Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up. We seek positive attributes first before resorting to negative, and only in aggregate. It's a local-first favouring tactic. local networks (maybe small-world) are maybe more stabilized by the up-rounding.

Or maybe it's also more about calibration over time.

Most of our social technology is about not being shitty to one another at scale (or maybe "in massive sequence"), so this seems aligned with my understanding of the world. The work of progress is to "not be shitty" at increasing scale (of population, idea complexity, levels of abstraction), and we build institutions that mostly try to do that. Though I think digital has kinda failed on that mission lately, which is another conversation

Seems kinda nice and adaptive and optimistic even. Though yes, downsides in a society that lives at scale, if not mitigated by process or social/digital tech.

It seems like maybe abstraction runs contrary to the concept of not being shitty, because while abstraction is meant to neutrally essentialize people, as often as not, the abstraction process is used to identify aberrations for individual treatment, rather than to streamline creating individual treatments for all.

Put another way, we typically tend to sort first for assholes, then maybe sort for other things later.

Ah interesting. I guess when I think of abstraction, I think of a boundary over which complexity is reduced, and therefore information is lost. My more personal sense is that a ton of human misery comes from poorly chosen abstraction. Or abstraction where there should be none.

The idea of "the tyranny of the database" was where I first encountered this:

> At a higher, more semantic level, a subtle distortion in how we perceive reality took hold: things that were hard to represent in databases became alternately devalued and fetishized. [...] Once in awhile a technical counter-current would take hold and try to push back on the tyranny of the database, but the general trend held firm: if it does not fit in the database, it does not exist.

> You may not think you know this world of databases, but you live in it. [...] Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent.

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-....

Or: people who are hiring their future co-workers sort for people who will not make their life hell(or their co-workers life hell), and then evaluate for actual expertise.

>Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up.

Put it another way: we're shallow, primitive, creatures.

If that's true then I would put even less stock into these just-so stories.

Heh I like the sentiment, but this feels to me a little bit odd, like saying "evolution is a cold ruthless inhumane process". There is no human (the root of all things "humane") without the evolution being critiqued by the very human values it made possible :)

What you're calling "primitive" (perhaps with judgement) is part of the system that perpetuates our collective socio-biological process in poorly understood ways.

For all we know, liking ppl until we're at scale is highly adaptive (in an information-theoretic sense) for sociality as a whole, and not some broken primitivity :)

Well, evolution doesn't care anyway if there's a human - much less a humane human, it's indeed a "cold ruthless inhumane process". Evolutionarily speaking we could be replaced by cockroaches in a heartbeat if the conditions arise

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