chmsky00

You become a doomsayer by appealing to “think of the children” and their anxiety.

Children have been stressed by disease, poverty, nation state politics… prove it is avoidable before making it a problem.

Of course the environment doomsayers must be silenced, right? For calling for action and change, rather than “stay the course I know to avoid anxiety” which you seek to feel is even achievable despite truths of physical reality.

Like… one of these platforms has merit. And you’re annoyed by it, so let’s be anti-speech. Because then the problem just goes away.

It makes sense; before formal language humans still had to intuit “how much” food, water, sleep, would maintain life.

I sometimes wonder if romantic era language forced on the species by warlords is actually responsible for a lot of our cognitive dissonance and Duning-Kruger like traits.

After all, dimension, distance, weight, shape, color gradient, etc, are all right in front of us.

Ownership, theory, value stores, etc. all conceptual. Ideas defined by the dead and put upon the next generation to babysit or else!

We try to make concept concrete and ignore what’s happening literally.

I wonder how he’d speak of a supposedly even better educated society stealing the future of the next due to circular validation of our waste filled industrialism.

You should familiarize yourself with his actual research career and not just his popular political commentary.

He also advocates for science based social policy all the time.

It’s not “unknown” to technologists.

How it all works is very unknown to the average parent.

This thread seems to think the government needs to function with the logic of this thread in mind.

Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to.

Any individual is just “one of seven billion.” Shut the computers off and what perspective do you have that puts you above anyone else?

Indeed, degree programs as we know them have a shady history where they were often just nonsense credentials the general public was too ignorant to invalidate, but they were secular, and gained popularity as religions has faded.

There’s a long history of payola in university. IMO our entire accreditation and credentialing system has so much corruption, anything but reproducible STEM education should be treated as being of suspect value.

The credential is earned due to social hoop jumping, and very specific. It doesn’t really say much about general intelligence or worker skill. I’ve worked with PhDs that were so obtuse nothing was accomplished.

It’s like trying to make a simple knife by first bootstrapping a universe to mine engineered carbon steel of the purest quality.

In the end political network effects dictate reality. And that realm is clearly rife with delusions of grandeur.

The whole undocumented code being useless is weird to me.

I can determine the intended logic regardless of class or function names, and parameters labels.

I’ve repurposed a lot of code that was labeled as being for one thing but the logic worked fine for another so I just changed the names.

There are a lot of educated bad programmers out there who think their academic view make them good programmers.

Assuming there is a gold standard for intelligence, acting as if we can replicate what it took a universe millions of years to stumble into, by etching into silicon some algorithms that have meaning to us specifically, then seeing that as an autonomous experience acquiring organism is odd.

My take is beyond economic activity to enable the biological survival of the species, our economics are historically built on gossip and political whimsy. I suspect there are many fewer rules needed than we’ve been lead to believe.

We like to believe it must be complicated because of course society is. But social laws are based on social network effects which are politically manipulated.

So in conclusion, it’s rhetorically a free market but in practical terms it’s gamed by social corruption as usual, requiring ever more Byzantine economic theory to capture the edge cases.

Infinitely big little numbers have allowed economists to iterate on the edge, but socially it’s belly button digging.

It would be nice if the era of economic theory were to end.

Herbert Weisberg argues in Willful Ignorance (paraphrasing for brevity; read and come to your own conclusions) we’re using statistical and probabilistic tools in economics that were purposely left crude by the mathematicians that defined them, as they were defined to handle abstract quantities.

Applying them to human economics means we’re mathematically accepting rounding errors that leave people behind.

That is the pattern we have to break politically. We spend a lot of time emotionally promoting certain stats and hand waving away at a number like “2% reduction in poverty” still means we’re leaving millions behind.

Not having services like universal healthcare is clearly politically gamed, but we refuse to see it as anything like a government bombing civilians.

This is absolute nonsense. It’s accepted in science we select for biological traits like scent, and social standing; intelligence being a key component of a persons social standing.

Even when people find someone attractive it doesn’t mean they just get together. This is some high school level perspective way off base from a contemporary relationship.

Just because the words create a believable scenario does not mean you’re anywhere close to a probable one.

Actually, humans doing nothing would be the best thing for the environment

Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue

Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline

The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...

You ignore all the dumb ideas that came before Feynman. Falsify a theory specifically. Hand waving it away with gatekeeping weak.

