not great) socialist experiments like the USSR.

One of the biggest problems with communism and socialism is not that our ideas are bad, because they're not, but that there's nothing in history or science that prevents a complete thug or scumbag from calling himself a socialist. In fact, lots of thugs and scumbags have: you've got Stalin (psychopath) and Ceausescu (rot in hell) and Chavez (fucking idiot) for evidence of this. There's no admission test to becoming "a socialist" in political theater; you just have to say you care about the poor.

At least in the US, the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas, and therefore have a more nuanced understanding of their pitfalls and virtues--as well as the benefits of other systems (e.g., the computational power of markets vs. central planning) and the strategic need to replicate them somehow... whereas 19-year-olds in the 4.9% who believed in the system when they were getting top grades and told they had the world by the balls, but have gone socialist after losing an internship or a girlfriend to a Preston von Twattenberg VI and becoming redpilled about how our society actually works, are still arguing from emotion (and who can blame them?) and only time will tell whether they (a) build up intellectually consistent bases for their beliefs, and (b) continue to hold their (correct but, in the US, still unpopular) ideological convictions as they get older.

Still, I agree that a lot of it has to do with the fact that college is an age at which people get severely redpilled: they go from being big fishes in small ponds (smart kids at suburban high schools) to guppies in a world where the rules are completely different and parental advantages matter a whole lot more than they were taught (as they learn immediately when coming in contact with mediocre rich kids who got into Ivies, while equivalently middling kids from their hometowns go to community colleges if at all, and who will continue to easily get opportunities they will require hard work and extreme luck to get anywhere near).

What's really interesting to me in the past six years is that we've seen a complete change in what "left" and "right" mean. The left, as you've noted, has been deliberately steered in a direction that is harmless to capital ("the jocks in your high school are why you can't have universal healthcare, so you shouldn't feel bad about outsourcing their jobs"); but the right, now that the pro-establishment conservatives from the 1990s are as anachronistic as the dinosaurs, is now as anti-elitist as we (my "we" meaning true leftists, the 2-4 sigma leftward fringe, the socialists and anarchists and communists and punks) always were. The horrible thing about it, though, is that this "populist" movement, even though these people have become quite aware of how society is rigged against them, has been steered into dangerous conspiracy theories, bizarre revenge fantasies, and the revival of some terrible ideas (e.g., racism, antisemitism) that should have died a long time ago.

Also: I shan't get into details because I'm a banned HN "unperson" who changes his username every couple of months, but we know each other and I've enjoyed your company every time we've met. I hope you're well.

I don't disagree with you, but I think one of the understated tragedies is that this shrill weirdo extremism (usually an ideology of privileged mainstream people with white savior complexes; note, for example, that most Latinos consider "Latinx" ridiculous) distracts people from the populist, inclusive platform of legitimate leftists (as opposed to corporate centrists taking virtue-signaling stances while not changing anything they actually do). The staunch but watered-down (from an economic perspective) "leftism" that is becoming mandatory on college campuses is a product deliberately engineered by Kapital to make upper-middle-class liberals and leftists (yes, there's a huge difference, but 85% of the country sees us as the same) look a certain way, and one that doesn't suit our goals.

Thing is, our society is still as racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and classist as ever; it's just that the rich have gotten good at using chatter about these issues (chatter of a kind that will never actually progress toward solving them, because that's not what capital wants) to divide people.

It doesn't advance the objectives of liberals or of leftists to have wankers going on about how "math is racist" (it isn't). It just makes us look like idiots.

I'll save y'all the time and tell you what that something is: climbing organizational hierarchies. Executives are good at becoming executives: glorifying themselves, stealing credit, shifting blame, pandering to superiors' weaknesses and petty idiocies.

The fact that OP got this so wrong, and spaffed such ridiculous pro-employer bias on the page, discredits the rest of the treatise.

