psi75

The most dangerous people, though, are bandits who figure out how to use stupid people for their own purposes. They can turn uncorrelated human stupidity, moderated by the central limit theorem, into correlated human stupidity and use it as a weapon. They come with armies; they become the bosses.

Stalinism was economic totalitarianism with a goal and an exit strategy. Authoritarianism was supposed to be a phase; the system would moderate itself over time. The degree to which that would have actually happened, we don't know. External forces destroyed the Soviet Union, so all we can do is speculate, but I suspect that if it had been left alone, it'd have fixed a lot of its problems and be a decent place to live by now.

The corporate system we have now is also economic totalitarianism. Financial interests decide where you can live, what jobs you can do, and what kind of reputation you have in the community. The issue here is that it's economic totalitarianism with no exit strategy. Neoliberalism insists that things have never been better (despite substantial evidence to the contrary) and there's no reason to exit from economic totalitarianism when we should, instead, "own nothing, have no privacy, and be happy".

If a function is analytic, then the derivatives at one point tell the whole story on the complex plane--the information is all encoded at (an arbitrarily small neighborhood around) a single point. But most smooth functions aren't analytic; indeed, a smooth function that is the trace of a process taking any stochastic external input will typically (probability 1) not be.

That doesn't mean, of course, that changing jobs is never the right move. Clearly, it often is. If there's a re-org and you're not promoted, you should probably leave--you're going to have to prove yourself to a new set of people either way, so you might as well get paid for it.

As for the comp increases, this is tricky. If you're increasing your salary but not getting promoted, you're actually putting yourself first in line for layoffs in the future, because HR people are going to see you as anomalously expensive within a band. This strategy can pay off, especially because 99% of corporates are too dumb to assess performance correctly and so often you can improve your perceived performance by becoming more expensive--but you have to be sure you're getting yourself a better position in the pecking order, or otherwise you're going to end up in a career cul-de-sac.

Also, the job-hopper stigma is real. It isn't right, but if you have three or more jobs under 18 months, people are going to assume you keep getting fired for performance or, worse yet, keep getting fired because you're disabled... neither of which they'll touch.

The last thing I want to advocate for is corporate loyalty. They aren't loyal to you, and so you should always have your eyes open and be ready to take everything that isn't nailed down (within the confines of enforceable law, of course) and jump. However, you have to be strategic. Remember that these people are a lot more skilled at screwing people like you than you are at screwing them--that's just how capitalism works.

It may not be true automation, but it's very effective, and it's something we're seeing not only at the grocery store. What used to involve calling a person up and asking for services is now done through web portals... taking a few minutes of the person's time.

The real issue in this degradation of customer service is usually not the time cost but the fact that, while it doesn't change the amount of random human error that occurs, it shifts the penalties onto the users... if your travel agent screws up, you get a refund... if you screw up (in something that used to be someone else's job) you're told to eat the costs.

Thing is, the replacement of a process when an ersatz alternative may not be "true automation" but it doesn't need to be in order to work. And job destruction across an industry isn't 0/1. There are still jobs in car factories in Detroit, just far fewer of them. There will still be jobs for truck drivers in 2040, but there probably won't be nearly as many. Employers will still need programmers; they might not need the same number of us. It only takes a dip of a few percent in job supply to cause wages and working conditions to crater (that's inelasticity), and even this says nothing about the ripple effects and systemic calamities (up to and including the possibility of economic depressions that last decades) that occur when large numbers of working people lose substantial income.

We're not going to see AIs replacing humans in all jobs any time soon. We are going to see, barring regulation or (better yet) a total overthrow of the corporate system, increasing power accruing to capital--due to AIs' ability to perform the "80" in the aforementioned 80/20 analysis--with devastating human consequences. And this is true even though DALL-E, in the given example, doesn't actually understand (even in a figurative sense) that a third of Africa is desert or that certain facial expressions indicate concentration.

If an AI can do even half of your job--and anything you do as a subordinate probably can, in principle, be done by machines--you should be terrified. You're not going to be working 20 hours per week; you're going to be working for pennies due to wage inelasticity--there's now twice as much competition for jobs. Automation is of course both desirable and inevitable, but we've got to transition to an economic system in which it doesn't result in widespread poverty and homelessness... which is not the one we've got right now.

We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an afternoon if we got our shit together.

What's less clear is what will replace it. We could end up with an improvement--post-scarcity technological socialism (en route to automated luxury communism)--but we could also end up with something a lot worse than the current system. There's no law of nature saying that the next world order has to be better than the current, outdated and moribund, one.

To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it is a statistical fact that this lifting out of poverty has been going on since 1980 comes entirely from one country's influence on the data, and that's China. The rest of the world is net neutral, with some losers and some winners.

