Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for politics, oh god, please, no. The guy with the nuclear launch codes should not be the best entertainer.
> Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling.
Kayfabe. And yeah, Hate Inc, was such a good book, I listened to it 3 times in 2 years and it's scary how closely this resembles most of the political theater that takes place around the World.
It's not just the US, though its the most visible, it's a systemic issue that is ultimately incredibly effective: it's the same formula that reality TV used but on steroids and for much higher stakes and with mentally sick participants (sociopaths willing to do anything for power and control).
As a long time channer, 4 and then 8 before things got incredibly violent, I highly recommend the Q: Into the Storm to see exactly what 'type of people' buy into these types of conspiracies.
Like most of the BS that went on chans, larping was always for the lulz, so whether it was John Titor, or the Time Traveler who predicted Bitcoin would destroy the Earth it's there for entertainment purposes to fill the void between the boring parts of life (think: something to read while waiting for a bus or taking an uber).
Instead it was taken seriously by a cohort of the population who were entirely destroyed economically and disenfranchised since the Reagan era in the US (and abroad) and it shows the perils of how basic the current Human Condition is when a pervasive narrative that suits your desired reality eventually becomes your entire reality.
It also underscores the reasons why Social Media is and has been a major source for anxiety, depression and suicide: the Human mind is just not optimized for that much input, so when coupled with low intellect, wide-spread loneliness and a need to feel accepted at all costs due to a loss of community it's not hard to see how this all turns out.
Cullen Hoback was recently on Joe Rogan and it was super insightful to hear his views on the entire thing (seeing Hotwheels' drama was utter insanity as I checkedout entirely from channing after the mass shootings) after watching it in utter disbelief when this documentary came out detailing how this whole thing took place and who was involved.
There's some real value to this. I think a lot of folks on the left failed to understand that Trump is a heel, and were caught completely off-guard that every single scandal ("grab 'em by the pussy!") not only flopped, but energized his base. To this day, a lot of press seems focused on "orange man bad" without any recognition that they're supporting his political standing.
Can you explain why people would want a heel to make decisions about their lives and freedoms? I assume you’re implying that heels gain popularity through drawing emotion, but likely has an inverse correlation to being a good leader? Heels are self-obsessed generally, right?
Because the heel hurts "the other" - marginalized people - more than the average person who voted them in. They're willing to suffer a little, as long as the right people suffer _a lot_.
I'm not inclined to characterize people with radically different political views from mine... but I'd encourage you to read what Trump supporters say that they like about him and dislike about other leaders, and to take it with a lump of salt because you'll be reading the writing of his most fervent supporters and not his "median supporter." Also, I'd encourage you to read what the Trump-supporting press writes about him, and what they write about other leaders, because that's what the "median supporter" is probably consuming.
Also, something weird has happened in the wrestling world. Once upon a time, heels were booed, and faces were applauded. Today... heels are increasingly popular and faces are getting boos. I can't explain this.
Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quote about it, something along the lines of the most good being done in the history of man by people throwing cats into temples.
If you think about this from a game theoretic perspective, it makes business sense to "defect" first (make this offer to employees). If all firms could be trusted to cooperate, they could pressure workers to return and workers wouldn't have any recourse. But because the first firm that defects has its pick of the remote talent litter, the slower you move the worse off you are.
Not really. Most _good_ companies are really flexible for employees they value a lot in terms of remote work, so this is not an issue. And they will likely have contingency plans to go mostly or fully remote in case they realize they are losing too many people.
I'd actually be curious to see an analysis of this. All of my experience suggests that there is indeed a significant difference in employee quality and a substantial cost imposed by turnover, but I'd love to see some data to the contrary, i.e. that the "employee as interchangeable cog" model is defensible.
Sorry to be that guy, but it's funny to me Seneca identified this exact thing thousands of years ago. He said something like, we must not take on tasks which are not so much huge as generate a proliferation of smaller tasks.
I think the biggest place where it's really necessary is integration points. Within your system it's reasonable
to try to define exceptions out of existence. Once you start accepting user input or depending upon some system outside of your control, though, you better have some kind of mechanism to handle whatever unknown asteroids come flying in from deep space ready to annihilate your entire planet and civilization.
