But saying that will also make you a woke terrorist for the right.
I'm not saying it is not a problem and the left is not to blame. But I don't see why you explain the situation because of the "all or none" of the left, rather than the "all or none" of everyone in the US: left and right.
> But I don't see why you explain the situation because of the "all or none" of the left
I'm not sure about the person whose comment you addressed but, from experience, I can think of these reasons:
1. A Democratic supporter naturally assumes the Democratic party is the smarter one and holds them to a higher standard.
2. Most of us independents have written the GOP off as a total loss sometime after last January. I suspect, many Dem supporters had arrived at the same conclusion a tad earlier. In other words, what's the point of beating a dead horse?
3. follows from the previous two - there is a sense of real urgency as to make the Dem party do something meaningful, so by pointing the criticism only to them we deprive them from their favorite excuse - that the other party is even worse - they've been hysterically eager to use that excuse for many decades.
Otherwise, both parties are very selective about what they do or don't compromise on, but in either case, the public rarely gets something other than the short end of the stick.
A lot of people who support the current US government do not want the laws to be enforced, they just want to see people who look brown or foreigners to be deported, regardless of if they are in the US legally or illegally.
The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.
But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).
In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".
Where are you getting the idea that 10 innocents are being deported for every 1 illegal? Or that the "majority" of people supporting the crackdown would support that?
The information I can find suggests only a handful of cases, maybe a dozen, out of 600,000 or so.
I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?
I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.
This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.
edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".
(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)
If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be then I think you'd see more people speaking up, but there's not. People don't have to caveat their support of every policy with hypotheticals.
I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
> I am
also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis
courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and
the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year
old).[1]
Federal district judges in mpls are releasing dozens of illegally detained individuals per day. You may not be hearing about it, but it is absolutely happening. Your not hearing about is part of the problem.
> I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
That's my point and the reason of my first comment, which answered to a comment saying
> Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?
I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)
> If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be ...
Somehow, I doubt it. You are yourself saying "they think (rightfully or wrongly)". They are not interested in evidence, they don't really care to check if what they think has any evidence supporting it, it is just convenient for them.
If there are evidence of widespread false positive, they will just hold tight to the idea that "they were traitors anyway". It is more convenient for them. (and in fact, there currently is a lot of evidence of a high number of false positive, but they deny it exactly like that)
The proof of that is that there are already plenty of red flags everywhere showing that officials are incompetent. The officials say that there are plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, and yet, the only people they manage to shoot just appear to be non-illegal with no history of extremism. Then, when it happens, they starts fabricating excuses that turn out are total lies. And then ... it happens again. Even if you buy into the idea that there are indeed plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, you have to admit that they are awful at fixing it.
It is not technically a "widespread false positive", but it is already something that a neutral reasonable person will be incapable to deny that there is a problem. And yet, right now, these people who, according to you will totally "start to speak up", don't hesitate to bury their head in the sand and insist that it is all normal.
It is totally unrealistic to pretend that suddenly, when there is widespread evidence of false positive, they will not continue to find excuse and pretend that these evidences are fake news and lies propagated by traitors.
> I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)
What is the motivation here then? In your opinion?
And speaking of false positives, could you explain what you mean by that?
> I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?
The people who oppose don't care about the fact that illegal immigrants are continually breaking US law by continuing to be in the US, and often explicitly argue that laws restricting immigration into the US are immoral. There's no reason grounded in an ethic of general respect for the law why formal law-violation associated with the crackdown is more important than formal law-violation associated with the illegal immigration.
Ok. First, the people who oppose don't justify everything with "apply the law". They in large majority are consistent and honest and explain that cracking down without respecting basic right is disproportionate and that you need to have a good balance. The large majority agree with the existence of law and agree that just ignoring illegals does not make any sense (they may propose better process to avoid that they end up being illegal in the first place, but also better process to treat illegals, in which case, they are literally proposing solution in which breaking the law is punished, just not by using violence and recklessness).
But again, this is a false dichotomy. You are pretending that the only way to stop breaking the law is by accepting an incompetent organisation (ICE) to act as bullies without having to answer for their actions (while I'm not sure if the people involved in the recent killing will be punished or not, plenty of unjustified violence happened without any consequences for the perpetrators). They are incompetent: they keep making stupid mistake, saying things that appear to be obviously wrong as soon as we see the footage, ...
If you really want "applying the law", why are you not contesting ICE for not being able to arrest illegals while not breaking the law themselves in situation where breaking the law is totally useless (and don't tell me it is not useless: cops and local authorities managed to do the same without creating the mess that ICE has created).
