>Bullshit filter #2: Does their livelihood depend on being right?
That one is a tricky one, because pretty much every single activist organization and non-profit cannot exist unless they are correct. And even if they 'win' it's very hard for them to admit it and dissolve their organizations.
The author also references a quote from Nassim Taleb and his claim to fame is that he predicted the 2008 crash - but I never got a sense if he just got a lucky guess or there was actually something to his model.
Exactly. "Does their livelihood depend on being right" is a chicken-and-egg problem. Applying this principal only makes sense if you have a preexisting bias against activism in general, which some people actually do.
One might also invert it: Does their livelihood depend on them not being wrong. We tend only to remember the successful predictions but a bad prediction can be harmful.
> Exactly. "Does their livelihood depend on being right" is a chicken-and-egg problem. Applying this principal only makes sense if you have a preexisting bias against activism in general, which some people actually do.
I'm not sure I get how this is a chicken-and-egg problem, except perhaps in the sense that if what you have is a chicken, every problem might look like it can be solved by selling eggs.
> And even if they 'win' it's very hard for them to admit it and dissolve their organizations.
But doesn't that mean that the suggested filter is indeed a good one?
Given an activist organization, how should I assess whether 1) they are genuinely raising awareness for and/or acting to set right something they believe to be a problem, and which indeed is a problem, or 2) it failed to perform apoptosis after fulfilling its original purpose, and now clings to survival by trying to find or even create new problems.
Since the latter will be more likely to be observed, being sceptical of an activist organization seems a good idea a priori. Especially if it has existed for a while already, or if it has considerable funds and/or is well known (which may increase resistance to a dissolution; "We have all this financial support and awareness, we can use it to do more good! Quick, what else is wrong in the world that we totally have the expertise to fix?").
pretty much every single activist organization and non-profit cannot exist unless they are correct
Not at all. They cannot exist unless they are popular -- at least, popular enough to get donations to fund their operations -- but being popular and being correct are very different things.
I can see this one backfiring if someone's livelihood depends on their past predictions being correct. Now they have a strong incentive to double down on those predictions, and dismiss contradictory evidence.
Anyone whose livelihood depends on providing a solution to Problem X will assure you that X will continue to be a problem well into the future. This is visible everywhere in both for-profit and non-profit organizations.
I don't doubt that the people who run MADD sincerely believe that drunk driving was a pressing problem when they joined. But are they ever really going to tell you that drunk driving has been successfully addressed and isn't a problem anymore? Or that they were wrong after all, and it never was a problem? (I just picked MADD randomly. Substitute the mission-driven organization of your choice.)
I'm not so sure about that. One major gripe from the rest of the LGBTQ+ acronym was many of the groups working toward marriage equality nationally in the US shut down the instant they won instead of working on related issues.
The huge header image led me to expect some commentary on COVID-19 coverage in the media, which indeed would have been interesting to read. But the article doesnt really talk about that issue in particular. Are we supposed to make some inference as readers? It's confusing.
edit: after looking at the headlines more closely, it seems that it's commentary on early media reports of coronavirus being no more deadly than the flu. Not sure if that is clear-cut bullshit, rather than just uninformed reporting... or maybe they're the same thing :)
This is a nice article with some good guidelines but I have to point out a bit of irony, just for fun:
> Filter #1: Are they free to speak their minds?
> If they are in an institution – who funds it?
> If they are in a company - what are the incentives of the company?
> As an individual, what are their incentives?
This is great advice. In the case of this article, according to the "About" info, one of the authors works for a VC-funded tech company who's making an online game platform. Would they be incentivized to write about a BS filter that denigrated venture capital, tech, or online gaming specifically?
> Filter #2: Does their livelihood depend on being right?
From the "About" info, that doesn't appear to be the case here. But still, I tend to agree.
> Filter #3: Do they take cyberspace seriously?
This is where working for a VC-backed online gaming startup may activate filter #1, given the author lists examples that neatly support the industry they're in. I'm not convinced this filter belongs with #1 and #2, and because of #1 and #2, I'm skeptical of #3.
