I've long thought economics is the art of controlling an unstable feedback mechanism into spiraling out of control slow enough that generational amnesia prevents greater society from noticing.
331 karma · joined August 2, 2016
I think the closest we can get is to compare the predictions from their theories to reality X years later. It anyone has done that, I'd be very curious to see it.
What made Farmville successful was to basically bribe players into sharing by rewarding them with in game currency. This resulted in a ton of spam.
If that's not outright banned by now, it's possible the feed filter makes those messages all but invisible regardless. They want people to pay to advertise now.
We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users.
It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.
"Economics, it's not about learning how money and markets work, it's about learning how to think."
"Art, it's not about learning about aesthetics, style, or technique, it's about learning how to think."
"French, it's not about learning how to speak another language, it's..."
Math has a problem, and it's because the math curriculum is a pile of dull, abstract cart-before-the-horse idiocy posing as discipline.
People in those circles can't say what they mean due to stifling ideological policing and status seeking games (and don't have many interesting thoughts as a consequence), so they all just sit around disguising aborted thoughts as impenetrable wisdom.
- Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution.
- Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv, music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge preservation and freedom of expression.
- Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn, private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it.
Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3.
There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom, which the contemporary web sorely lacks.
Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild.
If the all-genders-equal, non-feminist side swings the discussion, the entire thread disappears off the front page, inexplicably sitting at position 500+ with no flagged indicator. The lambdaconf debacle comes to mind, but it's hardly the only example.
If the feminist, women-are-victims-side swings the discussion, the thread is left up, full of moral chastising, with a graveyard of flagged comments serving as a warning to the evil dissenters.
On this topic, HN is unquestionably biased from the top, and the pretense otherwise is laughably non-credible and deluded.
Furthermore, while meta-complaining is against the rules, this rule is again only enforced against those who question the party line, not those lamenting the amount of immoral thought on display.
The bigger message being sent is obvious though: men, don't bother apologizing for your missteps or character flaws. Forgiveness is not coming.
If a woman got drunk at a guy's house, and was being insistent upon being shown the door, throwing it in her face would be considered cold and insensitive.
Ignoring half of the equation to paint women as a unique victim class is disingenuous, and ironically, it is a power move. Topping from the bottom.
HR taking the company's side... A superior leveraging their position to extract concessions rather than engage a person on equal ground... These are universal problems. Twisting everything into a gender issue because of sexuality involves the automatic assumption that a woman's sexual virtue is something special and any other abuse of power is just not as big a deal. A very gender essentialist and conservative position.
As an actual leftie, it should make me sad, but tbh it amuses me to no end in its absurdity. In the name of progressive politics, all sorts of traditional views are being promoted. Men should be chivalrous, women need protection, public shaming is good, morality must be enforced by a clerical class, with everyone else kissing the ring in acquiescence. Bizarre.
As if politics are far more built-in than we want to admit, and freedom and tolerance can become labels for the exact opposite.
The exact opposite is true. Almost nobody would take a man who complains about sexual harassment seriously. Just look at the night and day difference in response to teacher student abuse when the student is a guy or a girl.
I do not understand what world people live in where constant special concern is twisted into a lack of it. I mean, I do, in so far as it's just benevolent sexism masquerading as equality, but I can't wrap my head around those people considering themselves rational.
All you had to do was not treat the subject as sacred.
Second, people don't like it because it's special pleading, funneling disproportionate attention to a minority in the industry for the sake of the omnipresent boogieman of "cultural pressure". Of course coupled with heavy handed moderation that if you disagree, you're a bad person.
The fact that it is easy to get support for stuff like this is paradoxically used as evidence that it's hard. But coverage does not equal incidence, and equal opportunity has not lead to equal occupations in those countries focusing the most on gender equality. Thus the goal posts get moved again in search of a 50/50 utopia that will never happen.
But shunting data in and out of sql databases and making REST APIs is not novel tech work, it's just a very fragile way of describing and maintaining policy. The tech sites of old had more interesting and novel implementations in a handful of articles than passes through HN in a week, and it wasn't stuck behind a SaaS wall either.
As for VR or AI, one is stuck in a rut of uninspired arcade shovelware and the other is being used for terrifying totalitarian purposes. Welcome to cyberpunk dystopia, population you.
Police live under a fundamental illusion that people can be divided into good or bad, ignoring the role of circumstances, ease of deniability and special pleading in how it actually goes down. Most of all with their own abuse of power.
If you don't want to be interrupted, keep talking. If the moderator is an ass, he's an ass.
If you expect to always be treated with respect by default, a) you're privileged and b) you're deluded. Those men probably learnt to assert themselves because if they didn't, they'd be invisible. The woman on the other hand learned that if she waits long enough, someone will stand up for her and everyone will applaud.
So the cycle continues, that those whose problems are automatically taken seriously by most are those who are the least self sufficient and the most coddled. Hacker culture and the internet doesn't apply this rule so much, most of all because physical attractiveness and charisma is usually out of the picture.
What's that line again, about how when you're used to privilege, equal treatment feels like oppression? Strange how nobody examines it in both directions.
If you changed the grid geometry, changed the action radius, or added a more complicated decision mechanism, it is likely to result in a completely different outcome. It is more like a cellular automaton than a sociological model, compounding design choices, not agent choices.
It should probably be called Parable of the Quantization Error instead and held up as an example of an explorable explanation being misused for propaganda purposes, using its medium to present a false image of impartiality.
Men generally don't hang out on sites to talk about their burrito shits, they don't bond over their gender, lacking a mechanism for in group preference based on it. They bond over shared interests and hobbies. Unlike women, for whom "X For Women" is inevitably created as an end in itself.
If you want to talk about privilege, the fact that your gender has a political movement, media sector and academic faculty dedicated to it is probably relevant. As does the general ability to damsel, act childlike, and shy away from conflict without paying a price in respect.
When you turn all this privilege theory back onto the originators, the result is loud and vicious protest, and the insistence that you just shut up and let women speak. Backed and enforced by sympathetic ears in the halls of power. It doesn't add up.
As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.
The American right loves its military industrial complex, its police crackdowns, its bank bailouts, its manifest destiny, and so on. These are not left wing institutions in creed or membership. You could ask the same question: do you not see rightism (ingroup loyalty, moral purity, respect for authority) as naturally decaying into authoritarianism?
That should tell you what was going on, especially when what set it off was an abuse victim warning that his abuser was capable of anything for self aggrandizement.
Candace Owens / Social Autopsy found that out when she started getting threatening and hateful emails from "gamers" on an address she'd only given out to progressive "anti abuse" activists.
Now they post a long self indulgent medium post rambling on about their career, which turns out to be a job ad / guilt tripping combo.
Nobody owes you a job, everyone goes through struggles like this sometimes. The fact that it even occurs to someone to post something like this is a sign they believe it'll work. That's privilege.
It's really simple. First you make outrageous claims, then you define everyone who disagrees as a harasser. Find the one tweet or comment that's a bit off color, and pretend that's representative. Or just false flag it.
It's the digital version of how to discredit an opposing view or protest, you just need one person smashing a bus stop or looting a store. Once you have enough fear, it becomes self justifying.