Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
2017 sure was a year for the history books.
IMO, while James raised a valid question ("how do we know any of this is working, or even can work?"), some of his mistakes were in attempting to answer it (instead of solidly beginning a conversation); attempting to answer it on his own (instead of recruiting a diverse group of backgrounds to answer it); attempting to present his answers as more substantial than the underlying investigation could support (instead of doing a substantive sociological investigation); in the answers he provided (aligned with historical misogynistic orthodoxy); how he presented those answers (in a way not inviting or encouraging questioning); etc. I really, really wonder what would have happened if he'd sought out diverse co-authors.
Ironically, (AFAICT) the entire core issue of diversity in the first place is answering questions from/with only one perspective; and (AFAICT) much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.
So there really wasn't any possible way for him to succeed at anything beyond raising the question, on his own.
If Damore didn't perfectly solve America's diversity problems in one swoop, I guess that's a mark against him -- but what about the people who attacked him rather than helping to realize his vision of a more candid, psychologically safe discussion of corporate diversity policy? People like Sundar Pichai, very rich, comfortable, powerful folks who chose to rhetorically demonize Damore rather than showing literally any courage to critique his points in a nuanced way?
And no, it wasn't an anti-diversity screed. Powerful people said it was, so now people scramble to say how the powerful people were kinda right. They weren't. They lied.
TBH, I didn't pay much attention to what others said about JD's document. I saw there was a controversy, looked at a few things about that controversy, then went to the source and came to my own conclusions. Those were some of my conclusions.
Sure, JD didn't say diversity was bad. He said something along the lines of what I'll paraphrase as "these are the insurmountable blockers to this kind of success for people who aren't like me." Which, like... if you don't see how that's the problem, I can 100% throw some effort trying to communicate to you how that's the problem. Just ask :)
Here's questions: Do you feel like your reply, here, was in any way a critique of my points in a nuanced way? Do you feel like what I've presented of my take on JD's document was a critique of his points in a nuanced way?
In other words, Damore does not view diversity problems as insurmountable blockers. Damore also says of himself that he is less likely to be assertive in ways that are rewarded at Google and explains that efforts to appreciate traits that are better represented among women would also benefit men evincing those traits. In other words, Damore doesn't break things down into "people like me" versus "people not like me". It seems like your summary is completely wrong.
I've noticed that a lot of Damore critics have very strong opinions that seem not well informed by Damore's actual writing. Can you highlight any specific thing from Damore's document that is wrong?
First of all, he stressed that the relevant traits exist in abundance in all groups, as each group has a wide range of people within it. He had a giant graph illustrating this at the outset. He couldn't have been more clear.
Second, he was talking about psychological tendencies and preferences, not a literal inability to do tech work.
I have problems with how Damore expressed himself too FWIW. But I think he was only trying to break an oppressive silence and start a conversation that was being heavily suppressed.
I would have been happy to give him a strong, balanced critique had I been at Google and had I felt it wouldn't get me fired too.
JD says: "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways", and then has the nice overlapping bimodal distribution graph. In my read, this data is foundational to many of his arguments, but there's a fundamental flaw in his application of it, which is: why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any sub-group with a filter process) would be meaningfully predictable by or representative of their biology's bimodal distribution, in the first place?
I've noticed that a lot of Damore proponents never actually engage with the questions I ask them. Can you provide answers to the questions I've already asked?
Edit: Acccctually. I'm noticing that this is exhausting for me (wouldn't be surprised if you felt the same) annnnd I don't predict it'll generate all that much worthwhile buuuut I have an idea.
Rather than hash over something someone else said four years ago - what do you think of workshopping something that you'd like to express, that you think would receive a negative reception "by the orthodoxy", ala JD? Because I'm willing to bet my time and energy on my thesis that "tone" is what sunk his essay, and that I can help someone else express themselves in a way that'll receive a much, much better reception.
(I realize that while I might just be betting my time and energy, you'd be likely to be betting much more, but we're rather limited by this medium haha)
This is an important point and would have been my main intellectual critique of Damore as well. Statistics of large populations don't necessarily generalize to small subpopulations. For this reason Damore's arguments, while worthy of consideration, are quite a bit less than conclusive.