When I was a structural engineer (Ontario EIT) I did not think that buildings were going to change the world dramatically. I thought software, biotech, and nanotech would. And so far, it's been software that has been leading the way with biotech coming second. Software is huge.
We've only had the internet for a few decades and it's already dramatically changed almost anything I can think of. Politics (including war, espionage, campaigning, propaganda), the economy (gig economy, AirBnb / Outdoorsy, high frequency trading, remote work), society / culture (including the quality range of damn near everything from shows on Netflix to music to even food), funding (Kickstarter, cryptocurrencies).
Like, I struggle to even comprehend how many decisions are made by computers around the world each second. Cyber is the number one issue on the DNI report on global security. It's a big deal.
This is a stronger argument than that in the article. Still, you could make a strong argument for a variety of important industries/fields. Agriculture? Climate science?
Edit: I see everyone's latching onto agriculture as a literal suggestion rather than a rhetorical device, sorry for the confusion. I think it's valid to treat agriculture as seriously as cyberspace but honestly I don't know enough about the former to respond to the good scrutiny in this thread.
Agriculture is important, and software is driving most of the innovation. Whether its better software to design the machines that harvest crops, more efficient futures markets for selling grain in advance of harvest, better watering scheduling, self-driving harvesters, a basis of information for farmers to learn about advances in farm tech, computers that enable genetics research for better genetically modified crops.
Put another way, it isn't like the head of cabbage I ate six months ago has me writing better code then or today. But the script I wrote to make my development loop faster still does.
The system is chaotic and interdependent, but the flows of causation are still broadly understandable. It even makes sense on a philosophical level. Humans were once the only agents in the economy with decision making power. Now a human writes some code and the code operates long after the human that wrote it has gone. Output is no longer tied to attention.
Furthermore, we happen to live in an existence where information transfer is extremely, extremely, cheap from a resource standpoint. So the software doesn't just scale attention on the one computer it was written on, it scales for everyone! An upgrade to Microsoft Excel helps millions of people all at once! We can even use software to make better computers and software! It's naturally self-building, and the main reason why I think it will continue to lead biotech until biotech merges with software.
Agriculture is clearly a need but doesn't have a huge impact on society. It's not like there's multiple gardens in everyone's home, and even if it was they still lack some key capabilities software&internet combine for
Climate science is clearly being overwhelmed by bad actors, generally exerting their influence thru bot & troll farms, communicating thru various software&internet platforms
I don't think either of those are particularly compelling reasons not to s/tech/agriculture|climate science/ to the original argument. There aren't multiple IDEs in most homes, but there are multiple food products. And the climate science bit doesn't really say much - there are bad actors but taking it seriously is no less credible than taking cyberspace seriously IMO.
I don't agree at all. The point was that software has changed the world the most in the last some-odd amount of years, more so than any other discipline, and I don't really understand your counterpoints - there's always been multiple food products in every home, that is actually a demonstration of how little agriculture impacts our lives. It's a mainstay.
And climate science is once again really not impacting our lives - it should be, we should all be making sweeping changes to our behaviors and requiring massive corporate overhauls & pricing in costs of disposal & cleanup - but it's not, because no one cares, and no organization with real teeth bites you for that.
Software, though, it doesn't matter what you do, it will find a way to impact you & what you've done, and if you have non cognizance of that someone else will probably eat your lunch eventually. It's obvious how climate science doesn't have the same level of import wrt every aspect of our lives [note I'm not saying this makes sense, and I would argue climate science is the most important thing, but someone saying "pollute less" isn't more credible for it].
Far be it from me to understate the importance of software, but I think that the notion of “always” having food products is (a) not true for most people in most places throughout most of history and (b) not a compelling counterargument. Food is not like oxygen, the abundance of which is all but guaranteed.
So, I'd say the Network is a bigger deal than Agriculture. Agriculture was important for humans to settle down, it definitely shouldn't be underestimated just because we take it for granted now, but the Network enables human culture to scale enormously further than it could have otherwise.
In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.
But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.
The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.