You bought a latte last February? Well, then, you're also a buyer of human labor. You're a capitalist, too. The only difference between you and Elon Musk is that he's smarter. If capitalism is a problem, then you're part of the problem, because you do after all buy things. If you really believed in your anti-capitalist rhetoric, you'd grow the beans hydroponically in your basement (capabilities that, if you were serious, you would surely possess even if you weren't born into the tiny minority who actually benefit from the widespread and rigid enforcement of asymmetric state services called "property rights").

Meanwhile, the world is on track to be J. G. Ballard's Drowned World by the end of the century due to the persistence of a moribund socioeconomic system with no exit strategy or real means of improvement.

If we ever create a machine that's "as smart as" an average person, we're probably not very far from having one that's smarter than all of us put together. (Let's be honest; except in highly technical fields, the differences between a 150 IQ human's abilities and an average person's are not that great.) Should this happen, we'll soon enough be outmatched; we'll be just another animal in a world whose rules (ever changing) we cannot possibly understand... and just as humans have destroyed countless species often without conscious ill intent, it does not seem unreasonable that a robot successor would do the same to us.

Here's a thought experiment. Let's say we want to build not just a great Go player, but the best Go player that is possible in any world. Go is harmless, right? Sure, in isolation, but now let's imagine an AGI smarter than any of us which only "cares" about maximizing its Go proficiency. It's going to need a lot of energy. It'll hack or create robots and drill new oil wells (bypassing any constraints we put on it, since it in essence is spending thousands of human years figuring out how to escape). It'll devise nuclear technologies that may be unsafe from our perspective. Consider all the horrible things humans do in order to procure excess money (a commodity loosely correlated to energy) they don't actually need; there's no reason to think a badly aligned AI won't be just as inventive and horrible in its quest for more exajoules.

If capitalism and war are still the way of the world in 100 years, we are guaranteed to see some idiot inventing robot soldiers, hundreds of times faster and stronger than us, and with at least as much operational intelligence. He might never deploy the technology--a lab leak is in my opinion more likely--but at some point, it will get out. It won't be one robot; it won't have a body we can destroy. It'll be able to replicate itself and beam copies to satellites. It'll have control of our power infrastructure (which it will divert to its own "wants") within hours. We'll be screwed, not because it will want to harm us, because our lives require the use of resources that it will divert toward some objective function we technically invented but do not understand.

The problem is in the assumption that paid corporate work has zero social value. This is untrue. It has negative social value. If a rich person or a corporation that operates on rich peoples' behalf is paying you to do something, the odds are high that its total social value is negative, especially because we live within a moribund economic system that turns to extreme violence--fascism is capitalism in decay--whenever it hits the skids and people start to question it.

> “I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?” he questioned. “Don’t you want to feel part of something?”

Doing a braindead typical corporate job from home, in one's pajamas, is an alienating experience. The issue is that, above a certain level of intelligence and awareness, having to go in and do that job on-site is even more alienating.

I don't "feel part of something" in corporate work. I haven't since my 20s, when a series of life circumstances forced me to figure reality out very quick.

At the same time, the few jobs that are intrinsically rewarding and useful do not become less rewarding and useful .

To keep hoi polloi motivated, and to keep them overestimating their tiny actual chance (less than 1%, in many circumstances, because it's typically something one is born into) of being invited into the executive circle so they actually do the work (which they are just smart enough to do, but hopefully not smart enough to see the pointlessness of), the office is pretty much necessary. Otherwise, it becomes just too clear, even to people of sub-mediocre apperception, that "work" isn't really about Starbucks at 11:00 and town halls at 4:00, but that it is merely the trade of an intensely valuable and personal commodity--one's time--for the artificially scarce one called "money" (existing largely, in bulk, to measure the asymmetric state services called "property rights") that (a) is owned in the greatest amounts by the literal worst people in the world, but (b) is absolutely necessary if one wishes access to the means of survival.

To be honest, you raise a valid point; often the people who show the highest degrees of intellectual vigor are those the purportedly intellectual institutions reject. Einstein wasn't actually a poor student, nor was he ever thought to be stupid, but he was an absolute misfit in academia even then, and he would have failed out of the conformist environment today (in large part because, as an ostensibly mediocre graduate student, he'd never have gotten his 1905 papers published or read at all). Which raises the question of why we have them in the first place. Brilliant kids who grow up in Harlem will never get into Harvard; complete dolts from prominent families do; so why have it at all? It becomes a long discussion.