At the same time I think Damore's points were basically insightful and likely to have some truth even within Google. In particular, there's a lot about tech that could be more human, and that women would disproportionately excel at. Why don't we do more of that stuff? Not only would we employ more women productively in tech, everybody would be happier with how tech works in society.
One of the most progressive and "woke" women I know at my work said essentially this to me, unprompted. This was her idea of how to make tech better. Damore's idea! (Of course she'd never admit that it was Damore's but...)
I think that point is true and I think it is the kind of thing where, if Google were considering taking Damore's feedback, they should investigate. Is Google's population of employees noticeably different from the general population? How about the population of people who interview at Google?
I think that the assumption that Google, with 150k (or whatever it was at the time) employees plus candidate employees, roughly approximates population trends is a reasonable starting place for a single author writing up some thoughts. If this were an academic paper we would probably expect the author to consider this at some point. If it's some thoughts the author put together on diversity? Seems like a crazy standard to me.
I'm not sure what questions you've asked that haven't been responded to. I see a couple questions in your parent comments asking whether your take on Damore was nuanced/critical. If that's what you're referring to my answers to those questions are that I feel you badly misrepresent Damore and your commentary on him is short of meaningful.
Regarding your edit - in my view we have a substantive disagreement here, over Damore. I don't see why we would abandon that to discuss other topics.
My position on Damore is that you and others misrepresent Damore in order to gaslight and threaten people who disagree with you. "Unapproved thoughts on diversity? That's an anti-diversity political screed. You are a sexist bigot who will be fired and relentlessly slandered in national media."
By gaslighting I mean that you and others pretend to invite "conversation" but when disagreements happen there is less conversing and more heretic-burning. Damore is a perfect example. Google hosts a diversity class, the class asks for feedback, Damore shares his thoughts on diversity, then he is terminated and renounced in the media, and even here, by you, on Hacker News.
But we know this to be untrue: Damore's questions come up as a response to the question of "why does Google have an unrepresentatively low number of women" (and from that, the implied "how do we fix that"). To assume that Google's employees match broad population trends is to assume the entire conversation moot. In fact, everyone involved agrees that Google doesn't match general population trends, so if you're having to assume that to justify Damore's takes, something has gone wrong somewhere!
> Google hosts a diversity class, the class asks for feedback, Damore shares his thoughts on diversity
For what its worth, this is a pretty serious misrepresentation of things, and if that were the extent of things Damore wouldn't have been fired. As I understand it, he gave the feedback to HR and nothing happened. He proceeded to post the document in larger and larger discussion groups, until he eventually posted it into a really big group, where it was linked to an even bigger group. That's also a big part of what moves this from "feedback" to "manifesto", its disingenuous to call it "feedback on a diversity class" when you're emailing it to a thousand people, nearly none of whom ever took the class. That's pretty far into thesis nailed to the church door territory.
The other thing that puts it into "screed" territory is that it doesn't have a coherent thesis. Is it about gender diversity? Well a lot of it is, but it also has a significant subtheme about political diversity (and trying to psychoanalyze Google as a "left-biased" company), and has a number of potshots at "the left". Why?
Regarding Damore sharing his memo - he shared it in places where the topic was being discussed. He wasn't mailing this to all workers, but posting it in groups that were discussing diversity and asking for feedback. If Damore's memo had reached different conclusions - like say that Google had fewer women because of sexism in education and implicit biases among hiring committees, and he had shared it in the same places, would he have been fired? I think we both know the answer to that.
The gender balance at Google is not representative of the broad population. Presumably there are axes on which Google's demographics match population demographics, but we're talking about one axis where everyone involved agrees that they don't.
> Regarding Damore sharing his memo - he shared it in places where the topic was being discussed. He wasn't mailing this to all workers, but posting it in groups that were discussing diversity and asking for feedback.
Right, and it got basically no response, until he finally posted it in a very large group that wasn't related to diversity. As I understand it, there were months between when he initially wrote and shared it with D&I people and and when he posted it in the big group where it went viral.
> If Damore's memo had reached different conclusions - like say that Google had fewer women because of sexism in education and implicit biases among hiring committees
I'm not clear what your point is. You seem to be arguing that "because one view is acceptable to express in the workplace, we must be allowed to express the opposite view in the workplace" or something. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
My earlier point, which you seemed confused about, is that Damore was fired for disagreeing with the orthodoxy. You seemed and seem to be implying that he shared his opinion in an incorrect. You write that he "finally posted it in a very large group" as if this were some crime. And yet, if he were expressing Google dogma, it wouldn't have been a problem. This illustrates that the problem is not where he posted his feedback but simply what he posted.