This sounds like a good start point to evaluate politicians. Even before "ideology". May be add their track record. But avoid looking for perfect people(purity tests) because no one will pass that and you end up with the worst of all. The ones that no longer care about anything.
I was wondering about this recently. It feels like there are much less people willing to engage in good faith today as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago on the Internet.
Is this just a bias on my part, or has this been the experience of other people too? Is it just more people on the net, or really less people willing to talk honestly?
It is a bias probably of the groups you were in. I know people who would go on the internet to pick fights. Good faith is a good start. If the fight starts with know 'talking points' fed to them by someone else that they just googled up you usually know it is not worth messing with.
The honesty bit is 'gone' more I think. Because of things like 'lets clean up the comment sections', 'lets clean up the videos of problematic things'. So people are self filtering because they fear being tagged and brigaded because of something they do not see as wrong. This happens because the people with real money to spend showed up to advertise. The real customers have some sway.
>“The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”
Do any world leaders do either of those things? I guess tweeting is technically telling a computer what to do. Seems like his prediction ignores the higher end power structures. It's right for a lot of jobs, but not the ones that actually inherit the earth and run things. You might inherit some of it as a geek, but you won't be a landlord.
Stammbach worked with a colony of longtailed macaques. In the paper cited
above, the running header is "Responses to Specially Skilled Java
Monkeys." Stammbach took the lowest-ranking macaque out of the society and
taught him to operate a complex machine and obtain food. When the nerd
monkey was reintroduced to the society, the higher ranking macaques
stopped kicking him out of the way long enough for him to complete
operation of the machine and obtain food for the community. I.e., society
cooperated to create the conditions under which the nerd could toil for
them. However, the monkey who acquired these special skills and provided
for the society did not achieve any rise in his dominance status.
The difference here is that the nerd monkey didn't build the machine. If it breaks, the creator needs to fix it or no one gets the benefit. The creators and maintainers are the ones, ultimately, who stand to obtain power over the ones who can't create and maintain.
The guy who owns the company ends up owning the machine, not necessarily the guy who made the machine.
It takes a certain amount of backbone to maneuver yourself on top of the monkey pile. Being a clever slave who can make useful machines for your better won't accomplish that.
This can be true, but a lot of nerds don't need a company to make a machine. A side project becomes a business solely owned by the nerd, for example. I'm assuming the nerds do have this freedom, however (I certainly do in the US).
A good quick check: when person says that A is true, can I imagine that person saying that .NOT. A was true if that were their conclusion instead? If after further investigation they were to change their conclusion, would I believe that they would correct it? Have they ever done so?
> “Listen to the experts” doesn’t cut it. By definition of course we should listen to them, but finding them by title or pedigree within specific disciplinary boundaries got us to where we are
I'm not sure that "we listened to the experts" is how we got to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.
I'd like to add a filter but in the opposite direction -- how do you know if you're asking a reasonable question or having a reasonable reaction to someone's opinion or information?
-- Are you phrasing your question or reaction in a way that the person could reasonably respond to?
Basically, if you are putting a question in front of someone such that their answer would get them in trouble or put them in some liability or embarrassment, don't expect them to respond. Or be angry or outraged when they don't. The most laughable example is when someone replies in a post to someone doing an AMA, saying, "please respond as your reply will be taken as the company's position on this matter".
-- Are you giving the person a way to answer concretely?
If you're asking someone to respond to you in a way that takes a lot of story telling, or high level judgement, or interpretation -- don't expect an answer. Most people have not thought about something at that level, or don't know enough to say. Or if they do, who knows whether that's what you want to hear or were specifically asking.
Most people are a little lazy. Ask yourself if you're asking them to do work and a lot of hard thought just in answering your question.
-- Is your question just as a spectator, or someone actually seeking to improve or help?
A lot of people can't resist the urge to ask questions. And the internet was a great democratizing factor for that at least.
But for what purpose are you asking? Even if you received the full information you wanted, are you going to do something about it? If not, are you just a spectator? Why are you qualified or deserving of an answer? It's like some sports fan wanting to ask their favorite team's GM a slew of questions why they made the starting lineup as they did. What difference does it make? To your fantasy football league?
