I look smarter than people in areas with weaker infrastructure because the infrastructure is taking cognitive load off of me
Invisible hand, bitches!
It’s not always obvious when the magic that let you form and maintain something goes away: there’s a long lead time before the cracks appear, long enough that you may have lost all the people who could recreate the original magic. Similar to the England/scurvy/lime juice story.
It’s easy to misidentify the magic, especially when there are incentives to do so.
Geeks/MOPS/sociopaths
Possible that Great Depression led to unusual period of government competence because other jobs were scarce and there was a premium on job stability, so they could attract better applicants.
Anna seems to be skipping over institutional/individual alignment
Certain kinds of coordination have gotten vastly easier or moved from impossible to possible using modern logistics tech.
How are CA’s electrical failures related to bad governance? I see bad results but it’s not obvious the necessitating circumstances had responses that wouldn’t be called bad governance.
Not clear how much worse the US actually did on covid- Europe is having a resurgence now.
Curious about how subcultures are harder to form, seems like it would be way easier than when you were stuck in the same 200 person town for life.
Predicted response: being too easy to form/join is actually bad.
HAM radio culture as described in that autism book was a dead ringer for lesswrong, and that was pre-1975.
[redacted]
Pushing out casuals is hard because sometimes they are nice and your friends.
Gatekeeping is so, so hard/frowned upon in our culture
Unless you call breaking past the gates appropriation, then you’re allowed defenses.
Sometimes geeks are really weak on particular skills and bringing in some casuals with those skills is really helpful to the overall subculture.
What are the net effects if it becomes harder to keep out casuals?
Fewer subcultures reach critical mass → less novel art.
Wasn’t there a study showing pop music is changing much slower than it used to? That could be confirmatory if the methodology is good.
How does this interact with science?
Lack of defended factions leads to even more pressure for premature consensus than currently exists.
Something something inter-institution diversity vs intra-institution diversity.
Is it more important that a single campus has many viewpoints represented, or that each viewpoint has a stronghold university focusing on it?
Dad talking about how jazz had got more locally but less nationally diverse.
From the perspective of people living at that time, that’s more variety which seems good.
That scene in Treme where the high-status Jazz player has to defend New Orleans jazz.
multiple institutions with very different views are easier to defend than the same institutions with a variety of views.
But any given student is attending at most one school at a time, and will only get a single POV if at at a stronghold institution.
Large schools could have a stronghold + tokens from other viewpoints, who will not be as productive as scholars at strongholds for their viewpoints. It’s not like there’s a shortage of professors.
Chapman leaves out the conversion of casuals → geeks, or how hard it can be to distinguish future geeks from future casuals.
If it’s too hard to join your club, people won’t do it and the club will atrophy and ossify. E.g. wikipedia editor culture.
Ray’s melting gold essay
Where the hell did the 6:1 ratio in Chapman’s essay come from?
“Under [the Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths] model [...] it has somehow become easier and more common for people to successfully ape the appearances of an institutional culture, while not truly being true to it ”
This has been happening in television. It used to be tactical competence (acting, dialogue, continuity), which is easy to assess early, was strongly associated with strategic competence (which often can’t be assessed until the show is over) (Sopranos, Mad Men). Or tactical incompetence made it obvious who had strategic competence (Babylon 5). But lately they’ve figured out how to have good tactical competence without deep strategy, leading to shows that are compelling until a deeply disappointing ending (Game of Thrones).
The strongest form of Effective Altruism parasitizes first-world institutions by benefiting from the intangible resources like trust and prosociality, while not contributing to them, and moving resources from the populations with those institutions to the (much, much needier) populations outside of them. This can be very moral on an individual level (because those outside the institutions are so much needier than those inside, for the exact reason of being outside), but disastrous if widespread because the institutions do actually need resources to run.
This suggests that bringing people into the institutional ecosystem (e.g. immigration) is better/more sustainable than moving resources from one ecosystem to another.
Maybe taking away all the rewards of power/declaring them immoral was a terrible idea, because it drove all the good-but-not-100%-self-sacrificing people out of power.
Amazon seems way more competent than Google but I’d rather work for Google because they’re nicer.
