samizdatum

Maximin is probably better for avoiding those pesky "torture/enslave half of humanity" scenarios.

Yes, a utility monster is conceivable under both theories. It's amusing how a utility monster represents a serious objection for utilitarian philosophers, but is a total non-concern for people that solve optimization problems for a living. It would be like software engineers lying awake in bed worrying about what they'd do if they just stopped writing bugs one day.

See, in this family, we DON’T just want to maximize the overall quantity of individual happiness (like Bentham). No… In this family, we want to maximize the overall quantity AND the quality of individual happiness (like John Stuart Mill).

But daaad, this now becomes a multi-objective optimization problem, and there are potentially an infinite number of solutions that lie along the Pareto frontier...

I'm pretty confident that Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, composed the greatest single-sentence ode to toothpaste ever written:

"In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-made mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles–bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane–uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing idle with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now–it is true return–to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see."

In a banal sense, it's correct to say that there's no searcher, no goal to evolution. As far as we know, "natural selection" isn't "real" in the sense that electromagnetism is "real"; natural selection is just a staggeringly convenient shorthand that refers to the multitude of ways organisms can die. But if we go further, and think of evolution as a mere random walk through state space, we've suddenly lost all explanatory power. The independent emergence of echolocation in whales and bats, for instance, becomes a brute mystery.

Evolution only makes sense if we think of it as as some kind of massively parallel Monte Carlo that's weighted to explore regions of the state space with high fitness. So it's perfectly valid to talk, as biologist do, of selection pressures and directional selection, because- and here we've come full circle- there is a goal to evolution: to exist.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that evolution is a tautological collapse of the "why" in "why do we exist".

Let me explain: evolution is a massive, groping search in the ultrahigh dimensional space of possible organisms, one that is solving for fitness by literally obliterating less fit entities from existence. So fitness is actually just "what is good at existing", which, given enough iterations, will determine what actually exists anyway.

So now we can simply substitute in the answer to the question "why do we exist?": We exist because we evolved, which is like saying, we exist because we are fit, which is like saying, we exist because we exist. And that explanational ouroboros sort of levitates before us, a silent, immutable feature of the universe: we are here because we exist, because we exist, because...

And it's so easy for us to make that small, seductive step to saying that our existence is therefore inevitable. But I think that's a mistake. The tautology doesn't answer the why question; it annihilates it, dissolving the teleological question into its mechanistic refutation: WE. ARE. HERE.

I think I was addressing attitudes towards new technologies, rather than their actual impacts, which you quite rightly focus on.

I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.

But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.

Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners, and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face that the result turned out to be negative after all.

Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.

Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in broad agreement on that front.

Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.

Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.

We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:

* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world

* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World

* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People

* And so on.

But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is now simply a part of life, sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".

There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:

* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other

* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.

* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.

But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.

I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.

I think societal condemnation is inconsistent, poorly calibrated, and largely rooted in exogenous/historical factors.

The outrage over isolated killings of charismatic megafauna is matched only by the indifference to extraordinarily large-scale habitat destruction that sees multiple species go extinct every day. See also factory farming.

The incredible revulsion we feel toward an individual pedophile is diluted over an entire industry of child sex trafficking until it reaches homeopathic levels.

I think the condemnation of racism and sexism were basically gavaged into society by social movements and brave people fighting for their rights. While this was definitely an incredible step forward, it did little to neuter our base instincts for prejudice; we were instead outfitted with a sort of pattern-matching, Pavlovian hair-trigger that fires whenever someone says the word "black".

It's said that society progresses one funeral at a time, and that could be the reason why intergenerational prejudice has had no champion. Who will fight for Gen Z once they're dead?

I'm baffled that this sort of discourse is considered acceptable. Not in an "I-feel-appalled" sort of way, but in a very literal, "why doesn't society treat this like racism or sexism" sort of way.

If someone wanted to argue that intergenerational differences are significant, they'd have to contend with the fact that the ratio of intragenerational:intergenerational variance is far smaller than intrasex:intersex or intraracial:interracial variance, and commit themselves to also being a racist or a sexist.

It's routinely taught in org-psych and related fields, for example, that different generations have X characteristic that makes them better or worse suited to a particular role. Imagine the uproar that would ensue if we taught that "women are better at teaching professions while men are better at science", or "you should prefer asian employees in STEM roles vs black employees".

Maybe someone would then say, "hey, our condemnation of racism isn't based upon some ANOVA or arbitrary significance test- we aren't racist because Every Human has intrinsic worth." In which case, we can stop promulgating this antiscientific ingroup/outgroup hysteria and just focus on the Every Human part.

Location: Melbourne, Australia

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You're implying that if something can be outdone it doesn't have a purpose, which seems to rule out purposes for pretty much everything.

I'm sure there's always someone that can write books or maths papers or symphonies better than you. I don't think this robs you of purpose, unless your purpose is to be the absolute best at something.

Anyway, I find it curious that you would say logic is a quintessentially human trait, because humans are naturally quite bad at logic.

Voting is compulsory in Australia.

