> Here is my related hypothesis: we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers. In particular, we put more weight on markers of connections to statusful people and institutions.
At first I didn't agree with OP's claim that there is more visibility of status. I don't think that is entirely correct: I always knew my family was poor, and I knew who the rich kids were, or who the top performers were. But when I circled back to the top of the article I realized it makes sense: 40 years ago in my childhood it was rich/not-rich, smart/not-smart, hot/not-hot. Now there are dozens of metrics for ranking oneself. I agree that overload of negative data is the anxiety driver.
It's like we're all being forced to become data scientists and numbers junkies. We've metricked the hell out of our well-being. At least for this generation. Aren't we infinitely adaptable? Or will future kids just have shorter life spans due to the social stress?
You can't win at this game. You can only lose. Especially these days, with the "dozens of metrics". No matter how well you do at one (or several) metrics, there are more at which you fail to excel. If you measure your worth by your social standing, and your social standing by status metrics, you lose.
So, don't do that. Don't play a game at which you can only lose.
Interesting article and ideas. I wonder how well we can truly know how the thoughts and motivations of “our generation” compares to “past generations” though. How would we _know_ that people today are more worried about status than people in the past? How would we _know_ that in the past merit carried more weight than “noble blood.” That doesn’t seem to me like something that can be quantified, so I don’t see how we can confidently make comparisons over time in any scientific sense, only in an anecdotal and philosophical sense.
Yet another problem with that quote is that generations are in fact different. Some of them are more violent then others. Some of them drink more then others. Some of them are more submissive then others. Sometimes, kids are raised to be assertive, other times they are raised to obey.
This quote is used to devalue anyone who points out some difference between now and then. But, it does not prove that such person is wrong.
History studies do deal with that sort of thing. But, one would have to deep down into it and go on reading it in order to learn it.
The big problem there is that real historians never talk about "past generations" as a whole which is nonsense concept anyway. Historians talk about "1735 English aristocracy" or "1865 lower class women in American north" and so on. Because how the society is organized constantly changes.
I think this goes beyond status afforded to you by wealth and education. If you look at beauty standards for both men and women, they are converging around one or two achievable looks via make-up/filters/diet/exercise. Sure, we could all end up with the same credentials, but what’s everyone’s plan when we all also look the same?
This is very dependent on your personal bubble. Plenty of communities make fun of the "beauty" standards you mentioned. If anything, making fun of these standards seems to me to be at least as popular in our general culture today.
While the premise is interesting, I really do not buy some of the contemporary examples given at the end of the post. In particular the one about physics exams. It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love...
I teach university physics. Intro classes are easier and the exams in these classes are meant to test whether you have learnt physics, not uncover "gifted geniuses". Once you have shown interest in the early classes, you can decide to go into the more challenging classes, whether the classical "problem based" ones celebrated in this blog post, or the more recent "project based" ones which are just as challenging, just a different style of challenging. Which is good, we should encourage all types of genius, not only the masters of algebra. However, yes, we should avoid belittling the masters of algebra in these conversations as well, the same way we learnt to stop belittling "nerds" and "geeks".
For what is worth, the bad "problem based" classes that the author bemoans, have always existed.
Your username betrays an Eastern European origin. Your entire comment is a self-serving argument about "kids these days". No one cares that you teach university physics. You are not the candidate elite. You are a hired slave, an educated slave, but a slave nonetheless, toiling away for your slave wages. Hence, as a slave you are not privy to the problem of "elite" overproduction. In your home country you may have considered an educator role to be a a role allocated to local elites. However in your current place of employment you are just hired help. Until you recognize your place in the society you chose you will have no opportunity to move beyond where you are.
I always shake my head when confronted with "rationalist" positions. They often consider important questions and issues but just as often mix these considerations with remarkably immature and historically ignorant thinking. Which isn't to dismiss them but it seems there's barrier they need to overcome.
It's fine to let emotions control you, you just need to be aware that they are and make sure it's the right emotions controlling you.
I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally:
* I like the weather
* I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts
* I like my house and I'm too lazy to move
Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.
It isn't the rationalist ethos. Your emotions should obviously guide you, they're a part of you and important evidence.
What you described is exactly how rationalists think emotions are best wielded: you look at your/a situation and look at how you feel about it. They're your barometers for whether that which you believe to be your goal is actually your goal.
Emotions are misused when you treat factual beliefs as goals: then your emotions get attached to them, in unhealthy and cult-like ways.
Speaking as a part-time rationalist, it is not a rationalist position that there is such a thing as "bad goals". At most there may be inconsistent goals. The Utility Function Is Not Up For Grabs https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/the-utility-function-is-not-up... .
If under your goals living in California is optimal, then it is rational to live in California.
The point of, for instance, EA is not that giving to homeless people in New York when there's starving children in Africa is a bad goal- it's that it's an inconsistent goal when one also professes that human lives have equal value. And when one wants to live by that tenet, then EA offers better routes to optimizing lives saved.
I cannot disprove that individual rationalists believe this, but to my knowledge it is not a community opinion.
The problem with emotions arises when you attach emotional valence to beliefs and conclusions, rather than outcomes.
Inasmuch as rationalists can be seen as down on emotions, it is because lots of people allow emotions to distort their thinking about reality. In other words, rather than having emotional preferences over outcomes, they have emotional preferences over beliefs and modes of reasoning. (That's why a core of rationalist technique (short [1] long [2]) is learning to emotionally tolerate the possibility of being mistaken.) This is indeed antithetical to rational thought, but it's hardly the only thing emotions are for.
There is nothing wrong with emotions. They just have no place in the process you use to arrive at beliefs about reality. In other words, rationality rejects the Pratchettian claim that you have to believe "the big [lies]: justice, mercy, duty." [3] Instead, it reframes those as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society." This places emotion in its proper context without invalidating it. Quite the opposite, it views emotion as a vital, useful part of human interaction and decisionmaking, rather than the generic default of "just part of what it means to be human".
> [rationality] reframes [emotions] as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society."
Do the rationalists realize that this is fundamentally a metaphysical or even theological argument?
I disagree; I think it is fundamentally an empirical argument. The source of our convictions should have no impact on their validity, which is the realm of morality. In doing so, rationality does not seek to disprove emotions, which would be nonsensical, but rather to justify and contextualize them by understanding the competitive pressures that gave rise to them.
In other words, the idea is that in understanding the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing when we feel things - "get where it's coming from" - we can bring our emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs, and either support our unconscious brain in its emotional reaction or reign it in where the evolutionary context is no longer valid.
(I'm not sure where you're coming from with "theological.")
In order to say things like "my brain" one is necessarily creating a distinction between themselves as thinking subject and a "lower self" which consists of a biological substrate. Of course, this is common practice in folk epistemology, but in order to achieve this, one needs the support of an "objective" frame of reference, which can only be achieved through a theological justification (or in this case cosmological, through reference to evolutionary processes).
This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.
That said, I still support the end-goal of "bringing emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs", but often that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit (e.g. psychoanalysis, Buddhist thought, etc).
I view evolutionary psychology as in the category of psychological divination techniques, in which a set of predetermined systematic constraints allow you to locate interesting patterns in your day to day life through a process of reorientation. In all sincerity, I suggest astrology as an alternative technique that avoids any normative connotations of "fitness" etc.
> In order to say things like "my brain" one is necessarily creating a distinction between themselves as thinking subject and a "lower self" which consists of a biological substrate.
Come on, that's a stretch. I think it's clear from context that this is referring to unconscious vs conscious awareness, in the like one case where I failed to specifically highlight this distinction (because I wanted to head off just this claim). Both of course happen in the same slab of meat.
> This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.
Sure, but consider: [1] [2]. Of course conscious deliberation is just another strategy, but it's a strategy that benefits from clarity. There is no good reason why reason and deliberation should be unable to close over itself, let alone as "separate" a component as emotional state.
Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world. (Note: There's some claims that reason rose to prominence because it made humans good at making up sensible claims to deceive others - but this sort of evolutionary history would still produce a system that's good at inference, if only as a side effect. Compare GANs.)
> that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit
Now who's doing dualism? The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.
And sure, a lot of evpsych is just-so trash. But especially around the game theory of emotions, I think the conclusions hold up.
> There is no good reason why reason and deliberation should be unable to close over itself, let alone as "separate" a component as emotional state.
It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself, and is the process that psychoanalysis is intended to support. Instead they "rationalize", and come up with explanations like that one that follows, which don't understand the emotion so much as "explain it away" through what amounts to, as I said earlier, a metaphysical argument about the causal origins of the species.
> Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world.
This sort of causal argument is why I tend to cringe at rationalist theory, because not only is it not necessarily true, there's no way to even tell if it were true.
> The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.
Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality. Again, a reference to the totality and causal origin of life; do you see why I describe it as theological or metaphysical? This is very similar in structure to Christian theories on the topic of e.g. original sin.
> This sort of causal argument is why I tend to cringe at rationalist theory, because not only is it not necessarily true, there's no way to even tell if it were true.
I mean, to be fair I'm leaning myself out the window a lot with that claim. But it seems plausible, and more importantly, the argument is resilient to why reason arose. I'm not saying this in a sense of "this is definitely why we have reason, and that's why I am right"; I'm more saying "even in this case where we don't necessarily have reason because it's useful," (note the alternate theory I list) "that is still no reason (heh) to expect it to mislead us." And I think we can confidently say that reason is useful today, at least, and submit as evidence approximately the last 10000 years of planetary history. I think it's not a big stretch to claim that the reason that reason is useful today may be the reason that it evolved to begin with.
> Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality.
And again, I don't see why it has to be one or the other. Of course, even and especially in "events in your own life" it is ironically very easy to make up pat just-so stories to justify any reaction or sentiment. In comparison I honestly think evpsych is on a firmer footing, particularly given I don't think psychotherapy needs particularly to be correct about the causes it posits in order to function as therapy. Whereas if you are mistaken about the evolutionary cause of an emotion, you will completely misconstrue it and probably behave badly.
> It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself
For instance, I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out. This is the exact sort of thing rationality says should not be expected to work. - Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth. You need to have a cognitive mechanism that is in principle capable of producing truths to begin with, in order to even arrive at a hard truth that you can emotionally reject. Without that, you're liable to just admit hard made-up claims as a form of catharsis.
Is something being hard to admit evidence that it is true? Yes, but weakly - if it weren't convincing enough to outweigh being hard to accept, you probably wouldn't even entertain it. (How to be convinced by things that are true but hard to accept is actually a core tenet of rationality - see How To Actually Change Your Mind linked above.) But you still have to do the work to arrive at a true belief about yourself to begin with.
> "even in this case where we don't necessarily have reason because it's useful,... that is still no reason (heh) to expect it to mislead us."
There are plenty of cases of reason misleading, going wrong, perhaps as many or more as reason going right. But of course, judgment of right and wrong depends on your criteria, and reason will never help you achieve that which is prior to reason: faith, in the most basic form.
But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology. All other considerations are shoved under the bus, or else dictated by a sort of bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering", without really interrogating what that even means (if they looked into older philosophy, they would see that thought itself could be considered a form of suffering). It is not necessarily bad to hold to a master signifier as such, as all faith exists in this form, but the rationalists seem especially unaware or unable to interrogate their beliefs to this level.
> I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out.
This is a misunderstanding of what I meant to express, and I apologize for using that term. In my experience (and in the psychoanalytic literature), "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves that we were previously blind to. The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process (of course, the preparation for that flash might well be a laborious process of re-learning how to look!). The "hard truth" is being able to admit something like "actually, I'm not just out to get the truth. I want social recognition after all."
> Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth
Such a focus on truth in relation to psychological affairs feels, to me, wrong-headed, in that all truth is contingent, grounded in some act of judgment. Don't read this the wrong way: contingent != relative. It just means that we need to address the question of "how do I know that true things are true?".
The cultural impact of the enlightenment, especially of Kant, was to collapse "truth" into an intersubjective agreement based on sensory observation ("science"), but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions" (i.e. "how is psychology possible?")? This is where psychoanalysis had its real epistemological innovation: free association as a technique is a way of generating shared knowledge about what was formerly private. Christian "confession" functioned similarly. Modern behavioral psychology is several steps behind. But with or without such a technique, one can never really achieve the absolute (gnostic) truth about oneself, at least not without a strong frame that answers the question "under what circumstances is a given statement about myself true?"
It seems better to ask the question of "what do I want that I'm having difficulty achieving? And what factual observations about myself can I make, which demonstrate patterns that prevent me from achieving this?" Notice how this moves the direction of thought (of reason, even!) away from "finding the truth" and toward a more environmentally-oriented mode of "understanding", closer to what Plato meant by that term, with its connections to "wisdom". The "hard truth" here as I mean it, is noticing sites of competing desires, as Spinoza and Freud do in their discussions ...
> There are plenty of cases of reason misleading, going wrong, perhaps as many or more as reason going right.
Right, but note what you are saying: reason going wrong.
I don't think I even need to add anything there. Your phrasing already reveals that there is "a rightness ... by which it may be judged" in reason that there is not in faith.
> But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology.
I agree that reason is ultimately circular. I even agree that religion can also be circular. (I disagree strongly that all religion is circular, or that religion is inherently circular, or even that religion inherently hinges on faith.) Nonetheless, I think that where religion is circular it is so in a different way from reason. When we reject the circularity of religion, we do so not because it is inherently wrong to posit a God that justifies everything, but because it is not useful. The very self-supporting structure of the faith, the retreat to an insulated core element, prevents its adherent from doing any cognitive or predictive work with it. Rather, I would argue the circularity of religion is a consequence of reason, a retreat into self-justifying tautology prompted by the failure of religion to compete with reason on its own grounds.
In other words, reason closes on itself in a way that shapes itself to a particular inherent standard ("that seems to be associated in some way with success in interacting with the natural world", my reason throws in, giving yet another reason why it is judged valuable under itself, argumentatively achieving nothing yet undeterred.) However, religious faith does not even have any such constraint.
> bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering"
I don't know why you are talking about suffering. I was not talking about suffering. I have no idea where you are going with that.
Evolved animals don't seek to minimize suffering. They don't even seek to maximize propagation; they're just the result of a process of relentless selection for things that propagate.
> "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves
I'm sorry, you were previously accusing rationality of putting too much faith in reason - and now we're supposed to just notice objective aspects of ourselves? With what absolute source of truth, exactly, are we supposed to do this?
> The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process
Now, I myself am as much of an addict to this sort of sudden endorphin-supported flash of insight as the next nerd. But - though it is an indicator of a simple theory that supports the facts observed, that does not in itself suffice to establish truth, let alone "objective truth"!
I have a new theory: lots of rationalists are programmers because programmers are used to having the sudden flash of insight be wrong.
> "how do I know that true things are true?".
I mean - rationality in particular does not engage in any attempt to establish truth, so I feel this charge somewhat misses its mark. Rather, rationality seeks to improve the quality of one's beliefs by engaging in processes that interact with the presumption of an ordered natural world in order to come to beliefs that are, given that assumption, more likely to be true.
That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".
> but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions"
I have a rejoinder to this called "you are not ...
> I don't know why you are talking about suffering. I was not talking about suffering. I have no idea where you are going with that.
I brought this up because the EA community seems very closely associated with rationalist ideas. Although I'm sure there are other rationalist conceptions of "the good" out there, I've yet to see them clearly articulated.
> ...emotions...
Perhaps the word I should have used is "desire", as emotion springs from desire, and although specific emotional states are easily observable, the underlying desire is what often remains hidden, subject to the other's fantasies. But it's an aside at this point.
> That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".
I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?
> I brought this up because the EA community seems very closely associated with rationalist ideas. Although I'm sure there are other rationalist conceptions of "the good" out there, I've yet to see them clearly articulated.
The EA community aren't even unified in minimizing suffering. Most of the formulations I've seen are about maximizing good life, though there are certainly people who care about suffering in the community. (I think it's mostly Tomasik.) I haven't seen any of them try to justify their preferences with evpsych though.
> I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?
Once more: Less Wrong relative to a presumed-ordered natural world. To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.