Strong disagree that those are the only two possibilities. I hold that most of the issue was how he presented his thoughts.
Regardless, you'd have to prove, first, that "what" and "where" are the only possibilities before your deduction can be solid.
Yeah, that's correct. And IMHO, if Damore had presented just that, I would expect the outcome to be different, although still fraught for other reasons. But he didn't present just that.
> questions
You did end up answering them, although in a different chain! And I appreciate it.
> disagreement
I mean, bluntly, I'm pretty much ready to abandon it, although since others are engaging seems like you're good to go without me :)
> conversation
One issue that seems to come up in these situations - not always, and I don't really know one way the other if it came up in Damore's - was recently demonstrated by Dave Chappelle, when he went to his alma mater saying (paraphrased) "let's have a conversation", and then (IMO) very much didn't, even if people said words to each other. So that happens.
> you and others
So... Like. To the extent that I've invited you to a conversation, that we're then having here - do you feel like we're having a conversation, or do you feel like there's more heretic burning?
Damore's memo was not an anti-diversity screed and I don't believe any reasonable reader could reach that conclusion. As such, I view your comments not as participating in conversation but as a warning light to passersby that they will suffer enduring reputational damage should they express the wrong opinions - a reminder that even if your positions are evidence based, measured, and appropriately expressed you will still face the destruction of your career and reputation for expressing those ideas.
Maybe I am naïve, but I do strongly believe that it is completely possible to express non-orthodox positions in a way that doesn't prompt that kind of backlash. (And to put my money at least somewhat where my mouth is, I'll totally workshop something with anyone reading this if they're wanting to express such a position.)
Going back to OP, if I rephrase "k-complicity" as "don't challenge people with lethal power; instead be silent", then this all becomes "don't talk normally to people about sensitive things; instead be exceptionally kind."
I don't think you would; however you might find you end up with a ratio of both groups that is not 50/50 but rather proportional to the ratio between the areas of both curves that lie above some cutoff.
For a maybe less controversial take, as of 2021 there are far more women than men who do, say, embroidery as a hobby. In that sense "population by hours spent embroidering per year for fun" is two overlapping histograms that skew differently by gender. Big peaks for both groups at zero. However, once we filter our discussion to "people who do embroidery as a hobby", cutting off the majority of both populations (but the supermajority of men), we can't assume that the same pattern holds. The trend might even flip; the average man-who-does-embroidery might do it much more than the average woman-who-does-embroidery, just because they've been so strongly selected for; less committed men never would have picked up that hobby at all.
But we can be pretty sure that the population of men who spend even an hour a year embroidering is much smaller than the population of women who do the same, without making any assumptions that those men who do embroidery have any lesser skill, interest, or dedication.
I'm glad that you like SSC though and I'm sure we could get along and discuss this rationally and fairly. I did not say that you didn't read the SSC article, only that you should look at it to appreciate the relevance to the current conversation.
All that said, I'm not going to hold back on how poorly I think you've understood what Damore said.
> I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article
That definitely reads to me like you saying I didn't read it. Can you take a moment and attempt to understand how that would come across as having that meaning?
The problem with human societies is that they crave faith, they crave an easy mental model of the world and an easy way to tell "us" from them, but science by construction is anti-faith, it's built of questioning everything.
In other words, to the extent that it was true that it was a contribution to an internal discussion, and to the extent that that matters, it had many critical flaws as a contribution to a discussion.
He backed it up with evidence.
It may be that he didn't use all the evidence available and some supports contrary views - I'd be surprised if this weren't the case - but he was engaging in good faith, expecting someone else to present that counter-argument.
I don't mean this to be disrespectful but it appears the majority of your criticism boils down to tone-policing.
No, I get that, and you're not wrong. But...
The more time I spend with people who've been emotionally abused, listening to their experiences, the more I understand how huge a part of abuse is the tone of speech involved in that abuse.
And again, I see that core diversity issue: a lot of us don't start out noticing tone pretty much at all (I definitely didn't!), or with tone having a meaningful impact on our experience of someone else's words, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or doesn't matter, or doesn't have an impact. And the more I notice all that, the happier I am with my words, the better they seem to be, and the more people seem to understand them.