If you make it clear that you have some concrete desire, or role, or outlet to help in the situation being discussed, people are more likely to want to give an answer. Rather than your question just consuming time of theirs that ends up not producing anything useful as an outcome.
As someone who has recently been asked a ton of questions, this list is gold. Especially the last one.
One I’d add is to give enough context to make your question answerable. “What programming language should I learn?”. Dude, I don’t know you. My answer is going to be a lot more about me than you and not very helpful.
I am not a friend of filtering at all. Who am I to know whether my point of view is really the well founded thing that I think it is?
So I always had people on social media who were very much not like me. Not all of them were clever or articulate etc, but they remind me of other human realities out there, lives which went in a totally different direction than my own probably since before their birth.
The only people I really tend to block are malicious actors, spambots and vampiristic people who obsess with you.
It was bold to lay out two criteria in direct tension with one another and then not address the tension.
1. Be wary of views coming from people who are not free to speak their minds on the topic at hand, because of their existing incentives.
2. Favor views from those who get paid for being right, discount views from those who get paid for sounding right.
In order to get paid for being right, you have to place a bet. Once you've placed a bet, you have incentives and aren't free to speak your mind. Obviously these are both matters of degree and some compromise can be had, but the process of hashing out the compromise seems like the "secret compartment" into which these filters squeeze all of the original complexity.
I suggest the addition of griefers: nation-state actors, white supremacists, vigilantes, 4chan lulzers and others who seek to create chaos for the sake of chaos, sometimes just because it looks like fun, they've got nothing better to do, kayfabe, and perhaps a personality disorder or two. Scary people.
I think a lot of those entities aren't griefers-by-design. Some of them really believe in what they're doing. This makes them scarier than the garden variety 4chan-er out for the "lulz".
I feel like it's a catch-22 and you can dismiss almost anything either by point 1 OR 2.
If someone has skin in the game (is an investor etc.), then you can dismiss them based on those incentives: Of course he will say cryptocurrencies are important, he has just invested in a startup in the area! (Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut!)
If they have no skin in the game, then dismiss them for this reason: well, if they believe crypto is so important, why are they just being an armchair smartass about it in the newspaper, why don't they put their money where their mouth is and invest in a crypto startup?
"These are heuristics, not hard-and-fast rules. They definitely shouldn’t replace objective evaluations of arguments you hear, regardless of who they might come from!"
Recognizing conflicts of interest is an important skill. It is very telling if a speaker/advocate does not reveal them at the outset.
Still there is a damned if you do and damned if you don't aspect.
The causality can go either way: maybe you were really convinced about something so you went all in, you invested in it, you founded a company on that bet etc. -> i.e. we can trust your judgment. Or maybe you're just doubling down on something hopeless, but now that you've invested in it, you're incentivized to pontificate about it.
Perhaps the best way to break the dilemma is to check if the person has recently made skin-in-the-game decisions/investments supporting his position or whether it's a pre-existing position that he may no longer believe in, but must keep pretending due to the pre-existing incentives that are for some reason hard to get rid of.
For example assume someone says: "College is overrated and bloated and outdated, the trades are actually more important" It's a valid critique to say "Oh yea? Then why didn't you send your own kids to trade school?". Equally valid may be to say "Of course you'd say that, you've sent all your kids to trade school, now you're looking to justify your bad decision". A good retort can be "Nah, actually my kid got a scholarship to college a month ago, but I recommended him to reject it because I think trade school will be better in the long run!". Recent signals are important and it's important to see that they aren't locked into a position but are actively choosing to stay in it.
Confidence in your own bullshit filters is a strong indicator that you are the bullshitter, and you’re rationalizing away how you can disengage from people who actually have a point.
Regarding whether an opinion comes from someone with the freedom to express it honestly, I used to work on making "fuck you money," but now I'm figuring out how to make enough that I could afford to use twitter. Thinking I'll save that for the second billion.