> Less Wrong relative to a presumed-ordered natural world
The "natural world" doesn't have beliefs, the world itself cannot be right or wrong, it just is. So the question again is, Less Wrong relative to whom?
> To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.
> The "natural world" doesn't have beliefs, the world itself cannot be right or wrong, it just is. So the question again is, Less Wrong relative to whom?
What?
Okay, let me try really small steps.
We assume the natural world is ordered.
We assume that the brain holds beliefs, which are compressive/predictive patterns, about the observations of the natural world.
Inasmuch as these are predictive, and inasmuch as we can take multiple actions, then a belief can be qualitatively better or worse in selecting actions that make the world be more good by one's judgment.
Beliefs can fail to be appropriate to select actions on (at least) two metrics: they can be "right or wrong", or they can be "more or less useful."
An example of a wrong belief: if you think it is raining, and so you bring an umbrella, but it is not raining (the belief is wrong), then you have failed to improve your position: you are dry anyway, but now you are also carrying an umbrella, which is annoying.
An example of a useless belief: you can believe that your shirt has more fibers than the average shirt of its kind. This may be true, but even if it is true, there is no decision that you would make where the belief is instrumental in deciding which of the possible actions leads to a world that better matches your preference.
(Unless you have very specific preferences about clothing.)
The goal of becoming Less Wrong is for your brain to contain fewer beliefs that are wrong, and more beliefs that are right; and also (but less importantly) fewer beliefs that are useless, and more beliefs that are useful. The term "Less Wrong" does not refer to a comparison to some other existing human, but rather to the counterfactual outcome of failing to reflect on your thoughts - Less Wrong is a collection of techniques whose goal is, when applied, to make your brain have less wrong beliefs and less useless beliefs, in order to improve your ability to shape the world to your preferences. (Whether they actually achieve this is a hot topic of debate - but that is the standard which they set.)
> And what if one is unsure of one's preferences?
That depends on your preferences for your preferences. :)
In any case, setting your preferences is not the purpose of rationality. (Though as your preferences are part of the ordered natural world, rationality also aims to improve your ability to shape your preferences, this does not tend to be a central consideration.)
So, to be perfectly clear, the main reason for studying rationality as you explain it, is the belief that many individuals are not skilled at determining whether their beliefs about the observable world are right or wrong (as in your umbrella example), and that this is something they would benefit from working on?
Well, most people can generally recognize when a belief is wrong if they are directly confronted with the fact. I think it's a bit more meta - such as creating modes of thought that systematically (again, holding in mind the assumption that nature is regular) produce right and useful thoughts, and dismantling modes of thought that systematically produce wrong or useless thoughts.
But in essence, yes.
(Though of course, again, the ultimate goal is to be better able to achieve preferred outcomes in the world, and if thinking only the word "blue" on repeat produced outcomes perfectly in line with your preferences, then rationality would espouse blue blue blue blue. But at that point, most of the techniques gathered under the label would be useless, because yadda yadda ordered world etc.)
Thanks for sticking with me as I clarified, I see the crux of our disagreement now.
Basically, I am personally of the belief that any "wrong" or "useless" beliefs that one holds are always actually useful, as all belief is instrumental. Ignorance is maintained because it serves a purpose.
I am also of the belief that the only way to determine why one holds a wrong belief is to understand the "emotional" or desire-based reason that underlies or supports it. Hence why I spent a lot of time above discussing emotions. We have seen in recent times the repeated failure of individuals to adjust their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Why is this? My stance is that their "wrong" beliefs serve deep emotional needs for them. Most people have stronger desires than the desire to arrive at truth in their evaluation of the world.
The difference in emphasis here is shifting from "the brain as a prediction-making device" to "the human body including the brain is a system that acts to relieve tensions placed upon it", and that prediction-making is one biological strategy for doing so. Of course, better predictions can and will relieve more tension than worse predictions, but my stance is that being able to conceptualize the causes and nature of tension directly will lead to better outcomes, as it permits stronger meta-cognition.
I see the term "preference" doing a lot of work in rationalist thought, and I generally taboo it. The term comes from economics and fails IMO to adequately describe the nature of desire. But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.
Yeah that makes sense. I really think where this is running apart is that... like, a lot of the people driving the rationalist project are in environments where holding strategically correct beliefs isn't just useful but vital. Eliezer famously believes on a gut level that he once held a wrong belief and that if he had acted on that wrong belief, the world would have ended. I don't know how that relieves a tension, but I can see how it would make you really really wary of cognitive mistakes.
(I'm having a lot of fun with this debate too, it's really forced me to firm up my understanding of faith and reason.)
> But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.
I agree with this take! Though I think it's less that this is something rationality cannot do as that, well, Eliezer when he was writing the Sequences, had an overriding belief that put all his other preferences at risk. This tends to focus one's attention on strategy. :)
> No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand.
Which implies that to most people, the pursuit of individual rationality, possibly even above mental wellbeing, is counteradaptive.
(Man, does Eliezer have a way with words though.)
(To me, personally, the idea of holding wrong beliefs is like a persistent itch or annoyance. I do not have a driving need, but I also have few attachments. And, of course, I am a nerd, and this is all nerd cocaine. All that sums up to create an ideological space in which I am comfortable.)
Thanks for sharing those two posts. These might be instrumental in helping a (more rationalist-leaning) friend and I move forward in a years-long debate about ethics, lmfao
This part particularly resonated with me:
> Your trust will not break, until you apply all that you have learned here and from other books, and take it as far as you can go, and find that this too fails you—that you have still been a fool, and no one warned you against it—that all the most important parts were left out of the guidance you received—that some of the most precious ideals you followed, steered you in the wrong direction—
> —and if you still have something to protect, so that you must keep going, and cannot resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality—
> —then you will be ready to start your journey as a rationalist.
My trust broke years ago, and I found the rationalists, and then I realized, unlike Yudkowsky (I guess?), that I didn't have something to protect. So, my personal goals are in that sense very different.
In my experience with the rationalist community as well, I found that most people I met didn't have a specific personal motivation beside their beliefs surrounding x-risk, and I personally find the set of axioms required to accept rationalist beliefs on x-risk a bit... difficult to swallow.
Yeah that all makes sense. I called myself a "rationality consumer" in a LW post a few years back, and I think that roughly still holds. Though I will say that being part of a community where wrong beliefs are corrigible through argumentative persuasion is an immense social relief for me.
(Also, AI X-Risk makes a lot more sense if you're already habituated to thinking of the mind in terms of algorithm. 40% programmers: not a coincidence.)
This also makes sense. I did enjoy all the arguments I got into on the SSC discord. It was formative for me even though I found myself often frustrated when the arguments reached an impasse, often in relation to the desires of the interlocutors.
I'm also a programmer and am very habituated in terms of thinking in algorithms, but when I had my "break", I realized that my beliefs were not working on a very deep level, and I needed something a lot stronger/deeper than rationality to push me out of whatever local extremum I was trapped in.
ahaha classic... I haven't used IRC since my college days, unfortunately I don't think I can support another chat client tab :P (the software i'm working with takes up way too much memory smdh)
> Instead, it reframes those as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society." This places emotion in its proper context without invalidating it.
To me, this leads to almost indistinguishable outcomes as the straw vulcan.
I don't see how it would. If you make me angry, this doesn't lead me to say "I should not be angry", or to deny that I am angry, or to pretend that I'm not angry; rather the opposite, I will (best case) understand both why I am angry and why I should be angry; what the point of being angry is.
If that's a straw Vulcan, we have moved very far away from Mr. Spock.
> I always shake my head when confronted with "rationalist" positions.
Rationalism is almost by design going to be either different logic or a different position from what seems and feels like a good idea. That is why it gets its own word.
So while overt rationalists are often bad communicators, it is quite possible that what you are identifying is inherent in the message anyway. If the rationalists agree with common sense then there isn't much to talk about.
Plus it isn't rational to identify as a rationalist, so the really good rationalists are hard to spot.
> Plus it isn't rational to identify as a rationalist, so the really good rationalists are hard to spot.
Depends whether you're valuing broad acceptance or a tight-knit peer group of people who get you.
Though of course the real trick would be to have both, this can be hard in our omnisurveillance society. I just don't think it's a universal law that people who are easy to spot are bad at it. Certainly people who are bad at it are easy to spot.
It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture.
>It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture.
I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?
I’m not taking innate ability here - which is something else - just there is finite time to learn so 3 - 6 years focused on academia is less time focused on other things.
Ok, I think that aligns with my statement about specialization. With finite time and incentives to specialize, I wonder if it pressures people against being generalists. I’ve often thought common sense is borne out of having many different, diverse experiences.
If you factor in availability of resources, it is nothing short of amazing what the USSR achieved and how long they could stand up to the US. They probably would have put someone on the moon too, but that wasn't too important after the US was first.
> this number used to be in the low single percentages.
1970 or so it broke through, for reference.
> do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?
Yes but not in the way you imply. Having access to enough accurate information and being able to spend time efficiently to accumulate it, has catapulted large swathes of people into investing in a college education. These people who would have been stunted along the opportunity, genetic, and economic axes in the past. This is despite the horrendous increases, in costing, over the last 30 years (imo).
> Having access to enough accurate information and being able to spend time efficiently to accumulate it, has catapulted large swathes of people into investing in a college education.
factors you're leaving out that i find much more persuasive -- low interest rates, federally guaranteed loans, credentialism/professional guild dynamics. a degree costs more and gets you less than it did in the past, but you're forced to get one to have most professional jobs. it's an obligate gatekeeping tax, the piece of paper that says you're allowed to be middle class.
in the last four decades college has become orders of magnitude more expensive while wages have stagnated and almost all economic growth has gone to the very top, at the same time that the portion of the population with a degree has risen steadily
Well, it's because of the money system. People were told that working hard and smart is the path to success because people believe in the absolutism of morals even though there is no such thing in economics.
The acquisition of degrees is just a form of specialization to avoid the effects of the current money system. The reason why large cities are so rich is that international investors prefer established cities. When parents put money into investments and their children follow that money out of their hometown into a large city. Considering how much we do to compensate the bad influences of our money system I seriously wonder when nations are going to change it. Probably in 2030.
The problem isn't "free market" or "capitalism" although the adherents of those ideas tend to love the existing money system. Of course there are also other non reproducible assets like land and patents but I feel like properly taxing land should be more than enough. Patents only slow down progress, they shouldn't make things worse.
There are two fundamental problems: 1. The velocity of money keeps going down. It's not circulating at all. Meaning fiat currency is becoming less and less a medium of exchange and instead turns into a store of value just like Bitcoin. 2. Positive interest only works with either a growing supply of money at constant velocity or an increase in velocity at fixed supply. Basically inflation via endless debt growth if there is no productivity growth or population growth.
Combine this with the rise in neoliberalism in politics which basically runs into the contradictions of money at every corner. Global trade? Causes deflation which lowers interest rates. Less regulation? Businesses become more efficient. More deflation. Austerity? More deflation. Union busting? Lower incomes mean more deflation. You see, at some point you have created more deflation than the money system can survive. What breaks isn't the economy, it's the people that end up breaking. To be fair to neoliberalism. If there wasn't this pesky zero lower bound on interest rates it could have worked.
I've read an article about the "negative impacts" of negative interest rates and it mentioned a complete subversion of the standard response regarding competition for interest rates. Countries will end up competing to have the lowest negative interest rate. Isn't that absurd? Countries like Zimbabwe, Greece or Turkey who are net borrowers would see negative interest rates that would pull their economy out of the gutter and yet it is considered a negative effect. It's actually weird how that article never mentioned inflation, as if it was dead for some reason.
Most people could get a college degree. It's mostly hard work. You don't need to be a genius. The few geniuses stay and do research, the normal people got out and apply what they learned to the world.
Mostly agree, but "The few geniuses stay and do research" is probably not true. I don't like the term "genius", but many of the best and brightest are put off by academic elitism and bureaucracy and leave, while at least some not particularly gifted individuals stay because they are more comfortable to play the academic game. One could even go so far to say that academia needs both of these types, but arguably, there are too many "game players" at the moment.
(And of course, this is an oversimplification, and most academics try to play the game AND do useful research, but to different extents.)
I saw it more as "teachers these days" than "kids these days".
There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.
In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
You are absolutely right! The only thing I would add is that it is important to choose the appropriate type of exams for intro classes (the ones that verify understanding and hopefully intellectually entertain but do not excessively challenge) and for advanced classes (the ones that might even have unsolvable problems, there is an established understanding that a 100% is not expected, and that provide for a great sense of intellectual challenge (and achievement)).
How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of intrinsic knowledge.
Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.
That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.
Cause everyone not entirely brain-dead can memorize, but society kills the intrinsic motivation and curiosity necessary to solve-problems in most kids in a young age? So if you ruined that curiosity spark in your kid or never even kindled it- your kid has no chance, unless you force society to make school a memorization test?
Its basically parrot-parenting voting for its own right to continue to exist?
How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information?
Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class.
Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.
> Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes.
Meh, if your goal is for students to learn from mistakes, you can give them those any time during semester. No reason to put them on test. The best students will try to crack them, in fact, will spend more time that test allows on them. The difficult questions, especially in math or computer science, may take multiple days and attempts to solve. Going through that frustration is definitely learning experience. Putting time hour limit on it during test just weakens it.
> Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
In that point, it becomes in scope. Because "beyond scope" is infinite you have people guessing what "beyond scope" they should learn to gain it. The tests and exams should not be game.
Let it be know what are you going to test in advance.
The first exam type tests what you are expected to have learned. A good student can assume that they can solve every problem and get a close to 100% score. Each problem must therefore have a small solution that is easy to find without any special insights. That requirement alone limits the applicability of such exams to confirming that the student has a sufficient understanding of the topic to continue to more advanced topics.
In the second exam type, even a good student can't assume they can solve every problem within the time limit. They have to prioritize the problems based on how easy they expect them to be. The exam tests not only what the student has learned but also how well they understand what they can do and what they can't. The same can also apply to other types of assignments. For example, even a good student can't assume that they can solve every homework problem before the deadline.
The third grading approach is usually used for most important works. Under this scheme, the highest grades are reserved to those who do something exceptional. No matter what the expectations are, if you only meet them 100%, it's not sufficient for the highest grade.
As an example of the third approach, when I studied CS, our department gave the highest grade to only around 1 thesis in 100. There were no set criteria for the highest grade, except that the faculty had to agree that the work was beyond what one would expect from an excellent thesis. It was something not even a smart determined student could expect to gain, except by accident. Even the theses that got the highest grade were rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. Except the one that described an OS that runs on billions of devices today. That's the proper bar an undergraduate student should aim for if they want to guarantee the highest grade under this grading scheme.
> The first exam type tests what you are expected to have learned. [...] Each problem must therefore have a small solution that is easy to find without any special insights. That requirement alone limits the applicability of such exams to confirming that the student has a sufficient understanding of the topic to continue to more advanced topics.
This untrue implication. You can have difficult exercises that do require special insights with long solutions and still keep it within curriculum or "what you was expected to learn". What you cant do is to give them exercises that require one more chapter or invention of difficult to prove theorems that were not taught.
> When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade.
In France you only need half of the points. When I was in college, you had to have at least a mean of 10/20 (we grade on 20 points), and have no course below 8/20. The best students were usually around 16, 17. The worst were around 5. Most of the students were between 10 and 12. I like that system because it gives a vast field to grade people, and most people can always improve. You can also compensate some courses with others, but only to a point.
>sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident
Sure we can learn some techniques and the way we approach things may let us tackle problems in a way that is more likely to work.
And yet I find it baffling that sometimes formal education wants a student to reach by themselves a conclusion that the brightest minds of mankind had a hard time getting there by themselves.
While spending a fraction of the time thinking about the problem, of course.
If you are meant to reproduce the way to the solution (having studied the method already), that's one thing. But if you are asking some student to come up with some bright idea that people spent years without being able to get it? Now that seems a little too much.
> There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.
> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
On a more holistic level, the second approach seems better in some ways. Except for exceptionally talented students, it removes the ability to achieve "perfection," so good students would become a little more resilient because their exposure to failure.
>One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common
>with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would
>expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest
the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.
(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.
> It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.
> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade.
I've seen a system where they grade on a curve, A is 4.0. But there's A*, which still gives a 4.0 on the transcript, but denotes that a student (or a group) were statistically far enough from those who got an A that they deserved special recognition (ie, the threshold for an A is 85% but someone managed to score a 98%).
I once was a Physics student and recall both grading regimes. There were grading practices on both ends of the spectrum from the average grade being a 50% on a test to the average grade being 95%, with the former camp being a minority of professors.
Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc.
Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution.
The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort.
It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?
Each style has its place. Just like you, I found the "harder" problem sets and related classes much more interesting and exciting. That significantly correlates with me being in this field after all. That is also a poor style to pick for an intro class, as the intro class needs to provide an overview of the field and teach many diverse skills in relatively minimal depth. The intro classes are not meant to teach mastery. Good schools pay sufficient attention to their students to bump up the occasional student that is taking the intro class instead of the more appropriate for them mastery class.
Honestly there's nothing particularly novel in this thesis. It's more a less a restatement of anacyclosis or the principle behind Hesiod's Ages of Man.
>It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history
First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong.
And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still:
(a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated)
(b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated)
(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true
There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint".
In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct.
So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".
When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction. Gen 1 says "we were great as kids, but kids these days are terrible". Gen 2 claims they were great as kids and it's Gen 3 that's terrible. Gen 1 and Gen 2 are contradicting each other. Was Gen 2 good or bad as kids? Depends on if you ask them or their elders.
It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it.
What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.
> It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.
The OP considered this though, to quote: It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.
A contradiction leaves no doubt. It's not a contradiction then. A contradiction is not just something that is unlikely or infeasible, it is something impossible. It means that your set of beliefs is flawed and that at least one premise needs to be corrected for them to become consistent.
OldSecondHand is correct that it is possible for each generation to have been worse than the preceeding one. For example, the degradation might be so minute, or we may have started from such lofty heights, or the society has become more resilient to the degradation. It is possible, and therefore no contradiction. ...just unlikely.
To the point where we abandoned civilisation and became Hunter gatherers en masse? No. There have been ups and downs for individual kingdoms and empires but civilisation as a whole did alright since the 8th century BC, Socrates’ concerns about kids these days notwithstanding.
>To the point where we abandoned civilisation and became Hunter gatherers en masse
To the point of the fall or Athens and Greek empires, the fall of the hellenistic kingdoms, the fall of Rome, all the way to WWI and WWII, and that's just confined to the Western side of the world...
The fall of Rome was not "the collapse of civilization" and the Roman empire as a political entity never quite ceased existing seeing as how it continued in one form or another all the way up to the modern day by virtue of Istanbul still existing.
> When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction.
There is absolutely no contradiction, because in fact they are complaining about different things. Sometimes they are complaining about kids being more violent then they used to be. Other times they are complaining about kids being more rude, more passive, more drinking. Then they complain about kids dont more sport, less sport, reading too much, not reading enough.
If you abstract it away to "kids are bad", then yes, it sounds as if the complain was constantly the same. But that abstraction is manipulative.
> Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true.
I have in fact said that multiple times. The "no one ever says" part is not true either.
Yes, people are more likely to comment on negatives that affect them then on positives. That is true about literally anything, including software updates. And that still does not imply that every complain about bad software update should be shut down.
>When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction.
Not really. It's totally logically consistent if things are going downhill with each successive generation. (In fact, it would still be consistent if different things were going downhill, Gen 2 worse on X compared to Gen 1, and Gen 3 worse on Y compared to Gen 2, and so on). Whether that's the case it's another matter.
>It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it.
Exactly.
>But I doubt it.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Note also that since there are no permanent eternal standards standing outside of history, each generation only has to be worse by the standards of its previous generation, for the accusation to be true...
"It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it."
On the contrary, that has been my interpretation of these signals since I first started hearing them.
All living things (cats, societies, lizards, civilizations) are born, have an adolescence of growth and development, then decay and die.
So there must be some brief period in the adolescence of a civilization where "kids these days" cannot be applied. Society is growing, developing and integrating.
After that brief period it may then, indeed, be possible for each successive generation to correctly identify and decry the decay of their (society/civilization).
"It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand."
If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now. It would be measurable in wealth, IQ, rates of murder, crime, literacy, etc.
Every statistics avaliable indicates that we used to be more ignorant, more violent and less literate. So this complain belong in the same box as:
"back when I was young we used to talk to school 12 miles, through a blizzard, uphill, both ways!"
>If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now.
That doesn't follow.
Civilization != technology.
And those previous generations weren't lamenting "kids these days have less technology than us", but "kids these days are worse in X, Y, Z" regarding ways of living.
So kids are worse in some 'X Y, Z', but in any of hundreds of statistics we collect they are better. Except the fact that younger generation has less sex, but that seems to run contrary to the spirit of the complaint.
Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?
>So kids are worse in some 'X Y, Z', but in any of hundreds of statistics we collect they are better.
That's more of an argument that one can't really trust statistics. Or that they don't always measure what matters...
>Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?
Well, we can define, and it does exist. Not sure if we can measure (not everything that exists can be measured in some meaningful way. Some things matter in qualitative ways).
So, for some concrete examples, the roman generations that followed the acme of Rome and steered it towards the decline had certain very specific characteristics. Less inclined to work for common good, more selfish, having less children (lamented by roman critics of the time, and which less to a big problem with economic dynamics, the army, and so on), more concerned with greed and self-indulgence, less interested in civic matters (which was the bread and butter of earlier generations), and so on.
* technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time. Thus tomorrow will still be better than today, at least from the point of view of things like technical advancement, regardless of what is happening within each person.
* population increases, so the smartest can still be smarter even if the average is declining
* Even if population is not increasing, improvements in communication and replication technology can mean that an increasingly smaller share of the brightest people anywhere in the world can design products that are replicated or simply assembled by masses of others, whereas in the past this required local designers. Think of how many people are truly needed to keep advances in jet engines happening. You have basically three companies that supply all the engines to the entire world.
* And one can even make up for the other -- e.g. in previous times all shoes were handcrafted, now they are mass produced. Thus a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period.
Now I'm not saying I necessarily buy the decline thesis. It's an intriguing thesis, basically that you can be pretty dumb and still thrive well enough to keep reproducing whereas in hunter gatherer societies you would have starved to death and so the population would on average be smarter due to the challenges they had to overcome. Maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the objection that knowledge accretes does nothing to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
"technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time."
I cannot fathom how you possibly write this - surely you cannot be claiming that dumber and dumber workers develop better and better technology, or technology is some independent quantity that develops without human intervention, like a divine gift of some sort?
"a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period."
The last bloke operating the machine doesn't produce anything on his own, you have to compare the whole value chain, including the folks making the leather, making the tools and machines, etc. I am sure the old process includes plenty of people doing unskilled groundwork, although I would not bet my house on which way the dice would fall
Yes, some times it's correct, some times it's wrong.
The complaint itself is always there (absolutely always), and should be dismissed every time because it carries no information at all. This does not technically make it a logical fallacy (ironically, most logical fallacies carry more useful information), just a useless waste of time.
All models are wrong, but that doesn't stop them from being informative. Looking at things like the Revolutions of 1848, it's easy to see how the idea applies, as so many of them were driven by University students who had no money, had no prospect of being absorbed by the existing power structures, and were not allowed any political participation. The result? Revolutionary agitation.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
I get perpetually annoyed by Robin Hanson’s inability to properly grasp this concept. Peter Turchin’s books are clear about the concept and provide objective ways to quantify elite production, yet Hanson perpetually ignores them.
I discovered Robin Hanson around 3-4 years ago. I read one of his books, through his blog, and his twitter musings and polls.
Often he would question something fundamental about human interaction that seemed to me (and I suspect most) to have obvious and quite simple explanations. But he is intelligent and couldn't be missing the forrest for the trees I told myself. Clearly he must be operating many steps ahead. Levels above!
Now I wonder if maybe he just isn't so good with trees.
I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of his work. No doubt much of it has been valuable. He seems to struggle to understand people, in much the same way as one of the alien's he's obsessed might struggle.
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
At the risk of inviting survival bias, this Sounds like the situation that befell the the Bronte family. Well, at least one can make the argument that the Brontes died young because they couldnt move out of the unhealthy curate living environment.
That's happened to several of the Arab oil states. Lots of educated people, but not with practical skills.
Egypt has a huge overeducation problem.[1] For several decades, Egypt had a policy that anyone who got through college could get a government job. Then the oil ran out.
Thanks for the link, interesting read. I had no idea Middle Eastern countries have such major issues with overeducation/underemployment. I'm used to a model where state assigns the number of university admissions based on job market demands, so I didn't imagine this kind of almost unlimited growth in degree holders.
At one point a lot of people only got school up to 8th grade. Then eventually everybody is going to school up to the 12th grade. Maybe in the future it will just be customary to go all the way through 4 years of college.
So when people say university degree, is it usually Bachelor's degree then? I'm assuming Master's so 5-7 years. That's the default in Nordics, I don't know a single person with a Bachelor's.
In the US at least, Bachelor's is much more common than a Master's. It depends on the area of study I bet. The views I grew up around about education treated Master's as a waste of money with a "go PhD or get a job after the 4 year bachelor" prevailing theme.
Here Master's is a requirement for quite many jobs such as teaching. Bachelor's is enough for jobs such as preschool teachers and pharmacy clerks.
Technical sciences didn't have a Bachelor's even as an option until some time ago. I think it wasn't seen as useful, and still these days Master's is the default. Tuition is free so there's no direct cost associated with studying longer.
Even having practical skills doesn't seem to make that much difference: witness all the engineers in Al Qaeda. Presumably there simply isn't much in the way of engineering jobs, either.
Elite overproduction is not as big of a concern as the hype would seem to suggest
Despite record high college attendence, the college wage premium is fatter than ever, and unployment for grads is really low at just 2 percent, the baritista meme not withstanding.
The majority of grads major in actionable fields with good career prospects, not journalism or the humanities. Liberal elites who write highly publicized articles about matters pertaining to gender studies or politics are of the minority of majors. Most grads just want the requisite credentials for a middle class lifestyle, not to change the world or rise to the highest tiers of power.
Absolutely. FiveThirtyEight has an excellent article [1] from 2016 that reiterates what you say here. In short: A lot of the tropes about college elitism are bogus. (But instead of relying on conventional wisdom to support their argument, they use data, and some might find that too elitist.)
Student debt is structurally not the same as other debt because it's non-discheargeable and this changes a lot including who is offered the debt in the first place.
The latter difference is a good one in a great many cases. If asked to name two major factors to elevate people into the middle class, I’d choose education and ownership of their home.
Policies and structures to allow people on the precipice access to funding required to take the leap and which attempt to keep the system stable by putting personal “skin in the game” find support with me.
The more accessible (and popular) college is, the bigger signal it is that someone didn't go. That premium could just as well be the result of the (relative) wage floor falling out for non-grads.
No comment on the greater thesis. Just noting that those two things might not relate.
In my last job I moved from a team that had no "senior" level people on it to a team that was pretty much all "senior" and up level people. I was impressed at the high rankings of everyone on my new team and thought that first, I was about to witness powerhouse performances and a lot getting done, and second that on such an elite and senior team I would have a good chance of moving up the org chart myself.
What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive.
I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines.
I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things.
To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.
Exactly. Many senior-level people probably do want to write code, create things, and do that "shovel to dirt" work, but their company's performance review process discourages it. So, instead they have to fill their days with all that cross team impact, leadership, architecture, complexity, and process improvement stuff. Everywhere I've worked, "shovel to dirt" work is seen as what's done by the lowest rung on the totem pole. This mentality is all over industry. If you want to get promoted, you need to "create organizational transformation and synergistic thought leadership" instead.
a possible way out is to tie more of senior's compensation with equity, including senior manager's.
you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value.
If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
Let’s say there are two ranks. Senior 1 and Senior 2, with Senior 2 being a higher ranking position.
Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt.
Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
If you're working for a FAANG or any company of similar scale, it's virtually impossible for an individual contributor to move the needle in terms of stock price. So the rational thing to do is plan and review with an eye to your own promotion, and let the busy bees in Ads lift up the stock price by churning out tens of billions in revenue.
Seems that there was no manager and constant "architectural" discussions because everyone wanted only to show off how smart they are.
There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time".
I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed.
So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.
One counter example: the Go team, when it started (Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer, Russ Cox, Ian Lance Taylor), was quite senior. But they did deliver.
In my experience there are some genuinely elite people in the world who do genuinely elite things. However, most of the people with elite titles or rankings aren't such people.
I'm pretty sure they went ahead and wrote the thing rather than generating a million white papers about it, though.
I suppose the 'thing' being prestigious to write is a differentiator, here. Put that team on AdWords with principal expectations for each of them and it's probably dysfunctional.
Golang-team refused to add `math.min(x,y int32)` when I asked them with an internal Google ticket, around 2017. The company already had 63 separate instances of the function. I would add the 64th instance in my team's code. They said that's fine and closed the ticket as "Won't Fix - Working as Intended".
I wrote a golang WaitableBool struct for my team's code. I tried to submit it to the company's internal 'contrib' library, but golang-team rejected it. I pointed out that the company's C++ and Java versions of the struct were used in >150,000 places. Clearly there was demand and the Golang version would become widely-used. They argued that all Golang coders should always remember details of channel syntax and be happy to read five lines of boilerplate instead of "value.waitUntilTrue()".
I think their team was too senior. None of them were willing to add breadth to the standard library, despite massive code duplication within the company. They need a junior team member who can get promoted for growing and maintaining the standard library. We all need that.
An example from this year: Rather than fix problems with the golang.org website search box [0,1,2], they just removed it [3]. They ignored the low-effort workaround which is making the search box into a form that submits to Google Search. Is their whole team too senior to spend time maintaining a website search function?
Heh, my current team is trending towards all-senior swe, and we're all eager to eliminate as many meetings as possible to keep the focus on building shit and solving problems. Love it.
Heh, at a previous company we had the opposite problem: relatively few senior people, and they almost all still wanted to get stuck into the nitty-gritty engineering instead of doing the work needed on higher-level coordination.
On the other hand, I once had the opportunity to work in a small team like that, everyone else was senior with 10+ years of experience. It was probably the best experience of my career, incredibly humbling but I learned so much, we did in 6 months what I would have though only possible in one or two years.
My guess is that it can go either way and a significant part of it is having the right environment, the right management, probably some luck too.
> the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person
Isn’t this the exact reason why Google has such a high rate of churn in its product lineup?
I have been seeing more and more press hits for "elite overproduction" recently. It stinks of an ulterior motive: the middle class has been under withering financial attack for decades and I fear is now weak enough that the overlords smell the opportunity for a frontal assault on the concept itself.
I agree, and I think non-elites should also have more access to middle class earnings and status. They don't, and many of them are also frustrated at the lack of opportunities they face. But if I were to say that we have a non-elite overproduction as a result, that would sound stupid, because it is.
Right. That never stopped being the case and should never stop being the case. The concept of "elite overproduction" wants to trick you into thinking it did.
The "elite overproduction" framework begs you to not view the middle class as a group of people who have achieved a balance where they do valuable work and are rewarded with nice things, but as a group of scheming do-nothings who pose a burden to society as they foolishly aspire to elite-hood and repeatedly fail. It's a laser-guided propaganda missile aimed directly at a fault line in populist movements that have been gaining steam recently.
I don't see that in the "elite overproduction" framework. I see a bunch of desperate kids trying to stay in the middle class that their parents supposedly were in. You need an increased level of specialization to stand still.
Let me offer a defense of the meme, because I think you've got the causality backwards. I think that because I'm of an age where, had I gone straight to university after high school, I'd have graduated straight into the teeth of the 2008 recession. So I know how my cohort thinks about plight of the middle class. And almost everyone my age or younger, given a chance to think about it, agrees that the middle class cannot be saved. It's considered a lost cause, and among those who do believe it can be saved, their arguments amount to a blinking confusion and insistence that it must.