Eh, is that true? I hated working for Google specifically because they didn’t care about my actual productivity, and Amazon has supposedly softened from when everyone was wrung out in 18 months.
Door desks are still stupid though.
See also: not buying developers the best laptops.
Some institutions (PTA) run on invisible slack and we ate up all the slack.
Two income trap.
I’m learning to draw and have all the resources I could possibly use at my fingertips. Art school is less necessary than it used to be. Grad school used to be the only way to keep up with academic research: now I have sci-hub and twitter. This can simultaneously be awesome for me, outside of art school and academia, but if art school/academia had an off-the-books goal it will suffer as people/resources leave.
Existing institutions that have invisibly lost the magic can inhibit the formation/expansion of newer institutions that have it.
WEIRD cultures’ fairness towards strangers is in fact really weird and would be bad to lose.
Destroying minority-owned institutions that made them less dependent on the majority had a worse impact than the majority excluding the minority from their institutions (e.g. Tulsa massacre, “Urban Renewal” destroying black business districts)
Coding bootcamps were originally aimed at people who knew how to code but needed a little polish before they could excel at software eng. They ran through that backlog and are now their taking people from 0->coder. This greatly lowers the value of a bootcamp grad and the bubble is due to pop soon.
Ditto datascience?
[Redacted] described the same thing with plumbing. Master plumbers are replaced with people who have been taught how to execute a few things but can’t manage the system as a whole.
Treating public education as a thing done for the students as opposed to the country (which benefits from educated citizens) has huge implications for how you focus, especially what you do with the tails of the IQ curve.
Treating public education as for the students rather than for the country is a huge luxury. As a country declines, it can either give it up or collapse.
The concept of nepotism being bad is fairly new and precious.
Many political institutions are dead inside but received lip service anyway. Some of Trump’s inflammatory statements weren’t different from what other politicians thought, people just objected to or enjoyed him saying it out loud.
George Washington was an unusually good country founder.
Cults are typically providing a (semblance of a) real need and much of the stigmatization of cults stigmatizes meeting that need, which just pushes people towards unhealthy ways of meeting it.
Institutions (and people) taking charge without responsibility do a lot of damage.
>! eating some space for preview purposes :::
I look smarter than people in areas with weaker infrastructure because the infrastructure is taking cognitive load off of me
Invisible hand, bitches!
It’s not always obvious when the magic that let you form and maintain something goes away: there’s a long lead time before the cracks appear, long enough that you may have lost all the people who could recreate the original magic. Similar to the England/scurvy/lime juice story.
It’s easy to misidentify the magic, especially when there are incentives to do so.
Geeks/MOPS/sociopaths
Possible that Great Depression led to unusual period of government competence because other jobs were scarce and there was a premium on job stability, so they could attract better applicants.
Anna seems to be skipping over institutional/individual alignment
Certain kinds of coordination have gotten vastly easier or moved from impossible to possible using modern logistics tech.
How are CA’s electrical failures related to bad governance? I see bad results but it’s not obvious the necessitating circumstances had responses that wouldn’t be called bad governance.
Not clear how much worse the US actually did on covid- Europe is having a resurgence now.
Curious about how subcultures are harder to form, seems like it would be way easier than when you were stuck in the same 200 person town for life.
Predicted response: being too easy to form/join is actually bad.
HAM radio culture as described in that autism book was a dead ringer for lesswrong, and that was pre-1975.
[redacted]
Pushing out casuals is hard because sometimes they are nice and your friends.
Gatekeeping is so, so hard/frowned upon in our culture
Unless you call breaking past the gates appropriation, then you’re allowed defenses.
Sometimes geeks are really weak on particular skills and bringing in some casuals with those skills is really helpful to the overall subculture.
What are the net effects if it becomes harder to keep out casuals?
Fewer subcultures reach critical mass → less novel art.
Wasn’t there a study showing pop music is changing much slower than it used to? That could be confirmatory if the methodology is good.
How does this interact with science?
Lack of defended factions leads to even more pressure for premature consensus than currently exists.
Something something inter-institution diversity vs intra-institution diversity.
Is it more important that a single campus has many viewpoints represented, or that each viewpoint has a stronghold university focusing on it?
Dad talking about how jazz had got more locally but less nationally diverse.
