iroh2727

<deleted>

Been teaching/tutoring. The pay is not great but it’s survivable. Much more flexibility with my time. I can basically just show up, though I can’t get away with coasting or not having energy when I do show up (which is actually good!). Much more freedom to pursue my interests outside of work.

Perhaps I will want to do software again in the future, but if I do, it will be something hourly, contracting perhaps. There are still things I’d like to learn/explore in software but it’s hard to find a job to do that where it doesn’t suck all my headspace (I think something in the nature of salaried jobs and promotion structures, etc are designed to not be 40 hours a week, rather all of the hours in a week, even if one can theoretically choose to maintain their “work-life balance”).

Agree, but really the question is: why is it going up and why is it going up much faster in certain locations or among certain demographics? Or why are outcomes much better in certain locations/environments/demographics?

For example, it is more prevalent in urban environments, more prevalent among minorities in western countries, etc. it has better outcomes in “developing” countries.

Core human biology likely hasn’t changed much in recent history, so what had changed? Many of these factors that have changed, like drug use, are also very much related to social and economic factors. Of course these are all psychologically related and biologically related. But the point is we need to model the whole system, and focus on what has been changing if we want to get to root causes of change.

Well the classic work on sociology of mental illness is not about schizophrenia but about suicide (Emile Durkheim’s Suicide). The same types of social causes can be observed with schizophrenia, though, in the facts of geographic disparities in diagnosis as well as changes (usually increases in recent history) over time. See for example, how urban environments are more likely to give rise to schizophrenia [1].

Also recommend like I said Gregory Bateson’s work, or more recently books like The Myth of the Chemical Cure by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff.

The general point is that if we want to model causality we have to include the full system in question. If we narrow our perspective to an inner sub-system, then anything outside looks like an exogenous cause. But we may have to keep expanding wider and wider to get an accurate picture. Intervention can be done at any level of granularity, but the lower it is done, the more we’ll be missing on the root cause of damage, which is likely causing harm elsewhere too.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049530/

Preventative is always more important than fixing after the fact where like you said it may be very difficult to do so.

Basically what I was indicating though, and which I get from for example, RD Laing and Gregory Bateson, is that the best “cure”, societally-willing, is to provide a safe community environment where the schizophrenia is allowed to “run its course”. I know capitalist societies always want a commoditized solution like a pill, and certainly those can be useful, but we shouldn’t forget that a more personal, human solution is always better.

Western medicine can also learn a lot from eastern medicine in this regard. Luckily there’s a lot of research being done on what the pros and cons of each system are. Definitely recommend the book The Web that Has No Weaver for example.

Schizophrenia is usually a kind of coping mechanism to handle an unhandleable environment (e.g. family in the case of a young schizophrenic person). It’s also, as some psychologists (e.g. RD Laing) have argued, a kind of “journey”. If people are allowed to go through the journey, they often come out the other end healed.

ECT has always served to remove symptoms or “normalize” people by just frying them until they’re a hollow drone.

Drugs can be useful. I know many schizophrenic people are happy for their drugs. But we shouldn’t forget that “real schizophrenia” is impossible to model in mice (how do you model a terrible parental situation for example?). And more generally, we shouldn’t forget that schizophrenia is mostly social and psychological in origin, rather than purely biological. A drug can target some chemical that is present in this process, but the cause is not some exogenous chemical, so it does not treat the “real cause” (see e.g. The Myth of the Chemical Cure). Another way of saying this is that the biological system that needs to be modeled is really the holistic biological system of society, family, etc (can also be useful to think about this in a cybernetics kind of way—see e.g. Bateson who developed the “double bind” theory of schizophrenia).

Moral of the story, at least in my view: we should care and treat schizophrenic people with empathy and simultaneously aim to improve the social situations that induce schizophrenia. And how do we improve the social situations? Well, first, if needed, we just work on ourselves, our own self-respect, competence, moral agency, etc., and spread goodness to the people in our vicinity, whilst having faith that others who are quite equal to us and who we have no control over can do the same.

Poverty in terms of what? Needs of the body are met for many (though generally with cheap, ugly, and/or low quality products lacking craftsmanship) but needs of the soul are at an all time low. Just judge from the present mental health crisis—likely the worst in human history—which is largely fueled by disconnection which is an inherent feature of capitalism.