Given that people like me have only ever participated in the economy during a time when the middle class was shrinking, what are we to do? Most of us agree, if our future is a world of a few 'haves' and many 'have nots', priority one is to become a 'have'. Even from the most moral stance imaginable, a 'have not' has no ability to help others. Hence, too many of us try to get into the elite. To aim for the middle class is to aim for grinding poverty, and why would anyone?
The middle class has been bifurcating, with more rising into the upper middle class than falling into the working class. Where would you place the 60% or so of the part of middle class that "disappeared" by rising into a higher class? Are they the barbarians at the gate who need to be pushed down by the elites, or are they part of the power structure now?
I draw the lines based on the taxes. Those are a good proxy for true power.
If the bulk of your tax bill comes from special capital gains rates on the fraction of your net-worth-increase that you are ignominiously forced to admit constitutes capital gains, you're an elite. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a higher income tax tier, you're middle class. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a lower income tax tier, you're correspondingly lower class.
Needless to say, the principle that taxes reveal true power does not lead me to agree with your premise that 60% of the middle class has disappeared into the upper class.
A non-founder CEO (not a Zuckerberg/Bezos type that owns a large fraction of the equity in the company) that makes $20 million a year will probably be paying regular income taxes on most of their income. I’m not sure you can accurately describe them as middle class.
If this hypothetical CEO indeed pays regular income taxes on $20 million a year, I'd describe them as new money that hasn't yet assimilated into the power structure but will probably figure it out soon enough. With help, if necessary, and at those levels the help will seek them out.
Just to clarify, I'm saying of the small percent of the middle class that disappears every year, slightly more than half rise while slightly less than half fall. I acknowledge it was unclear, but I don't mean that 60% of the entire middle class is now upper middle class.
I know nothing about Social Science, so maybe someone can chime in. Whenever I read about something from the social sciences, it always seems to read as an opinion rather than something rigorously tested.
Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology?
> Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology?
I think there's a middle ground between being a rigorous science and being an anti-science like phrenology. I think there's no problem with having soft sciences, as long as the difference between them and hard sciences is understood, and one does not confuse the levels of rigor and certainty between the two.
Agreed. Unfortunately, a concerning percentage of the population seems driven to treat it as the former when defining their core beliefs, like castles built on sand.
I think the bluring of lines is what I'm worried about.
There's a lot of soft science when it comes to policital economy, and countries have gone all-in with policies from different branches, even though there's really no hard evidence and rigor of some of these ideas. It's mind blowing when you think that millions of people's lives are affected because politicians have had gut instincts of a soft science sounding scientific.
These are fundamental misunderstandings that I often see on HN. First, world leaders must make decisions about the economy, even if those decisions are to, say, permit a more free-market economy. They have no choice in the matter but to decide. The choices they make are based largely on what they consider the best evidence available to them at the time. Second, everyone who participates in the economy has a mental model of how that economy works, using their own evidence. Anyone who says they don't is lying. So if your model of how the economy works is better than the ones they are using, then show us your evidence. Pointing out the flaws in their model is easy and insufficient; you need something better to replace it with, and you must be able to sell it.
> The choices they make are based largely on what they consider the best evidence available to them at the time
But they're not doing this, and this was my point. A lot of political economy is opinion rather than based of fact, and these non-fact based opinions are what politicians are choosing over hard evidence.
Not sure whether you're suggesting that decision makers don't incorporate mainstream theory into their decisions, or whether mainstream theory is just opinion and not based in evidence. I think either statement would be wrong.
1) First, questioning the premise—you may encounter a whole lot more pop-social-science writing than the Real Deal. Consider, for example, what a smart and thoughtful person, whose main exposure to the work of historians was watching Ancient Aliens, might think of history, as an academic field. I don't know what you've read, but it's possible a lot of it's way toward the entertaining-but-wrong end.
2) As for "rigorous science", the social sciences have many limitations that something like chemistry or physics do not. They are necessarily based much more on observation and comparison of complex real-world systems. Limited ability to perform controlled experiments doesn't make them not science, as there's more to science than just that, but it does mean it can be very difficult to prove solid, definitive results in social science. It does also mean that the edges of social science are a great place to hide and nurture some serious bullshit, and if it's politically convenient for someone maybe even get your bullshit a few well-funded think-tanks—that in addition to how much the heart of it's full of bullshit, too, due to careerist game-playing by researchers, but that's not so different from other fields.
> I don't know what you've read, but it's possible a lot of it's way toward the entertaining-but-wrong end.
Not quite... I've gone through the classics, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, General Theory of Employment etc, and about to start Ricardo. What I've found is although they sound logical and use many examples to make their case, I still see most (with some exception to Keynes) of these are just opinion with possibly selective bias of examples.
What's bad here, is that these authors each take themselves as gospel, which then politicians have implemented these ideas with a blunt hammer.
Ricardo's going to be a fun one, then. I think you'll find he doesn't make quite so broad a claim re: the benefits of free trade as free-trade advocates tend to imply he does, in his study of comparative advantage. (there's a trend here, since similar things happen with Adam Smith)
There is a divide between political philosophy (and adjacent economic work) and social science proper, that's analogous to the divide between the theoretical side of modern physics and the experimental side but cranked up a few notches. As in most other sciences, journals, low-print-count and narrowly-scoped books from academic presses, and (to some degree) textbooks, are where the scientists really work (this doesn't mean it's all good work, of course)—though the standard reading (which you seem to be working through) is standard for a reason, and guide the vocabulary and context of that work.
> possibly selective bias of examples.
Heh, when you're lucky there are a good number of even biased examples. The really painful ones are mostly "suppose if..." fairy tales spinning fantasies based on some questionable premises and definitions, the odd bad syllogism, and a very small number of cherry picked examples that, if you dig, aren't even presented accurately. Whole schools of political and economic thought can be based almost entirely on this, as their adherents sneer at the illogic and idiocy of those who aren't convinced.
> There is a divide between political philosophy (and adjacent economic work) and social science proper, that's analogous to the divide between the theoretical side of modern physics and the experimental side but cranked up a few notches.
Its not really that analogous. Theoretical physics is at least in theory still predictive, though it may be vert distant from the pragmatics of verification. There are areas of political/economic science that are like that, but political/economic philosophy is predominantly normative rather than predictive (Austrian school economics, despite being called “economics” rather than “economic philosophy” and despite occasionally making fact rather than value claims is, and fairly openly admits to being, part of this.) There's a lot of people who are active as public intellectuals on both sides of the predictive/normative world, and the media (who are often the employers of public intellectuals) do an extremely poor job of explaining, when they aren't straight up concealing, the divide between predictive and normative elements of controversies in political and economic debates.
> Its not really that analogous. Theoretical physics is at least in theory still predictive, though it may be vert distant from the pragmatics of verification.
Sure, I intended the "cranked up a few notches" to cover the difference, but could have been clearer. Think things that don't even have a clear path to verifiability or testability, but continue to generate papers (string theory, maybe) but even more speculative.
> There are areas of political/economic science that are like that, but political/economic philosophy is predominantly normative rather than predictive (Austrian school economics, despite being called “economics” rather than “economic philosophy” and despite occasionally making fact rather than value claims is, and fairly openly admits to being, part of this.)
Absolutely! Part of the trouble is that to chart a course in politics or economics, you have to choose a desired outcome with winners and losers, so there's inherently a normative aspect to it. There's a whole lot of "ought" involved that's practically unavoidable. Throw in conflicts of interest and it's a hell of a mess. It's like if no-one had been able to agree on where Apollo 11's Eagle should land, and also they're already in flight, and also gravity doesn't always do what we think it does, and also several of the people involved are being paid to shill for particular landing sites, even if the spacecraft can't physically reach them within its fuel budget, but they've got some really fancy-looking explanations about the whole "gravity is weird sometimes" thing so maybe they're not full of shit?
To pick on the Austrians in particular (hey, you brought them up, not me, I only posted a complaint about their broad political sphere's style of argument without naming them :-) ) they've got a bad case of presenting their ethical egoism as also satisfying consequentialist approaches better than any other framework, just by happy coincidence. This should set off one's alarm bells at full volume, but it sure does help them cast a wide net when evangelizing.
Thomas Sowell talks about this phenomena a lot, however he describes it as an abundance of wealthy individuals who are highly educated in philosphical ideas but who have no practical or useful skills for society.
It often happens in societies where hard work is looked down upon as something only poor people do. The result is that these 'elites' have nothing else to do but agitate politically.
I feel like people have a great need to succeed and further themselves in life. When they don't have an avenue to satisfy these needs through hard and useful work, they find other outlets. Often these other outlets that can be very detrimental to society as a whole.
> Thomas Sowell talks about this phenomena a lot, however he describes it as an abundance of wealthy individuals who are highly educated in philosphical ideas but who have no practical or useful skills for society.
I wish this was the only problem. I have been exposed to so many 'elites' (investors, diplomats, C-level executives) that are just plain stupid.
For some reason people assume they are very smart, perpetuating this myth.
Seems like the obvious is being overlooked? If elites are being overproduced, it suggests that whatever is being used to justify that status isn't warranted, and therefore, any inequities are unfair or unjustified. You can move the goalposts but if it's in the wrong direction you just make the problem worse.
This might be why the "class grades don't mean anything anymore" rings hollow to me -- it's trying to close the barn door when the horses are already gone. Or to use a different analogy, it's like some variant of the fox and grapes fable (maybe there is a fable for it on its own?), where if the elites' markers are shown to be empty, they start saying "well those weren't good anyway."
That might work for awhile but if there's enough of it people start thinking the system is rigged.
> Seems like the obvious is being overlooked? If elites are being overproduced, it suggests that whatever is being used to justify that status isn't warranted, and therefore, any inequities are unfair or unjustified. You can move the goalposts but if it's in the wrong direction you just make the problem worse.
The problem is there's no consensus on what's fair. A lot of people think they deserve to be part of the elite, and they have reasonable-to-them grounds for that. The people saying "grades don't mean anything" are probably sincere - they really do think something else is now more important than grades and that's why they focused on that something else. But it all adds up to something far too top-heavy.
This is actually the point of the elite overproduction hypothesis, although the article doesn't get that across. People who pose the theory don't believe that actual elites are being overproduced, but people who believe they should be elite and act as though they are.
Many people with a degree believe that they should be elites (because they would be in the 1960s) and are disappointed that they are not. The elites have circled the wagons and use friendships to determine eliteness (see WeWork and Theranos - where elites started companies that are total frauds and still were billionaires for a while).
At the same time, it is good for society to have a meritocratic component to the measure of "eliteness." This is why generals who won battles was a good example, and college degrees used to be: people who became generals or got into college were generally not there purely on merit, but the cream of the crop became apparent through challenges relevant to the society of the day.
The meritocratic component also allows for social mobility for people who are really damn good at whatever the merit is: great soldiers could find their way into the roman aristocracy from nothing, and colleges always admitted a few exceptionally talented lower-class people who became great scholars. The "elite overproduction" theory suggests that there is too much social mobility for the wrong people, and not enough for the right people.
What could falsify this hypothesis? I feel like I can tell just-so stories about the all-consuming importance of elite status in the post-war United States that are just as shocking and compelling as what is written here. Did you know people used to smoke cigarettes to look cool and keep their weight down? That men working in white-collar jobs wore suits to work to distinguish themselves from the lower-classes (hence the name "white-collar")?
I agree that societal instability stem from problems within the elites, but not sure it's due to 'elite overproduction' necessarily. I think it has more to do with divergence of interests within the elites. Even without elite overproduction, if the interests of a significant segment of the elites diverged from the interests of the rest of the elites, then you will have societal breakdown, civil war, etc.
One example is the american revolution where the one group of elites in the british empire wanted good relations with the indians to protect their fur trade while another group of elites wanted to invade native areas and steal their land. Don't think there was an issue of elite overproduction in the british empire in the mid 1700s. But there was an issue of divergent interests and there was no room for compromise as these competing interests directly conflicted with each other.
Another one is the civil war, where the interests of the industrial north ( the desire to protect industry via tariffs ) directly conflicted withe the interests of the agrarian south ( who wanted to remove tariffs ) so they could sell cotton/agricultural goods to foreign markets. Once again, I don't think there was an overproduction of elites in the north or the south in the 1850s.
But I guess if the elite overproduction was severe enough, it could structural conflict of interests. But my guess is that conflicts would naturally arise amongs the elites long before elite overproduction.
I like this analysis but am missing the next step. What material interests are in play today?
David Graeber argued that the people who controlled the two major parties in the United States, until recently, were into Finance, which benefits from deindustrialization and a weak middle class, and that Trump was different because his interests were in Real Estate, which actually requires domestic consumers -- hence trade war and antiglobalism.
(For someone as "far left" as Graeber, it sounded more apologetic for Trump than I expected.)
Now, I find this theory interesting, but I'm not sure I buy it.
I see a more meaningful split within the elites between industrial and post-industrial magnates. This maps better onto the positions and preferences of the two political parties.
> David Graeber argued that the people who controlled the two major parties in the United States, until recently, were into Finance, which benefits from deindustrialization and a weak middle class, and that Trump was different because his interests were in Real Estate, which actually requires domestic consumers -- hence trade war and antiglobalism.
What does “into finance” even mean? And how can you be in real estate without being “into finance”? The real estate business is all financing.
I posted the interview in a sibling post to yours.
But yeah. What does Graeber mean?
The argument would go something like --
Many countries are in debt to the United States (immediate question: Isn't the US in huge debt to China?), which drives up demand for US dollars (since everyone needs to pay those back), which makes the dollar strong. As a result, if you have access to these dollars at low interest rates (i.e, are a bank), you can get lots of stuff from other countries "for free". But a strong dollar also has the effect of destroying domestic industry, because it makes exports too expensive for anyone to buy.
So he's saying "finance" is all these institutions with access to dollars, and "real estate" is a bunch of other institutions that are one more step removed from the Fed.
Something like that.
Like, are you a cloud provider, or do you run a lot of cloud jobs? Either way, you're "into the cloud", but you're on opposite sides.
That's about as much sense as I can make of it.
Or maybe it's all bullshit. Which would be funny, given the other things Graeber has written. I don't know.
I do notice it's weirdly aligned with RT's narrative. Not that that means it can't also be true.
A big part of the issue is because the US effectively controls the world's money printer due to the use of USD as a reserve currency. This necessitates a trade deficit so that other countries can actually have access to USD.
The solution to that problem would be the introduction of regional bancors. The EU needs one for internal use. Technically the euro is a very "shitty" bancor which rather than being used as a unit of account, was directly adopted as a currency in each member state. In theory each country should have had its own branch euro which are then exchanged via the bancor. i.e. regional currencies. The bancor is actually just a barter exchange for currency. I mean that is what it boils down to.
>Many countries are in debt to the United States (immediate question: Isn't the US in huge debt to China?),
The US is in huge debt to the rest of the work because that is how a reserve currency works. You issue currency, in this case USD can only be created through debt, when it leaves the country to enter the world economy there is not enough USD in the US so the government has to do deficit spending or tax cuts (i.e. never retrieve the money it created).
Let's see if I can expand and work through what you wrote. Someone else may need to correct parts.
So the Fed/Treasury passes over the void, and in this vacuum forms a dollar and a T-bill, a particle/antiparticle pair. In this transaction, the Treasury sells a debt obligation (the T-bill), which someone buys with dollars. Then again, and again: We now have a few T-bills and dollars.
There are a few purchasers involved -- a few places to which T-bills flow, and from which dollars flow.
One: A T-bill flows to China. A dollar flows in the opposite direction (they used it to purchase the T-bill).
Another: The Federal Reserve buys a T-bill. This is "quantitative easing", or colloquially "money printing" (as it can be done within the current system). The Federal Reserve gets the T-bill, and the Treasury gets dollars, which then fund US government spending.
