normalhuman

I understand your point. I work with sociologists and I also follow the ongoing "Internet cultural wars". People like Jordan Peterson (who I don't either dislike nor agree 100%) really brought these matters to the forefront. His criticisms of postmerdernism are somewhat relevant, but they are also exaggerated. Some corners of "postmodernist academia" are as bad as he paints them, but not all of them, by any means.

Even the Sokal scandal is somewhat simplified. It was not so easy for them to get the paper accepted, in fact they were rejected many times by other journals. This is rarely mentioned.

The cited work in TFA compares performance evaluations with raises. It found that for the same performance evaluations, an explicit focus on meritocracy leads to worse monetary outcomes for women. That seems fairly objective and methodically sound to me, and not at all related to Sokal-style bullshit.

The income gap is a complex topic, and it is clearly not as simple as either extremes of the cultural wars paint it. It is not true that the pay gap is 100% due to discrimination against women, but it is also not 100% true that such discrimination plays no role. As usual in real life, there are nuances and complexities that cannot easily be reduced to simple slogans.

Silicon Valley has a religion-ideology that we have no name for yet. It is a very American kind of Protestantism with zero gods. I know the environment and I know what I'm talking about, even though I accept you might disagree. My view is that the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalists are not as rational as they would like to think.

It is true that Sociology has a left-wing bias. In my view, this is true of all academia. There was a time, not so long ago, when academia had a right-wing bias. This too is a subject of sociological research :)

Conventional software engineering is extraordinarily brittle, in the sense that any random mutation to a program is likely to cause catastrophic failure: it is very likely that it will not even be valid anymore, or behave in a completely different way. In this scenario, complexity is the enemy, and we take all the well known-measures that are taken in human engineering to manage complexity.

When one dreams of a biological approach, one is interested in replicating the "graceful degradation" aspect of biological structures, which is the opposite of brittleness. If you remove one random cell from your body, it will make virtually no difference. If you remove 1K random cells, you will still not notice anything. If you remove 1M cells, maybe it's not so nice, etc. Biological systems have fewer central points of failure and are much better at adapting to unexpected situations. In this case, complexity can be our friend. I believe it is possible to learn how to design systems more like nature does, and I think this is Kay's dream.

> What am I really losing though by allowing access?

Sovereignty over your cognitive processes.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

> Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".

You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.

One of the first times I traveled to the USA, I was watching TV in my hotel room and caught some sort of documentary about art. They were showing a painting by Gustav Klimt and the nipples were blurred out. I couldn't believe it! I knew about American prudishness over nudity and sex, but I didn't know it went that deep. It made me want to learn more about the phenomenon.

Some common explanations:

- The USA is just way more religious overall;

- Pilgrims were the most radical protestant Christians, they were kicked out of Europe and then spread their social norms in the USA, in a very early moment of the development of American culture. Also, according to Max Weber, and to simplify things a lot :), Protestantism = Capitalism;

- Colonization is risky business, enormous territories were available and increasing the population was urgent. This could explain both acceptance of guns/violence and the need to regulate sexual behavior.

I think there is at least some truth to all of the above, but I always feel unsatisfied. There are so many confounding factors. For example, in Europe the catholic south is more sexually repressive than the protestant north, perhaps with the exception of the UK. But the north is also more atheistic overall. Anglo culture overall seems to me to have some specific flavor of sexual repression that I don't feel from other European cultures. Maybe I'm just more used to the catholic flavor.

I have this cynical suspicion that, for a large scale society such as a country to be possible, and for people to accept collaborating with the project somehow, some tabu must be created. At least one dimension of personal fulfillment must be out of the control of the individual. This is very simplistic but, in modern USA the tabu is sex, in modern Europe it is money. I think it is common for revolutions to destroy one tabu and create another. For example, left-wing revolutions tend to point at sexual tabus as "bourgeois values". But communists can also be super socially conservative.

Yet another detail: the differences in attitude towards sex and nudity in USA vs Europe also apply to alcohol. I feel that alcohol is both way more regulated and seen as more "naughty" in the USA than in Europe.

Perhaps someone here can point me in other interesting directions. Sorry for all the rambling :)

Our overall computing environment acquired a distinct patronizing/infantilizing feel to it in the last decade. I don't think it's only visual -- or even visual at all, not sure.

I think you misunderstand me. You are talking about computers and technology, I am talking about crayons, paint, musical instruments... Things that you can immediately use to create without restrictions. There was a small window of time when computers offered that for kids. There is no reasons why this could not be achieved with modern technology, but somehow our current culture prevents it. I'm sure it will be reinvented one day.

I too grew up with a "power on to basic" computer, in my case the ZX Spectrum. I don't think that people that did not have that experience at that age can truly get it. I was able to create graphics and play sounds with a very simple language. The text editor, the graphical display, the "OS", it was all the same thing. The manual taught you how to program in BASIC. It was an amazing tool of creativity and intellectual development. It was truly magical.