If you cut the bullshit, you cut most of society out. Institutions, the government, the media, the left, the right, corporations... And bullshit is the glue that keeps it all together.
So, I would add one more rule. The George Carlin rule:
-- Are they part of any group?
That actually covers the first and second rule of the author.
But to hate the government is suicide because we are the government. Same with society, and same with groups.
My logical conclusion with regards to speech: Learn to observe, think, form your own opinions, always speak your mind, and be no part of group think or group speech. Which is exactly what George Carlin did.
In an ideal world, no one would be part of any group. But since we all are, here is the Carlin rule revised:
-- Are they openly critical of their groups?
But again, most groups do not tolerate external or internal criticism. They're the disloyal traitors and whistle-blowers. So most of us have to chalk this up as doing our job, so we can all have one. Not everyone get's paid to speak like George.
But wherever and whenever we can, we should promote and protect the groups that embrace and advocate free speech against themselves. They are the only groups sustaining free speech.
'We' are not the government. A specific group of people are. There are many people who want nothing to do with any government. That included Carlin.
> My logical conclusion with regards to speech: Learn to observe, think, form your own opinions, always speak your mind, and be no part of group think or group speech. Which is exactly what George Carlin did.
Hey, I was reading your comments. Had to check out the guy with the huge balls. Kudos to you sir. I sum up George Carlin's life's work and applied it to bullshit detection and get nothing. I wonder if there are better places to hang out.
> "Moving from scarcity of capital to scarcity of attention" is where my bullshit filter lead me to stop reading.
"Scarcity" is perhaps the wrong word, but we don't really have a better one. Perhaps aggregation? Regardless, we can see that there are problems (and not just in the form of bubbles) being created by a lot of capital in very large piles sloshing around chasing opportunities for investment around the globe (even though capital still isn't exactly not-scarce), and that the current big winners in 'tech' are mostly purveyors of attention of various sorts.
Attention scarcity is real. "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive." James Gleick, paraphrasing others earlier. An abundance of information makes scaarce what information consumes: attention. There are only 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds, in a day. Whether it's individual humans or groups, our capacity to assimilate information is profoundly finite. No matter how many stories there are, there are only ten top-ten slots.
Attention is inextricably rivalrous.
I'm not convinced that true capital abundance is possible, but that's a different argument.
I will argue that attention scarity and capital scarcity are simultaneously possible.
I have a personal bullshit filter: Are the authors open to criticism and allow others to speak their minds? If an article does not have a comments section, I am very skeptical of it. I find myself scrolling to the bottom looking for a comment section. If the article doesn't have one, I'll likely skip it.
This doesn't seem like a great system to me for a couple reasons. First of all, it can be used to dismiss basically anything. If someone is bullish on crypto and also has a big financial stake in the crypto ecosystem are there more reliable because they have "skin in the game" or less reliable because they are just "talking their book"? But more importantly, it is really reductive about making predictions. You can look at vague predictions as wishy-washy or you can look at it at as someone being thoughtful about the fact that the world is complicated and the best we can do is assign probabilities. And how do you evaluate that? Was Nate Silver wrong because he gave Hillary Clinton a 70% chance of winning the 2016 election? According to him she "should have won" but didn't but things with 30% probability happen a lot so a single event doesn't really tell us much.
Be aware of incentives. Can the person speak their mind freely? If they're an institution, who funds it? If they're an individual, what are their incentives? Or, are they Elon Musk, in which case none of this counts?
I lack the epistemological certitude to propose a "filter", but I'd say a strong "red flag" in evaluating thinkpieces about whose predictions you should take seriously would be "anybody who elevates technology workers above others because computers are eating the world".
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] threadThat one is a tricky one, because pretty much every single activist organization and non-profit cannot exist unless they are correct. And even if they 'win' it's very hard for them to admit it and dissolve their organizations.
The author also references a quote from Nassim Taleb and his claim to fame is that he predicted the 2008 crash - but I never got a sense if he just got a lucky guess or there was actually something to his model.
I'm not sure I get how this is a chicken-and-egg problem, except perhaps in the sense that if what you have is a chicken, every problem might look like it can be solved by selling eggs.