@cauch: let me ask you this: how do you weed out the illegals besides asking for proof or citizenship or proof of a passport visa that you are in the US legally?
Really, you're going to go with "papers, please" ?
ICE is on record of requesting ID from _children_. I don't know if you're a parent, but my kids didn't carry ID until they were nearly adults. That's okay, though, because they're white. I don't like bringing race into this, but we're not seeing ICE ask white people for their passports.
I don't have a problem weeding out dangerous criminals, but flagging someone who had a parking ticket a decade ago is wrong. Additionally, removing TPS from groups and then subsequently deporting them up is wrong. Arresting individuals and deporting them when they are going through the proper legal avenues to become citizens is wrong.
How soon until other "undesirables" are targeted?
Did you carry proof of citizenship as a child? Do you carry it today? I don't, as my license is not a "real id" yet. They could scoop me up as I walk into Home Depot and send me off to god knows where tomorrow.
> Did you carry proof of citizenship as a child? Do you carry it today? I don't, as my license is not a "real id" yet.
Where I'm from, I am legally required to have proof of ID with me all the time. So basically used to never leaving home without it.
No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally? Just because they were good citizens is it OK to be forgiven for crossing the border illegally? How does that make any sense?
And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?
> Where I'm from, I am legally required to have proof of ID with me all the time. So basically used to never leaving home without it.
Yes, I too have proof of ID. It does not prove that I am a citizen. I can also tell you that children in the USA do not carry ID.
> No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally?
If they were brought here as young children, yes, it's wrong -- they're being punished for the actions of their parents.
> And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?
Of course. Let's look at Somalia, who recently had their temporary protected status designation revoked. Their home country is currently involved in a civil war, and the US government simultaneously lists Somalia as "Level 4: Do Not Travel". There's a good chance that we're sending these people to their deaths. You are okay with this?
> You also didn't answer my question about us likely sending Somalis off to their deaths.
I did not answer it because it is a "might", not a certain thing. Also, take into account the fact that they knew it was a temporary thing when they came to the US. Now, knowing one possible outcome, they could emigrate to a third country that is willing to receive them.
You don't see the disparity over the state department saying "Do not go to Somalia, it is unsafe", yet also saying "The need for TPS has passed, it is safe to return to Somalia" ?
The State Department issues warnings for US citizens. It does not care if othet nationalities go there.
And speaking of it is safe to
return there, I am not familiar with what happens when the TPS status is removed, but I think it only means they’re no longer welcome in the US, not necessarily being deported to Somalia the next day. So I don’t see any contradiction.
Their TPS status was abruptly revoked and they were given two months to find another country to reside in or they will be deported to Somalia. Two months! Do you think that you could find another country to reside in and handle all of the legal arrangements within that short of a time frame?
I sincerely hope that you never find yourself in such a situation.
What I don't understand is that ICE are clearly incompetent: they shoot the wrong guys, they keep claiming they arrested bad guys and it turns out they totally misunderstood and the persons in question are not who they thought they were. Even with Pretti, ICE declared they were there to arrest a known illegal with a "significant criminal history", but turns out the Minnesota officials have said it was not the case.
This is an usual strange situation: some people want to see "less illegal immigrants", and yet, they are ok with paying big money to pay incompetent people do an half-assed job.
Other civilized countries routinely ask for proof of citizenship or legal residency when people interact with their bureaucracies and deport people who are discovered by law enforcement to not be legally resident. This happens all the time in every civilized country and in many countries we don't consider civilized.
I've lived in several civilized in Europe, and they don't do raid like it is happening in Minnesota.
What is happening in Minnesota makes the front pages in Europe, and a lot of people are saying that according to them, it will never be possible here (I'm not sure I agree with them, but it shows that the idea that the ICE methods are "the usual way to deal efficiently with immigration" is totally crazy).
I guarantee you, in Europe, illegals are arrested and deported regularly, and yet, the large majority of people don't even notice. There is no masked troops doing raids. And some people push for more care in managing illegal migrants expulsion, they do demonstration, they organise events and sometimes even are present and makes small obstruction during interventions. Yet none of them are being killed.
There is a huge disconnect with reality in US right now, with a part of the population so uneducated with the "usual" migration regulation and so fed with fear that they are painting the situation as if having unhinged ICE acting outside of due process is the only alternative to "open border and lawlessness". What a joke.
