hammerzeit

If you see a piece in the NYT that's making fun of those weird tech nerds, odds are high it's in the styles section. Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker, took over the section last year, and since then there's been a rash of pieces akin to this one. Not exactly hit pieces but it's hard to miss the wry condescension throughout.

Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true:

1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.

2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.

My spouse is a doctor as well, and I've also observed the issues the author discusses. I don't think your read of the causes here is correct.

It's worth reading more about the history of medicine to truly understand what's going on here -- the culture of abusive overwork in American medicine goes at the very least back to Osler and the invention of the modern residency program, and has as much to do with cocaine than any corporate malfeasance. Certainly hospitals and the medical industry profit from this culture, but they hardly created it.

Also, on what basis do you say that longer hours with fewer tradeoffs don't improve patient outcomes? You frame it as though it's obvious but is there any evidence to back that up? My wife and most other doctors I know all claim they'd rather have longer hours with fewer handoffs.

I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.

We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.

I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.

But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.

Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.

What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.

This is a really interesting question to ask, but survey-based responses only tells us how venture capitalists think they make decisions. Obviously this is a secretive industry but I think the far more interesting question to answer is around revealed preferences rather than self-assessment.

This is a problem we've managed to solve for dozens of other dietary preferences, from kosher status to gluten-free, without insisting on mandatory labeling. Why is GMO so special?

It's hard to believe the sincerity of your claim, given that you can reasonably infer anything not advertising itself as "non-GMO" contains GMO.

This article, and its reflection on the creative process, on the insecurities felt by those who take part in it, on the pain of how long it takes to get anything done resonated very strongly with me. I think there's a lot to learn here for those of us in the business of creating software or businesses.

It's also written by one of my personal heroes, Robert Caro.

I have a young child at home. He eats bamba, peanut butter, and a worrying amount of New York City dirt.

That said, this is such a dangerous article, and I'm honestly surprised the NYT published it. It's written by a non-scientist making a "common sense" claim, and it even closes with a paragraph-long variation on the "how much can we really trust science anyways?" claim.

My understanding is that there has been a single study, done among a largely homogenous population, that has indicated Bamba's benefit. Maybe Bamba does help inoculate against peanut allergies -- I think it's plausible, even likely. But it's certainly not anything approaching scientific consensus, the author is not a scientist of any variety, and I think this article has a real danger to mislead.

100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well-defined that everybody has a consistent definition of it, meaning you will inevitably have a situation where 2 people are doing directly contradictory things in the name of the company culture. The whole situation at GitHub from a few years ago with a founder's wife running reckless is a perfect example of this.

Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit Centrifuges.

There's already an internet-scale mechanism to avoid seeing ads while ensuring that publishers are compensated for the content they're creating -- it's the very ad exchanges that show us all the terrible ads we see. All you'd need to do is set up a pixel retargeting yourself, match it against the exchanges, and then bid an uncapped amount against it while displaying a blank creative.

Admittedly this won't block 100% of ads, closer to 50-60%, although it would most likely block all of the worst offenders. Likely net cost would be in the $1-$3/day range, distributed amongst the sites you patronize. And, again, all of the infrastructure to do this already exists. You wouldn't need to do deals with publishers or anything like that.

I've always wondered why nobody's created this yet; I've always assumed it's because people using ad blockers would not actually pay for an ad-free experience. Other ideas?