IMO Biology explains consciousness fine. Reinforcement of sensory data given repeat exposure leaves agency memory.

I think “higher abstraction” is such a flimsy term as to be meaningless.

Nothing is more or less abstract. It’s just the abstract it needs to be to “exist”. Humans are the abstract they need to be to exist on Earth.

This idea there’s layers of abstraction and meaning beyond what we can know literally is just a neural implant from years of having tribal elders dictating we fetishize a small set of bad ideas ad naseum, we conjure alternatives in order to escape.

Supply and demand took a back seat to hoarding assets to prop up investor value.

Taken literally the government is engaged in class warfare by forcing the public to engage in labor for private enterprise to prosper.

America is effectively a caste system, abstracting a persons value into a net worth, focused on gossip, and gaming semantics, very similarly to religious tribes.

Murder rates have come down generally speaking, over the centuries.

The cycle we need to break is letting millions starve and go homeless. We refuse to see it as equivalent to other human atrocities political capture by selfish, bitter men and women.

We need a pivot to new core values entirely. My preference would be along the lines of prioritizing biological/medical health of individuals and setting aside superfluous economic activity. But good luck passing laws favored by the public (polling has shown a majority support universal healthcare for years now).

Work stoppages will force austerity on aristocrats. History is pretty clear that’s what it takes to move the needle politically.

Gaming house prices is, to borrow Greers area/perimeter metaphor for programming, hacking the area of the established perimeter.

Futurists have been predicting collapse of nation states and a re-emergence of the city-state by 2050 for a while now. Often leaning on environmental concern and the lack of Federal exigency to tackle the problem. Perhaps they’re onto something.

Cherry picked articles aren’t going to paint a nuanced portrait.

Google is right there and I suggest you do the legwork forming your own opinions.

I’ve merely stated my own and take the position I’m not trying to influence you. Coming here for insight, well, you get what you pay for on free social media.

I don’t do nuanced work for free.

I take a physics perspective first view of reality, and see Chomsky’s work as a field theory of linguistics.

Trade to support biological life is one thing, and is something I feel should be unencumbered by servicing memes like “Jeff Bezos is worth billions of dollars.” An idea my math education informs me is built on abstraction the public cannot understand. It’s little different than conquering indigenous people with language like “My God commands it!”

Bezos isn’t a savior or genius; he had help from our social field theory in the form of rich relatives and friends who gained in a higher tax era, then changes the rules.

Paulo Freire and countless others offer similar metaphors for applying economics to social behavior. We call it behavioral economics now.

IMO the public should be holding out at scale, and only enabling the building of long lived solutions rather than lowest bidder public works, and social agency bent towards consumer waste creation and cleanup, while letting a minority LARP being above the daily work that enables their life.

Simple.

My bad; he wrote the Senate not “government”, should protect the opulent minority.

Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system.

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...

Yeah they can because social laws are not beholden to the kind of logic used in science.

Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses.

Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority.

Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.

Engineer to solve the problem. Not banter online.

My problem is people take a slogan like best practices and copy-paste in every new framework because it’s de facto best practice.

If the business is one of 1,000 todo apps, sure copy paste.

But it’s new hardware best practices are different and we ought to acknowledge that software use case isn’t as uniform as electronics, where Ohms law and material waste are coupled to waste.

Language choice and syntax choice depends on the problem as the team sees it. Avoid buffer overruns, sanitize inputs.

There you have it; software best practices.

He should probably remove the writings online where he literally posted exactly as I claimed.

It’s almost as if he’s the sort of person who will take whatever position fits his immediate need.

If Thiel was a genius he’d be more than another rich businessman.

I am close friends with an engineer that worked on a power transform system for the LHC. He’s a moron.

Given humans had to rely on innate intuition of acceptable effort for survival early on; quantity of food, etc, before formal language, I’m leaning into the idea human language are a cognitive boondoggle forced on us by tribal warlords.

Most humans have the same cognitive capability as Thiel, but none of the relative network access, or political burden.

So many old ways are now seen as illegal and manipulative of people too ignorant to falsify them. Thiel is no god and political corruption is everywhere. I see no reason to believe he’s special.

Print out all his dollars as official currency and they all have some words on them claiming they’re property of the US Government. Thiel’s power is reliant on big government.

I mean much of the economy is an MLM for elites.