But doesn't that mean that the suggested filter is indeed a good one?
Given an activist organization, how should I assess whether 1) they are genuinely raising awareness for and/or acting to set right something they believe to be a problem, and which indeed is a problem, or 2) it failed to perform apoptosis after fulfilling its original purpose, and now clings to survival by trying to find or even create new problems.
Since the latter will be more likely to be observed, being sceptical of an activist organization seems a good idea a priori. Especially if it has existed for a while already, or if it has considerable funds and/or is well known (which may increase resistance to a dissolution; "We have all this financial support and awareness, we can use it to do more good! Quick, what else is wrong in the world that we totally have the expertise to fix?").
Not at all. They cannot exist unless they are popular -- at least, popular enough to get donations to fund their operations -- but being popular and being correct are very different things.
https://prostate.org.nz/2014/01/men-die-earlier-womens-healt...
Anyone whose livelihood depends on providing a solution to Problem X will assure you that X will continue to be a problem well into the future. This is visible everywhere in both for-profit and non-profit organizations.
I don't doubt that the people who run MADD sincerely believe that drunk driving was a pressing problem when they joined. But are they ever really going to tell you that drunk driving has been successfully addressed and isn't a problem anymore? Or that they were wrong after all, and it never was a problem? (I just picked MADD randomly. Substitute the mission-driven organization of your choice.)
edit: after looking at the headlines more closely, it seems that it's commentary on early media reports of coronavirus being no more deadly than the flu. Not sure if that is clear-cut bullshit, rather than just uninformed reporting... or maybe they're the same thing :)
> Filter #1: Are they free to speak their minds?
> If they are in an institution – who funds it?
> If they are in a company - what are the incentives of the company?
> As an individual, what are their incentives?
This is great advice. In the case of this article, according to the "About" info, one of the authors works for a VC-funded tech company who's making an online game platform. Would they be incentivized to write about a BS filter that denigrated venture capital, tech, or online gaming specifically?
> Filter #2: Does their livelihood depend on being right?
From the "About" info, that doesn't appear to be the case here. But still, I tend to agree.
> Filter #3: Do they take cyberspace seriously?
This is where working for a VC-backed online gaming startup may activate filter #1, given the author lists examples that neatly support the industry they're in. I'm not convinced this filter belongs with #1 and #2, and because of #1 and #2, I'm skeptical of #3.
But I liked the article, thanks for sharing!
The author's field of expertise is software, therefore only people who take software seriously are worth listening to.
When I was a structural engineer (Ontario EIT) I did not think that buildings were going to change the world dramatically. I thought software, biotech, and nanotech would. And so far, it's been software that has been leading the way with biotech coming second. Software is huge.
We've only had the internet for a few decades and it's already dramatically changed almost anything I can think of. Politics (including war, espionage, campaigning, propaganda), the economy (gig economy, AirBnb / Outdoorsy, high frequency trading, remote work), society / culture (including the quality range of damn near everything from shows on Netflix to music to even food), funding (Kickstarter, cryptocurrencies).
Like, I struggle to even comprehend how many decisions are made by computers around the world each second. Cyber is the number one issue on the DNI report on global security. It's a big deal.
Edit: I see everyone's latching onto agriculture as a literal suggestion rather than a rhetorical device, sorry for the confusion. I think it's valid to treat agriculture as seriously as cyberspace but honestly I don't know enough about the former to respond to the good scrutiny in this thread.
Put another way, it isn't like the head of cabbage I ate six months ago has me writing better code then or today. But the script I wrote to make my development loop faster still does.
The system is chaotic and interdependent, but the flows of causation are still broadly understandable. It even makes sense on a philosophical level. Humans were once the only agents in the economy with decision making power. Now a human writes some code and the code operates long after the human that wrote it has gone. Output is no longer tied to attention.
Furthermore, we happen to live in an existence where information transfer is extremely, extremely, cheap from a resource standpoint. So the software doesn't just scale attention on the one computer it was written on, it scales for everyone! An upgrade to Microsoft Excel helps millions of people all at once! We can even use software to make better computers and software! It's naturally self-building, and the main reason why I think it will continue to lead biotech until biotech merges with software.