The T-bill/dollar current to China is superposed with an opposite current: Simultaneously, a different stream of dollars impinges on China, prompting another current of cargo ships in the opposite direction. These carry iPhones, and flip-flops, and everything else sold at big-box stores.
Enter countries in the US / IMF / World Bank sphere. These have dollar denominated debts (they used the loans to build (hopefully useful) infrastructure). Now they do something to acquire dollars, like accept a stream of tourists, or export coltan or palm oil. In the case of the raw materials, some go to the US (palm oil to food processors), and others to China (coltan to whoever makes tantalum capacitors, which eventually end up in iPhones).
In a net sense, then, dollars flow into the "developing" world, and resources flow out to the West, with those needing industrial steps of the "value chain" traveling via China.
And each of those dollars has a corresponding T-bill "antiparticle", held either in China (or another country), or at the Fed. This prompts another flow of dollars to the holders of all those T-bills, which we call interest. Those dollars now, can come from the sale of yet more T-bills.
Now here I realize that my metaphor is wrong. T-bills and dollars only exist in "pairs" when they are created by a QE transaction. Other T-bills attract dollars from outside (e.g. those sold to China).
Finally, I have left out the commercial banks. I'll need to work fractional reserve banking into this somehow.
This is all becoming pretty complicated. But it still feels like a simplified stock-and-flow model is within reach...
In this context putting money into Finance means investing it through Wall Street via a range of their products such as derivatives/options trading, currency trading, HFT what have you. You could say making money through speculative assets and you won't be far off.
In other words Finance here refers to investing money not directly in real economy, such as building factories, houses etc., but in speculative products such as I listed above. It is possible that the money so invested in Finance somehow eventually makes it to the real economy. But since late 20th century the size of Finance relative to Real Economy has exploded. Multiple trillions of dollars worth of products are traded each day in Financial markets but in real economy (i.e., people buying/selling goods/services) only a fraction of that amount changes hands. So there is a growing disconnect between Finance and Real economy; which is why Wallet Street (Finance) and Main Street (real economy) have grown so much apart.
Coming to Trump and Real Estate. For a real estate builder, their domain expertise is around forecasting future needs and invest in building houses/office spaces. They invest some of their own money, borrow some from banks, build houses, sell for profit, repay banks and pocket some of that profit. So this part is well understood.
A builder can do well only when millions of people are earning well and are able to buy/rent their buildings. Falling wages is a really bad news for real estate firms. As Graeber says in that video, you can not export real estate buildings. So for them to do well the domestic real economy must do well. The Finance sector however has no such constraints. At the shortest of notice they can seamlessly move their money across the border chasing higher returns. There are times when Finance feels the effects of worsening real economy however as we saw in 2008 when falling housing prices (which were artificially inflated to being with, thanks to speculation) lead to Wall Street crisis.
I usually don't trust Wikipedia now a days but it does have good content in this case[1].
I think ideology plays a strong role in addition to interests. In my mind (from reading about this a lot) there are roughly four political factions at the elite level (there's probably more variation at the grassroots level).
The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s).
The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things.
On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say capitalistic or neoliberal) and they also differ in political style. I think people are pretty familiar with Sanders etc but here's [3] an article by a center-left economist talking a little bit about how the nature of this coalition affects what policies are possible.
[1] Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal and Murray's By the People
Nice post and references. This is basically how I see it too. You could increase the symmetry a little by adding to the Democrats the ghost of an FDR/LBJ "New Dealer" faction, corresponding roughly to the displaced Eisenhower/Rockefeller faction of the Republicans. You'd have something like:
- "moderate Trumpists" (if there can be such a thing) : "Progressives" (who, I will add, are somewhat less "left" than Wokeists)
They form a 3x2 matrix. Each column represents a side, and each row the spirit of an age.
I guess you could call the rows: "Institutions", "Markets", "Movements".
Then, breaking the symmetry, the "Progressives" are moderated a little by the ghost of FDR/LBJ, while the ghost of Eisenhower lives on in the Never Trumpers, who... weirdly, might ally with what "respectable" Neocons remain, and turn into some kind of "establishment" figures aligned as much with the center-left market liberals as with anyone. Sort of a "deep state" faction without a party.
> Another one is the civil war, where the interests of the industrial north ( the desire to protect industry via tariffs ) directly conflicted withe the interests of the agrarian south ( who wanted to remove tariffs ) so they could sell cotton/agricultural goods to foreign markets.
Of areas where the north and south’s interests conflicted in the civil war that’s not the one most people call out.
What you say is true but the poster didn’t really draw a connection to the main point that showed why this example was chosen so it’s a pretty random example to draw and kind of odd.
Bees some of the most organized forms of life on this planet.
Bees have different roles, among them, the queen bee. Bees have the ability to create queens by feeding them with royal jelly. When for any reason there's more than one queen, queens fight to death.
> For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse.
Is this really a good example? Building an empire and holding it are different things. Many empires collapse from succession disputes and rebellion rather than a lack of military success over rivals.
> For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse.
The more I think about this statement, the harder it is for me to actually come up with any examples of this happening. While military success of a general might well be useful for status, it is hard to find any examples where that's the primary source of status. The closest I can think up are steppe confederations, whose great size (when they attained such a size) was driven in large part by the personal charisma of the leader, and the loot they could bring to the table, and almost invariably fell apart the moment said leader died, even if their successor were tremendously militarily successful (such as Kublai Khan's conquest of China).
I can come up with some more examples where the military caste ultimately robbed the polity of military success, but these came about because the military caste was unwilling to adapt to modern military technologies and opposed military reforms that might lessen their status. And even then, military nonsuccess didn't lead to empire collapse very quickly (cf., the Ottomans).
> So early on, ambitious soldiers tried to figure out how to win battles, and to get involved in promising battles. But it was hard to guess just how to do this, and outcomes were noisy functions of efforts.
... do you know anything of military history? Because the key to success is invariably training. Whether we're talking about the citizen soldiers of Greek city states (where soldiering was a part-time job) or the professional army of Rome (where it was a lifelong career), soldiers trained. Hell, the sports of elites (e.g., polo, fencing) are basically military training in disguise. And if you're not talking about common soldiers but elite generals, that military training will absolutely include studying the great generals of yesteryear to be able to apply their tactics and strategums when the time comes due.
> So no one could be very sure of their future status, or with whom to associate to gain status. But later on, ambitious soldiers would need to come from the right family, and make good new social connections.
Is the implication meant to be that common soldiers uncommonly good at soldiering could leverage that into high society? Because... again, I'm hard-pressed to any time that was true. Even in cases such as the Aztecs, where military prowess was a prized status symbol and was theoretically open to anybody (and everybody received military training!), in practice, actually getting yourself in a position to demonstrate military prowess required elite connections. If we instead restrict ourselves to elites whose power derives from their demonstrated military abilities, well, most such people you can point to could only do what they did because of their connections. Alexander the Great was the son of the guy who conquered all of Greece. Julius Caesar was the scion of one of the most powerful families in Rome, and even after he found himself on the losing side in a civil war, he was able to get plum military and political appointments by attaching himself to the richest man in Rome.
So I again ask, what is this society of which the author speaks? It doesn't match with any empire, ancient, medieval, or modern, of which I am aware.
Companies get lower cost, higher output labor, for free. The money flows upward, enslaving the middle class with obscene debts trying to compete for prized jobs that used to require far less schooling. Meanwhile trust in authorities and institutions falls to new lows. I heard yesterday that 50% of populace now supports censorship, not of hate speech or anything like that, censorship of whatever popular opinion currently deems “misinformation.” Darwin, Newton, Galileo, all “misinformation” that benefitted from having far fewer gatekeepers than we do today. If this is what the democratizing force of higher education gives us, I’ll pass. We have more educated people and greater economic divide than ever before. The group with the greatest amount of “vaccine hesitancy” are those with phds! If that doesn’t scream elite overproduction you may be deaf.
There were fewer “elites” then. You are agreeing with me without realizing it. We now have what amounts to millions of little popes — nothing more than school children with high credentials in mostly nonsensical fields calling for widespread excommunication of heretics from their privileged positions in government and social media. If Galileo lived today we would never know of his positions- he would be immediately deplatformed, entirely erased from the historical record. This is elite overproduction.
From historical perspective, another side effect of "elite overproduction" is that as "elites" grow in number, they take an increasingly larger slice of the pie, eventually leading to peasants rebellions when enough people cannot even feed their families.
Not sure how it applies to modern society, as we seem to manage food scarcity much better than previous millennia. And disgruntled elites alone is not enough to start rebellions if they lack popular support.
> For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse.
Is this being said seriously? As someone that once aspired to be a historian this sounds like a massive oversimplification. But maybe this is a hyperbolic rethorical resource. It does sound Toynbeesque though, so maybe the author is taking this from Toynbee's work?
I feel like these examples/arguments/proofs need to be developed a lot more to be consistent, specially for an article hosted in a domain called "overcomingbias.com".
On the philosophical level, gotta love the unashamed "starting wars is a good thing, never mind the pain, destabilization and suffering you caused" in that sentence.
“Here is my related hypothesis: we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers. In particular, we put more weight on markers of connections to statusful people and institutions.”
I wonder if the writer is familiar with the class system? Or noticed the democratisation of connection through technology? From a historical perspective, this part at least seems backwards to me. At best, the “now” is irrelevant and there is either no such trend or it has changed more form than quantity.
I think the problem has more to do with continued application of filters based entirely on one's ranking according to some metric. The problem with this is that we never have a measureable metric for the goals we actually care about. For example, universities want the students who will succeed the most at university and thus use some combination of grades, test scores, extracurricular participation, etc. as a proxy for future success. However, future success is a vague goal and the measures chosen would often fail as predictors even if the objective were formalized due to a combination of chance and various biases of the predictor metrics. This gets disastrous in the long term because all these filter processes reinforce each other's biases and due to people being filtered trying to game the system. I think to fix some of these issues, we should stop trying to rank everything precisely and introduce some degree of actual randomness in who passes a given filter. For example, instead of passing the top 10% of applicants in the old system, still keep the top 5%, but do a weighted choice for sufficiently qualified people to fill the other slots. I think this would also help improve diversity as well without the use of true affirmative action.
I think we would keep the top 5% scores, and the remaining 5% would be filled with the people able to "affect the randomness" (read bribe) the best.
There is already a degree of randomness inherent, since for example students don't all study all the material with exactly the same level of attention to each individual part of material. And some will be tired the day of the exams. Some will have something else on their mind while studying due to their relative being in the hospital. Some will by chance happen to guess right on some difficult task. etc. So you already have randomness.
The fundamental problem is work piling. The unit of work isn't 1 hour, it's a "job". If there is 60 hours of work then one person will get a whole job while the other one struggles part time. Both could have gotten a 30 hour work week. Now they start competing for the 40 hour job.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadAt first I didn't agree with OP's claim that there is more visibility of status. I don't think that is entirely correct: I always knew my family was poor, and I knew who the rich kids were, or who the top performers were. But when I circled back to the top of the article I realized it makes sense: 40 years ago in my childhood it was rich/not-rich, smart/not-smart, hot/not-hot. Now there are dozens of metrics for ranking oneself. I agree that overload of negative data is the anxiety driver.
It's like we're all being forced to become data scientists and numbers junkies. We've metricked the hell out of our well-being. At least for this generation. Aren't we infinitely adaptable? Or will future kids just have shorter life spans due to the social stress?
So, don't do that. Don't play a game at which you can only lose.
This is a quote that I put in a sibling comment that might entertain you. The "kids these days" complaints have been a consistent claim made by each adult generation since antiquity https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love...
This quote is used to devalue anyone who points out some difference between now and then. But, it does not prove that such person is wrong.
The big problem there is that real historians never talk about "past generations" as a whole which is nonsense concept anyway. Historians talk about "1735 English aristocracy" or "1865 lower class women in American north" and so on. Because how the society is organized constantly changes.
I can’t help but laugh.
I teach university physics. Intro classes are easier and the exams in these classes are meant to test whether you have learnt physics, not uncover "gifted geniuses". Once you have shown interest in the early classes, you can decide to go into the more challenging classes, whether the classical "problem based" ones celebrated in this blog post, or the more recent "project based" ones which are just as challenging, just a different style of challenging. Which is good, we should encourage all types of genius, not only the masters of algebra. However, yes, we should avoid belittling the masters of algebra in these conversations as well, the same way we learnt to stop belittling "nerds" and "geeks".
For what is worth, the bad "problem based" classes that the author bemoans, have always existed.
Edit: A sibling comment explained that the Socrates quote I used is probably wrong. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
That Scott guy is/was somewhat problematic, but recognizably smart. It’s one of maybe five people where I consciously notice someone’s intelligence.
The rest of that community is toxic and misguided, starting with the idea that emotions are somehow “bad’.
I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally: * I like the weather * I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts * I like my house and I'm too lazy to move
Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.
It doesn’t decide your goals, it just helps you reach them. The number of strawmen in this thread is far too high.
What you described is exactly how rationalists think emotions are best wielded: you look at your/a situation and look at how you feel about it. They're your barometers for whether that which you believe to be your goal is actually your goal.
Emotions are misused when you treat factual beliefs as goals: then your emotions get attached to them, in unhealthy and cult-like ways.
Rationality is one approach to trying to believe fewer misguided things.
That doesn't make it easy and it doesn't mean that success rates at doing so aren't still wildly variable.
If under your goals living in California is optimal, then it is rational to live in California.
The point of, for instance, EA is not that giving to homeless people in New York when there's starving children in Africa is a bad goal- it's that it's an inconsistent goal when one also professes that human lives have equal value. And when one wants to live by that tenet, then EA offers better routes to optimizing lives saved.
Ok, I'll bite. If it's the wrong emotions controlling you, what do you do then?
Please don't suggest any course of action that requires you to be in control.
I cannot disprove that individual rationalists believe this, but to my knowledge it is not a community opinion.
The problem with emotions arises when you attach emotional valence to beliefs and conclusions, rather than outcomes.
Inasmuch as rationalists can be seen as down on emotions, it is because lots of people allow emotions to distort their thinking about reality. In other words, rather than having emotional preferences over outcomes, they have emotional preferences over beliefs and modes of reasoning. (That's why a core of rationalist technique (short [1] long [2]) is learning to emotionally tolerate the possibility of being mistaken.) This is indeed antithetical to rational thought, but it's hardly the only thing emotions are for.
There is nothing wrong with emotions. They just have no place in the process you use to arrive at beliefs about reality. In other words, rationality rejects the Pratchettian claim that you have to believe "the big [lies]: justice, mercy, duty." [3] Instead, it reframes those as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society." This places emotion in its proper context without invalidating it. Quite the opposite, it views emotion as a vital, useful part of human interaction and decisionmaking, rather than the generic default of "just part of what it means to be human".
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-gendlin
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/how-to-actually-change-your-mi...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather
Do the rationalists realize that this is fundamentally a metaphysical or even theological argument?
In other words, the idea is that in understanding the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing when we feel things - "get where it's coming from" - we can bring our emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs, and either support our unconscious brain in its emotional reaction or reign it in where the evolutionary context is no longer valid.
(I'm not sure where you're coming from with "theological.")
This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.
That said, I still support the end-goal of "bringing emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs", but often that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit (e.g. psychoanalysis, Buddhist thought, etc).
I view evolutionary psychology as in the category of psychological divination techniques, in which a set of predetermined systematic constraints allow you to locate interesting patterns in your day to day life through a process of reorientation. In all sincerity, I suggest astrology as an alternative technique that avoids any normative connotations of "fitness" etc.
Come on, that's a stretch. I think it's clear from context that this is referring to unconscious vs conscious awareness, in the like one case where I failed to specifically highlight this distinction (because I wanted to head off just this claim). Both of course happen in the same slab of meat.
> This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.
Sure, but consider: [1] [2]. Of course conscious deliberation is just another strategy, but it's a strategy that benefits from clarity. There is no good reason why reason and deliberation should be unable to close over itself, let alone as "separate" a component as emotional state.
Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world. (Note: There's some claims that reason rose to prominence because it made humans good at making up sensible claims to deceive others - but this sort of evolutionary history would still produce a system that's good at inference, if only as a side effect. Compare GANs.)
> that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit
Now who's doing dualism? The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.
And sure, a lot of evpsych is just-so trash. But especially around the game theory of emotions, I think the conclusions hold up.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46qnWRSR7L2eyNbMA/the-lens-t...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation...
It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself, and is the process that psychoanalysis is intended to support. Instead they "rationalize", and come up with explanations like that one that follows, which don't understand the emotion so much as "explain it away" through what amounts to, as I said earlier, a metaphysical argument about the causal origins of the species.
> Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world.
This sort of causal argument is why I tend to cringe at rationalist theory, because not only is it not necessarily true, there's no way to even tell if it were true.
> The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.
Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality. Again, a reference to the totality and causal origin of life; do you see why I describe it as theological or metaphysical? This is very similar in structure to Christian theories on the topic of e.g. original sin.
I mean, to be fair I'm leaning myself out the window a lot with that claim. But it seems plausible, and more importantly, the argument is resilient to why reason arose. I'm not saying this in a sense of "this is definitely why we have reason, and that's why I am right"; I'm more saying "even in this case where we don't necessarily have reason because it's useful," (note the alternate theory I list) "that is still no reason (heh) to expect it to mislead us." And I think we can confidently say that reason is useful today, at least, and submit as evidence approximately the last 10000 years of planetary history. I think it's not a big stretch to claim that the reason that reason is useful today may be the reason that it evolved to begin with.
> Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality.
And again, I don't see why it has to be one or the other. Of course, even and especially in "events in your own life" it is ironically very easy to make up pat just-so stories to justify any reaction or sentiment. In comparison I honestly think evpsych is on a firmer footing, particularly given I don't think psychotherapy needs particularly to be correct about the causes it posits in order to function as therapy. Whereas if you are mistaken about the evolutionary cause of an emotion, you will completely misconstrue it and probably behave badly.
> It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself
For instance, I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out. This is the exact sort of thing rationality says should not be expected to work. - Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth. You need to have a cognitive mechanism that is in principle capable of producing truths to begin with, in order to even arrive at a hard truth that you can emotionally reject. Without that, you're liable to just admit hard made-up claims as a form of catharsis.
Is something being hard to admit evidence that it is true? Yes, but weakly - if it weren't convincing enough to outweigh being hard to accept, you probably wouldn't even entertain it. (How to be convinced by things that are true but hard to accept is actually a core tenet of rationality - see How To Actually Change Your Mind linked above.) But you still have to do the work to arrive at a true belief about yourself to begin with.
There are plenty of cases of reason misleading, going wrong, perhaps as many or more as reason going right. But of course, judgment of right and wrong depends on your criteria, and reason will never help you achieve that which is prior to reason: faith, in the most basic form.
But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology. All other considerations are shoved under the bus, or else dictated by a sort of bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering", without really interrogating what that even means (if they looked into older philosophy, they would see that thought itself could be considered a form of suffering). It is not necessarily bad to hold to a master signifier as such, as all faith exists in this form, but the rationalists seem especially unaware or unable to interrogate their beliefs to this level.
> I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out.
This is a misunderstanding of what I meant to express, and I apologize for using that term. In my experience (and in the psychoanalytic literature), "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves that we were previously blind to. The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process (of course, the preparation for that flash might well be a laborious process of re-learning how to look!). The "hard truth" is being able to admit something like "actually, I'm not just out to get the truth. I want social recognition after all."
> Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth
Such a focus on truth in relation to psychological affairs feels, to me, wrong-headed, in that all truth is contingent, grounded in some act of judgment. Don't read this the wrong way: contingent != relative. It just means that we need to address the question of "how do I know that true things are true?".
The cultural impact of the enlightenment, especially of Kant, was to collapse "truth" into an intersubjective agreement based on sensory observation ("science"), but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions" (i.e. "how is psychology possible?")? This is where psychoanalysis had its real epistemological innovation: free association as a technique is a way of generating shared knowledge about what was formerly private. Christian "confession" functioned similarly. Modern behavioral psychology is several steps behind. But with or without such a technique, one can never really achieve the absolute (gnostic) truth about oneself, at least not without a strong frame that answers the question "under what circumstances is a given statement about myself true?"
It seems better to ask the question of "what do I want that I'm having difficulty achieving? And what factual observations about myself can I make, which demonstrate patterns that prevent me from achieving this?" Notice how this moves the direction of thought (of reason, even!) away from "finding the truth" and toward a more environmentally-oriented mode of "understanding", closer to what Plato meant by that term, with its connections to "wisdom". The "hard truth" here as I mean it, is noticing sites of competing desires, as Spinoza and Freud do in their discussions ...
Right, but note what you are saying: reason going wrong.
I don't think I even need to add anything there. Your phrasing already reveals that there is "a rightness ... by which it may be judged" in reason that there is not in faith.
> But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology.
I agree that reason is ultimately circular. I even agree that religion can also be circular. (I disagree strongly that all religion is circular, or that religion is inherently circular, or even that religion inherently hinges on faith.) Nonetheless, I think that where religion is circular it is so in a different way from reason. When we reject the circularity of religion, we do so not because it is inherently wrong to posit a God that justifies everything, but because it is not useful. The very self-supporting structure of the faith, the retreat to an insulated core element, prevents its adherent from doing any cognitive or predictive work with it. Rather, I would argue the circularity of religion is a consequence of reason, a retreat into self-justifying tautology prompted by the failure of religion to compete with reason on its own grounds.
In other words, reason closes on itself in a way that shapes itself to a particular inherent standard ("that seems to be associated in some way with success in interacting with the natural world", my reason throws in, giving yet another reason why it is judged valuable under itself, argumentatively achieving nothing yet undeterred.) However, religious faith does not even have any such constraint.
> bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering"
I don't know why you are talking about suffering. I was not talking about suffering. I have no idea where you are going with that.
Evolved animals don't seek to minimize suffering. They don't even seek to maximize propagation; they're just the result of a process of relentless selection for things that propagate.
> "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves
I'm sorry, you were previously accusing rationality of putting too much faith in reason - and now we're supposed to just notice objective aspects of ourselves? With what absolute source of truth, exactly, are we supposed to do this?
> The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process
Now, I myself am as much of an addict to this sort of sudden endorphin-supported flash of insight as the next nerd. But - though it is an indicator of a simple theory that supports the facts observed, that does not in itself suffice to establish truth, let alone "objective truth"!
I have a new theory: lots of rationalists are programmers because programmers are used to having the sudden flash of insight be wrong.
> "how do I know that true things are true?".
I mean - rationality in particular does not engage in any attempt to establish truth, so I feel this charge somewhat misses its mark. Rather, rationality seeks to improve the quality of one's beliefs by engaging in processes that interact with the presumption of an ordered natural world in order to come to beliefs that are, given that assumption, more likely to be true.
That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".
> but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions"
I have a rejoinder to this called "you are not ...
I brought this up because the EA community seems very closely associated with rationalist ideas. Although I'm sure there are other rationalist conceptions of "the good" out there, I've yet to see them clearly articulated.
> ...emotions...
Perhaps the word I should have used is "desire", as emotion springs from desire, and although specific emotional states are easily observable, the underlying desire is what often remains hidden, subject to the other's fantasies. But it's an aside at this point.
> That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".
I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?
The EA community aren't even unified in minimizing suffering. Most of the formulations I've seen are about maximizing good life, though there are certainly people who care about suffering in the community. (I think it's mostly Tomasik.) I haven't seen any of them try to justify their preferences with evpsych though.
> I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?
Once more: Less Wrong relative to a presumed-ordered natural world. To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.
The "natural world" doesn't have beliefs, the world itself cannot be right or wrong, it just is. So the question again is, Less Wrong relative to whom?
> To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.
And what if one is unsure of one's preferences?
What?
Okay, let me try really small steps.
We assume the natural world is ordered.
We assume that the brain holds beliefs, which are compressive/predictive patterns, about the observations of the natural world.
Inasmuch as these are predictive, and inasmuch as we can take multiple actions, then a belief can be qualitatively better or worse in selecting actions that make the world be more good by one's judgment.
Beliefs can fail to be appropriate to select actions on (at least) two metrics: they can be "right or wrong", or they can be "more or less useful."
An example of a wrong belief: if you think it is raining, and so you bring an umbrella, but it is not raining (the belief is wrong), then you have failed to improve your position: you are dry anyway, but now you are also carrying an umbrella, which is annoying.
An example of a useless belief: you can believe that your shirt has more fibers than the average shirt of its kind. This may be true, but even if it is true, there is no decision that you would make where the belief is instrumental in deciding which of the possible actions leads to a world that better matches your preference.
(Unless you have very specific preferences about clothing.)
The goal of becoming Less Wrong is for your brain to contain fewer beliefs that are wrong, and more beliefs that are right; and also (but less importantly) fewer beliefs that are useless, and more beliefs that are useful. The term "Less Wrong" does not refer to a comparison to some other existing human, but rather to the counterfactual outcome of failing to reflect on your thoughts - Less Wrong is a collection of techniques whose goal is, when applied, to make your brain have less wrong beliefs and less useless beliefs, in order to improve your ability to shape the world to your preferences. (Whether they actually achieve this is a hot topic of debate - but that is the standard which they set.)
> And what if one is unsure of one's preferences?
That depends on your preferences for your preferences. :)
In any case, setting your preferences is not the purpose of rationality. (Though as your preferences are part of the ordered natural world, rationality also aims to improve your ability to shape your preferences, this does not tend to be a central consideration.)
But in essence, yes.
(Though of course, again, the ultimate goal is to be better able to achieve preferred outcomes in the world, and if thinking only the word "blue" on repeat produced outcomes perfectly in line with your preferences, then rationality would espouse blue blue blue blue. But at that point, most of the techniques gathered under the label would be useless, because yadda yadda ordered world etc.)
Basically, I am personally of the belief that any "wrong" or "useless" beliefs that one holds are always actually useful, as all belief is instrumental. Ignorance is maintained because it serves a purpose.
I am also of the belief that the only way to determine why one holds a wrong belief is to understand the "emotional" or desire-based reason that underlies or supports it. Hence why I spent a lot of time above discussing emotions. We have seen in recent times the repeated failure of individuals to adjust their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Why is this? My stance is that their "wrong" beliefs serve deep emotional needs for them. Most people have stronger desires than the desire to arrive at truth in their evaluation of the world.
The difference in emphasis here is shifting from "the brain as a prediction-making device" to "the human body including the brain is a system that acts to relieve tensions placed upon it", and that prediction-making is one biological strategy for doing so. Of course, better predictions can and will relieve more tension than worse predictions, but my stance is that being able to conceptualize the causes and nature of tension directly will lead to better outcomes, as it permits stronger meta-cognition.
I see the term "preference" doing a lot of work in rationalist thought, and I generally taboo it. The term comes from economics and fails IMO to adequately describe the nature of desire. But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.
I hope this all makes sense!
(I'm having a lot of fun with this debate too, it's really forced me to firm up my understanding of faith and reason.)
> But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.
I agree with this take! Though I think it's less that this is something rationality cannot do as that, well, Eliezer when he was writing the Sequences, had an overriding belief that put all his other preferences at risk. This tends to focus one's attention on strategy. :)
The most illuminating post on this, for me, is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-... . You see this notion of "rationality is a tool to come to conclusions when the conclusions really really matter" all over his writing. I especially like the phrasing in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-de... :
> No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand.
Which implies that to most people, the pursuit of individual rationality, possibly even above mental wellbeing, is counteradaptive.
(Man, does Eliezer have a way with words though.)
(To me, personally, the idea of holding wrong beliefs is like a persistent itch or annoyance. I do not have a driving need, but I also have few attachments. And, of course, I am a nerd, and this is all nerd cocaine. All that sums up to create an ideological space in which I am comfortable.)
This part particularly resonated with me:
> Your trust will not break, until you apply all that you have learned here and from other books, and take it as far as you can go, and find that this too fails you—that you have still been a fool, and no one warned you against it—that all the most important parts were left out of the guidance you received—that some of the most precious ideals you followed, steered you in the wrong direction—
> —and if you still have something to protect, so that you must keep going, and cannot resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality—
> —then you will be ready to start your journey as a rationalist.
My trust broke years ago, and I found the rationalists, and then I realized, unlike Yudkowsky (I guess?), that I didn't have something to protect. So, my personal goals are in that sense very different.
In my experience with the rationalist community as well, I found that most people I met didn't have a specific personal motivation beside their beliefs surrounding x-risk, and I personally find the set of axioms required to accept rationalist beliefs on x-risk a bit... difficult to swallow.
(Also, AI X-Risk makes a lot more sense if you're already habituated to thinking of the mind in terms of algorithm. 40% programmers: not a coincidence.)
I'm also a programmer and am very habituated in terms of thinking in algorithms, but when I had my "break", I realized that my beliefs were not working on a very deep level, and I needed something a lot stronger/deeper than rationality to push me out of whatever local extremum I was trapped in.
(I think we've run out of disagreements. Good talk?)
(Woe! A deeper rift than even incompatible epistemologies: incompatible chat clients!)
To me, this leads to almost indistinguishable outcomes as the straw vulcan.
If that's a straw Vulcan, we have moved very far away from Mr. Spock.
Rationalism is almost by design going to be either different logic or a different position from what seems and feels like a good idea. That is why it gets its own word.
So while overt rationalists are often bad communicators, it is quite possible that what you are identifying is inherent in the message anyway. If the rationalists agree with common sense then there isn't much to talk about.
Plus it isn't rational to identify as a rationalist, so the really good rationalists are hard to spot.
Depends whether you're valuing broad acceptance or a tight-knit peer group of people who get you.
Though of course the real trick would be to have both, this can be hard in our omnisurveillance society. I just don't think it's a universal law that people who are easy to spot are bad at it. Certainly people who are bad at it are easy to spot.
Practical smarts has probably declined as a result.
I know the stereotype, but is there any evidence that “book smarts” and “street smarts” are mutually exclusive?
Is it possibly an artifact of an economy rewarding hyper-specialization?
I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?
1970 or so it broke through, for reference.
> do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?
Yes but not in the way you imply. Having access to enough accurate information and being able to spend time efficiently to accumulate it, has catapulted large swathes of people into investing in a college education. These people who would have been stunted along the opportunity, genetic, and economic axes in the past. This is despite the horrendous increases, in costing, over the last 30 years (imo).
factors you're leaving out that i find much more persuasive -- low interest rates, federally guaranteed loans, credentialism/professional guild dynamics. a degree costs more and gets you less than it did in the past, but you're forced to get one to have most professional jobs. it's an obligate gatekeeping tax, the piece of paper that says you're allowed to be middle class.
The acquisition of degrees is just a form of specialization to avoid the effects of the current money system. The reason why large cities are so rich is that international investors prefer established cities. When parents put money into investments and their children follow that money out of their hometown into a large city. Considering how much we do to compensate the bad influences of our money system I seriously wonder when nations are going to change it. Probably in 2030.
The problem isn't "free market" or "capitalism" although the adherents of those ideas tend to love the existing money system. Of course there are also other non reproducible assets like land and patents but I feel like properly taxing land should be more than enough. Patents only slow down progress, they shouldn't make things worse.
There are two fundamental problems: 1. The velocity of money keeps going down. It's not circulating at all. Meaning fiat currency is becoming less and less a medium of exchange and instead turns into a store of value just like Bitcoin. 2. Positive interest only works with either a growing supply of money at constant velocity or an increase in velocity at fixed supply. Basically inflation via endless debt growth if there is no productivity growth or population growth.
Combine this with the rise in neoliberalism in politics which basically runs into the contradictions of money at every corner. Global trade? Causes deflation which lowers interest rates. Less regulation? Businesses become more efficient. More deflation. Austerity? More deflation. Union busting? Lower incomes mean more deflation. You see, at some point you have created more deflation than the money system can survive. What breaks isn't the economy, it's the people that end up breaking. To be fair to neoliberalism. If there wasn't this pesky zero lower bound on interest rates it could have worked.
