courtf

Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society.

We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.

Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.

So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.

> The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.

That's not really what I'm saying. The ways in which society hands out wealth and power today are not necessarily the ways in which it always has or always will. What specific traits lend one toward success are a bit subjective and take different forms at different times and places. So if right now, some individual cannot succeed as easily as another, those tables may very well turn at some point in the future.

To the degree that we justify whoever is being rewarded now, because they are smart/resilient/beautiful (by current standards) or whatever allows them to succeed, we must also acknowledge that under different circumstances it may very well be that we would be congratulating someone else for completely different justifying reasons. By the same token, if someone is not rewarded by society, we should resist the urge to justify their lack of success in terms of some intrinsic deficiency, when indeed they very well may have succeeded with the same traits in a different version of society. The arbitrary nature of how society chooses to reward individuals clashes with attempts to justify the status quo, which would much prefer to describe outcomes as an inevitable consequence of various conditions, like genetics, that can be used to explain why some are wealthy/powerful and others destitute.

It is this framing that I find to be morally suspect, because it tries to justify the current social hierarchy in absolute terms, when the reality is a bit more complex and subject to the prevailing whims of the times we live in.

> If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.

Agreed. I only want to acknowledge that these are but a few of the many ways society can choose to value its individual members. The genetics, or upbringing, or nutrition, or behaviors of those who have achieved success are not predictive of obtaining wealth or power in all versions of society, past and present, and so should not necessarily be treated as more important or superior in any universal way.

It only becomes a moral issue if someone who does not happen to stand out along one if the axes that is currently rewarded by society ends up suffering significantly as a result and cannot find ways to succeed in life. Individuals may possess a great many valuable traits that are worth encouraging but simply aren't rewarded as well when it comes time to divvy up the loot. Sort of like being an essential worker during Covid who holds the line against a pandemic to keep society functioning but can't afford to raise a family in the income from that ostensibly important job.

Comparing Bezos to Galileo, what a joke.

Back then an equivalent article would have targeted the church, and its author probably would have suffered greatly for doing so, sort of like our friend Galileo... Your obsequiousness, especially pathetic in this age when the stakes are so much lower, would have spared you from facing any similar repercussions I'm sure.

It reads like a religious sermon intended to ease the fragile consciences of a rapidly dwindling elite, jumping at shadows while they barricade themselves ever further into self-reinforcing fantasy. Complete and utter detachment from reality, complete with an imaginary foe in the form of "degrowthers," who supposedly exist and spend their days relentlessly banging at the gates of prosperity with intent to needlessly sack the city on the hill. Economics as a discipline has always been abused to justify the unjustifiable, but here it seems to be employed purely to defend the psychological safety of the most privileged, who cannot even bear to observe the destructive results of their lifestyles from a safe distance. The violence committed all around them, in their name, and the cries of anguish that result are easily brushed aside in service to maintaining the desperate illusion that cause and effect don't exist.

I like the take home tests myself. Whiteboarding and brain teasers are not outside my experience (I did mathletics stuff as a child) but doing them out loud in front of a hostile audience is not a strength of mine. The best work I have done has been largely composed of private problem solving, syncing up with peers only once I was sure I knew the topology of the problem and perhaps had run a few experiments.

It doesn't really take long to get to the point where talking about a problem with others can be helpful, less than a day most times, but starting off a new problem with verbal spitballing with peers has not been all that useful in my work. For me to really learn something I need to hold it in my hands/code editor and get to know the ins and outs, build up intuition so that I can speak about it accurately. Jumping into unknown problems in an interview by standing up at a whiteboard talking just seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. Maybe the interviewer wants to see my "thought process," whatever that means, but what does it really matter if I can get to a good solution without vocalizing every step along the way?

I often go down the wrong paths when problem solving, if only to traverse them for my own edification. If I can make 10 mistakes or false starts in a row and still arrive at a decent solution as quickly as anyone else, what does it matter in the end? I also tend to write code out of order. I might jump around between concepts and write disparate sections of a solution without linking them back right away, following my intuition without trying to enforce order on everything I do. No one has ever complained about my speed or code cleanliness/clarity, quite the opposite in fact. Yet when I am put under the microscope, these behaviors inevitably stand out to the interviewer as cause for concern.

Despite a strong track record of building numerous successful systems and apps, many solving "serious" problems that go beyond what can be assessed in an interview, on tiny teams where I shouldered large amounts responsibility, if I can't present my thoughts in a coherent, structured way, in the moment I am thinking them, I am bound to catch flak from the interviewer. So I often feel I must alter my behavior, go slower and try to only display ordered thinking, but this does not play to my strengths. Frustration and stage fright further degrade my performance. So the take home test is much appreciated for people like me. I am happy to be left to my own devices when starting a problem, and happy to talk with peers once I have gotten myself oriented, but the initial process I use does not lend itself well to interrogation.

It would be easier to listen to concerns about creeping wokeness if the alleged dangers were actually different and worse than the problems that already exist. In many states people are fired from their jobs for not being conservative, for being lgbt etc. It happens with full knowledge of the state and is completely legal; the media doesn't even bother trying to follow up. Worse than that: our prison system, our overseas military belligerence etc etc. Wokeness? Add it to the list I guess, but the only reason some people spend so much time screeching about it is because they have been lucky to avoid getting nailed by one of the many other long-lived dangers that continue to stalk our society.

