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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#691

Post by jplusequalt »

warkdarrior wrote: post #568
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our case I think late stage capitalism is what we are calling the combination of extremely low interest rates, low tax rates on the super-rich, and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The rich get richer, the middle class gets gutted, and nobody is incentivized to care any more.

> extremely low interest rates Citation needed. The current mortgage rate is 6.8% for 30 years. > a lack of antitrust enforcement Citation needed. Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple are all in court for antitrust cases.

>in court for cases

Being brought to court is not the same as being brought to justice. Look at our president, he's been to court a lot--been indicted even--and he's still in the fucking oval office. These companies will get a slap on the wrist and nothing will change.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#692

Post by tim333 »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #158
0_____0 wrote: post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first wo…

The original second world was a bit like that in that it used to refer to the soviet and socialist countries. Looked like the west but not quite right.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#693

Post by ponector »

immibis wrote: post #509
superdude12 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.

Can you list several significant pieces of technology created since the iPhone?

Cheap high-speed FPV killer drones with thermal camera and auto-aim.

Btw there hardly was a new technology in iPhone at the time of the launch.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#694

Post by throwaway5028 »

Datapoint from a late-twenties Ph.D. student in AI:

During my formative years studying pure math, I learned that the hard work of _caring to understand_ is rewarded---for example, by your internal sense of beauty and by the enthusiasm of other mathematicians.

For my Ph.D. I decided to try bringing the mathematical toolbox to the field of artificial intelligence, which seemed to be facing some interesting problems. Overall, the message I've received loud and clear is that understanding is _not rewarded_ in this field, and actually discouraged.

The work of an outwardly successful machine learning scientist is to make incremental improvements to well-established methods and package the results in easily marketable papers. Learning about and using previous work is rewarded to the extent that it improves marketability (for example, by improving Greek alphabet or \displaymath density) but is discouraged if standing on the shoulders of giants in this way renders the paper incomprehensible to a goldfish with a knowledge of high school algebra.

I think it's clear that our current paradigm on deep learning is struggling to make scientific progress. The hard work of reshaping a paradigm must involve looking back and _caring_ about the perspectives that have been developed over the last 60-odd years. Learning other points of view is hard work, but it's what you're supposed to do as a scientist! Unfortunately, it's hard to overstate how little people care about anything beyond their diminutive research niche. (I had one colleague who said their work hasn't been intellectually demanding ever since LLMs got good at writing pytorch code and others who seem to feel that LLMs are "experts on math.") Every day I look at my own research group and the boatload of "top conference papers" and feel sad and angry that we call this science.

It's certainly poetic that LLMs---the emblem of people who don't care---is backed by a "research community" that, on average, doesn't know what it means to care about science.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#695

Post by tim333 »

deathanatos wrote: post #383
kittikitti wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain the meaning of kvetching and where it comes from?

Just Google it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch > To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly. I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully. It's a bit of a reg…

And before that yiddish / jewish.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#696

Post by Balgair »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #642
Balgair wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take: "in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22n…

This is the most childish take ever.

thanks

Re: The Who Cares Era

#697

Post by danans »

0_____0 wrote: post #418
danans wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans. It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standar…

In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.

> the burden of a shirking employee

Who says they are shirking? Perhaps they are working really efficiently, and doing their job in 1/4 the time.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#698

Post by foobarchu »

jmalicki wrote: post #189
angry_moose wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my experience it always starts at the company level. I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.

The effort you could put in would be to switch companies

Thats kind of part of the problem, though. Yes, switching jobs constantly is a solid path to higher wages in fields like tech (at least it was before this year, some of the most competent people I know are struggling to change jobs), but in my experience that act tends to reduce ones number of "give a damns".

Re: The Who Cares Era

#699

Post by Ray20 »

komali2 wrote: post #604
Ray20 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation. If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness an…

To clarify, are you suggesting capitalism doesn't select for cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness? If so I find that remarkable. If I were to guess at what true universal human values were, I'd take a look at history, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness.…

>you suggesting capitalism doesn't select for cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness?

Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.

>The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness.

Not universlly, and that's the problem. And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.

>I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism

For the purposes of the discussion, I am even ready to agree with this to a certain extent. It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.

>The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it

The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker. Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.

>the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying.

That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism

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