Capitalism only improves human life when heavily restrained, and what we've learned since about 1980 is that even mild, neutered, "nice guy" capitalism will, in time, erode the restraints put upon it... and then you get the catastrophe of the American 21st century... which is probably going hit Europe just as hard in 10-15 years because, ultimately, dangerous and greedy assholes aren't limited to one nation but exist everywhere.

The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

It's common in societies to accumulate unpayable debts (that, over time, evolve into debts designed never to be paid) for ceremonial purposes. A society might foster interdependence by having everyone in debt to everyone (as described in the fable above) in small amounts. Over time, these amounts grow. Nothing really stops them. House prices and education costs are no longer limited by what people can pay, because borrowing in increasingly large amounts becomes licit (and necessary, due to inflated prices). This generates a spiral. People can't afford to pay off their coming-of-age debt? Yeah, it's designed that way. In other societies it has been marriage or funeral expenses or receiving one's first hunting tools--in ours, it is the last 4-8 years of schooling.

These ceremonial debts seem harmless, insofar as the penalties for nonpayment are rarely enforced--few people actually have their wages garnished over medical bills or student loans--but, of course, they're anything but. In practice, they reify the ruling class's self-asserted superiority by giving them a legal justification for bringing harm to those who "freely" took on these debts. For reasons unclear, although Graeber examines a few possibilities, there seems to be a psychological weight given to the notion of debt, so strong that debts even outlive governments and states.

The thing to understand about corporate capitalism is that executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The bosses want brag points so they can justify promotions, and that's all they care about. Subjective achievements don't matter, from this perspective. The health of the company certainly doesn't matter. Being able to say they grew a team from 40 to 150 people... and then being able to say they "saved $10 million per year" when they cut all those people... those "achievements" burnish their resumes and, therefore, matter.

There's also an element of toxic masculinity in play here. No, I am not saying that all masculinity is toxic (it's not, not at all) and I am certainly not saying men or maleness are toxic (I'm a man, and most people would read me as masculine). But you cannot understand corporate America if you don't understand the toxic masculinity on which it is based. Here it pertains to the division of labor between "male work" and "female work". The nice-to-haves and the subjective improvements are female work; the ugly work (usually, ugly because it hurts other people, as if "making tough decisions" were as onerous as being on the receiving end thereof) that actually drives a P&L is male work. (Does this distinction of labor as male or female map in any intrinsic way to the biological sexes, as opposed to the social construct of gender? I highly doubt it.) What we see in companies is that the work regarded as "male" grabs all the glory and accrues power; the work that can be construed of as the objective domination of others for the company's direct benefit is what gets rewarded and will, in time, be the only work that matters. The nice-to-haves don't; their contribution to the health of the company (or to the health of society, about which executives care even less) is too diffuse to be considered real.

Paradox of tolerance. Academics were too peacefully inclined to realize what is happening to them and their jobs until it's too late.

As the left re-emerges, I hope it will evolve into something with some fight in it. De-corporatization is going to take decades and it's not all going to be pretty.

This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be. Ten papers won't even get you tenure. In terms of metrics, the game is a lot more competitive.

I would argue that the bigger problem is that academic science is now consumptive. Think of all those tuitions dollars the universities get because they run a protection racket over (what's left of) the middle class job market. Now consider how terrible the academic job market has been for the past 30 years, and that professors who want even a chance of getting respect basically need to self-fund by getting grants. Lots of money is going in, and how much is coming out? Something, for sure, but is it worth it? Or is it like U.S. healthcare, where we're paying 4x for a not terrible but merely acceptable product?

I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me.

Right, and this kind of opportunity has gone extinct, due to the hypercompetitive culture you get as our society disinvests itself in research and as funding becomes harder to find and more winner-take-all. If the neoliberals have their way, being a professor will just be another next-quarter focused corporate job within ten years.

We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources necessary to market their books get further validation and credibility; the ones who don't will go unheard. Academia's the same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the professors themselves--you'll get more funding (and published in better places) on account of using their name, and for that they take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing emerging talent, these institutions are nurtured by emerging talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions are failing at approximately the same right.

Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel-flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and salesmen run the day.

Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of warriors and nations of farmers. We've become a nation of sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk.

I don't know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence. Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions again.

Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, because that's usually in the operating range--it's the rails and machinery and confined spaces hitting 60+ that fucks everything up.

New York considered shutting down its subways in July 2011 when it was "only" 40.5. Why? Because the underground stations were hitting 50, which (esp. in New York humidity) is dangerous for the most heat-sensitive people.