From the perspective of people living at that time, that’s more variety which seems good.
That scene in Treme where the high-status Jazz player has to defend New Orleans jazz.
multiple institutions with very different views are easier to defend than the same institutions with a variety of views.
But any given student is attending at most one school at a time, and will only get a single POV if at at a stronghold institution.
Large schools could have a stronghold + tokens from other viewpoints, who will not be as productive as scholars at strongholds for their viewpoints. It’s not like there’s a shortage of professors.
Chapman leaves out the conversion of casuals → geeks, or how hard it can be to distinguish future geeks from future casuals.
If it’s too hard to join your club, people won’t do it and the club will atrophy and ossify. E.g. wikipedia editor culture.
Ray’s melting gold essay
Where the hell did the 6:1 ratio in Chapman’s essay come from?
“Under [the Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths] model [...] it has somehow become easier and more common for people to successfully ape the appearances of an institutional culture, while not truly being true to it ”
This has been happening in television. It used to be tactical competence (acting, dialogue, continuity), which is easy to assess early, was strongly associated with strategic competence (which often can’t be assessed until the show is over) (Sopranos, Mad Men). Or tactical incompetence made it obvious who had strategic competence (Babylon 5). But lately they’ve figured out how to have good tactical competence without deep strategy, leading to shows that are compelling until a deeply disappointing ending (Game of Thrones).
The strongest form of Effective Altruism parasitizes first-world institutions by benefiting from the intangible resources like trust and prosociality, while not contributing to them, and moving resources from the populations with those institutions to the (much, much needier) populations outside of them. This can be very moral on an individual level (because those outside the institutions are so much needier than those inside, for the exact reason of being outside), but disastrous if widespread because the institutions do actually need resources to run.
This suggests that bringing people into the institutional ecosystem (e.g. immigration) is better/more sustainable than moving resources from one ecosystem to another.
Maybe taking away all the rewards of power/declaring them immoral was a terrible idea, because it drove all the good-but-not-100%-self-sacrificing people out of power.
Amazon seems way more competent than Google but I’d rather work for Google because they’re nicer.
Eh, is that true? I hated working for Google specifically because they didn’t care about my actual productivity, and Amazon has supposedly softened from when everyone was wrung out in 18 months.
Door desks are still stupid though.
See also: not buying developers the best laptops.
Some institutions (PTA) run on invisible slack and we ate up all the slack.
Two income trap.
I’m learning to draw and have all the resources I could possibly use at my fingertips. Art school is less necessary than it used to be. Grad school used to be the only way to keep up with academic research: now I have sci-hub and twitter. This can simultaneously be awesome for me, outside of art school and academia, but if art school/academia had an off-the-books goal it will suffer as people/resources leave.
Existing institutions that have invisibly lost the magic can inhibit the formation/expansion of newer institutions that have it.
WEIRD cultures’ fairness towards strangers is in fact really weird and would be bad to lose.
Destroying minority-owned institutions that made them less dependent on the majority had a worse impact than the majority excluding the minority from their institutions (e.g. Tulsa massacre, “Urban Renewal” destroying black business districts)
Coding bootcamps were originally aimed at people who knew how to code but needed a little polish before they could excel at software eng. They ran through that backlog and are now their taking people from 0->coder. This greatly lowers the value of a bootcamp grad and the bubble is due to pop soon.
Ditto datascience?
[Redacted] described the same thing with plumbing. Master plumbers are replaced with people who have been taught how to execute a few things but can’t manage the system as a whole.
Treating public education as a thing done for the students as opposed to the country (which benefits from educated citizens) has huge implications for how you focus, especially what you do with the tails of the IQ curve.
Treating public education as for the students rather than for the country is a huge luxury. As a country declines, it can either give it up or collapse.
The concept of nepotism being bad is fairly new and precious.
Many political institutions are dead inside but received lip service anyway. Some of Trump’s inflammatory statements weren’t different from what other politicians thought, people just objected to or enjoyed him saying it out loud.
George Washington was an unusually good country founder.
Cults are typically providing a (semblance of a) real need and much of the stigmatization of cults stigmatizes meeting that need, which just pushes people towards unhealthy ways of meeting it.
Institutions (and people) taking charge without responsibility do a lot of damage.