They are not. They want illegal migrants to be processed and deported if they are illegal. What they are complaining about is the fact that current, people are "marked" as illegal (or fail to be regularised) for arbitrary reasons and the process is not fair. Imagine if you were doing everything correctly as much as you can and still being treated as a thief? It does not give you a fair chance. You can be marked as illegal just because of quotas or because you had bad luck and the officials did not read your file, or because you did not do something that no one told you you should do despite the fact that you ask, or because you followed the proper process and ask what you should do and the person you asked decided to arrested you, ...
All of this happens in western countries (maybe not all in US). Immigration processes are just really badly designed. Look it up, it is crazy: from some countries, the only way to be considered as "legal" require you to be "illegal" during to the time of the admin process. Even if you pretend that it just means they are just not accepted, it does not make any sense: in this case, why the process does not say "no, sorry, from this country, no one can be legal". But the process is "you want to be legal, good, come to my country and walk this way. Oh, by the way, now that you are here, you are technically illegal, let me arrest you".
The reason is that the victim of the bad design cannot complain because people say "they are illegal anyway, so their voice does not count". For this reason, some citizen noticed that the system is just stupid, and just ask that for each illegal person, we give them a chance to demonstrate if they are really not fit to be regularized. But right now, the whole system is just a waste of money, and some idiots are trying to defend it just because they are too lazy to consider fairness and justice.
edit: if you want more concrete information on why the immigration system is unfair, badly design and waste your money, you can watch John Oliver on youtube about "legal immigration"
My point is that all the people being hunted and deported by ICE are the people that crossed the border illegally. And my question was related to that: why is it unfair to deport all the people that basically broke the law as the first thing they did when they stepped onto US soil?
You say that illegals are people who broke the laws, but that's a big simplification.
For example, the law says that people who have close family living in US and being US citizen are allowed to apply to become US citizen themselves. To do so, they need to come to the US to apply and be present to answer the questions when their file is progressing. But this process is slow and can take years before they even start reviewing the case due to delays. So, for these people, 1) in few year, the administration will say "oh, yes, we concluded that you perfectly have the right to be here", 2) the administration requires them to stay close, so, to live in the city they are applying. And right now, they are now illegals.
In other terms, the only way for them to not be illegal is to be illegal for a while. And once they have been illegal for a while, they may became legal, which is a way for the administration to say "well, turns out that you had the right to be here all along".
On top of that, some people who tried their best to follow all the process still become illegals just because the administration was too slow or did not inform them of the correct procedure (or inform them of the incorrect procedure). It is simply unfair of you they say "these illegals are bad people not following the rules" when in fact they really want to follow the rules but somehow the rules break and someone says "oh, too bad, you did absolutely nothing wrong, but now people can point the finger at you and treat you as if you are a bad person".
Sure, this is not the case for all the illegals. But this is also a huge incentive for illegals to not even bother to try to become legals: why jumps to all the hoops and spend energy if anyway even when you should be granted the nationality, you are still considered as illegal and take the same risks. The system is broken and people don't see the point of following an unfair process.
People cannot live without money. A huge swath of illegal immigrants work for money. Wouldn't it make sense to target the individuals who are _hiring_ them rather than the actual laborers themselves? This logic seems to work perfectly fine when cracking down on drug use, but seems completely ignored when it comes to immigration. (Yes, I'm aware ICE cracks down on some employers, but it's obvious this isn't their primary strategy.)
Seriously, think about it. If _you_ were tasked with cracking down on the immigration situation, what would you do in good faith? Send masked goons to check every single individual's papers and rough up people who can't show them? Or just send men in suits to every labor operation and ask for their I-9s, at 100x less cost? It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that people even assume a shred of good faith from the current administration here. This is terrorism, not law enforcement.
Your reaction makes me remember the "Angry Jack" videos about Gamergate, in particular the video discussing the fact that when some people (troll or not) were propagating racist or sexist things, they were reacting by saying "whaaaat, I'm not racist/sexist, how dare you". Who cares about them, and what they "are" really: for the society, if someone is spreading racist information "for the lols" or spreading it because they really believe in the content, the damage is exactly the same.
I, like you, don't believe the phenomenon was the result of an organised action (of course). The phenomenon was started as meme, resonnated with the far-right, and both far-right and people who don't see any problem with far-right ideology just amplified it. After all, the government has made a lot of stupid videos, and yet, the popularity explodes mainly when it's aligned with far-right.