That is still provided by error values or error types. The defining feature of exceptions is that they provide a secondary control flow path, and that control flow path automatically flows up the stack until it reaches an explicit catch.
With error values/types, control flow happens normally, and the programmer is expected to explicitly branch on the the value using normal control flow constructs.
The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less than they are, even if I can bring myself to admit to myself that they're better at the job, I'm still going to feel we're "doing the same job" and I'm getting screwed. Those people don't immediately and quietly
just look for a new job. They complain and moan and poison the well and generally destroy the social atmosphere of the company.
Studies of workplace motivation and performance often find that one of the worst things you can do is get everyone obsessing about salary all of the time instead of focusing on the work. (Notably, this isn't just bad for the company, it's bad for the workers' quality of life.) I think it's fair to say that sometimes companies are trying to screw the workers, but I also think some of the norms around discretion on this topic were an informal evolved mechanism to dampen the natural status competition people fall into and get them to work more as a unit focused on a goal. While I appreciate the aim behind transparency laws, I'd prefer it if certain things like choosing to talk about salary were protected. Publishing all of the salaries by default seems like a blunt mechanism and strikes me as very libertarian or Marxist thinking where you're either assuming a) a free and transparent market always produces the best result, or b) people fall into broad "classes" in which all individuals share the same interests and will work together. I generally think both of those modes of thought are simplistic and, despite some underlying truth, fail to account for many important complications and unintended side effects.
I can see it now, there a bunch of tasks in Trello to do, and all the shit jobs go to the guy that's getting 10k more than than his manager. They guy getting paid the least gets all the easy jobs so his productivity looks better so he can ask for the pay rise at the end of the yet.
Meanwhile, Everybody else is doing the bare minimum to close the ticket so they can look good when it comes to pay review time.
I did a quick search for the article "How to Ruin Motivation With Pay" but it's behind a paywall. The book "Punished By Rewards" has a lot of references if you're interested.
Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing it because of the mismatch in non-verbal cues. I for example often find myself completely unable to parse the facial expressions and body language of my cat, yet she is very obviously a reasonably intelligent animal.
Worse, they interpret their gestures and expressions as intentional and human -- the cat is smiling/laughing/frowning. Or the cat's failure to smile/laugh/frown (because it lacks the facial muscles to do so) are an indication of its cold, calculating nature. People interpret other people's expressions rapidly and instinctively and they unconsciously misapply this same skill to animals. Perhaps people on the spectrum understand animals better, a la Temple Grandin, not because they are more like animals, but because they aren't misapplying skills which they lack, mind blindness in this case being better than mind hallucinations.
That's a shame -- cat body language is incredibly expressive! The tail gives away so much, as does the line of the body... It's definitely worth finding a quick guide when you have the time.
It's also interesting to note that domestic cat vocalizations are used primarily to communicate with humans! They notice we use speech, so they do too! And while some meows are common, others vary between cats -- it's like their very own language to talk to their owner.
Just going to share a fascinating thing which at least to me explain that at the core, all beings are one – a conscious, eternal entity with self-awareness that experiences pain and pleasure.
If karma theory is to be believed, evolution happens at the level of individual soul (called jivatma) – gradually a soul takes birth starting from the smallest microorganism and traveling all the way through 84m type of species before becoming a human. It's not exactly linear and one can be stuck in the same type of species for more than once or jump to a human being early.
The difference between a human being and animal is the development of the intellect sheet of the consciousness; however, depending on what was your prominent animal tendency in past births, some humans act as lion, some as cow, some as folks, observable in their behavior. It's also possible to fall back to animal birth depending on your karma as a human or for other reasons.
Can we validate this theory? Yogic methods are there which requires mastering meditation (many enlightened beings have verified it such as Buddha). Scientifically I don't know. Maybe in future it'd be possible.