The “poverty” narrative a lie, a rehashing of the old “savages” narrative. It goes hand in hand with this idea that "poor" countries need the western world’s help. No they don’t. Has forced indebtedness helped them? No. And most of their people did not even get a say in the matter of becoming indebted. Advertising of nonprofits and the like is still littered with posters of white men kissing little black babies. It’s quite strange.

In fact, America as a culture is quite new and though it has many good qualities, seeds which can be watered to make for a better future, at present it has become especially barbaric, which is of course not news. These other “impoverished” countries generally have much more historic and developed cultures, ways of handling themselves, etc.

Also, it’s not like “capitalism” was proven and tested before “it” came to be. It has been an incredibly complex process. And it’s not that “it” even will be replaced at some single moment. It’s always a process, and this particular process is already underway.

I would not say that corporations in America are characterized by merely fulfilling consumer desires, rather creating consumer desires—often without precedent—and then fulfilling those desires that were created. As can be seen by the sheer quantity and market size of advertisement (which is the business of manufacturing desire itself).

It appears that we can be encouraged to desire almost anything, or at least an incredible amount of things…

Interesting question. Well, both are now capitalist hells, but very different forms.

Both individualism and collectivism have positive and negative sides. With individualism, the positive is e.g. self-expression, creativity, innovation, while the negative is e.g. selfishness and disconnection. With collectivism, the positives are e.g. connection and supporting others, while the negative is e.g. imitation and lack of diversity. Ironically, when pushed to extremes the negatives of individualism and collectivism seem to kind of equate with each other (though it may not look that way at first glance from the outside).

All this to say that yes I mostly agree with you, though it’s complicated since the pros and cons are often quite different. And I think this is often misunderstood (since people may, for example, for their own more individualist country focus on the positives of individualism while for another more collectivist country focus on the negatives of collectivism—-or vice versa).

+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.

If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagiarism. I don't see how adding a piece of code—one that's fully created, owned, and wielded by the corporation—as an intermediary changes anything. If anything, it looks like plagiarism-as-a-service, which seems worse (at least to my eyes).

Of course, this matter is a bit confusing. Because, for example, (1) it's not always plagiarism, (2) defining what exactly is plagiarism even in the purely non-technological realm is difficult (and likely somewhat subjective), and (3) there is a lot of corporate marketing which suggests this "AI" is "autonomous" (presumably to distract from who exactly is autonomous in this picture). And of course ML art is quite useful for many things. But I mean, so are artists.

Not long ago, a lot of Silicon Valley rhetoric was that the purpose of "technology" was to free up time so that people could be more incentivized to "do what people love to do" like, for example, artistic creation. But now it seems that rhetoric was just that: rhetoric, or what was needed to be believed/said at the time.

And now at our present time, when technological "progress" has been followed a bit further (that is, when we've developed our machinery a bit further under the incentives of our present economic system), much rhetoric has conveniently shifted to something else, something largely contradictory, but again precisely to what is needed to be believed/said to continue following the same incentive structure.

It’s wrong because good capitalists do not want a measly 40 hours of workers’ time. They want it all.

Well, just from reading this, I can tell that you have great potential, not just as a hirable economic agent but, more importantly, as a human being. Being "qualified" according to some company's stupid protocols (which may, for example, just be biased to whether you can follow rules) says nothing about you. So don't feel bad. And speaking of you—the real, internal you, not the you as measured by external social institutions/norms—I completely agree that you should keep learning what you like to learn and finding ways to express yourself.

As for jobs, in the short term definitely consider other jobs (e.g. I recently got a job as a math/CS tutor, pivoting away from my previous software job), or worst case, beg for some shitty job for now and/or ask for assistance from family/friends/etc. Doing so requires humbling yourself in that external sense (like the external sense of being "qualified") but that external you is not the you that matters. So keep fighting for (and improving) that real, beautiful you, whatever it takes!

It’s quantity first and foremost, of calories and of gas carrying us around rather than our own bodies.

Put in the bigger picture of our capitalist consumer economy, which has been unstoppably growing since the neoliberal policies of the 1970s, it seems like the quite logical result. (As is the fact that there is more information still trying to convince us these are not problems—-e.g. big is beautiful! or coke == happiness—-than who are trying to point us towards solutions, i.e. halting and/or at least slowing the liberal regime.)

Our minds haven't changed. What has changed are external factors (e.g. culture and economic forces). So a causal sociological analysis would see those as the crucial factors here.

It's best, if possible, to attack causes or mechanisms behind problems.