As an example of the same communication with very different tone, so I can talk about it: "Here is what's going on, and here's the evidence that demonstrates it". "Here's what I think, and here's what I saw that led me to think that."
IMHO, the first one has a "tone" of "conclusiveness" (similar to "stop words", from Less Wrong). The only way for me to continue the (notional) conversation is to take an adversarial stance; the "tone" of the sentence is one of concluding the conversation. Contrast with the second one, which as a "tone" of "inclusion"; I'm bringing you along with my experience; and which I find has an inherent effect of inviting people to continue the conversation; the "tone" of the sentence if one of encouraging a continuation of the conversation.
I do think JD was attempting to contribute in good-faith (or, more so than less so; people are complex to begin with). IMHO it was a poor contribution in critical ways, and it's both sad and ironic to me how related those specific failures are to the diversity conversation to which he was attempted to contribute.
Have you asked yourself who was emotionally abused in the Damore affair? Who was misrepresented in a defamatory fashion? Who was publicly denounced and fired?
Frankly, I think it's sociopathic to emphasize kindness so much as a moral principle while being so horrible to the people who fall afoul of a favored ideology. This is the one thing about our current elite that I find the most revolting. Fake, hypocritical promotion of kindness, with immediate and overwhelming viciousness to anyone who dares to disagree with them in the slightest.
Second, I really don't understand how this should be applied to my assertion that tone matters. Can you walk me through that? Or, am I mistaken in thinking that you're saying you disagree that tone matters?
No one disagrees that "tone matters", but issues of social censorship - rapidly adopted taboos - are only dealt with by frank conversation, and tone policing serves only to preclude that.
Yes "tone matters", but that is never pointed out by the side that isn't protecting its hegemony in doing so.
Damore wasn't quite as gentle as he could've been, but the context did not clearly ask for gentleness and invited critique, which he gave.
It's a bit rough expecting engineers to have expert kid gloves on delicate social matters, especially when a large group of people on side are sitting poised and ready to pounce on any disagreement - at which point "tone" is going to be evidence of malice.
Sure, someone still needs to be taught (or miraculously realize on their own) the basic rules, but once known them, I don't think the rules really require any skill to use, even if applying them can take time and effort.
Realizing when to use them, comes back around to OP and K-complicity; "if I'm worried this'll get me in trouble, use the kid gloves.". Or, perhaps: "If this is a sensitive topic, use the kid gloves". Which to me seems pretty straightforward - do you know anyone who doesn't think diversity/etc issues are sensitive?
Here's a few of my "rules":
1. Don't make statements about other people - only ask questions.
2. Say less. Say less than that.
3. Look for opportunities to hand off the "microphone"
Are there rules you've noticed, that are easy to apply, that make talking about hard things easier, or less fraught, for you?
This was the main issue I noticed when I read it. It read like a newbie academic making the classic fallacy of assuming the conclusion, then citing only sources that support that conclusion, while ignoring 1) that those sources are not definitive or conclusive, and 2) the body of research and evidence that may disprove it.
It's much easier to disprove an assertion than prove one true. In fact all of science is based around rigorously disproving hypotheses, simply because Process of Elimination is the most robust and reliable way of surfacing new truths while minimizing false positives.
Back to Damore's paper, if you're going to write a critique of something so controversial in society, you can't just cherry-pick sources that agree with you. A better approach would have been, as you observe, to raise questions about some issues and challenge society to a discussion, but without trying to prime or anchor it with pre-conceived conclusions.
So what if there are minor differences in brain development that have some statistical effect? It doesn't mean that all members of group X are somehow unsuited for a particular career - let alone deserving of less dignity as human beings - but it could explain why fewer of them choose to pursue it. Different people have different talents and inclinations, and membership in a particular group defined by biological factors could well be correlated. But that is irrelevant when it comes to individuals.
In Nazi Germany, one propaganda poster said "You are nothing, your People (Volk) is everything". So in their ideology, the individual by itself doesn't matter, only as part of the group.
But every one of us is different from each other, and membership in some Group (whether defined by ethnicity, gender or anything else) may be a small part of it, but it does not define who we are.