The issue in discriminating "navel gazing" from "enduring achievement" is just that latter adjective. We don't know ahead of time what will endure. We have to be more accepting of the 999 contributions and efforts that, in the long run, will not amount to very much in order to get the 1000th that will. The tradeoff is that, while we ought to nurture genuine contributions as if they all have intrinsic value, we have to get better as a society at preventing charismatic (or merely randomly successful) artifacts from taking up all the oxygen and starving what we really want to see. We have to be tolerant of intellectuals who want to offer their ideas, but intolerant of those who insist on only their ideas being heard.

Under capitalism, it won't.

You're right, of course. The purpose of the credentialism is to sustain class barriers. Most of these jobs are brain-dead simple, and quite a large number are unnecessary (see: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).

The reason employers hire overqualified people is actually quite complex. Classical nice-guy management theory ("Theory Y") would argue that it's bad for morale to hire smart people and put them on dumb work, but in practice it turns out that bosses can easily utilize this discomfort by selectively and politically offering more engaging assignments, so the morale hit is offset (from a careerist manager's perspective) by the enhanced power and importance accruing to managers. So, don't expect it to change. Workers will often work extra hard "to prove themselves" (i.e., for free) because they think it was benevolent bureaucratic mishap, rather than deliberate emotional manipulation, that got them placed on work several levels below their actual ability (and thus underpaid and easier to exploit).

The truth, though, is that the system only works if the people at the bottom believe meaningful promotion is a real possibility... and indeed, it sometimes (rarely) can be, but for each person who wins, tens or hundreds have to lose, especially given that the few good jobs have already been allocated to progeny of wealthy or connected families. Companies can only get diligent, conscientious work out of people (as opposed to bare-minimum work, over which the associated middle management checking/correcting costs would render them uncompetitive) if they lead people to wildly overestimate their prospects. This requires a whole mythology wherein each hire has to be, at least, a longshot call option on an executive; companies want college graduates in call centers because they want call center managers to work like people who might one day be executives (even though, let's be honest, 99 percent of them won't be) rather than like people who would be better served by leaving at 5:00 on the dot.

WFH is set to totally break this. When you WFH, you increase your per-hour productivity by about 150 percent and your total productivity by about 70 percent... but your chance of being promoted to an executive role drops to near zero. You go from spending 50 hours at the office to work a 10-hour week to working about 17 hours in 17 actual spent hours. You're now doing your job duties and probably doing them better than before, but you're snubbing the carrot of promotion into the executive clique. They can no longer entice you with your own office (as opposed to a depressing cubicle or, worse, a seat in an open-plan fartbox) if you already have a home office and a zero commute. So, once you go WFH, you're basically admitting that "work" is not some passion but the depressing trade of one's finite time for a very small amount of money, and this blunt fact about corporate work is so depressing that even executives hate to acknowledge that it is true.

So, yeah: don't expect it to change, unless capitalism is overthrown. The corporate system runs entirely on empty, unrealistic promises. The mythology in which every loser paper-pusher might one day be a CEO can only hold if employers demand that even the loser paper-pushers have CEO-able degrees. If they hired at-level for menial jobs, they'd get people who'd probably do the jobs just as well, and for a lower price, but they wouldn't get people who'll do scut work with smiles on their faces and thereby make the bosses actually feel good about themselves.

You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed.

Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will.

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[1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.

So, if you studied computer science in 1990 and kept the knowledge up, you'd still know a fair amount of what's relevant today. The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... the real CS is just in place to be an IQ test, a first-line hiring barrier.

It's a status meeting. It's not supposed to be, but status meetings are good for managers and bad for workers and so they're not going anywhere.

Capitalism would be bad enough if managers actually did care about "the company" or their shareholders, but it's simpler and more degenerate than that. They are optimizing for their own careers. It isn't more complex than that. The "bureaucratic culture of fear" suits them well. The weaponized standup is great for them; toward their real aims, it works beautifully, because it's basically thunderdome in its ability to make workers slug each other and terrorize those seen as least productive.