I mean if we assume that we are impotent to change society (e.g. to regulate food companies and advertising companies from encouraging worse diets), then what you say is true. But we are only impotent if we make ourselves impotent, or fail to organize against such external forces.

That’s a reasonable explanation for the spread across racial groups. But that spread has existed for a long time. There are other even more important phenomena to explain, like (1) why is it going up across all (or most) groups and (2) why are there geographic disparities?

Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives, those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and sales/marketing, which they've of course also done).

Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products.

Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.

I’ve realized only recently a way to interpret what’s going on at Google economically-speaking: as companies grow and as economies grow as well (e.g. to be more automated and industrialized), this always results in greater bureaucracy [1]. However, Google while it did add more bureaucracy, tried to instead turn these new less-purposeful jobs and bloat into widescale attempts at “innovation”.

Partly legitimate, but partly to maintain culture and a semblance of being an innovative company, in spite of the fact that they are a monopoly that, at the end of the day, is not really incentivized to innovate (e.g. M&A is much more practical for monopolies, as is competitor sabotage, sales and marketing, which of course they’ve also done).

I guess Peter Thiel for example said this long ago (in a convo with Eric Schmidt iirc): that Google is actively anti-competitive. And this is always, always the case for monopolies. They’ve just done such a good job of marketing and creating sideshows to make it appear otherwise. Not to say that they haven’t made some legitimate tech breakthroughs since being a monopoly, but also that tech is solely to serve their ads monopoly, rather than to serve the general public (e.g. what do you think their ML investments are for? It’s not to create C-3PO…)

[1] see e.g. Max Weber for how industrialization leads to bureaucracy, or more recently, David Graeber’s bullshit jobs talk or book for a more fun, anecdotal take.

Seems like a veiled (but really not so veiled) demonstration of military power, no?

Not sure by what strange logic you interpreted this as an attack on “men”.

They’re using “bro” in a similar sense to how it was used to describe Martin Shkreli as a “pharma bro”. Specifically, it’s unrelated to “hard work” and precisely related to the kinds of narratives that these people spin. We’re seeing a shift in narratives away from a focus on qualitative innovation, speaking of products and engineering intricacies, and towards a focus on money and “competition”.

Martin shkreli, for example, was not interested in chemistry and biology and actually improving health. He was interested in getting rich off of driving prices up on niche drugs with no alternatives. The same is become more and more true in Silicon Valley.

It’s the kind of narrative of the monopoly. When what you need to maintain power is sales and PR, rather than qualitative innovation, the culture will shift towards sales and PR.

I saw an article recently where an FB spokesperson was arguing—albeit in an indirect, fluffily-phrased way—that in order to be able to only track you in the places X where they're allowed to and not the places Y they're not allowed to, they need to track you everywhere (X+Y) to know if you're in X. That way, presumably, they can be sure to not track you in X.

I gotta find that article again...

because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation

I don't disagree with this statement. But arguably, it's becoming clear that these fields exist, on an economic level, as a means for already powerful corporations and technocrats to gain ownership over and repurpose the labor of previous generations for profitable automation (not simply to create C-3PO or something).

Not unlike all those other non-digital areas of the economy (e.g. railroads were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of previous generations and they are now owned by a small few, likely unrelated to the descendants of the laborers who built them).

For some ML-related commentary on this subject, see e.g. https://nathanieltravis.com/2022/08/01/ai-research-the-corpo...

+1. There is a widespread "metric fallacy" or "task fallacy" going around. Models of course optimize for metrics, so they tend to perform well on those related metrics.

Humans, however, are not simply metric optimizers. Though it's always in the interest of those corporations producing metric optimizers (i.e. models) to paint humans as such, so their models shine in comparison. They want humans to look like bad machines, so it looks like they should be automated. Not to say they shouldn't in many cases, just that there's a clear one-sidedness in all corporate PR (and funded research, especially that research which is also PR).

All this to say that yes I agree with you. And if we humans don't want our unsustainable economic growth to turn us even more into machines (as our bureaucratic creep has done quite well thus far), we should fight such rhetoric that aims to paint humans simply as machines or task-doers.

I don't think kids doomscrolled the bible.

This kind of purely statistical investigation (quite prevalent in modern academia) is just so bad at investigating holistic causal forces.