Climate science is clearly being overwhelmed by bad actors, generally exerting their influence thru bot & troll farms, communicating thru various software&internet platforms
And climate science is once again really not impacting our lives - it should be, we should all be making sweeping changes to our behaviors and requiring massive corporate overhauls & pricing in costs of disposal & cleanup - but it's not, because no one cares, and no organization with real teeth bites you for that.
Software, though, it doesn't matter what you do, it will find a way to impact you & what you've done, and if you have non cognizance of that someone else will probably eat your lunch eventually. It's obvious how climate science doesn't have the same level of import wrt every aspect of our lives [note I'm not saying this makes sense, and I would argue climate science is the most important thing, but someone saying "pollute less" isn't more credible for it].
In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.
But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.
The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.
Herman/Chomsky's "Five Filters" from Manufacturing Consent
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
Parenti's Inventing Reality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/673719.Inventing_Reality
1. Are they competent?
2. Are they acting in good faith?
These can then be further subdivided into things to check.
Is this just a bias on my part, or has this been the experience of other people too? Is it just more people on the net, or really less people willing to talk honestly?
The honesty bit is 'gone' more I think. Because of things like 'lets clean up the comment sections', 'lets clean up the videos of problematic things'. So people are self filtering because they fear being tagged and brigaded because of something they do not see as wrong. This happens because the people with real money to spend showed up to advertise. The real customers have some sway.
Do any world leaders do either of those things? I guess tweeting is technically telling a computer what to do. Seems like his prediction ignores the higher end power structures. It's right for a lot of jobs, but not the ones that actually inherit the earth and run things. You might inherit some of it as a geek, but you won't be a landlord.
The optimistic prediction that "geeks will inherit the Earth" is likely to be wrong:
https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
http://www.loper-os.org/pub/codemonkey.pdfIt takes a certain amount of backbone to maneuver yourself on top of the monkey pile. Being a clever slave who can make useful machines for your better won't accomplish that.
I'm not sure that "we listened to the experts" is how we got to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.
Sure it is, as long as you cherry-pick the expert or use expertise in another area as a substitute.
-- Are you phrasing your question or reaction in a way that the person could reasonably respond to?
Basically, if you are putting a question in front of someone such that their answer would get them in trouble or put them in some liability or embarrassment, don't expect them to respond. Or be angry or outraged when they don't. The most laughable example is when someone replies in a post to someone doing an AMA, saying, "please respond as your reply will be taken as the company's position on this matter".
-- Are you giving the person a way to answer concretely?
If you're asking someone to respond to you in a way that takes a lot of story telling, or high level judgement, or interpretation -- don't expect an answer. Most people have not thought about something at that level, or don't know enough to say. Or if they do, who knows whether that's what you want to hear or were specifically asking.
Most people are a little lazy. Ask yourself if you're asking them to do work and a lot of hard thought just in answering your question.
-- Is your question just as a spectator, or someone actually seeking to improve or help?
A lot of people can't resist the urge to ask questions. And the internet was a great democratizing factor for that at least.
But for what purpose are you asking? Even if you received the full information you wanted, are you going to do something about it? If not, are you just a spectator? Why are you qualified or deserving of an answer? It's like some sports fan wanting to ask their favorite team's GM a slew of questions why they made the starting lineup as they did. What difference does it make? To your fantasy football league?
If you make it clear that you have some concrete desire, or role, or outlet to help in the situation being discussed, people are more likely to want to give an answer. Rather than your question just consuming time of theirs that ends up not producing anything useful as an outcome.
One I’d add is to give enough context to make your question answerable. “What programming language should I learn?”. Dude, I don’t know you. My answer is going to be a lot more about me than you and not very helpful.
So I always had people on social media who were very much not like me. Not all of them were clever or articulate etc, but they remind me of other human realities out there, lives which went in a totally different direction than my own probably since before their birth.