I find this is one of the biggest problems with object-oriented programming. The object is a terrible unit of abstraction, because it forces you to carve up your domain into rigid chunks which might map to your domain today, and fail to map to it tomorrow, and a terrible unit of reuse, because it couples methods to data, and bundles these methods together on top of that.

Fair enough, but I think that's a separate issue. If we go down this path, we'd be diluting the term "UX" to homeopathic levels. I wouldn't criticize an iOS-only app for bad UX because it ignores half the market.

Fair enough. Do you think informal discussions benefit from a focus on thematic engagement, rather than logical minutiae?

Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.

There's a repeating motif in reactions to disruptive technology, where the technology is first viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from other Old Activities that existed before the technology, and people who aren't early adopters only look at the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.

We saw this motif of oppositional reaction in how people viewed the internet: people are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world; people are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the real world; he's meeting someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with people, etc. But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "cyberlife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is simply a part of Reality, sans prefix and with a capital R, instead of being boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".

There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent: we're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other; every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.; you can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity. But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you're sitting in a restaurant that you just found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones have inextricably woven themselves so far into our lives, that if you ask someone how their smartphone life compares to their real life, they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.

I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.

Why not? That's a very strong statement. I could think of a countless number of bets that trivially match your criteria (i.e. even odds Facebook will not stop selling ads this year), that you'd be crazy not to take.

Yeah, this article reads like someone was forced by their employer to write a blog post. If it was for self-promotion you'd think they'd put a bit more effort into it. Would be better if retitled to "10 things that just so happened to pop into my head".

In theory, the only irreducible UX distinction surrounding logically separate pages in a traditional website vs a SPA is that the SPA doesn't do the full postback, which is arguably a better UX.

Sure, in practice many SPAs might be subpar, but then the debate shifts to "are SPAs are difficult to implement correctly," rather than "SPAs for blogging engines (necessarily) creates horrendous UX". There are existence proofs of well-designed SPAs with logically separate pages and excellent UX.

As an aside, someone who pattern matches on "SPA = horrendous UX" might not even notice a well-designed SPA, further entrenching their belief that SPAs are a Bad Idea from a UX perspective!

Fair enough, you meant to refer to a subset of web development, rather than the entire field. It's a significantly weaker claim, though. I could pick out subsets of any field of work, and declare them non-transferable, and the details of most systems are going to be less transferable than the concepts undergirding them.

Saying an application has a "horrendous UX" because you refuse to run its code seems strange to me.

You could disable CSS and images and call the result ugly, but I don't think that entitles you to call the website ugly?

Really? Functional reactive programming, immutable data, unidirectional data flow, application state as a fold over a stream of actions... it seems like web development is seeing a really high uptake of valuable, transferable abstractions and ideas, far more than mobile GUI toolkits, for example.

SPAs don't need to have horrendous UX?

Yeah, the YouTube is better quality, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk&t=55m50s

This link will start playing as Carmack tells the "broken Netflix engineer" story, while recounting how he finished the app in that incredibly short timeframe.

You're making a far stronger claim than denying that some people are not 10x more productive than others. You're claiming that anyone can be just as productive as anyone else.

That seems to either be such a strong claim that it's trivial to refute, (i.e. a newborn baby, or a quadriplegic with severe mental retardation, etc.), or too nebulous and ill-defined to be of any use (i.e. said quadriplegic is productive in cultivating character in carers?)

Facebook has a pretty good record of non-interference with acquisitions, especially in the user-facing sense that you're describing. It will be even more true for Oculus, because Oculus was not a competitor to Facebook like Instagram, and, to a lesser extent, WhatsApp.

Facebook buying Oculus was a two-billion dollar bet on virtual reality being the next big platform, and to have that bet pay off, Facebook has to play the long game, and let Oculus and the virtual reality market grow.

Facebook isn't stupid or myopic enough to require a Facebook login to use Oculus products. It makes absolutely no sense when you consider the reasons that Facebook bought Oculus.

Carmack is just insanely productive. He had a working prototype of the GearVR Netflix app three days after he started working with Netflix to develop it, and pretty much finished the app a week later.

Have a read about how he developed the app:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/john-carmack-on-developi...

It's almost beyond belief what he managed to accomplish in one and a half weeks. Hacking the Netflix video decoding system, fine-tuning the UX control heuristics, working around DRM limitations, optimizing the power draw and thermals, and much more, all on top of implementing the very polished app itself.

Razor is really quite different from React.

Razor seems to have been born out of a frustration someone had with writing

  return "<div>" + model.name + "</div>";

While it's technically possible to write Razor code with a React-style focus on composition, the syntax and architecture of viewmodels/templates actively pushes you away from doing so. In my experience, most Razor ends up like a C# translation of PHP, and I think that's really the paradigm Razor inherited. Razor has been around since 2011, which significantly predates the Cambrian explosion of clientside js frameworks, so it makes sense.

Maybe kungtotte is talking about accommodation or vergence, though I don't see how these are relevant to f.lux or colour temperature.