There does seem to me to be an orthodoxy today. One that claims that any underrepresentation of some group must be the result of systemic discrimination, and that it has to be corrected by whatever means necessary. More and more, it tends to see people not as individuals, but again as representing some particular group, with relations between those groups always defined in terms of oppression and victimhood.
This orthodoxy has become the most dominant force on the political "left", but strangely enough, it is supported by some of the largest corporations as well - corporations that also increasingly control our access to information. Are they really just trying to counteract historical injustices? Will the invisible hand of the market guide us into a better society, once the CEOs are no longer straight white cis-males? Or do they, like so many others, just want to be on top of the power dynamics that they frame every human relationship in?
This is how ideologically dominant positions always shore up their hegemony. Every time an enemy of theirs fails to dot every I and cross every T, you can be sure that the regime will magnify their missteps all out of proportion and invent procedures that they failed to follow in order to justify whatever act of savage repression is visited on them.
>much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.
Again, remind me which “perspective” was calling for the other side to be rendered unemployable?
> I really, really wonder what would have happened if he'd sought out diverse co-authors.
I wonder too what would have happened if Jesus sought out diverse co-authors for his teachings.
It feels - based on your presumptions - like you're gearing up to attack them if the source isn't acceptable.
(This may be completely inaccurate and I'm just being hypervigilant)
However, I’m curious because it’s a much nicer-sounding term than the alternatives, seemingly engineered. Given the difficulties Conservatives have had in expressing distrust of newspapers, news stations, etc, I’m wondering if it came from a Conservative source.
Which isn't to say that the discourse has to be logically consistent - it isn't ever going to be. But it should be open to challenges from a logical basis. One of the strengths of western society is that persistently asking "why are we doing [X] it doesn't make sense?" or repeating "there is evidence that approach [Y] gets better results" has often resulted in change. Compared to somewhere like the USSR where the system collapsed before it let people just go out and make their own lives better.
But I think it's also possible to have pro-social taboos, particularly if they're attempts to correct for some indefensible (but maybe cognitively appealing or historically convenient) past error.
So for example, imagine a society that long practiced infanticide against the neurodivergent, and state-backed violence, disenfranchisement, and murder against the merely socially awkward. After intense and often violent social struggle, this society now affords them (us) formal equality, but big gaps in wealth and power remain, and a revanchist minority (with a terrorist fringe) openly wishes for a return of the old ways.
That society might develop strong taboos against "just asking questions" about whether shy people really had it so bad, or whether society should worry about whether they're treated fairly, or whether there isn't some innate biological difference that accounts for their relative lack of success. That would probably be a good thing!
There's some amount of epistemic deadweight loss you would happily accept to be extra guarded against backsliding on the core ethical commitments. You might even come out ahead epistemically, where there would otherwise be strong but subtle cultural biases, pressures of ideological convenience, and cognitive-scientific artifacts around in-groups and out-groups that make _false_ claims about the shy, awkward, or neurodivergent more appealing than the objective facts merit.
Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling with the effects his memo might have had on such a complex environment, or even sticking to pursuing the empirical facts about his claims, he decided to pursue a career as a right-wing micro-celebrity, only engaging with conservative activists and alt-right trolls. And he's been stuck there ever since, with his fellow culture warriors clapping each other on their backs about what brave heretics they are, instead of getting back to building anything interesting.
You compare Twitter vs. Gab or Reddit vs. Voat, and these free speech alternatives get stuck in that alt-right filter bubble precisely because social media moderation has been largely (certainly not entirely) effective at targeting hatred and toxicity. When you only ban a bunch of hateful toxic people from your platform, any competing platform for the banned will be dominated by hateful toxic people, and nobody wants to be a part of that. If Reddit bans cat pictures tomorrow, suddenly there is a huge opportunity open for a competing platform that can appeal to wide mainstream audiences. This dynamic helps keep social media moderation in check.
Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships. If that wasn't the case, then all he would be left with is the path he seems to have taken - align with a camp in the culture wars and seek exposure through identity-based media.
Why would the opportunity to change the organizational system have anything to do with whether there was any truth to what he said?
Just being right doesn't create such opportunities.
It is easy: 1. ban inconvenient views on popular platforms. Start with disgusting views ("think of the children" is a great start), when extend (it helps when there are people who can be offended by anything--encourage it) 2. flood marginal platforms with trolls/provocateurs 3. point at the disgusting content your trolls generated and claim that anybody who uses the uncensored services is disgusting by association.