But I don't have a problem with considering that the "bunch of trolls who did classic troll things" are considered as far-right. They indeed totally jumped in the opportunity to make racist things for the lols. How does that not make them racist themselves? If you create stuffs that racists find great and very aligned with their ideology, I'm sorry, even if you think you are not intrinsically racist, just be an adult and accept the consequences of your actions: you are part of the racist community, you are one of their "allies".
So, I'm perfectly fine with trolls being considered as racists. Trolling is a pain on society anyway and each time a kid thinks of themselves as "super smart" because they are trolling, the reality is rather that the world would be a better place if this version of them was not part of it. Why should we care about what trolls are feeling, they choose to put themselves at the top of the list of people who don't deserve any consideration for their feelings.
So the Hindus are racist because the Nazis appropriated the swastika, and nearly the entire western world doesn’t know the difference, yet they still use it?
Oooh, the poor little trolls, they were doing nice little videos full of flowers and kisses, and the big bad far-right came and stole their memes. Boohoohoo, it's so sad.
Come on, from the start, what the trolls were doing was to parody the initial video game (which is apparently shit) by taking the opposite stance: so, they were, on purpose, making it as much as opposed as the perceived wokeness of the video game. So, they were putting, on purpose, plenty of racist tropes.
The Hindus did not do that: their symbol was used in a totally different context. But the trolls were doing exactly that: the trolling itself consisted in putting plenty of racist things. They knew about it, they knew it was racist, they did it 100% on purpose.
Trolling is, by definition, behaving like an assh*le. I have absolutely no sympathy for those little kids who behave like assh*le and then come crying "boohoo, people say I'm an assh*le". What did you expect? Did you really think you were being smart, or edgy, or that somehow you can spit in people's faces and just say "it was a joke man" and not being accountable?
According to you, a drawing equating a black person to a monkey is only problematic if some people do really believe that black persons are literally monkeys? And people who enjoy these drawing are lacking basic biology concepts and would be flabbergasted if they were told that, no, black people is not a different species as distant from white people than macaques or gorillas?
The problem is the message that it carries and how it unities, spreads and empowers racist communities.
"Don't feed the trolls" is a cute saying on the internet, usually said with confidence by people who think they are smart but in fact don't really know about what they are talking about. And the goal is usually to deter a troll from a forum, so they can go to the next one and do the same trolling (so, it does not stop any trolling, it just displaces it). And it is not even clear if it is working.
It is also quite a coward way to response to that. Imagine "oh, these people are beating a foreigner to death. I know what to do: just ignore them, they are doing that for the attention, if we ignore them, maybe they will stop". Trolls act for attention, but these trolls are getting plenty of attention, from racist communities that loves them (and often even manage to groom them). So, who care about "feeding the troll" or "the streisand effect", this has no impact of the damage they are doing.
> Nobody is complaining about trolls being told they are assholes.
In the comment I've answered, you were literally saying that the trolls were unfairly blamed in the same non-logical way one would blame Hindus for their usage of their symbol.
I always have a lot of questions when I see this kind of articles, and I don't think any articles properly answer it.
1. What is different in software engineering with respect to any other work that require exploration?
The author mentions "it requires research, it's why it's impossible". But plenty of work requires research and people doing it are also asked to provide an estimate: writing a book, managing a complicated construction project, doing scientific research, ...
In all of this, it is also well known that time estimation is tricky and there are plenty of examples of deadline not met. Yet, it looks like that these people understand 1) that their estimations are guesses, 2) that still giving an estimation is useful for their collaborators.
I've worked in academic research, and famously, you sometimes need to write a document for a grant detailing the timeline of your project for the next two years. We all knew what it was (an estimation that will deviate from reality), but we understood why it was needed and how to do it.
I now work as researcher in the private sector, sometimes very closely with the software developers, sometimes doing the same work as them, so I have a strong experience of what it is asked. And I'm often surprised how often software developers are thinking that they are "special" when they have to deal with something that a lot of other persons have to deal with too, and how often they are all lost by this situation while other persons manage to go around it pragmatically.
2. Why is so many of these articles not reflecting in a balanced way on why people asked time estimates?
When the article comes to explain why developers are asked for estimate, the main reason seems to be "because non developers are idiots, or because of the checking box system, or because of the big bad managers who want to justify their role, or because it is the metric to judge the quality of the work".
