planet-and-halo (u/planet-and-halo)

planet-and-halo commented on The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn't go to college slowboring.com/p/the-medi... · Posted by u/paulpauper

Melting_Harps · 4 years ago

> 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.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

Yep, it's definitely not a U.S. only issue. I agree, it strikes me as basically a consequence of media.

planet-and-halo commented on The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn't go to college slowboring.com/p/the-medi... · Posted by u/paulpauper

zw123456 · 4 years ago

My view on the problem with politics today is that people have started to view it as sport, not selecting competent people to represent you for law making. I call it Political Face Painting. Like the guy who paints his face the colors of his favorite team when s/he goes to the game. That's cool, if you want to paint your face to go to a ball game, drink beer and scream your head off, great, no problem. But it seems like that mentality has crept into politics where you now have people paint their face red or blue and view it as a competition between parties. That will not end well in my view.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation” doctorow.medium.com/faceb... · Posted by u/throwawaysea

Barrin92 · 4 years ago

I think Doctorow is largely right about how this uncritical acceptance of tech "magic powers" actually strengthens them, the 'rather evil than incompetent' argument works. As he alludes to in the piece Karp and Thiel used to actively push for PR that presents Palantir as this sort of omniponent surveillance super-tool because it actually makes it seem more intimidating.

Criticism of 'precrime' tech or robo judges should be directed towards how goddamn stupid it is to direct machine learning algorithms that were made for perception at tasks that involve complex cognitive and ethical human judgements.

Cambridge Analytica was a good example of this as well. The press fell over themselves to characterise their technology as some sort of election tipping, mind controlling super tool. They probably loved it. In reality there's not even any scientific backing for their targeting and it most likely did barely anything, they just wanted to look like James Bond's Spectre.

edit: another thing the post made me think of is how much the tech sector loves Yuval Noah Harari. He once said he's surprised by it but I'm absolutely not, because he basically constantly tells them how omnipotent and all-powerful they are.

There's actually a fantastic scene in The Young Pope about this (a satirical show about the internal workings of the Catholic Church)

> Do you know how many books have been written about me?

  > Seventeen.

> Eighteen. The last one's going to press next week, and it's got the best title of all.
> Which is?
>The Man Behind the Scenes. I suggested it myself.
> Who wrote it?
> Manna, that leftist reporter.
> That means it'going to be critical of you, Your Eminence.
> Of course, those are the best. They turn you into a legend.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on PwC Tells U.S. Employees They Need Never Return to the Office reuters.com/business/excl... · Posted by u/infodocket

RC_ITR · 4 years ago

This assumes “more than nominal” employee switching cost, and that’s only sort of true.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on PwC Tells U.S. Employees They Need Never Return to the Office reuters.com/business/excl... · Posted by u/infodocket

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on I just don’t want to be busy anymore elenasalaks.medium.com/i-... · Posted by u/PretzelFisch

MattGaiser · 4 years ago

One of the things which quickly overwhelms me is just all the little stuff.

Couple big ticket items? No problem. Long list of 5-20 minute items, or even worse, conversations of indefinite length? Exhausting.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on Studying the relationship between exception handling and post-release defects neverworkintheory.org/202... · Posted by u/zdw

mindwok · 4 years ago

Personally I really dislike exceptions and try/catch in languages. I don't like having to worry about whether some function call is going to surprise me with an exception, and handling them with try/catch really breaks the flow of the program.

I'm sure there's probably a lot I can learn to make this better for myself because I don't work with exception heavy code very often, but I find working with simple error value returns like in Go or error types in Haskell/Rust to be so much more ergonomic and comfortable to work with.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on Pay Transparency Is Coming businessinsider.com/pay-t... · Posted by u/walterbell

only_as_i_fall · 4 years ago

I'd be interested to see those studies.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on Pay Transparency Is Coming businessinsider.com/pay-t... · Posted by u/walterbell

only_as_i_fall · 4 years ago

I think those are two different issues though.

You can have pay transparency without enforcing strict pay levels per role.

The natural outcome is just that thise who make less than their coworkers will feel undervalued and look for other jobs, which is probably not a big problem.

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo commented on Researchers successfully potty-train cows science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/cheese_goddess

Maursault · 4 years ago

> Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular...

As opposed to? I read this the same as "circles, and round circles in particular...." Is there any other kind?

planet-and-halo · 4 years ago

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.