rhodri

> you may have experienced

no amount of good parenting can protect us from real badness

I am a software engineer, and also a luddite. technology destroys jobs. the question is whether that destruction liberates or oppresses. do we fire some workers and overwork others, or find ways to reduce and share the burden and benefits of labour?

> When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surprised that they're treated like children.

and does punishing children cause them to behave better?

> we sure don't patronize them, think them any less, or dismiss their and so many other people's genuine concerns be it immigration, or crime, or job security

great! perhaps you have been raised well and have managed to recover from emotional trauma you may have experienced in life so far. some people unfortunately have not been so lucky.

> Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.

the problem is that we are all chasing that buck, rather than imagining what that buck could do

> What if there were simply richer tools for users to rate things?

they would be abused by those with underdeveloped empathy to marginalise views that threatened them. emotional problems require emotional solutions.

one point is that most of SV's technology is in the hands of an elite of techno-libertarians and super-rich VCs with various chips on various shoulders.

they have no interest in spreading technology's monetary or possible systemic benefits to the entire population, and indeed a direct interest in accumulating and then exercising political power.

it's a real problem that cannot be explained away through a lack of education, as many over-educated, under-employed and disempowered young (and old!) people directly experience day to day. open-source software and education are steamrollered by the directed power of hierarchy.

nicely written. reconciliation is not like the movies, it requires from us steadfastness and courage in the face of criticism and outright character assasination.

as engineers we spend a lot of time dismissing the ethical or systemic consequences of our work in favour of concentrating on hard problems with deterministic solutions. humanity is more than that, reality is more than that.

there is real, legitimate anger, grief and confusion in the population. if we want to put technology to work for the people, we need to listen to them (us) in all their (our) messy, contradictory beauty/ugliness/realness.

grieving is a process that starts with denial and ends with acceptance.

drawing attention to a deep and abiding ideology here: economics often presents itself as a science describing a universal and indeed physical phenomenon. remember that "the market" as we it is not only an ideal model but a very limited one that vehemently does not apply to most of the world, both inside and outside of California.

"Institutions are organisations or patterns of behaviour built by societies to help solve social or economic problems which the law or private markets cannot fully address."

institutions have existed long before the rule of law, or the existence of private markets.

what he does get right is the fallacy of "ceteris paribus" or "all else remaining equal" that is used in most economic arguments with their limited scope.

Yarn came out this month

we're certainly capable of creating the most complex models – what's interesting about this very human tendency is that the models begin to take on a reality of their own, replacing our actual observations.

we can see this most clearly in our politicians' insistence on their particular model of the economy as their priority, rather than the actual concerns of the citizens they are responsible to.

good observation. makes me think also about the tendency of computers and the internet to actually slow us down in our work!

their general-purpose nature means that our minds take on the additional complexity of context switching as we use our tools for multiple simultaneous tasks, and indeed this generality means that they can be quickly adapted to new contexts. contrast this to specialist tools which, once learned, provide significant increases in efficiency in the specific context to which they have been adapted (including the benefits of increased concentration owing to lack of distraction!) but cannot always be re-engineered easily to suit new contexts.

technology has no purpose. it is a natural phenomenon that arises without any in-built ethics or direction. technology can manifest as a tool (to amplify human potential) or a machine (to replace human labour). the effect of a technology can be influenced broadly, for example by who owns and promotes a technology (open-source vs proprietary models) and which groups in society it is put to use to benefit.

Death makes space for new life, and new strategies. It's a key part of the evolutionary process, and thus of life itself. Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.

not sure why this has been downvoted, it's important to consider divination systems as fundamentally about exploring the psyche and its parameter space (which Jung – one of the fathers of psychology – characterised as archetypes)