"Agile" is a case-in-point where engineers, being intellectually intelligent but socially imbecilic, assumed good faith on the part of the people managing them and came up with a framework to make those good-hearted managers' lives and jobs easier... but, of course, the people above were not good-hearted and so any components of these methodologies that actually empowered working people got ripped out while still allowing the bosses to say, "Well, you asked for this."

This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.

Unfortunately, it seems to be an extreme historical anomaly for elites to put the welfare of their people over the zero-sum needs of their own class. One recent such anomaly was in the middle of the 20th century--The U.S. and USSR both invested heavily in building large middle classes (it being historically rare for such to exist at all) because they wanted research supremacy, which you can't get if you squander 95% of the natural intellectual talent, during the Cold War. Also, the existence of other systems put both sides on better behavior: capitalism couldn't be as scummy as it is today, and state-run socialism had to improve material circumstances and scale back the authoritarian tendencies it had developed during WW2... because, otherwise, neither system would have survived. But now that the Cold War is over, we're stuck in this global authoritarian capitalism that retains the worst aspects of both systems.

The division we're seeing is, of course, artificial. The elites deliberately pit people against each other (and trot out old divisive garbage: zero-sum nationalism, weird-ass conspiracy theories to distract from the more boring and often technically legal conspiracies occurring in plain sight, and of course antisemitism) because otherwise, the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses. That being said, I can't think of an easy way to end it. We do, as humans, need to (using your words) engage and unite; the problem is that what we need to unite to do--that is, overthrow the current global corporate elite using any means and mechanisms that shall work--is extremely socially unacceptable because those in charge have made it so. Thus, we're just expected to accept a declining standard of living and a nearly complete halt on technical progress at a time when we need it the most.

In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a level of autonomy that, these days, doesn't really exist.

There are a lot of problems, though. Your funding isn't guaranteed; you can be basically kicked out of the program (because very few people can afford to self-fund) for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your performance, and if this happens in your 4th or 5th year, you're fucked.

The other ugly fact is that even if you're not paying tuition, your advisor is. This means there's less money to send you to conferences or fund his lab, and it means he's under tighter financial constraints than he really should be. Your advisor gets his budget docked $80,000, and only $20,000 goes to you (the rest, to tuition). That's a bit ridiculous, especially because you're no longer taking many classes or using university resources except to do work on their behalf. There's no good reason you can't be paid $50,000 and your advisor has $30,000 more to fund his lab.

Yeah, this is very true, and it's degenerate, because research is a 12-month job and deserves a 12-month salary.

It seems to me that academia takes advantage of extremely smart people (and delusional middling-smart people) because it knows they have nowhere else to go. If you're a legit 140+, you're at the level where corporate America becomes to become a non-option because you're just too different, if not necessarily from the other people, from what you are expected to be as a subordinate.

The good news is that your advisor is safe (tenured, or at least likely to make tenure) in most circumstances, so he's not going to fuck you over unless he's a truly terrible person, and 90 percent of people aren't, as opposed to the corporate world where the pressure of constantly watching your back turns that middle 80% into bad people as well. The bad news is that he does have this extortive power over you, if he wants to use it.

There's also a conflict of interest when it comes to delayed graduations. If the advisor's getting cheap or free grunt work, and delaying your graduation for another year can get him more of said work, then he has an incentive to do so. Of course, this can't be continued forever, because eventually he'll get a reputation for his students taking too long and not doing well... but in the short term, it is an option for him, and it is sometimes exercised.

What should be abolished are 97 percent of postdoc positions. Postdocs used to be a rare, prestigious opportunity to do something different one might not want to do for one's whole life, like work for IAS in Princeton or for the government doing cryptography. What they became is something else entirely: another stupid rung on the ladder, an excuse to dangle the carrot of tenure (which isn't "lifetime job security" as academic detractors like to claim, but merely the presence of due process, as opposed to arbitrary whim, around personnel decisions) for longer.