I've read an article about the "negative impacts" of negative interest rates and it mentioned a complete subversion of the standard response regarding competition for interest rates. Countries will end up competing to have the lowest negative interest rate. Isn't that absurd? Countries like Zimbabwe, Greece or Turkey who are net borrowers would see negative interest rates that would pull their economy out of the gutter and yet it is considered a negative effect. It's actually weird how that article never mentioned inflation, as if it was dead for some reason.
Most people could get a college degree. It's mostly hard work. You don't need to be a genius. The few geniuses stay and do research, the normal people got out and apply what they learned to the world.
There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.
In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.
It worked pretty well
I still have stress nightmares about op amps though
Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class.
Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.
Meh, if your goal is for students to learn from mistakes, you can give them those any time during semester. No reason to put them on test. The best students will try to crack them, in fact, will spend more time that test allows on them. The difficult questions, especially in math or computer science, may take multiple days and attempts to solve. Going through that frustration is definitely learning experience. Putting time hour limit on it during test just weakens it.
> Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
In that point, it becomes in scope. Because "beyond scope" is infinite you have people guessing what "beyond scope" they should learn to gain it. The tests and exams should not be game.
Let it be know what are you going to test in advance.
In the second exam type, even a good student can't assume they can solve every problem within the time limit. They have to prioritize the problems based on how easy they expect them to be. The exam tests not only what the student has learned but also how well they understand what they can do and what they can't. The same can also apply to other types of assignments. For example, even a good student can't assume that they can solve every homework problem before the deadline.
The third grading approach is usually used for most important works. Under this scheme, the highest grades are reserved to those who do something exceptional. No matter what the expectations are, if you only meet them 100%, it's not sufficient for the highest grade.
As an example of the third approach, when I studied CS, our department gave the highest grade to only around 1 thesis in 100. There were no set criteria for the highest grade, except that the faculty had to agree that the work was beyond what one would expect from an excellent thesis. It was something not even a smart determined student could expect to gain, except by accident. Even the theses that got the highest grade were rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. Except the one that described an OS that runs on billions of devices today. That's the proper bar an undergraduate student should aim for if they want to guarantee the highest grade under this grading scheme.
This untrue implication. You can have difficult exercises that do require special insights with long solutions and still keep it within curriculum or "what you was expected to learn". What you cant do is to give them exercises that require one more chapter or invention of difficult to prove theorems that were not taught.
In France you only need half of the points. When I was in college, you had to have at least a mean of 10/20 (we grade on 20 points), and have no course below 8/20. The best students were usually around 16, 17. The worst were around 5. Most of the students were between 10 and 12. I like that system because it gives a vast field to grade people, and most people can always improve. You can also compensate some courses with others, but only to a point.
Sure we can learn some techniques and the way we approach things may let us tackle problems in a way that is more likely to work.
And yet I find it baffling that sometimes formal education wants a student to reach by themselves a conclusion that the brightest minds of mankind had a hard time getting there by themselves.
While spending a fraction of the time thinking about the problem, of course.
If you are meant to reproduce the way to the solution (having studied the method already), that's one thing. But if you are asking some student to come up with some bright idea that people spent years without being able to get it? Now that seems a little too much.
> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.
On a more holistic level, the second approach seems better in some ways. Except for exceptionally talented students, it removes the ability to achieve "perfection," so good students would become a little more resilient because their exposure to failure.
the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.
(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.
Grade inflation in a nutshell.
I've seen a system where they grade on a curve, A is 4.0. But there's A*, which still gives a 4.0 on the transcript, but denotes that a student (or a group) were statistically far enough from those who got an A that they deserved special recognition (ie, the threshold for an A is 85% but someone managed to score a 98%).
Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc.
Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution.
The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort.
It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?
First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong.
And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still:
(a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated)
(b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated)
(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true
There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint".
In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct.
So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".
It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it.
What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.
It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.
The OP considered this though, to quote: It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.
Which it did, in some ways.
A contradiction leaves no doubt. It's not a contradiction then. A contradiction is not just something that is unlikely or infeasible, it is something impossible. It means that your set of beliefs is flawed and that at least one premise needs to be corrected for them to become consistent.
OldSecondHand is correct that it is possible for each generation to have been worse than the preceeding one. For example, the degradation might be so minute, or we may have started from such lofty heights, or the society has become more resilient to the degradation. It is possible, and therefore no contradiction. ...just unlikely.
uhm, didn't it?
To the point of the fall or Athens and Greek empires, the fall of the hellenistic kingdoms, the fall of Rome, all the way to WWI and WWII, and that's just confined to the Western side of the world...
There is absolutely no contradiction, because in fact they are complaining about different things. Sometimes they are complaining about kids being more violent then they used to be. Other times they are complaining about kids being more rude, more passive, more drinking. Then they complain about kids dont more sport, less sport, reading too much, not reading enough.
If you abstract it away to "kids are bad", then yes, it sounds as if the complain was constantly the same. But that abstraction is manipulative.
> Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true.
I have in fact said that multiple times. The "no one ever says" part is not true either.
Yes, people are more likely to comment on negatives that affect them then on positives. That is true about literally anything, including software updates. And that still does not imply that every complain about bad software update should be shut down.
Not really. It's totally logically consistent if things are going downhill with each successive generation. (In fact, it would still be consistent if different things were going downhill, Gen 2 worse on X compared to Gen 1, and Gen 3 worse on Y compared to Gen 2, and so on). Whether that's the case it's another matter.
>It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it.
Exactly.
>But I doubt it.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Note also that since there are no permanent eternal standards standing outside of history, each generation only has to be worse by the standards of its previous generation, for the accusation to be true...
On the contrary, that has been my interpretation of these signals since I first started hearing them.
All living things (cats, societies, lizards, civilizations) are born, have an adolescence of growth and development, then decay and die.
So there must be some brief period in the adolescence of a civilization where "kids these days" cannot be applied. Society is growing, developing and integrating.
After that brief period it may then, indeed, be possible for each successive generation to correctly identify and decry the decay of their (society/civilization).
Illegal narcotics would like a word.
If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now. It would be measurable in wealth, IQ, rates of murder, crime, literacy, etc.
Every statistics avaliable indicates that we used to be more ignorant, more violent and less literate. So this complain belong in the same box as:
"back when I was young we used to talk to school 12 miles, through a blizzard, uphill, both ways!"
That doesn't follow.
Civilization != technology.
And those previous generations weren't lamenting "kids these days have less technology than us", but "kids these days are worse in X, Y, Z" regarding ways of living.
Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?
That's more of an argument that one can't really trust statistics. Or that they don't always measure what matters...
>Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?
Well, we can define, and it does exist. Not sure if we can measure (not everything that exists can be measured in some meaningful way. Some things matter in qualitative ways).
So, for some concrete examples, the roman generations that followed the acme of Rome and steered it towards the decline had certain very specific characteristics. Less inclined to work for common good, more selfish, having less children (lamented by roman critics of the time, and which less to a big problem with economic dynamics, the army, and so on), more concerned with greed and self-indulgence, less interested in civic matters (which was the bread and butter of earlier generations), and so on.
* technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time. Thus tomorrow will still be better than today, at least from the point of view of things like technical advancement, regardless of what is happening within each person.
* population increases, so the smartest can still be smarter even if the average is declining
* Even if population is not increasing, improvements in communication and replication technology can mean that an increasingly smaller share of the brightest people anywhere in the world can design products that are replicated or simply assembled by masses of others, whereas in the past this required local designers. Think of how many people are truly needed to keep advances in jet engines happening. You have basically three companies that supply all the engines to the entire world.
* And one can even make up for the other -- e.g. in previous times all shoes were handcrafted, now they are mass produced. Thus a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period.
Now I'm not saying I necessarily buy the decline thesis. It's an intriguing thesis, basically that you can be pretty dumb and still thrive well enough to keep reproducing whereas in hunter gatherer societies you would have starved to death and so the population would on average be smarter due to the challenges they had to overcome. Maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the objection that knowledge accretes does nothing to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I cannot fathom how you possibly write this - surely you cannot be claiming that dumber and dumber workers develop better and better technology, or technology is some independent quantity that develops without human intervention, like a divine gift of some sort?
"a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period."
The last bloke operating the machine doesn't produce anything on his own, you have to compare the whole value chain, including the folks making the leather, making the tools and machines, etc. I am sure the old process includes plenty of people doing unskilled groundwork, although I would not bet my house on which way the dice would fall
Of course meant "and sometimes false".
The complaint itself is always there (absolutely always), and should be dismissed every time because it carries no information at all. This does not technically make it a logical fallacy (ironically, most logical fallacies carry more useful information), just a useless waste of time.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
Often he would question something fundamental about human interaction that seemed to me (and I suspect most) to have obvious and quite simple explanations. But he is intelligent and couldn't be missing the forrest for the trees I told myself. Clearly he must be operating many steps ahead. Levels above!
Now I wonder if maybe he just isn't so good with trees.
I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of his work. No doubt much of it has been valuable. He seems to struggle to understand people, in much the same way as one of the alien's he's obsessed might struggle.
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
Egypt has a huge overeducation problem.[1] For several decades, Egypt had a policy that anyone who got through college could get a government job. Then the oil ran out.
[1] https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-brie...
Technical sciences didn't have a Bachelor's even as an option until some time ago. I think it wasn't seen as useful, and still these days Master's is the default. Tuition is free so there's no direct cost associated with studying longer.
Despite record high college attendence, the college wage premium is fatter than ever, and unployment for grads is really low at just 2 percent, the baritista meme not withstanding.
The majority of grads major in actionable fields with good career prospects, not journalism or the humanities. Liberal elites who write highly publicized articles about matters pertaining to gender studies or politics are of the minority of majors. Most grads just want the requisite credentials for a middle class lifestyle, not to change the world or rise to the highest tiers of power.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
It does feel like people like me are forgotten, ignored and dismissed by these cosmopolitan selective school elites.
Policies and structures to allow people on the precipice access to funding required to take the leap and which attempt to keep the system stable by putting personal “skin in the game” find support with me.
The more accessible (and popular) college is, the bigger signal it is that someone didn't go. That premium could just as well be the result of the (relative) wage floor falling out for non-grads.
No comment on the greater thesis. Just noting that those two things might not relate.
Not long ago it was below 4% for all workers, how recent is that number?
That 98% number includes barista employment.
What I found was that all the senior plus level people wanted to do was work on plans and reviews and architecture decisions and so on and so forth. We had a lot of "leadership" but very few people willing to actually put shovel to dirt so to speak. Our ultra-elite team was really unproductive.
I began to think of the senior people as something like salt. A meal may be best with a lot of food and a little salt. One or two high level people to plan for and guide a lot of lower ranking people who could actually do work. The second best configuration would be all food and no salt - people doing work without the high level insights and planning. The worst configuration, I discovered, was all salt and no food - just a ton of meetings, reviews, plans, and missed deadlines.
I'm connecting my experience with this blog post because it seems to me like the process of "becoming elite" causes the damage. Everyone on our software team was so busy trying to have cross team impact, show their leadership, come up with consequential architecture decisions, and the like - because all that stuff is what you need to be well regarded as a senior type person, that nobody wanted to do the more mundane tasks of actually implementing our plans. From the examples of the article it's like everyone is worried about the metrics they can control, like the academics publishing more and more papers in better journals, that they forget about actually discovering or documenting things.
To use the high variance language, maybe in the ur-company, when it was just starting, you could have done something big and consequential. If it was a success you'd get rewarded and become a senior or a principal or whatever. If it failed, even if it failed through no particular fault of your own, you wouldn't, or maybe you'd get fired. Nowadays, as the company has grown, there are fewer of those big risks and more people who want to be seniors and principals, so people take the low variance route - establishing that they are influential planners who wrote and reviewed a lot of stuff and so on, forgetting about the nominal goal of the company - shipping good products.
As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do.
I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.
you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value.
If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt.
Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time".
I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed.
So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.
I suppose the 'thing' being prestigious to write is a differentiator, here. Put that team on AdWords with principal expectations for each of them and it's probably dysfunctional.
I wrote a golang WaitableBool struct for my team's code. I tried to submit it to the company's internal 'contrib' library, but golang-team rejected it. I pointed out that the company's C++ and Java versions of the struct were used in >150,000 places. Clearly there was demand and the Golang version would become widely-used. They argued that all Golang coders should always remember details of channel syntax and be happy to read five lines of boilerplate instead of "value.waitUntilTrue()".
I think their team was too senior. None of them were willing to add breadth to the standard library, despite massive code duplication within the company. They need a junior team member who can get promoted for growing and maintaining the standard library. We all need that.
[0] https://pkg.go.dev/math
[0] "Make website search case-insensitive" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40217
[1] "Make search box remember what you typed" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40218
[2] "show search box on smaller viewports" https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40220
[3] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/44357
My guess is that it can go either way and a significant part of it is having the right environment, the right management, probably some luck too.
Isn’t this the exact reason why Google has such a high rate of churn in its product lineup?
The "elite overproduction" framework begs you to not view the middle class as a group of people who have achieved a balance where they do valuable work and are rewarded with nice things, but as a group of scheming do-nothings who pose a burden to society as they foolishly aspire to elite-hood and repeatedly fail. It's a laser-guided propaganda missile aimed directly at a fault line in populist movements that have been gaining steam recently.
Given that people like me have only ever participated in the economy during a time when the middle class was shrinking, what are we to do? Most of us agree, if our future is a world of a few 'haves' and many 'have nots', priority one is to become a 'have'. Even from the most moral stance imaginable, a 'have not' has no ability to help others. Hence, too many of us try to get into the elite. To aim for the middle class is to aim for grinding poverty, and why would anyone?
If the bulk of your tax bill comes from special capital gains rates on the fraction of your net-worth-increase that you are ignominiously forced to admit constitutes capital gains, you're an elite. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a higher income tax tier, you're middle class. If the bulk of your tax bill comes from a lower income tax tier, you're correspondingly lower class.
Needless to say, the principle that taxes reveal true power does not lead me to agree with your premise that 60% of the middle class has disappeared into the upper class.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/squeezing-the-middle-clas...
> the main reason for the shrinking of the middle class (defined in absolute terms) is the increase in the number of people with higher incomes
Is Social Science considered a rigorous science, or will we look back in 100 years and group it in as we do with phrenology?
I think there's a middle ground between being a rigorous science and being an anti-science like phrenology. I think there's no problem with having soft sciences, as long as the difference between them and hard sciences is understood, and one does not confuse the levels of rigor and certainty between the two.
There's a lot of soft science when it comes to policital economy, and countries have gone all-in with policies from different branches, even though there's really no hard evidence and rigor of some of these ideas. It's mind blowing when you think that millions of people's lives are affected because politicians have had gut instincts of a soft science sounding scientific.
> The choices they make are based largely on what they consider the best evidence available to them at the time
But they're not doing this, and this was my point. A lot of political economy is opinion rather than based of fact, and these non-fact based opinions are what politicians are choosing over hard evidence.
An example here would be leaders making Communism a country policy.
1) First, questioning the premise—you may encounter a whole lot more pop-social-science writing than the Real Deal. Consider, for example, what a smart and thoughtful person, whose main exposure to the work of historians was watching Ancient Aliens, might think of history, as an academic field. I don't know what you've read, but it's possible a lot of it's way toward the entertaining-but-wrong end.
2) As for "rigorous science", the social sciences have many limitations that something like chemistry or physics do not. They are necessarily based much more on observation and comparison of complex real-world systems. Limited ability to perform controlled experiments doesn't make them not science, as there's more to science than just that, but it does mean it can be very difficult to prove solid, definitive results in social science. It does also mean that the edges of social science are a great place to hide and nurture some serious bullshit, and if it's politically convenient for someone maybe even get your bullshit a few well-funded think-tanks—that in addition to how much the heart of it's full of bullshit, too, due to careerist game-playing by researchers, but that's not so different from other fields.
