matto

matto’s Shortform

• mattoOct 2, 2022, 5:45 PM

  3 points

  −2

  on: Com­pany lead­er­ship and tac­ti­cal decisions

  I’ve seen this happen too, along with same end result.

  It appears that a common failure mode here is that the middle management layer fails to translate the values into system updates. No one updates performance reviews, no one updates quarterly/​half goals, etc. So things just continue as they were before.

  Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of leadership to fix this. Whether it’s by direct intervention or a huddle with middle management, they must do something.

  (My experience as an individual contributor that attempted to change how performance reviews are done to better align with a value like “engineering excellence” tells me it’s impossible to affect this kind of change as an IC. Unless you’re friends with the CEO, which I wasn’t).

• mattoSep 20, 2022, 1:32 AM

  2 points

  on: Some notes on solv­ing hard problems

  Thanks for posting this. I’ll add it to my collection of “thinking tools.”

  These techniques feel like they have the same spirit as some of de Bono’s work, for example, his idea of PO:

  PO implies, ’That may be the best way of looking at things or putting the information together. That may even turn out to be the only way. But let us look around for other ways.

  The two main functions of PO are first to protect an arrangement of information from judgement and to indicate that it is being used provocatively and second to challenge a particular arrangement of information such as an idea, a concept or a way of putting things.

  Some of them also remind me of Gerald Weinberg’s books, but unfortunately I can’t find my notes on them.

• mattoSep 6, 2022, 2:05 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  In my experience with doing something similar, this practice also helps memorize adjacent concepts.

  For example, I was recently explaining to myself Hubbard’s technique that uses Student’s t-stat to figure out the 90% CI of a range of possible values of a population using a small sample.

  Having little memory of statistics from school, I had to refresh my understanding of variance and the standard deviation, which are required to use the t-stat table. So now, whenever I need to “access” variance or stdev, I mentally “reach” for the t-stat table and pick up variance and stdev.

• mattoSep 1, 2022, 6:51 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Thirding this. Would love more detail or threads to pull on. Going into the constructivism rabbit hole now.

• mattoAug 16, 2022, 12:55 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: The Open So­ciety and Its Ene­mies: Sum­mary and Thoughts

  That was my idealism/​naivete: that the league of liberal democracies is so mature and strong that they could flip a switch and the war would cease. Maybe they would just tell Putin to stop and he would have to. Because for me, democracy was always a guarantee of peace. But the war made me realize my map was way off from the territory, and Popper’s book, in turn, helped to replace my fantasy with something closer to the territory.

The Open So­ciety and Its Ene­mies: Sum­mary and Thoughts

• mattoAug 15, 2022, 8:30 PM

  25 points

  15

  on: The Parable of the Boy Who Cried 5% Chance of Wolf

  This echos an excellent post by Dan Luu that touches on problems you face when you build larger, less legible systems that force you to deal with normalization of deviance: https://​​danluu.com/​​wat/​​
  
  The action items he recommends are:

  Pay attention to weak signals

  Resist the urge to be unreasonably optimistic

  Teach employees how to conduct emotionally uncomfortable conversations

  System operators need to feel safe in speaking up

  Realize that oversight and monitoring are never-ending

  Most of these go against what is considered normal or comfortable though:

  1. It’s difficult to pay attention to weak signals when people build awful attention traps (eg. tiktok, youtube, etc.)

  2. People are commonly [overconfident](https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​ybYBCK9D7MZCcdArB/​​how-to-measure-anything#Step_2__Determine_what_you_know).

  3. Uncomfortable conversations are uncomfortable. In certain cultures, it’s better to straight out lie rather than deliver bad news.

  4. Few organizations have set up channels for upwards communication where front line employees can flag problems. It’s better to not rock the boat.

  5. Constant oversight and monitoring are mentally and physically draining. These are also the easiest activities to cut from a budget because they’re not visible until an accident happens.

  What the boy should have done is establish an organization (Wolf-Spotters) whose responsibility is monitoring for signs of wolves. This organization could be staffed by professional or volunteer observers. They need to do periodic trainings and live-action drills (perhaps using a wolf suit). To the fund this, the boy should have first created a PR campaign to make people aware of the cost of unspotted wolves (death), then use that to get support of some local politicians.

  (It’s basically a fire department).

  If the boy was open to using the dark arts, he could have executed a false flag wolf attack. That would incentivize local politicians to support his cause.