But at the same time, if they need something, the same developers asks for time estimate all the time. This is just something needed to organize yourself. If you know that the builders will work in your home for 6 months, you know that you need to prepare yourself differently than if it is 2 days. And how many time a developer asked for something, did not get it in time, and did not conclude that it demonstrates the worker was incompetent? (I'm sure _you_ don't do that, rolling my eyes at the usual answer, but you have to admit that such conclusion is something that people do, including developers)
Why in these articles, there is never reflection on the fact that if you don't give any estimate, your colleagues, the people you are supposed to work with, and not against, don't have the information they need to work properly? The tone is always adversarial: the bad guys want a time estimate. And, yes, of course, we have situations where the admin becomes the goals and these requests are ridiculous. But on the other hand, I also understand that developers are asked to follow more process when at the same time they act like teenage-rebel condescending kids. I'm not sure what is the distribution, but even if it is not 50-50, it tells so much about the level of reflection when the article is unable to conceive that, maybe, maybe, sometimes, the developer is not the victim genius surrounded by idiots.
(in fact, in this article, there is the mention of "Some engineers think that their job is to constantly push back against engineering management, and that helping their manager find technical compromises is betraying some kind of sacred engineering trust". But, come on, this is a terrible flaw, you should be ashamed of being like that. This sentence is followed by a link to an article that, instead of highlighting how this behavior should be considered as a terrible flaw, frames it as "too idealistic")
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others.
What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:
"People are idiots.
Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age
isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."
Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".
I think The Relativity of Wrong (Asimov, https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html) is a nice counterpoint to this. Sure, we may say everyone is an idiot in some area. But there are relative levels of idiocy, and there are basic tasks you can sort of master. At the very least you can minimize your own idiocy if never eliminate it. I think mastering most essential areas in life can make you unworthy of the title of 'idiot', at least not overwhelmingly so.
There are infinitely many things to know, but not all of them are important. Knowing finitely many things (which is all we can do) can still keep us alive and well, at least for a while. And we can know some of those finitely many things increasingly well, if never perfectly.
Just as an example, if you manage say your personal finances pretty well, your health pretty well, perform any civic duties you might have, maybe do some social good or social work or charity etc., if your relationships are reasonably agreeable, respectful and pleasant, etc. and if you have a good amount of joy or peace or satisfaction, etc. in your life, then I wouldn't call you an idiot. This is not an impossible ask to know infinitely many things or infinitely precisely.
And we can learn it over 30 or 40 years, or more, prioritizing the most essential first.
Moreover, I'd say whether you can be called an idiot is context-dependent. If you get a typical (non-idiot) person, and put him in a highly specific job (which he isn't qualified for), say manager of inspectors of nuclear power plants, then he might behave like an idiot; in this case the best ability is probably the meta-ability to recognize one's own limitations and refuse work you're not qualified enough for.
Like, any person (literally any person) can theoretically be put in a situation that he might do significant harm or something stupid, this just means we have to work in contexts and understand and do well within said context; we could only legitimately be called idiots while failing badly or unethically within a canonical chosen context.
I really just don't think it's generally a good idea to go around calling ourselves (or anyone else) idiots. Too broad, derogatory, and tries to put an irremovable label on a person, which as I've explained, almost never deserves such an absolute classification.
My point was not that doing something stupid means someone is stupid, but that the examples I've provided are showing that Adams was prone to think of himself as smart when he was not. So far, there is no much proof that Adams was particularly smart (unless you are arguing that everyone can be called smart)
> Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps
Doesn't help you, sure. I'm not a fan, as a matter of taste and am self-aware enough to recognize it. The near-reliable output of his creativity and the pervasive notions, distilled and distributed to the culture are proof enough for history.
I don't think white collar tech workers are uniquely predisposed to fascism. Blue collar tradesmen are more likely to be disposed to it and capable of getting their hands dirty.
> What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
Anyone who identifies as a rationalist is immediately suspect. The name itself is a bad joke. "Ah yes, let me name my philosophy 'obviously correctism'."
I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with empiricism. I would say you're a little off in characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of transcendent insight into these questions.
"Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume) that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning, but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_, conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on rationalism is that rationalists hold that every substantive philosophical question can be answered while sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.
It's pretty unfortunate that the Yudkowsky-and-LessWrong crowd picked a term that traditionally meant something so different. This has been confusing people since at least 2011.
Well empiricists think knowledge exists in the environment and is absorbed directly through the eyes and ears without interpretation, if we're being uncharitable.
