946 karma · joined December 29, 2017
A few thoughts:
* His view of UFOs is very unscientific and sensationalist
* His view of Cryptocurrency has always been extremely credulous and I never saw him confront the failures and problems honestly (IIRC he loved SBF)
* His tendency to post very cryptic items ("Straussian") that you would only understand if you've been following him religiously for years is very frustrating
I do think his fast grants program is a pretty cool idea though.
At first I was deeply impressed and considered him someone who was unafraid to confront challenging issues with thoughtful analysis.
Now I see him as a Malcolm Gladwell style entertainer.
Anybody thinking of taking him too seriously should do some meta-research of their own before spending a lot of time on his ideas.
Kripke was truly a brilliant philosopher.
I think it’s very likely that modern designers could come up with some really good ideas that would better convey the danger than anything presented on the wiki page.
I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to come up with a good approach…I’m arguing that the approaches presented seem unserious about achieving the stated purpose.
Take the “forbidding blocks” concept. It honestly reads like something from a low budget sci-fi horror movie: “A space crew lands on planet, finds the crumbling remains of forbidding blocks. One crew member warns that the blocks look forbidding. The warning is ignored and bad things happen.”
And what I just described is strikingly similar to the plot of the Alien series movie Prometheus :) [0]
The space crew disturbs the Alien bio weapon facility and unleashes a proto-Alien.
So again, my “complaint” (so to speak) is that the wiki article makes it sound like the amount of effort spent here was comparable to the effort spent on a mediocre sci-fi film script. It just doesn’t seem to me like a truly studious attempt at a framework to warn future generations.
I think I would probably say that it’s a serious attempt at making the case for the need for such a framework though. The people who did the work are clearly very intelligent people but some of the ideas presented just seem so fantastical.
For instance “The plans included a suggestion that the building be designed so as to create a ‘dissonant and mournful’ whistling sound when wind blew through it, acting as a Level I message.”
Would this whistling still even work right after 1000 years of weather and crumbling? Would a future culture have the same sense of dissonance and mournfulness that we have?
Much of it seems so rooted in the present for something intended to be so timeless.
This post is an attempt not to argue either side of that debate but to look at the deeper intentions of the message.
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I’ve always found this message chilling and effective at communicating the dangers of radioactivity but I have always been very skeptical that it was truly designed to sound that way to some future post-apocalyptic society.
Instead I believe that this is a “political” message specifically intended for the current day reader.
While the message has a form that is simple and repetitive as though intended to be easy to understand or translate for some future post-knowledge society, I’m also skeptical that it actually serves that function well.
There’s no evidence ever given beyond “experts came up with this” that the message would work. (Could there ever be evidence of something so unknowable as the capabilities of some far future society?)
I’m left to conclude that the message is a combination of conscience salving and propaganda.
To the people that want to feel as though a framework has been created that guards future generations against the danger of a waste facility they can plausibly claim they have it figured out.
To the people that are horrified by the specter of nuclear waste they have a chilling message they can point to that communicates their modern day fears and prescriptions, cleverly hidden in something supposedly intended for future generations.
In short, it’s a brilliantly written piece of poetry/prose that, in my opinion, has almost nothing to do with its stated purpose.
"Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job."
I do see people broaden the meaning of this term to mean almost anything that women do above and beyond a fair split of work, but I think your argument would be clearer if you just to it as the unequal divide of "housework" or some other term.
I'd guess that about 1/10th of the church donation ends up being spent on what most people would call charity and the other 9/10ths gets spent on ministry.
So I'm therefore giving about 1% of my income to "charity" but probably getting credit for 5.5% because Brooks (and others) lump that ministry giving into the figure.
Obviously I believe that that ministry giving is super important because I'm very religious, but I think that using ministry giving to claim that religious people are more compassionate is silly.
Christianity isn't a contest about who's nicer, and as a Christian I do not want to be compared to some "other" who isn't as "compassionate" according to Brooks or anybody.
This book is very likely just conservative propaganda that drives motivated reasoning.
Some quick examples:
Luckily I moved very quickly from that question to "my" answer which was "no" and mirrors your thought:
> If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies on Amazon, perhaps it’s time to face the music and realize that writing books—like knitting or playing the harp—is nothing more than a hobby. Something I can do for fun on the weekends but should never hope to earn a living from.
It seemed very obvious to me that I was neither a good enough writer nor a dedicated enough self-promoter to ever make it work. Twelve years and 16 novels later I am happily churning out 1-3 bad novels every year and loving every minute of it.
All the best as you continue to chase the dream!
But this is perhaps the least convincing argument I've ever read from him (and the commenters on Marginal Revolution seem to agree.) It does nothing to convince me that raising the rate on very wealthy individuals is a bad idea.
I'd be willing to entertain thoughtful arguments on either side of the debate and I wonder if anyone here can point to more convincing examples.
In the linked article, the table of the "main" differences are shockingly trivial from my perspective and include:
1) How "Jesus" is spelled 2) How to hold your fingers when making the sign of the cross 3) Procession direction (CW vs CCW) 4) etc.
That either side was willing to kill or die over these things is something I simply can't understand.
> It is well known that one of the best services a retail broker can provide is not answering the phones during a crash. The market is down, the customers panic, their timing is terrible, they want to sell at the bottom, they call you up to say “sell everything,” you say “we’re sorry all our representatives are assisting other customers, your call is important to us,” they hang up and get distracted, the market rallies, they forget about selling, you have saved them a fortune, good work.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/robinh...
If your goal is to influence the big picture at a corporation then your title probably has to be Sr. Director, VP, SVP, or something similar. Even then it won't be easy. Political and cultural inertia will conspire to prevent change.
* I _feel_ significantly less hopeful than I did in the 1990s. Things _seemed_ to be heading in the right direction in lots of important areas then. Now I feel significant anxiety about whether my kids will live in a dystopia within the next 30 years
* Many of the improvements listed reduce hassle and stress in some ways, and markedly increase stress and anxiety in other ways. I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.
* Many of the improvements to convenience feel like a bad trade. Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me.
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I know some of this is just that I'm 25 years older and I'm trying to subtract that out.
I understand that objectively this is a good time to be alive in many, many ways but I feel significantly worse than I did then.
If I could return to the 1990s at my current age I would do so in a heartbeat.
At my last company they attempted to implement a project in a low code framework and they eventually had to pull back significantly because the requirements were simply too complex for the framework to handle in a reasonable fashion.
The lesson is "use the right tool for the job."
The primary value add is the ability to organize groups of related requests and then run them as part of a test suite and assert against the outcomes. It's essentially a test tool for REST APIs that's accessible to a less technical audience.
Fighting against rape and sexual assault in US prisons.