• mattoJul 10, 2022, 1:40 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: Why Portland

  Enjoy Portland! Btw, if you want to hang out with some cool people, there’s a rationalist space in Seattle called The Territory full of cool people.

• mattoJul 10, 2022, 1:34 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: User re­search as a barom­e­ter of soft­ware design

  Some people seem to do this automatically. They notice which things make code harder to work with and avoid them. Occasionally, they notice things that make working with code easier and make sure to include those bits in. I guess that’s how you get beautiful code like redis or Django.

  But I’ve never seen any formal approach to this. I’ve gone down the software craftsmanship rabbit hole for a few years and learned a lot thanks to it, but none of it was based on any research—just people like Beck, Uncle Bob, Fowler, etc. distilling their experience into blog posts or books. The downside of that is that it would ignite furious debate that would go nowhere because there was no data to back it up, just anecdotes. These debates, I think, turned a lot of people off, even though there were gems of wisdom there.

• mattoJul 5, 2022, 7:17 PM

  4 points

  4

  on: Seek­ing opinions on the cur­rent and for­ward state of cryp­tocur­ren­cies.

  Disclaimer: I spent about 2 months diving into the crypto space this past December-January. Read a bunch of stuff (here’s a shortened list), got an ENS domain, and wrote some Solidity code (w/​o deploying any of it, even to a testchain though).
  
  I seems to me that blockchain tech has a lot of potential for building newer, better coordination tools that integrate with an increasingly online lifestyle and culture.
  
  Currently, most of the community’s energy seems to be going into financial solutions, which also produces many, many highly suspicious projects—either outright scams or extremely early alpha work that’s presented as mature.
  
  My personal bet is that we’re in a similar place where PCs used to be in the 80′s: crude, underperfoming tech that never amounted to much (ie. productivity gains) but attracted a lot of academics and enthusiasts that kept building and building until we arrived in today’s world where our lives are deeply enmeshed with personal computing technology + networks. So I’m expecting that the next 5-10 years will bring even more failed projects in this space, but maybe 1 or 2 will turn out to be transformational technologies.
  
  My thinking here is that we need only 1 or 2 “killer apps”, something like email or facebook, that give people immense utility, for blockchain to nudge our digital lives onto a different track. Seeing how much people like Vitalik write and talk about eg. quadratic voting or what the people at (Other Internet) are putting out reassures me that some folks in this space are working on coordination tools.

• mattoJun 30, 2022, 1:14 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jan Czechowski’s comment on: Jan Cze­chowski’s Shortform

  Another technique is to compare yourself to your past self.
  
  I’m often dissatisfied with my writing. But when I look back at stuff that I wrote six months ago, I can’t help but notice how much better I’ve become.
  
  The caveat here is that comparing myself to people like Scott Alexander gives me some direction. Comparing myself to an earlier version of myself doesn’t give me that direction. Instead, it gives me a sort of energy/​courage to keep on going.

• mattoJun 7, 2022, 12:11 PM

  6 points

  on: What do you do to de­liber­ately prac­tice?

  I analyze essays: I’ll find an essay I really like and then go through it paragraph by paragraph, trying to figure out what makes it so good. I have no formal training in composition above English 101 and 102, so it’s been a long journey of finding out things that people have been talking about for centuries. Above all, it has been slowly changing the way I see written texts because now I’m able to discern parts that I couldn’t see before.

  For some time, I also analyzed my daily work ([wrote about it here](https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​MAM3pdncCWBrkhnxq/​​watching-myself-program)), but I’ve put that on hold because things became too hectic at work (and I’m also changing jobs).

• mattoJun 1, 2022, 10:46 PM

  8 points

  on: Wield­ing civilization

  Thanks for sharing this. I often catch myself thinking this way, about how, for example, the outlet in the very room you’re sitting in is connected to another strand of wire, and another, and another, until the very generator in some powerplant somewhere. And since other outlets in other buildings and cities are connected to the same state, you could say that there is almost a complete circuit between your room and every other room connected to the same grid.

  Or go up a level: consider that all this infrastructure is being operated by humans, and that connecting each human is an invisible line—a contract, a duty, a responsibility, an agreement—but of course it’s never just one line, it’s actually a whole infinitely complicated web of them. Imagine the person that agreed and committed to emptying the mailbox on your street and taking the contents to a drop-off location. And the next person who agreed and committed to collecting all the bags of mail and putting them through a sorting machine. And then the next person who agreed to and learned to load up trucks with all these bags. And then all the drivers, complete strangers, who agreed to show up at a certain place in time to pick up some bags and drive them over to another place. And… and then the whole system of judges and inspectors and operations people who make sure that everyone else keeps their commitments, so that you can put a piece of paper in one box and another person can retrieve from another box on a different continent.