The general problem is overpopulation--but the good news is that there's a countervailing force built in: the more people there are, the more stuff of value there can be. New York's too congested to live in? Go to Chicago. Chicago becomes full? Live in Minneapolis, or Madison, or some up-and-coming artsy small town most of us have never heard of. So, the problem we actually experience is not overpopulation itself but, rather, the weighted overpopulation that is created by extreme inequality (i.e., by some people having 1,000,000 times more votes and more choices than the rest of us). When some rich douchebag can play the high school bully and buy hotel rooms for $1000 per night (or even buy out the whole hotel) it means everyone who can't pay $1000 per night for lodging suffers. We don't actually need to depopulate the world (although, and I hate to say this, I think traumatic and unplanned depopulation is a high likelihood in the next 50 years) so much as we need to do something about the astronomical footprint of the rich; we could support the global population that exists now if only the world were run by better people and the resources better organized.

The Great Recession did shrink wages, although for office workers it mostly produced permanent increases in work demands (Millennial nightmare jobs vs. cushy Boomer jobs which, by the way, won't be backfilled when those who hold them vacate) with wages merely flat.

Markets where one side is desperate are inelastic, which means that a small change in supply or demand can cause huge price swings. Usually, this works against those who are out of power; for example, oil producers can cause price spikes if they can hold a cartel together. The job market is also extremely inelastic. We might only see 10 or 20 percent of truck-driving jobs automated out of existence by 2032, but that will have devastating effects on wages.

The idea that this only threatens low- and middle-skill workers is also absurd. Look at programming. Agile Scrum has given managers the ability to replace those expensive, fussy high-skill experts with chain gangs of far less capable people who barely qualify as software engineers. If it can happen to software engineers, it can happen to anyone, and the broad-based effects on the labor market (collapses of one industry triggering refugee crises into other ones) are going to be horrible.

Anything you do as a subordinate can and will be automated, if not entirely, at least enough to make possible a massive wage cut. Of course, that's not a bad thing. On its own, it's the opposite. The problem is that the financial penalties associated with automation invariably go to the workers, and the benefits go only to capital.

We have about ten years left on the "if ya doesn't work, ya doesn't eat" model.

War seems to rewrite the brain. People are miserable and bored most of the time, are terrified while in combat, and come back with psychological issues we're still just beginning to understand. It's hell. And yet, people do get addicted to the mayhem and the rush. The mercenary life is attractive to a lot of people. There's still a lot being debated here, but one of the theories about PTSD is that much of the damage is done (or, at least, is made permanent) when people return to civilian life. Having been exposed to life-or-death situations, they find daily life to be low-stakes and artificial; the time in which they were most alive as in combat (even if they hated the experience and what it did to them).

Still, I agree that actual war is not at all "fun".

This is certainly what traditional economics says (they consume, rather than invest) because it's what rich people want us to think, but it doesn't hold out.

For one thing, their private jets and charter flights eat up a lot of fuel. Their lifestyles aren't free.

Second, attribution is a hard problem. When all the poor people drive to work in offices in places chosen by rich people, to create surplus value for the rich, who is consuming all that gasoline? Is it the rich, who benefit from this economic system and the poor being forced to participate? Or is the poor, who are the ones directly buying and using the fuel? Hard to say; at the individual level, attribution is probably impossible.

Third, the whole notion of "poors consume; the rich invest" is only true in proportionate terms. Sure, the billionaires don't directly consume 100,000 times as much as average people--simply because that would be ridiculous. No one can eat 100,000 hamburgers for lunch. But they do consume 100-1000 times more than average people--fuel is a big one, and those 20,000-SF houses aren't cheap to maintain--and this adds up. Their footprint on resources is bad enough; their overuse of land is destructive--this kind of private wealth is a catastrophic misallocation of resources.

Finally, what tends to happen with the rich is that they don't put their money into direct consumption (because, again, there's no hedonic payoff to having 100,000 hamburgers for lunch; 99,995+ will go to waste) so much as they use what they have to further secure personal and familial advantages, both economic and political. That's what this investment is: the configuration of society by the last round's winners to ensure they'll win the next round. This has resulted in an economic system that benefits them and keeps the middle classes comfortable enough to survive but--you're right on this--is unsustainable.

You're absolutely correct to say that "hit the rich" is far from sufficient here. We in the middle class are going to need to sacrifice. Thing is, no one's going to sacrifice anything with the current upper class in charge. Would you give up anything for these people and the society they've built? I sure wouldn't. You can't ask people in the middle classes to eat less meat and fly less often if you're taking a private jet to Davos. Neoliberalism has a lot of problems, but a big one is that these WEF people have literally none of the moral authority on which they seem to believe they operate.

Yes, in discrete cases. In continuous cases, you have to work with a probability density. I think this is one of the hurdles people encounter when they're first exposed to Bayesian stats. The probabilities, technically speaking, are zero.

The important insight in Bayesian work is that it's often not the probabilities themselves that matter but the ratios thereof, since from those alone you can compute posteriors.