I mostly liked this post because it’s a pretty decent short reference for a concept that I’ve wanted a pointer to in the past. I also think it does actually make some case for the concept being important, by highlighting a shared structure between a number of really high magnitude events (all of the ones listed above). It doesn’t do so explicitly, but implicitly I expect most readers of this post to come away with a decent model for why this concept might be important.
I don’t really agree very much with the section of the post that talks about broader societal problems caused by lack of industrial literacy. That kind of broad sociological modeling is usually wrong, and is probably also wrong here. I think the post would be marginally better if it didn’t have the second of the two paragraphs you quoted.
On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.
Ok, now a more proper notice:
I mostly liked this post because it’s a pretty decent short reference for a concept that I’ve wanted a pointer to in the past. I also think it does actually make some case for the concept being important, by highlighting a shared structure between a number of really high magnitude events (all of the ones listed above). It doesn’t do so explicitly, but implicitly I expect most readers of this post to come away with a decent model for why this concept might be important.
I don’t really agree very much with the section of the post that talks about broader societal problems caused by lack of industrial literacy. That kind of broad sociological modeling is usually wrong, and is probably also wrong here. I think the post would be marginally better if it didn’t have the second of the two paragraphs you quoted.
On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.