  It’s quite something, this machine.

• mattoMay 11, 2022, 11:17 PM

  7 points

  on: Fight­ing in var­i­ous places for a re­ally long time

  My impression is that this movie is to older teenagers/​early 20-somethings what The Matrix/​The Big Lebowski/​Fight Club were to me and my age group: grappling with nihilism by taking a long, hard look at all the completely arbitrary social hierarchies that our society is composed of. All of these movies highlight how flimsy social customs are. All of them also give voice to a certain kind of deep anger with the status quo through the violence they portray.

  It was a solid movie, though I wouldn’t place it in the top 100. I enjoyed it for giving me a window into the thoughts of a group of people I don’t normally get to talk with.

• mattoMay 11, 2022, 11:10 PM

  11 points

  on: Crises Don’t Need Your Software

  This is a trap that software engineers appear to be especially susceptible to. If you hang out in places where they congregate, like Silicon Valley, you’ll eventually hear about solutions to all sorts of problems, from homelessness to the opioid crisis.

  Being one myself, I attribute this to solving problems every day and getting rewarded for that, then falling under curse of thinking that since you just solved Very Complicated Problem X, you can probably solve Very Complicated Problem Y, except that Y is in a domain you have so little context in that it seems simple. Dan Luu wrote about this: https://​​danluu.com/​​cocktail-ideas/​​

  When the invasion of Ukraine was just beginning, I thought to myself: if only I was a doctor/​architect/​carpenter/​policy expert/​general/​etc., I could do something. Then I began donating money across a portfolio of charities, which didn’t fully alleviate the feeling of being useless in this situation.

• mattoApr 8, 2022, 12:50 PM

  1 point

  on: Dun­can Sa­bien On Writing

  Strong upvote too. Thank you for sharing this.

  There are innumerable resources with techniques like “avoid passive voice”, but very few about the writing process itself, which I think becomes a crucial point to focus on if a person wants to advance beyond a “good enough” level of writing ability. Reading about Duncan’s process gave me a few ideas on how to improve my own.

  I suspect that this why writers’ workshops help people improve—they allow writers to debug each others’ writing processes.

• matto 3 Apr 2022 17:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Be­com­ing a Staff Engineer

  build a rich mental model of how software engineering orgs work and be able to use this to change the organization

  Are there ways to do this apart from direct experience?

  After a little over a year at the startup I switched to from a Large Company, I realized that the engineering org is broken in a way that is not just “growing pains.” Levels are hazy and promotions are unclear, which makes it impossible to work towards greater responsibility /​ bigger problem areas. Hiring is owned by HR, so engineering has no say in this apart from conducting the actual interviews. Engineers high in the hierarchy, eg. “distinguished engineers”, are mostly focused on their own 1-person projects and almost never interact with other engineers.

  I describe this because it took me over a year that all these behaviors are not merely growing pains and that I cannot do anything to change them because I am merely a “code/​yaml production resource”. I am now looking for another company (in NYC!) and thinking really hard how to avoid joining another broken engineering organization.

To Make Bet­ter Soft­ware, Do What Artists Do

• matto 31 Mar 2022 12:08 UTC

  4 points

  on: Beyond Blame Min­i­miza­tion: Thoughts from the comments

  I’m confused by what we mean by bureaucracy. Is is a governenment-run agency, like the DMV for example? Or is it a low-feedback cost center inside of a for-profit company?

  To me it seems that a bureaucracy is any organization, including a suborganization, where incentives and feedback loops weaken or become unaligned, making the whole thing more extractive toward those people it was supposed to benefit. Eg. the DMV still provides a useful service for citizens, but it does so inefficiently at a high cost. Or an IT department might not be run well, leading to blame-shifting behavior among its leadership, which will slow down any IT-related projects the larger company is demanding from it—this can go on for months or years at a big enough place because of how illegible such behavior can be made to be.

  In this sense, I would absolutely expect alien to have bureaucracies. At least those aliens that need coordination mechanisms (Zerg don’t), which introduce the possibility of individuals being bad at coordinating, leading to the creation of maze-like behaviors.

  P.S. Thanks for writing this. I see value in studying bureaucracies in order to make them better, so I find discussions like this very interesting.