I believe in a version of this, what i believe to be the obvious version. And that's that reincarnation happens continually, because we don't have singular souls but rather a great many that act in concert. Through interactions with all the people we have ever had, we are influenced, and their souls (composed of all the people they have been influenced by) flows into ours... And then we, in turn, upload ourselves to others in a continual process. Who we are is distributed across many people. This leads to a karmic concern for the future (where our future souls will be in misery or bliss).
Apply falsifiability - think of how somebody might prove it wrong. If you can't even imagine any way whatsoever, no matter how unlikely, then the "theory" tells you nothing about nature and is about as useful as any fantasy or religious belief.
I was using the word "animal" in the sense of "non-human." The point is that non-human intelligence is particularly difficult and complicated for us to discuss, because no member of our species has experienced it and so we can only reason about it through complex experiments and logic. We can't lean on things like personal experience and language in our investigations of it.
"Artificial intelligence" comes to mind even if what I see from that field is more like advanced pre-trained models, incapable of learning the slightest thing from its failures or successes on its own.
edit: ... but it is a very complicated topic even if most of it isn't even close to anything I'd call actual intelligence.
Not OP, but I imagine it's something like "precision" vs. "how often correct." So you can be extremely precise quickly, but not all the time. Or you can be extremely precise all the time, but not in time to make good decisions. Et al.
I don't have any one complete book that I can recommend, and I don't even really have a great reading list for this. But I'll make an attempt to share what I think is useful as a starting point.
1. Systems Operations is first and foremost about understanding systems, in all of their complexity, which means understanding the internals of your OS primarily.
2. Performance and networking, in particular, are super important areas to focus on understanding when it comes to learning the topic to help with software development.
3. A lot of it is about understanding concepts in abstract and being able to extrapolate to other situations and apply these concepts, so there's actually quite a lot of useful information that can be learned on one OS and still applied to another OS (or on one game engine and applied to another, et al).
Here's a few books I think are worth reading, not in any particular order of prevalence, but loosely categorized
Part 2: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-2-7th/dp/01354... (I had the pleasure of being taught from this book by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon at a previous employer, was an amazing class and these books are incredible resources even applied outside of Windows, we used 5th edition, I linked 7th, which has the 2nd part pending publication).
The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/books/perfbook.htm (no longer available from Amazon, but is available direct from publisher. This is basically the one book you should read about creating and structuring benchmarks or performance tests)
I guess that's a "reading list", but this is just a small part of what you need to know to excel in systems operations.
I would say for the typical software developer writing web applications, the most important thing to know is how databases work and how networking works, since these are going to be the primary items affecting your application performance. But there's obviously topics not included in this list that are also worth understanding, such as browser/DOM internals, how caching and CDNs work, and web-specific optimizations that can be achievable with HTTP/2 or QUIC.
For the average software developer writing desktop applications, I'd say make sure you /really/ understand OS internals... at the base everything you do on a computer system is based on what the OS provides to you. Even though you are abstracted (possibly many layers) away from this, being able to peel back the layers and understand what's /really/ happening is essential to writing high-quality application code that is performant and secure, as well as making you a champ at debugging issues.
If you're trying to get into systems operations as a field, this is just a brush over the top surface and there's a lot deeper diving required.
Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free and great service (like Google Maps) at the exact same time I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data. This is exactly what makes it so fraught. People aren't objecting to cheap phones, they're objecting to the continued commercialization and manipulation of human experience.
> I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data
Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
Both companies sell ads. Data they collect is used to target those ads. That is their market edge. It doesn’t even make sense for them to want to sell data to 3rd parties because it would diminish their ad-targeting advantage.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other reasons to be concerned, but the myth of Google or Facebook “selling your data” is just wrong.
Fair point, but it's a useful shorthand for "assembles a vast profile via collection of your data in an effort to manipulate your behavior." Part of Zuboff's book is about this very thing. This is an entirely new economic model in history and therefore we lack useful language to describe it, and since we struggle to describe it we struggle to criticize and oppose it.
> Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
These companies are in such a position, that they have so much data when selling it brings competitive disadvantage.
There is a competition going on from the control of the world, in terms of sophisticated A.I. development. This is where they are using their data. Ads are just little sidekick in the process anymore.
Also, they probably do everything with the data and a bit more than average data buyer would do.