E.g. in the intro it mentioned “malicious envy” as a motive accounting for 50% of people’s desires to redistribute wealth. But could not “malicious envy” be caused/increased by outside forces? Is that stable over time and across countries, for example? (I doubt it is.)

These are precisely the kinds of fallacies or at best partial explanations that founders of sociology like Durkheim so clearly cut through. And yet here we are > 100 years later.

I mean, I’d rather have science that sacrificed its significant p-value for a little perspective and philosophy. What good is a correlation with no idea of the causation or overall perspective? For us humans this kind of result is at best a conversation starter (doesn’t really show us anything).

Completely disagree. I think what is great about YouTube are the subset of creators that make genuinely good content, and especially those creators you follow consistently for a long time and really enjoy and get something out of.

The algos are useful if I follow so many creators that I can’t keep up, or occasionally I get some good unexpected content. But my favorite creators were all recommended me by other people, not algos.

Also, the algos just peddle in commoditized interactions like Likes and Watch Time and Subscribes. They can only optimize for meaningful creator-observer relationship so far as that’s measured by Watch Time, Subscribe, etc.

Not to mention some obvious problems how clickbaity the recs are for new/anonymous users or on videos with few views. Or the whole Elsagate incident (which no doubt continues to be a problem).

Overall I still like YT but I don’t think the commoditized algos are helping much. Just let me get recs from friends or search for what I want. Don’t try to get me to doomwatch easy content all day… and especially don’t try to get kids to doomwatch easy content all day.

I completely agree with you that, at the end of the day, it's the actions and choices of people that determines our rights and laws and society as a whole.

But at the same time, it sounds like you are acknowledging the agency of others, while at the same time absolving yourself of agency.

I mean, of course other people in the future can change things. But what about today?

(Not to diss, I just found your phrasing about "advantageousness" a bit odd. For example, it seems like any historical regime could've used the exact same logic, even those that we would absolutely in hindsight not consider "advantageous". To be more concrete: yes it's true that, taking a Martian view, problems are likely to "fix themselves". But at the same time, as history shows, problems "fix themselves" in many different ways. Sometimes relatively smooth or peaceful ways and in other times in ways that involve massive war and genocide. And this too is up to people to decide. If, for example, the fascists act, organize, and spread their opinions more aggressively than non-fascists, they may come out on top, etc.)

You are completely right. For example, the Tories in the UK now receive more donations from dead donors than living ones. How crazy is that?

Many of these structures, like trusts, take on a life of their own which is parasitic to the general public. Ergo they should not exist, or at least they should not be allowed to be political far into the future.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/dead-tories-prop-up-t...

When science does not serve people, and merely the interests of those with capital, it is natural that some people will want to reject it. Though, ideally we can find a middle ground.

I guess there are many causes for anti-science sentiment, but interestingly, part of it comes from being "too objective". Positivism often fails at trying find truth that's useful/empowering to individual people, even if it is good at mastering nature/growing economies.

We're seeing history repeat itself. Overabundance of positivist rationality at the cost of human subjectivity is precisely what the Counter-Enlightenment and Romantics were reacting to. It's also what sociologists such as Max Weber spoke about, and Marx, and especially the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse).

Let's hope we can find a new Romanticism, to come to value the subjective in addition to the objective as a society, to create science like literature that's actually empowering to people. Otherwise, radical rejections of objective truth—e.g. the Flat Earth movement, fascism—are natural, albeit deluded responses, as has been seen historically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

Well, saving is a virtue in itself (a virtue that most Americans don’t have I agree). But it’s really a separate issue. Suppose all Americans suddenly started saving 10% of their income. That would just establish a new standard of living, a new equilibrium.

The point is, though, that the population level class structure and socioeconomic mobility/opportunity would remain. As would the fact that the current generation cannot (as a whole) afford housing the way two generations ago could.

The narrative of “the individual” encourages non-elites to compete amongst themselves for a progressively shrinking portion of the pie. From the perspective of elites it has a twofold benefit: discourage worker solidarity and encourage productivity. From the perspective of workers, the latter benefit is good (we all should strive for competence and contribution), but the former is not good (even just in terms of life enjoyment). Also, at some point the pie needs a drastic and more balanced reallocation.

We don’t need silly statistics to show this. It’s just common sense.

I mean, if alcohol were banned, that would send pharmaceutical sales through the roof since we’d lose our most common medication for anxiety, depression, burnout, and general this-hustle-culture-is-fucking-people-up disorder (GTD is the technical term).