Not quite... I've gone through the classics, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, General Theory of Employment etc, and about to start Ricardo. What I've found is although they sound logical and use many examples to make their case, I still see most (with some exception to Keynes) of these are just opinion with possibly selective bias of examples.
What's bad here, is that these authors each take themselves as gospel, which then politicians have implemented these ideas with a blunt hammer.
There is a divide between political philosophy (and adjacent economic work) and social science proper, that's analogous to the divide between the theoretical side of modern physics and the experimental side but cranked up a few notches. As in most other sciences, journals, low-print-count and narrowly-scoped books from academic presses, and (to some degree) textbooks, are where the scientists really work (this doesn't mean it's all good work, of course)—though the standard reading (which you seem to be working through) is standard for a reason, and guide the vocabulary and context of that work.
> possibly selective bias of examples.
Heh, when you're lucky there are a good number of even biased examples. The really painful ones are mostly "suppose if..." fairy tales spinning fantasies based on some questionable premises and definitions, the odd bad syllogism, and a very small number of cherry picked examples that, if you dig, aren't even presented accurately. Whole schools of political and economic thought can be based almost entirely on this, as their adherents sneer at the illogic and idiocy of those who aren't convinced.
Its not really that analogous. Theoretical physics is at least in theory still predictive, though it may be vert distant from the pragmatics of verification. There are areas of political/economic science that are like that, but political/economic philosophy is predominantly normative rather than predictive (Austrian school economics, despite being called “economics” rather than “economic philosophy” and despite occasionally making fact rather than value claims is, and fairly openly admits to being, part of this.) There's a lot of people who are active as public intellectuals on both sides of the predictive/normative world, and the media (who are often the employers of public intellectuals) do an extremely poor job of explaining, when they aren't straight up concealing, the divide between predictive and normative elements of controversies in political and economic debates.
Sure, I intended the "cranked up a few notches" to cover the difference, but could have been clearer. Think things that don't even have a clear path to verifiability or testability, but continue to generate papers (string theory, maybe) but even more speculative.
> There are areas of political/economic science that are like that, but political/economic philosophy is predominantly normative rather than predictive (Austrian school economics, despite being called “economics” rather than “economic philosophy” and despite occasionally making fact rather than value claims is, and fairly openly admits to being, part of this.)
Absolutely! Part of the trouble is that to chart a course in politics or economics, you have to choose a desired outcome with winners and losers, so there's inherently a normative aspect to it. There's a whole lot of "ought" involved that's practically unavoidable. Throw in conflicts of interest and it's a hell of a mess. It's like if no-one had been able to agree on where Apollo 11's Eagle should land, and also they're already in flight, and also gravity doesn't always do what we think it does, and also several of the people involved are being paid to shill for particular landing sites, even if the spacecraft can't physically reach them within its fuel budget, but they've got some really fancy-looking explanations about the whole "gravity is weird sometimes" thing so maybe they're not full of shit?
To pick on the Austrians in particular (hey, you brought them up, not me, I only posted a complaint about their broad political sphere's style of argument without naming them :-) ) they've got a bad case of presenting their ethical egoism as also satisfying consequentialist approaches better than any other framework, just by happy coincidence. This should set off one's alarm bells at full volume, but it sure does help them cast a wide net when evangelizing.
Maybe Carlyle was right after all - it really is the dismal science :)
It often happens in societies where hard work is looked down upon as something only poor people do. The result is that these 'elites' have nothing else to do but agitate politically.
I feel like people have a great need to succeed and further themselves in life. When they don't have an avenue to satisfy these needs through hard and useful work, they find other outlets. Often these other outlets that can be very detrimental to society as a whole.
Like Lisp programmers.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...
I wish this was the only problem. I have been exposed to so many 'elites' (investors, diplomats, C-level executives) that are just plain stupid.
For some reason people assume they are very smart, perpetuating this myth.
This might be why the "class grades don't mean anything anymore" rings hollow to me -- it's trying to close the barn door when the horses are already gone. Or to use a different analogy, it's like some variant of the fox and grapes fable (maybe there is a fable for it on its own?), where if the elites' markers are shown to be empty, they start saying "well those weren't good anyway."
That might work for awhile but if there's enough of it people start thinking the system is rigged.
The problem is there's no consensus on what's fair. A lot of people think they deserve to be part of the elite, and they have reasonable-to-them grounds for that. The people saying "grades don't mean anything" are probably sincere - they really do think something else is now more important than grades and that's why they focused on that something else. But it all adds up to something far too top-heavy.
Many people with a degree believe that they should be elites (because they would be in the 1960s) and are disappointed that they are not. The elites have circled the wagons and use friendships to determine eliteness (see WeWork and Theranos - where elites started companies that are total frauds and still were billionaires for a while).
At the same time, it is good for society to have a meritocratic component to the measure of "eliteness." This is why generals who won battles was a good example, and college degrees used to be: people who became generals or got into college were generally not there purely on merit, but the cream of the crop became apparent through challenges relevant to the society of the day.
The meritocratic component also allows for social mobility for people who are really damn good at whatever the merit is: great soldiers could find their way into the roman aristocracy from nothing, and colleges always admitted a few exceptionally talented lower-class people who became great scholars. The "elite overproduction" theory suggests that there is too much social mobility for the wrong people, and not enough for the right people.
One example is the american revolution where the one group of elites in the british empire wanted good relations with the indians to protect their fur trade while another group of elites wanted to invade native areas and steal their land. Don't think there was an issue of elite overproduction in the british empire in the mid 1700s. But there was an issue of divergent interests and there was no room for compromise as these competing interests directly conflicted with each other.
Another one is the civil war, where the interests of the industrial north ( the desire to protect industry via tariffs ) directly conflicted withe the interests of the agrarian south ( who wanted to remove tariffs ) so they could sell cotton/agricultural goods to foreign markets. Once again, I don't think there was an overproduction of elites in the north or the south in the 1850s.
But I guess if the elite overproduction was severe enough, it could structural conflict of interests. But my guess is that conflicts would naturally arise amongs the elites long before elite overproduction.
David Graeber argued that the people who controlled the two major parties in the United States, until recently, were into Finance, which benefits from deindustrialization and a weak middle class, and that Trump was different because his interests were in Real Estate, which actually requires domestic consumers -- hence trade war and antiglobalism.
(For someone as "far left" as Graeber, it sounded more apologetic for Trump than I expected.)
Now, I find this theory interesting, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Do you have another one?
What does “into finance” even mean? And how can you be in real estate without being “into finance”? The real estate business is all financing.
But yeah. What does Graeber mean?
The argument would go something like --
Many countries are in debt to the United States (immediate question: Isn't the US in huge debt to China?), which drives up demand for US dollars (since everyone needs to pay those back), which makes the dollar strong. As a result, if you have access to these dollars at low interest rates (i.e, are a bank), you can get lots of stuff from other countries "for free". But a strong dollar also has the effect of destroying domestic industry, because it makes exports too expensive for anyone to buy.
So he's saying "finance" is all these institutions with access to dollars, and "real estate" is a bunch of other institutions that are one more step removed from the Fed.
Something like that.
Like, are you a cloud provider, or do you run a lot of cloud jobs? Either way, you're "into the cloud", but you're on opposite sides.
That's about as much sense as I can make of it.
Or maybe it's all bullshit. Which would be funny, given the other things Graeber has written. I don't know.
I do notice it's weirdly aligned with RT's narrative. Not that that means it can't also be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter#Exchanges
The US is in huge debt to the rest of the work because that is how a reserve currency works. You issue currency, in this case USD can only be created through debt, when it leaves the country to enter the world economy there is not enough USD in the US so the government has to do deficit spending or tax cuts (i.e. never retrieve the money it created).
So the Fed/Treasury passes over the void, and in this vacuum forms a dollar and a T-bill, a particle/antiparticle pair. In this transaction, the Treasury sells a debt obligation (the T-bill), which someone buys with dollars. Then again, and again: We now have a few T-bills and dollars.
There are a few purchasers involved -- a few places to which T-bills flow, and from which dollars flow.
One: A T-bill flows to China. A dollar flows in the opposite direction (they used it to purchase the T-bill).
Another: The Federal Reserve buys a T-bill. This is "quantitative easing", or colloquially "money printing" (as it can be done within the current system). The Federal Reserve gets the T-bill, and the Treasury gets dollars, which then fund US government spending.
The T-bill/dollar current to China is superposed with an opposite current: Simultaneously, a different stream of dollars impinges on China, prompting another current of cargo ships in the opposite direction. These carry iPhones, and flip-flops, and everything else sold at big-box stores.
Enter countries in the US / IMF / World Bank sphere. These have dollar denominated debts (they used the loans to build (hopefully useful) infrastructure). Now they do something to acquire dollars, like accept a stream of tourists, or export coltan or palm oil. In the case of the raw materials, some go to the US (palm oil to food processors), and others to China (coltan to whoever makes tantalum capacitors, which eventually end up in iPhones).
In a net sense, then, dollars flow into the "developing" world, and resources flow out to the West, with those needing industrial steps of the "value chain" traveling via China.
And each of those dollars has a corresponding T-bill "antiparticle", held either in China (or another country), or at the Fed. This prompts another flow of dollars to the holders of all those T-bills, which we call interest. Those dollars now, can come from the sale of yet more T-bills.
Now here I realize that my metaphor is wrong. T-bills and dollars only exist in "pairs" when they are created by a QE transaction. Other T-bills attract dollars from outside (e.g. those sold to China).
Finally, I have left out the commercial banks. I'll need to work fractional reserve banking into this somehow.
This is all becoming pretty complicated. But it still feels like a simplified stock-and-flow model is within reach...
In other words Finance here refers to investing money not directly in real economy, such as building factories, houses etc., but in speculative products such as I listed above. It is possible that the money so invested in Finance somehow eventually makes it to the real economy. But since late 20th century the size of Finance relative to Real Economy has exploded. Multiple trillions of dollars worth of products are traded each day in Financial markets but in real economy (i.e., people buying/selling goods/services) only a fraction of that amount changes hands. So there is a growing disconnect between Finance and Real economy; which is why Wallet Street (Finance) and Main Street (real economy) have grown so much apart.
Coming to Trump and Real Estate. For a real estate builder, their domain expertise is around forecasting future needs and invest in building houses/office spaces. They invest some of their own money, borrow some from banks, build houses, sell for profit, repay banks and pocket some of that profit. So this part is well understood.
A builder can do well only when millions of people are earning well and are able to buy/rent their buildings. Falling wages is a really bad news for real estate firms. As Graeber says in that video, you can not export real estate buildings. So for them to do well the domestic real economy must do well. The Finance sector however has no such constraints. At the shortest of notice they can seamlessly move their money across the border chasing higher returns. There are times when Finance feels the effects of worsening real economy however as we saw in 2008 when falling housing prices (which were artificially inflated to being with, thanks to speculation) lead to Wall Street crisis.
I usually don't trust Wikipedia now a days but it does have good content in this case[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
https://youtu.be/5Gq16RO2XB0
I can't tell if there's truth to it or if he's just really good at stringing words together.
The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s).
The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things.
On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say capitalistic or neoliberal) and they also differ in political style. I think people are pretty familiar with Sanders etc but here's [3] an article by a center-left economist talking a little bit about how the nature of this coalition affects what policies are possible.
[1] Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal and Murray's By the People
[2] https://www.amazon.com/When-Party-Came-Town-Representatives/...
[3] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/passing-the-baton-th...
- Eisenhower Republicans : New Dealers
- Reagan/Gingrich "small government" Republicans : Clinton/Obama/Blair market liberals
- "moderate Trumpists" (if there can be such a thing) : "Progressives" (who, I will add, are somewhat less "left" than Wokeists)
They form a 3x2 matrix. Each column represents a side, and each row the spirit of an age.
I guess you could call the rows: "Institutions", "Markets", "Movements".
Then, breaking the symmetry, the "Progressives" are moderated a little by the ghost of FDR/LBJ, while the ghost of Eisenhower lives on in the Never Trumpers, who... weirdly, might ally with what "respectable" Neocons remain, and turn into some kind of "establishment" figures aligned as much with the center-left market liberals as with anyone. Sort of a "deep state" faction without a party.
Of areas where the north and south’s interests conflicted in the civil war that’s not the one most people call out.
Bees have different roles, among them, the queen bee. Bees have the ability to create queens by feeding them with royal jelly. When for any reason there's more than one queen, queens fight to death.
Is this really a good example? Building an empire and holding it are different things. Many empires collapse from succession disputes and rebellion rather than a lack of military success over rivals.
The more I think about this statement, the harder it is for me to actually come up with any examples of this happening. While military success of a general might well be useful for status, it is hard to find any examples where that's the primary source of status. The closest I can think up are steppe confederations, whose great size (when they attained such a size) was driven in large part by the personal charisma of the leader, and the loot they could bring to the table, and almost invariably fell apart the moment said leader died, even if their successor were tremendously militarily successful (such as Kublai Khan's conquest of China).
I can come up with some more examples where the military caste ultimately robbed the polity of military success, but these came about because the military caste was unwilling to adapt to modern military technologies and opposed military reforms that might lessen their status. And even then, military nonsuccess didn't lead to empire collapse very quickly (cf., the Ottomans).
> So early on, ambitious soldiers tried to figure out how to win battles, and to get involved in promising battles. But it was hard to guess just how to do this, and outcomes were noisy functions of efforts.
... do you know anything of military history? Because the key to success is invariably training. Whether we're talking about the citizen soldiers of Greek city states (where soldiering was a part-time job) or the professional army of Rome (where it was a lifelong career), soldiers trained. Hell, the sports of elites (e.g., polo, fencing) are basically military training in disguise. And if you're not talking about common soldiers but elite generals, that military training will absolutely include studying the great generals of yesteryear to be able to apply their tactics and strategums when the time comes due.
> So no one could be very sure of their future status, or with whom to associate to gain status. But later on, ambitious soldiers would need to come from the right family, and make good new social connections.
Is the implication meant to be that common soldiers uncommonly good at soldiering could leverage that into high society? Because... again, I'm hard-pressed to any time that was true. Even in cases such as the Aztecs, where military prowess was a prized status symbol and was theoretically open to anybody (and everybody received military training!), in practice, actually getting yourself in a position to demonstrate military prowess required elite connections. If we instead restrict ourselves to elites whose power derives from their demonstrated military abilities, well, most such people you can point to could only do what they did because of their connections. Alexander the Great was the son of the guy who conquered all of Greece. Julius Caesar was the scion of one of the most powerful families in Rome, and even after he found himself on the losing side in a civil war, he was able to get plum military and political appointments by attaching himself to the richest man in Rome.
So I again ask, what is this society of which the author speaks? It doesn't match with any empire, ancient, medieval, or modern, of which I am aware.
Galileo was ordered to abandon heliocentrism by the Pope. Ultimately he was sentenced to prison for his views (commuted to house arrest).
He had plenty of gatekeepers.
No, I totally disagree with you and just pointed out the most obvious weakness in your argument.
Not sure how it applies to modern society, as we seem to manage food scarcity much better than previous millennia. And disgruntled elites alone is not enough to start rebellions if they lack popular support.
Is this being said seriously? As someone that once aspired to be a historian this sounds like a massive oversimplification. But maybe this is a hyperbolic rethorical resource. It does sound Toynbeesque though, so maybe the author is taking this from Toynbee's work?
I feel like these examples/arguments/proofs need to be developed a lot more to be consistent, specially for an article hosted in a domain called "overcomingbias.com".
I wonder if the writer is familiar with the class system? Or noticed the democratisation of connection through technology? From a historical perspective, this part at least seems backwards to me. At best, the “now” is irrelevant and there is either no such trend or it has changed more form than quantity.
Made me suspect that the rest is over-thought.
There is already a degree of randomness inherent, since for example students don't all study all the material with exactly the same level of attention to each individual part of material. And some will be tired the day of the exams. Some will have something else on their mind while studying due to their relative being in the hospital. Some will by chance happen to guess right on some difficult task. etc. So you already have randomness.