The only people I really tend to block are malicious actors, spambots and vampiristic people who obsess with you.
1. Be wary of views coming from people who are not free to speak their minds on the topic at hand, because of their existing incentives.
2. Favor views from those who get paid for being right, discount views from those who get paid for sounding right.
In order to get paid for being right, you have to place a bet. Once you've placed a bet, you have incentives and aren't free to speak your mind. Obviously these are both matters of degree and some compromise can be had, but the process of hashing out the compromise seems like the "secret compartment" into which these filters squeeze all of the original complexity.
If someone has skin in the game (is an investor etc.), then you can dismiss them based on those incentives: Of course he will say cryptocurrencies are important, he has just invested in a startup in the area! (Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut!)
If they have no skin in the game, then dismiss them for this reason: well, if they believe crypto is so important, why are they just being an armchair smartass about it in the newspaper, why don't they put their money where their mouth is and invest in a crypto startup?
Recognizing conflicts of interest is an important skill. It is very telling if a speaker/advocate does not reveal them at the outset.
Still there is a damned if you do and damned if you don't aspect.
The causality can go either way: maybe you were really convinced about something so you went all in, you invested in it, you founded a company on that bet etc. -> i.e. we can trust your judgment. Or maybe you're just doubling down on something hopeless, but now that you've invested in it, you're incentivized to pontificate about it.
Perhaps the best way to break the dilemma is to check if the person has recently made skin-in-the-game decisions/investments supporting his position or whether it's a pre-existing position that he may no longer believe in, but must keep pretending due to the pre-existing incentives that are for some reason hard to get rid of.
For example assume someone says: "College is overrated and bloated and outdated, the trades are actually more important" It's a valid critique to say "Oh yea? Then why didn't you send your own kids to trade school?". Equally valid may be to say "Of course you'd say that, you've sent all your kids to trade school, now you're looking to justify your bad decision". A good retort can be "Nah, actually my kid got a scholarship to college a month ago, but I recommended him to reject it because I think trade school will be better in the long run!". Recent signals are important and it's important to see that they aren't locked into a position but are actively choosing to stay in it.
So, I would add one more rule. The George Carlin rule:
-- Are they part of any group?
That actually covers the first and second rule of the author.
But to hate the government is suicide because we are the government. Same with society, and same with groups.
My logical conclusion with regards to speech: Learn to observe, think, form your own opinions, always speak your mind, and be no part of group think or group speech. Which is exactly what George Carlin did.
In an ideal world, no one would be part of any group. But since we all are, here is the Carlin rule revised:
-- Are they openly critical of their groups?
But again, most groups do not tolerate external or internal criticism. They're the disloyal traitors and whistle-blowers. So most of us have to chalk this up as doing our job, so we can all have one. Not everyone get's paid to speak like George.
But wherever and whenever we can, we should promote and protect the groups that embrace and advocate free speech against themselves. They are the only groups sustaining free speech.
> My logical conclusion with regards to speech: Learn to observe, think, form your own opinions, always speak your mind, and be no part of group think or group speech. Which is exactly what George Carlin did.
Agree. Someone should tell dang.
"Scarcity" is perhaps the wrong word, but we don't really have a better one. Perhaps aggregation? Regardless, we can see that there are problems (and not just in the form of bubbles) being created by a lot of capital in very large piles sloshing around chasing opportunities for investment around the globe (even though capital still isn't exactly not-scarce), and that the current big winners in 'tech' are mostly purveyors of attention of various sorts.
Attention is inextricably rivalrous.
I'm not convinced that true capital abundance is possible, but that's a different argument.
I will argue that attention scarity and capital scarcity are simultaneously possible.
I have a personal bullshit filter: Are the authors open to criticism and allow others to speak their minds? If an article does not have a comments section, I am very skeptical of it. I find myself scrolling to the bottom looking for a comment section. If the article doesn't have one, I'll likely skip it.
I lack the epistemological certitude to propose a "filter", but I'd say a strong "red flag" in evaluating thinkpieces about whose predictions you should take seriously would be "anybody who elevates technology workers above others because computers are eating the world".