Bodily health is important. Do everything you can to stay in shape. You don't have to have bulging muscles or a six-pack, but don't let yourself go. Some of it, of course, is out of your control. Your brain is a part of your body, so do what you can to take care of both.

Intelligence-wise, some people get smarter in their 30s, 40s, 50s, likely beyond that... and some people get dumber. I'm smarter than I was at 22, but an upward trajectory isn't a guarantee. You can actually predict which way people will go: the ones who buy into corporate and accept the notion of an employer having authority are the ones who turn dumb as rocks. If you sit in meetings with people who talk about "synergizing" "at the end of the day" after a "drill down session" where we'll "boil the ocean" and "jump on" calls, you become one of them. If you spend 10 years doing work with no career value, you lose your skills. The ones who never bought in are the ones who keep getting smarter.

Which explains what ageism is really about. Bosses know that not everyone turns into an idiot in middle age. Plenty of us don't. However, the people who buy into corporate do get dumber, and the ones who preserve or improve their intelligence and skills in middle age are exactly the anti-authoritarian types who don't make the best subordinates. With a 20-year-old, you don't know which way he's going to go, and it'll be a decade from now; with someone like me in his late 30s, you know which they've gone.

The truth is: this process can take years and nothing is guaranteed. Plus, your app that makes $30,000 per month might crater due to regulatory changes, competitors, et cetera. Most of the self-styled passive income gurus were independently wealthy already, or at least had the connections necessary to get back into respectable work if nothing panned out (which makes a huge difference). If you're working a regular prole job--even a programmer prole job, which is physically undemanding but humiliating (daily scrum)--you're probably going to be too exhausted to put all that much into a side effort; that doesn't mean you're weak or lazy, but that you're human.

I don't think you should quit your job and focus on your hustle until you're 99.5 percent sure that it can fail (or that you'll start to hate it once it becomes your primary source of income, and burn out) and you'll be alright. This means you need to build the skills, savings, and connections necessary to be safe if you need to run back to your old career.

Life circumstances can also push you in funny directions. I'm (mildly) disabled and (unrelated) almost died in 2019, and the reflections on my own mortality brought me to take time off to finish a novel (out in '23) and go back to graduate school and try for a legit research job... although it'll be several years (if ever, adjusted for inflation) before I'm back at my old TC level, because research pays 50 cents on the dollar compared to corporate garbage (a pay cut that's worth it, IMO) and no one can predict book sales (even the so-called marketing experts in publishing houses get it wrong half the time).

Good luck. It's hard, and the odds of each attempt are low, so you'll probably have to make a number of attempts. Don't trust anyone who makes it sound easy.

We also probably shouldn't be growing water-intensive crops in places that don't have water, nor eating ourselves into an early grave but eating twice as much red meat (which is far more water-intensive than the overly vilified almond) as we should be.

"Waterfall" is a straw man invented to sell Agile, which has evolved into a perverse, almost psychotic Taylorism... although I believe programmers themselves share a bit of fault in that. They assumed good faith on the part of the people managing them. That was not a wise move.

Technical Debt [...] Now means whatever anybody needs it to mean if they want their product owner to let them do some hobbyist programming on their line-of-business software, or else.

Uh, whose side is this guy on? Is he defending "product owners"? Is he saying we should forcibly typecast programmers to line-of-business grunts with no autonomy? If so, why should we take him seriously?

If programmers aren't getting personal investment in their career by the top executives, then they have every right to do "hobbyist programming" that will increase their employability, and they shouldn't have to justify themselves at all in doing so. The fact that we've failed to reach tribal agreement on this is an embarrassment.

I did not intend to argue that Stalin himself expected to bring about a communist utopia. It's more likely that he was a straight-out liar. Still, I think the USSR's government and society could only function, in the long run, if it offered progress in line with its promises, just as the US can only function by promoting a mythology of individual freedom and exceptional destiny.

The promise made to the people was that economic totalitarianism would end. It never did, but we still don't know if that was because the USSR was irredeemably corrupt, or because the country was attacked by some of the world's most egregious assholes (the czarists, then the Nazis, then the capitalists).