War is peace.
Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.
Some of the AI-generated art is nice though, so more power to him on that.
The other ones you link are a little boring I grant. But I notice you're filtering away all the jokes and art and focusing on culture war things. Interesting choice there given that I was trying to draw your attention to the other stuff.
He doesn't just do AI art. He does beautiful original art. First tweet after the pinned one. It was quite striking to me, but seems you didn't notice it.
Consider asking yourself who is the one blinkered by obsession with the culture war?
perhaps you missed the part where he was defamed and slandered in international press. his name became shorthand for a crude stereotype of a bigoted tech bro, totally undeservedly, for (very!) gently questioning the policies of a giant publicly-traded company.
How do you think regimes normally deal with dissent? Extreme violence makes for vivid imagery but it’s not typical. Usually, it’s as simple as threatening to fire you from respectable employment and education. This is how the entire Eastern Bloc kept a lid on things.
>Konrád lost his job by order of the political police in July 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse's aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.
Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.
All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?
On a related matter, people actively insisting that you discuss the lightning issue may be consciously trying to do the exact opposite, and get you in trouble. And, of course, if discussing the orthodoxy gets people in trouble, that's a different issue from the orthodoxy itself and you may be more or free to talk about it, or maybe less, it has to be independently evaluated.
Nah. That makes it a forbidden fruit attracting rebellious youth like nothing else. I've seen it happen in communist Poland regarding the Katyń massacre for example. You don't outright say "we don't talk about Katyń here" - that would just make it more popular and indirectly admit you are wrong.
What you actually do is invent your own version of facts that works emotionally just as well (Germans did it), spread it everywhere, and punish people in a way that is reasonable and provides plausible denial. For example my father (very interested in history since he was a kid) repeated a class in high school because he failed history - giving the "wrong" answers on exams.
It's not that they will kill your family - there's no need usually. It's just you're making everything harder for yourself.
If you are pulling a Kolmogorov, it's because you have no attachment at all to the orthodoxy, and you'd prefer nobody to believe on it.
In oppressive regime everything is a tradeoff between morality and convenience, and you need to pick your battles.
The equation of women to men is tacked onto the inequality justification like an epicycle. It has to be seen in that context.
All of the people inside Google politicking over wages should be viewed a kind of organized conspiracy to exclude outsiders from the golden goose's eggs. An economic narrative says wages are being traded for labor, but that's not how anything works operationally.
Maybe SSC is long because it's putting forth complex ideas. Ideas that some readers don't want to take the time to understand.
For those who want a few sentences they can chuck into one of the pre-existing boxes they formed at school, I agree SSC isn't very convenient for that.
I thought the article made interesting points, but could have done so far more succinctly. By comparison, when I read Richard Stallman's stuff, I don't always agree with it, but I'm usually impressed by how concisely he is able to say things. SSC is too often the opposite.
Subjective feelings aside, it would be more interesting to give an example of an author who addresses the topics Scott addresses at a similar level of insight and manages to do so more concisely. I don't think Stallman is much of an example of that.
Good writing is not some universal fungible. It really does depend on what you're trying to say. And there are basically no other writers I can think of who are trying to model a way of thinking like Scott.
An analogy: we're mostly experienced programmers here, so we can usually understand a quick description of a programming concept even if it's new to us. A programming book for beginners might have to spend much longer getting the same idea across. Perhaps "Scott's way of doing things from scratch" is like that. But once you've read a few of those essays, you're no longer a beginner, so you'd rather have the quick version.
More than once I've gotten the impression that people who criticize Scott for verbosity assume he's blah blah blahing about stuff they already understand, when in reality he's thinking a couple levels deeper than they're accustomed to from a blog.
Ok, that is a reasonable distillation. And you just said it in one sentence. Why does it take Scott 20 pages?
Scott knows that people will blithely accept his thesis as obvious... until the moment it matters most, when there is social pressure to accept something untrue. He wants you to feel the price you'll pay if you cave.
Most people are not interested in reading a Wiki article on an abstract topic, and want to be taken along for the ride - including why it's worth reading the article.
He is an excellent writer for getting hundreds of thousands of people to want to know about Kolmogorov complicity in a useful way.
But if it's just nostalgia, then I agree. Substack is slower, harder to navigate, and less Aesthetic.
I don’t get that with substack.