Viewing profile — planet-and-halo

Yep, it's definitely not a U.S. only issue. I agree, it strikes me as basically a consequence of media.

Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for poli…

Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quo…

I'd actually be curious to see an analysis of this. All of my experience suggests that there is indeed a significant difference in employee quality and a substantial cost imposed b…

If you think about this from a game theoretic perspective, it makes business sense to "defect" first (make this offer to employees). If all firms could be trusted to cooperate, the…

Sorry to be that guy, but it's funny to me Seneca identified this exact thing thousands of years ago. He said something like, we must not take on tasks which are not so much huge a…

I think the biggest place where it's really necessary is integration points. Within your system it's reasonable to try to define exceptions out of existence. Once you start accepti…

I did a quick search for the article "How to Ruin Motivation With Pay" but it's behind a paywall. The book "Punished By Rewards" has a lot of references if you're interested.

The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less…

I was using the word "animal" in the sense of "non-human." The point is that non-human intelligence is particularly difficult and complicated for us to discuss, because no member o…

Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing i…

Not OP, but I imagine it's something like "precision" vs. "how often correct." So you can be extremely precise quickly, but not all the time. Or you can be extremely precise all th…

Appreciate the recs. Thanks very much for taking the time to write a detailed response.

Any recommended reading? I've bought a few things in that vein but I'm self-taught and always looking to improve on the ops/perf side.

Fair point, but it's a useful shorthand for "assembles a vast profile via collection of your data in an effort to manipulate your behavior." Part of Zuboff's book is about this ver…

Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free a…

I'd rather be flagged as someone who gives a shit about privacy and autonomy than passively accept the further degradation of those things. If we all treat this as a tragedy-of-the…

This is my approach. If sovereign governments don't want to regulate in my interests and protect me from surveillance capitalism, I'm simply going to take every route I can find to…

That isn't a question I can answer in a short post, but a couple quick hits: 1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives. 2. The postgrad environment is a m…

Not exactly what you're looking for, but I started in Philosophy and could have minored, but I finished my degree in History. Quick thoughts: 1. I gave my siblings the advice after…

The emphasis on literature is definitely part of the problem. I was lucky enough to take an AP English Language class my senior year of high school, where the focus was on short es…

Whenever people say that, I feel a little bad because I suspect their education failed them. But I also think of this Otto von Bismarck quote: "Fools learn from experience. I prefe…

You counterexample would invalidate the idea that there is a direct causal mechanism between reading and pro-social behavior, but I don't think anyone is arguing that. Some anti-so…

This exact phenomenon is discussed in "Punished by Rewards." It's probably one of the best possible ways to train kids that reading is no fun, of no benefit to them, and should onl…

Yep. And those people need to be empowered and listened to enough to affect the hiring process. No great engineer I've ever met said "put them through 20 hours of leetcode, that'll…