The elites of Claire’s Boutique aren’t letting employees design novel items.

Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that division of labor, taken to extremes, would lead to dumber humans than the dumbest animal.

Here we have people standing around retail shops, not working on their ideas, but minding a “booth” for a distant “owner” who does little real work to sustain themselves. We believe in them therefor they get to be rich and not work. It’s simple manipulation of brain chemistry built into years of forced belief.

It’s exactly the math of an MLM; keep selling others selling my value for me.

Those things provide jobs and revenue streams for companies.

That’s why it exists.

Our free speech society relies heavily on sticking to jobs, economics, and service to industrialists.

He wrote how the masses need babysitters.

Even if that’s so, my problem is he thinks he should be one of the babysitters. That’s what elected officials are for.

All I owe Peter Thiel is letting him live his life. If he wants to co-opt the agency of others without consent, I don’t even owe him that.

Workers build the world. Thiel is not the smartest man in the world. There are engineers and scientists doing useful work while he grifts off government corruption he claims to hate.

When he’s participating in the management of the real human mess that enables him, he’ll have earned his place. Right now he’s a lazy nobody who has convinced people he’s worth a number that means something special.

The only number that applies to Thiel is he’s 1 of 7 billion+. Nothing more.

Why should a worker accept a smaller cut for a feature the whole team contributed to?

Did they write less code or contribute less bug fixes?

Is the pay based upon output or businesses ability to manufacture consent in workers?

Americans are battered spouses who would be wise to force austerity on CEOs rather than the other way around. Indeed, look at the wins teacher strikes and workers sitting at home right now, have on wages and competition.

They need workers (when humans believed in religion as our social temple they were called “flocks”).

We’re filling in the area of a perimeter originally defined by Bible thumpers and dead men of a classist perspective. Workers build the world.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed uses a forced importation metaphor, of high minded aristocratic/imperialist expectations on locals. It’s one of my favorites to point folks at.

“Best practices” smells like such a marketing term it should be tossed in the bin.

It’s poetic language that has nothing to do with specific problems.

What people usually mean when it comes to engineering is “be safe, reliable, and correct.”

Security best practices to be safe.

Developer best practices for reliability.

Etc etc

“Best practices” is hand wave-y fluff for “do a good job” and doesn’t need a technical definition.

Make sure you’re secure, reliable, and correct given the engineering context, and odds are you result in a system that also has a lot of specific best practices in place.

Different pay for the same work.

“Meritocracy” in action.

Since humans had to intuit quantities (food, etc), time (seasons), before formal language in order to survive, I’m pretty convinced logic and reason are our stronger innate abilities. That human romantic languages are a cognitive burden forced on the masses by conquerors of old.

I don’t see it as bad to bin ideas originally conjured by lesser educated dead people.

Researching elastic structures led me to the energy industry which led me to government role in the history of energy, which led me to government propaganda research documents; it was all gifted to advertising and marketing programs in university after WW2.

The goal is to instigate an emotional mood in the limbic system, and insert a semantic construct to associate with that mood. The science has been abstracted into career jargon and lost all connection to its roots.

It’s not about factual communication of current events, but emotional information transmission. It’s to titillate the emotional system and inject banality. To keep people thinking about the angry shit.

We’re doing what religion does; instigate anxiety with unverifiable “truth” as our culture is based upon that empty truth.

Like all frameworks, which are barebones libraries wrapped in opinionated organization, KDE/QT can be a lot when you need a simple UI.

I’ve used Nuklear to make simple, portable, UIs: https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear

Everything has trade offs; I might need to come up with my own way of handling some bit of state, but my projects aren’t big enough to need the software equivalent of a Costco.

Yep. Science is three things; space, time, field effects.

Human gossip is societies field effect.

A thing may be true but politics is obfuscating the importance.

The goal is to reduce network effects.

As poetic as free speech is, the 1700s were a different time. Hard to SWAT a rando a town away let alone a country. Now a nation state can instigate localized terrorism.

Thomas Jefferson understood laws and constitutions must change in step with human discovery.

Scalia wrote laws are not open ended, and up for public romantic interpretation.

To paraphrase both. Indeed many Founders wrote of the need for free speech in official political proceedings, never considering the privilege extending to the public. In public people were welcome to get a beating if they prefer to violate local order.

Humans are biological animals first. Gentile by training.