throwaway_7274

I’ve been starting to think that a lot of the variance in how people see the world can be explained by whether their attention is drawn to first-order localized effects, or nth-order distributed effects. This is not the same thing as optimism vs. pessimism, but it sure is correlated!

“…and does not have wings.”

You have so much "freedom from" in a world with strong, effective, well-designed regulation. It's unreal. How amazing is it to be able to buy pretty much any food product and eat it without wondering (almost ever in your life!) if it's been tampered with. How amazing is it to have your bank deposits insured up to $200,000. How amazing is it to be able to fly safely anywhere in the world and know it'll be totally perfectly fine with 99.99999% probability. I love regulation.

It’s been interesting finding out just how many people in tech have the same chip on their shoulder as Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles.

‘Tech’ culture has been getting nastier, more vicious, and more zero-sum for years now. It wasn’t even all that long ago that I remember feeling hurt when a friend of mine sneered about “tech bros.”

But I get it now. I see a certain type of guy in an AWS fleece and instantly judge him, round him off to some kind of bully. Harsh, unsmiling, tweaking on stims, telling you to cry harder. Or maybe he’ll open up tell you his theory of how we need eugenic breeding facilities on the moon, or which countries we need to “glass.” It’s gotten so ugly.

I know this seems mean, too. Coming out of nowhere. Strawmanning or whatever you call it. Literally inventing a guy to get mad at. I’m aware of the irony. I don’t know. I guess it’s another kind of mourning, and I don’t know how to express it. I thought tech people were supposed to be like Woz.

adderall

This kind of philistinism sucks.

Is this performance art? Pretty disrespectful to meat-proxy a response to someone engaging with your, uh, work.

Edit: plausibly there’s no human in loop here at all, in which case fair play, I guess.

I would rather read Polglish or text machine-translated from Polish than Claudese.

Which recent demographic shifts?

Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?

If you instead offer probabilities as answers, it picks the right one with high credence.

I'm sure Graeber is right about the ahistoricity of the orthodox just-so story of money, but I've always wondered if perhaps he misread the kind of claim that story is actually making.

What if economists don't really intend to make a factual historical claim? What if it's more like the principle of virtual work, if you take the analogy? What if it's saying, look, here are two possible configurations of the world: one with barter and one with monetary exchange. One of these configurations is "more stable" than the other. That's a reasonable explanation for "why" we use money, if you read "why" in a non-causal way.

Or maybe economists are straightforwardly careless historians. I don't know!

What does experience mean? Does only private-sector experience "count?" Should we remove Alito from the bench on those grounds?

Lina Khan has never eaten breakfast cereal out of a boot, nor even a shoe.

Fat cat math professors have had it too good for too long. Leave some crumbs for the AI company CEOs!

Only psychopaths interpret the prompt given to them by the world as, "make as much money as you can."

I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but to take the question seriously: as an extreme measure to disincentivize extreme externalities that would otherwise never be priced in. In the status quo, captains of industry have something close to a call option on the social utility of their products. They capture much of the upside (they get paid when people enjoy their goretex jackets), but are pretty free to socialize tail risks (relative to the harm, they have little to lose from poisoning thousands. Maybe a lawsuit. Maybe they have to sell the third house.) A society could decide that this is not a desirable incentive structure.

There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?

Dear Garvy. You and your writing are wonderful. Sincerely, someone.

I don’t really understand this. Sometimes I see even stronger versions of this sentiment, that amount to saying, hey, it’s inevitable, so you might as well be e/acc. But you can just not do things. Societies can just not do things. They used to know this. We don’t have to admit the neoliberal Nuremberg defense of “I was just following incentives.”

Typo-free text. Typo-free text used to more be likely to also be well-written, but now it’s likely not to be.

But also, obviously, they’re being a gadfly for funsies.

Indeed

I’m not making an argument, I’m offering a thought experiment: “what if workers are no longer needed at all, so that they have nothing to threaten to withhold?” It’s a bleak possibility.

Grammatically correct Claudish would say, “did not land clean.” Amateur hour.

What if even unions no longer have leverage?

No, of course $300k is a very high salary even on a US basis, never mind a global one. I’m not confused about that. I went my whole life thinking $100k was like “you’ve made it.” But it turns out that if you have what it takes to get into a top technical degree program, you’re among people who have the opportunity to make that kind of money, and most of them know it. This is a very surprising fact. It did not fully occur to me that this was what so many people were struggling for and fighting over in their Stanford applications. My parents told me it was all about “natural curiosity” or something. I believed them. It offended me a whole lot, at first, when I was disabused of that fairy tale.

And, yes, it certainly is a closing window for a gold rush.

> You don't even change your class, you go from working for a wage to working for a wage.

True, but I’m literally employed as a capital-C Capitalist now. You’re technically right, but…

I so appreciate the compassion in this comment. It’s rare on the internet.

Yeah, in that world. You realize this, and the next thing you realize is that you’re at the tail end of it and have about a year to escape the permanent yadda yadda yadda…

Oh hey that’s me! Not literally me. Probably I was a little better off. But I was recently in a similar position, and feel like my PhD was a lost decade in some ways.

The answer, as I’m sure many already know, is idealism and a certain kind of naïvité. It’s not an absolute naïvité, but it is some kind of belief in the value of doing something that isn’t “mere” careerism. You think it’s noble to contribute to science. And you do contribute, a teeny eensy weensy bit. You also find out that it’s not everything you imagined it would be. And then you’re 30 and one day you unblind yourself. You look at the job market, and how much money various jobs actually pay. More importantly, you realize quite suddenly that money can actually make your life better, and that, whatever damage it might have wrought on your soul to pursue it, it would at least have enabled you to own a home one day. Maybe have kids. Shit. And the fresh grads who went straight into tech and finance making $300k (hold on, you can make $300k? Wait a second, that’s not a senior executive salary? That’s a normal-ish bourgeois white-collar HCoL salary that people make fresh out of school? Hold on, that’s basically a starting salary in that world? WHAT?)… just naturally understood.

Then you try to explain this on a message board or something. You don’t want pity (after all, your life is very good in the scheme of things), you just want some connection, or maybe even a, “that’s ok, that’s how we learn, life is a twisty path.” But half the people call you a class traitor. The other half call you a mediocre sucker.

Like something straight out of the old internet. Beautiful work.