It's human nature to ignore the excesses of your own tribe and focus on problems originating across the border, but when it's just pure hypocrisy (another feature of human nature) it's hard to really give a shit. If we were discussing an asteroid hurtling toward the planet I'd like to think we could reach some kind of rough consensus that it is indeed an imminent threat, although my confidence in even this contrived scenario playing out as one might hope has been significantly shaken the more time I spend around large groups of humans. When it comes to trying to mediate the culture war, while real injustices occur on both sides and should punished/prevented, the fact remains that justice is often slow or absent for many, if not most. The truly powerful in our society are conveniently immune from the petty struggles, happy to watch the little people tear each other apart over skin color or religion or anything at all.

It is tragic how we seem to be unable to enjoy peace and prosperity. Blame it on politics, or the media, or perhaps just the national character, but Americans are a restless bunch. Prone to paranoia and rebellion, our reflex is to respond aggressively to perceived threats, and we can be tricked into rattling our sabres over any old thing these days.

Maybe rising authoritarianism is simply the natural outgrowth of overusing this impulse. The population, exhausted by the constant blaring of sirens over increasingly esoteric threats, would rather hand over the task of vigilance to some authority so they can finally catch some shut-eye.

Thanks for these names! I will have to look into them.

Rebirth is a tricky one for me because it just seems too fantastical, but then many things about our world and our selves remain inexplicable, if not outright fantastical themselves.

Rebirth also might not be a true continuation of our individual consciousness, but a repackaging of sorts.

I try to square these ideas with the physical world we inhabit, where our consciousness is very much affected by the environment and the state of our bodies and minds. It seems hard to believe in a soul (or anything ineffable that is a part of us lasting beyond death) in the traditional sense, when we are so malleable and our experiences so subjective. A tweak to my brain chemistry can drastically alter my behavior etc.

So if I still want to think about rebirth, I feel I must conclude that whatever can survive death must be quite a bit more abstract than the consciousness I am familiar with.

That seems reasonable to me, emphasis on "potential."

Whether that potentiality can be realized here on earth, in this life, is where I would start to quibble.

It's always a bit fraught to bring up the upsides of irrationality and potentially dangerous/destructive emotions and impulses. Bukowski didn't win a lot of popularity contests. I agree with what you've said here though.

We may be abstracting the conversation beyond the limits of what is appropriate in the workplace here, but I tend to think the workplace should and could be a more relaxed space if we were more patient with the negative emotions of others. At least for me, that starts with recognizing my own emotional states, and not always being afraid to experience them authentically.

> It's important not to judge the world by its effect on your internal state. The world isn't party to your internal state, although you walk around with an illusion of transparency. People are doing things for their own reasons, not for yours.

Sure, I agree. This isn't a contradiction with my post.

> Referring to the Buddha in order to make emotional regulation seem like an unachievable perfection is not really a good support, because the argument you're making is that we shouldn't always try to control our irrational emotions, not that we sometimes fail to control our irrational emotions, even when we try.

One core message of Buddhism is that we fundamentally cannot control ourselves, even when we try. You are correct that I am saying we shouldn't always try, and I stand by that, but the idea is that it isn't actually possible to achieve. Buddha is indeed an unachievable perfection, and supports my point because trying is truly futile in the end.

That is not to say we should always act however we want and treat others terribly for our own amusement, just that we are not actually in control. We can try to steer the elephant, and may have some success with that on occasion, but complete control is not possible. What I am saying, is that it's ok to let the elephant do what it wants sometimes, because ultimately it's going to do that a lot of the time anyway.

> Getting away from billions of years of reaction is the reason why we have civilization.

How would you say that experiment is going? Civilization isn't more powerful than evolution is what I would say, and we have seen a lot of man's worst impulses expressed with greater force than ever during the modern period. We haven't escaped evolution yet.

> It's a little more cowardly to interpret the world in terms of how it makes you feel rather than the complicated, messy problem of navigating the world in terms of how it may be making everyone feel.

Not sure how this relates to what I said. Sounds like you just wanted to turn my words around. I never said anything about substituting personal feelings for the act of being empathetic with others, and the topic is about not taking things personally, so this is a new goalpost. Nonetheless, I don't disagree. Part of having empathy for others is not judging their behavior from a position of assumed superiority.

Counterpoint: enlightenment is overrated and life is meant to be taken personally. In some senses, it is a bit cowardly to run away from the current moment we live in by stepping back and viewing the big picture too often. "Negative" emotions and experiences are valid parts of life. Anger, anxiety, fear etc are all part of being a human being and have evolved over billions of years to reach their current forms. We may not always enjoy these parts of life, but avoiding them completely would mean stunting ourselves.

Learning to observe and not react to the complex interplay of emotional states that constantly dance across our consciousness is a powerful tool, but you cannot survive inside the epiphany. We all must descend back into the messy day-to-day needs of maintaining our bodies, no one is actually the Buddha. I think we should all have more patience with inability to behave appropriately under all circumstances, because we will all fall short of grace.

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

What is the most impressive programming feat PG ever accomplished? A Lisp dialect maybe?

I sort of get the sense that he doesn't realize how many crazy talented (but not famous) programmers there are out there. He's got a microphone and is determined to keep using it to tell us how great his ideas are, but the audience has gotten a lot more discerning since the 90s when producing a CRUD app in Lisp could still be considered a feat.

I don't really think you or Terry knows what hard work even looks like. We hold this conversation about personal advancement from positions of extreme privilege while billions live without running water. If you want to limit your view to only those of us with access to all the delights of modern society (and none of its externalities) I'm sure you can find plenty of evidence for the meritocracy.

You can personally thank my grandparents, all four laying dead in their graves before the age of 60, for your opportunity to "work hard" in America.