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?
Technology also creates jobs. I think what you are missing here is that technology is neutral to human ambitions. Technology doesn't care--it could empower us, destroy us, whatever. Technology does not care about human destiny.
it never did for me. in fact i can remember many times in which i deliberately did whatever angered my parents again and again, just to piss them off more, to the point of them crying and having a near-mental breakdown (immigrant parents).
they literally could not process the reality of their child not following their authority 100%, because they grew up in a society in which that was the unquestioned norm.
eventually i conditioned them into not punishing me ever again, because they knew that punishment would beget more of the same unwanted behavior.
part of the reason i don't want kids. i wouldn't know how to handle the rebellion.
Sometimes you need a carrot, and sometimes you need a stick. I tend to think the stick worked better at shaping my behavior as a child, but you can't do that anymore.
> 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.
> the problem is that we are all chasing that buck, rather than imagining what that buck could do
So....tell everyone to stop being self interested?
> emotional problems require emotional solutions.
What emotional solution do you propose? Send everyone to therapy?
I see a dramatic difference in sites that have sophisticated moderation tools, such as Quora, vs those that don't, for instance YouTube. I just think they should go further.
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.
Calling ceteris paribus a fallacy is like objecting to the notion of integers because nature often presents quantitative problems involving things that are neither uniform not discrete; you may as well object to someone counting on their fingers because 'in reality they're all attached to the same hand, man.'
Ceteris paribus is a technique for decomposing complex problems into simpler elementary ones, not an assertion about underlying economic realities. It's employed most commonly in microeconomics, which works fabulously, in much the same way as classical mechanics continues to work fabulously for the vast majority of earthbound practical problems. Macroeconomics is beset by problems because our understanding of social and organizations structures is seriously incomplete, in much the same fashion as ants probably have extreme difficulty in forming ideas about the collective behavior of ant colonies.
Don't forget that next month someone will pull down his trivial package doing uppercase or something and the whole stack (of cards) will come crashing down.
Lately there was some great post here on hn mocking all that js framework lunacy.
But i guess that joke is old now as well...
But seriously does someone use this to do proper work?
And if so does this person expect this to be maintainable in the near future?
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.
If that were so, "left" and "right" would reflect similar inclinations across polities and evolutionarily-short time periods.
They don't.
Or at least, I'd be highly amused to see someone attempt to square the Trump platform with Burkean thought, and that's a relatively smallish difference, both evolutionarily and intellectually speaking, compared to others.
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.
To be honest, it's the fault of current UX trends of making everything so dumb that people can be "proficient" in a program within first few seconds of seeing it for the first time. General-purpose computer is perfectly able to switch between many highly-specialized tools on the fly. It's just that powerful, efficient tools are rarely built nowadays - they've been replaced by pretty looking toys that sell fast.