I know you mean well and I have nothing against bash, but I promise you it will not replicate that experience nor excite kids.

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things:

1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.

This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.

As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.

It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.

It might be useful to divide the wold in neat venn diagrams of "target audiences" when you are running a business, but it is not good to start taking this stuff too seriously. There's more to life than that.

We are humans beings and we like to create. The digital computer is a meta-tool, in the sense that it is possible to invent entire new mediums of expression within it. This appears to be a particularly interesting one. I think you underestimate kids. I know I would be very excited to have access to this tool back in the day, and would be delighted to be able to use randomness to manipulate sound. Being called a "superhuman musician" for pressing a button would make me want to puke.

Take your PM hat off sometimes and smell the roses.

I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. I'm not sure this will change in our lifetimes, but I think it will necessarily change if we survive for long enough.

To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does. Of course, reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy. So is the discussion of knowledge itself, what is knowable and how can we trust the various methods of seeking more knowledge. A lot of stuff surrounding these topics happened in the XX century.

The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position. One that is currently maintained by social norms and authority. Which does not mean it is "wrong". I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection.

Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed.

Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition.

It's a tragedy of the commons situation.

Even if you understand the downside of centralized systems (and most people really do not), you cannot individually do anything to stop them. So you use them out of convenience.

"Decentralized" people are out of touch only to the degree that they believe that they can change the world based on collective altruism. That is an uphill battle. They are not out of touch in realizing the dystopia that we are heading towards.

I imagine two possible scenarios for decentralized systems to take over:

a) Dystopia goes mainstream -- one scenario: "social credit scores" become common practice and people start to fear using the web to an extreme degree;

b) Someone comes up with a decentralized system that is able to do something, only possible with decentralization, that everyone really really wants.

I hope b) happens first.

I find the situation a bit similar to neural networks. It's a bio-inspired model, and we know from nature that it can work spectacularly well. The actual algorithms that became popular (both in neural networks and evolutionary computation) are extreme simplifications of the biological reality.

So a lot of the research goes in the direction of finding the "missing ingredients". On the evolutionary computation front, one of the topics I find the most interesting is the genotype-phenotype mapping. Naive genetic algorithms have genotypes that map directly to phenotypes (e.g you are evolving some vector which is a direct solution to a problem). More complex mapping (like what we see in nature) encode a generator for a solution.

On this note, exciting stuff happens on the genetic programming front (where you are evolving computer programs, commonly Lisp-like trees).

It really is a vast field, ranging from direct engineering applications to artificial life simulations aimed at theoretical biology. Like everything else, you have to be familiar with the literature.

> There's no formal science behind them.

I'm not sure what that means. Science is empiricism, and genetic algorithms are a wide field of research with a lot of experimentation behind them. There are many hypothesis about how they work, why they work and what their limitations are. These hypothesis are tested through experimentation, just like in other scientific fields.

> Smart heuristics beat these hybrid-genetic-memetic-algorithms all the time.

Sure, this is almost guaranteed by the "no free-lunch theorem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

There might be some exotic cases where genetic algorithms are actually the best solution, but nobody knows that.

But that's not the point of genetic algorithms. The point is having a generic solution that can be applied with some success when you don't have the time or the resources to find those "smart heuristics". And there might be cases where we are just not smart enough to find them. Some of these cases might be related to the effort towards developing generic AI. You can also claim that it is always possible to write a more efficient computer program directly in machine code, if you ignore time and resources.

Another interesting property of evolutionary computation is enabling some form of artificial creativity. Check out this antenna, created by NASA using evolutionary computation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna

Also, if you will forgive me a bit of self promotion, check out my own work on the discovery of complex network generators:

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep06284

I think a lot of the appeal of TempleOS is a certain nostalgia for a world where single coders would do something amazing on their own, and nobody knew what "UI/UX" even meant. A more naive time, with less specialization, where people just wanted to create something cool.

You can prove me wrong, of course, but why not just create a completely new UI on top of the Linux kernel? The Linux kernel is completely agnostic in regard to user interfaces.

Right, but you can't demand more realism for the results you don't like and accept the conclusions for those you do like.

For example, in a more realistic scenario people move for all sorts of reasons: leaving parent's house, changing jobs, marriage and divorce, etc. This stirring may lead to decreased segregation for slight decreases in bias, unlike what this more static model suggests.

I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.

I would be keeping my hat on. They would have done it with the taxpayers' money but without their consent or even knowledge. They would then be withholding a major scientific breakthrough from the public that financed it. A scientific breakthrough that might have all sorts of applications that could make our lives better.

They would be exposing all the people that rely in strong cryptography to major risks. Including people that have done nothing illegal and helped fund their research.

And more importantly, they shouldn't be reading our emails to being with, independently of them being encrypted or not. That was never the deal, no democratic process ever gave them the right.