Sure. The idea of raw, uninterpreted "sense data" that the empiricists worked with (well into the 20th century) is pretty clearly bunk. Much of philosophy took a turn towards anti-foundationalism, and rationalism and empiricism are, at least classically, notions of the "foundations" of knowledge. I mean, this is philosophy, it's all pretty ridiculous.
> Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
Other areas of human experience reveal the limits of rationality. In romantic love, for example, reason and rationality are rarely pathways to what is "obviously correct".
Rationality is one mode of human experience among many and has value in some areas more than others.
one is, "is there a rational description of the universe, the world, humanity, etc.". Some people think there isn't, but I would like to think that the universe does conform to some rational system.
the other, and important one is, "do humans have the capability to acquire and fully model this rational system in their own minds" and I don't think that's a given. the human brain is just an artifact of an evolutionary system that only implies that its owners can survive and persist on the earth as it happens to exist in the current 50K year period it occurs in. It's not clear that humans have even slight ability to be perfectly rational analytic engines, as opposed to unique animals responding to desires and fears. this is why it's so silly when "rationalists" try to appear as so above all the other lowly humans, as though escaping human nature is even an option.
Uh-huh. Rationality is open-ended, we're apparently not very good at it and room for improvement is plentiful. However, I can still try to be rational, and approve of rationality.
My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not even able to try to be rational, or to improve? "Perfect rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge", it's a mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far distant future that we'll probably revise the concept away before we get anywhere near it. So why present it as a goal? Being slightly more rational is a practical goal, unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that much.
> My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not even able to try to be rational, or to improve?
not at all
> "Perfect rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge", it's a mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far distant future that we'll probably revise the concept away before we get anywhere near it.
my statement refers to a general vibe from people who call themselves "rationalists" are going on the assumption that they are rational, while everyone else is not. Which is ridiculous. everyone "tries" to be rational. of course everyone should "try" to be rational. That's what everyone is doing most of time regardless of how poorly we judge their success.
> Being slightly more rational is a practical goal, unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that much.
Everyone should be "slightly more rational". The rationalists state that they *are* more rational, and then they go on to have fixations on such "rational" things like proving that "race" is real and determines intelligence. Totally missing what their brains are actually doing since they are so "rational".
In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice.
That said, I was surrounded by rationalists in my younger years by pure coincidence and spent some time following the blog links they sent and later reading the occasional LessWrong thread or SSC comment section that they were discussing each day in chat.
It's pretty easy to see that the movement attracts a lot of people who have made up their minds but use rationalisim as a way to build a scaffold underneath their pre-determined beliefs in a way that sounds correct. The blogs and forums celebrate writing of a certain style that feels correct and truthy. Anyone who learns how to write in that style can get their ideas accepted as fact in rationalist communities by writing that way. You can find examples throughout history where even the heroes of the rationalist movement have written illogical things, but they've done it in the correct way that makes it appear to be "first principals" thinking with a "steelmanning" of the other side along with appropriate prose to sound correct to rationalists.
You should explicitly state who those people are, what illogical things they have written, and why they are illogical.
I think it's very likely that people who can plausibly be considered "heroes of the rationalist movement" have written illogical things. But I don't know which specific people and which specific things you mean by that, so I don't know if I think you in particular are correct in your judgement or not.
Using first principles thinking and steelmanning are just rhetorical techniques for persuasive thinking and writing. Even people who are unfamiliar with those particular pieces of terminology do them.
It's stupid, but it works. There are innumerable examples of it, The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, National Socialism, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Good guys, or at least people who are good in the context of your or my value systems, also do it. I've got zero beef with my local Humane Society, they're great, but clearly the name of the organization has been chosen for its strong emotional potency.
Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.
They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.
J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say.
Intelligent people are sometimes very, very weird. Grothendieck and Gödel come to mind as well. It is not smart to die of hunger because your wife is hospitalized, every lizard knows better than that; but that is precisely how Gödel met his end.
>J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong".
I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day.
Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive).
The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done.
The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.
I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.
No, the article argues that Adams was good at one very specific thing (writing silly comics about the workplace) and bad at everything else. It's very clear on that point. It argues that later in life he lost his self-awareness of his own ineptitude and began to falsely believe he was smarter than everyone.
Keep reading. The central thesis of the article/eulogy is that Adams wanted to be successful at something more serious than Dilbert but was bad at everything else he tried.
It talks about his first new business attempt with the Dilberito, which was terrible. It quotes, it "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste".
Then he tries to run a restaurant, which he is also bad at. Even Adams realizes he is bad at it. "After every workday, Adams and the waiters get together and laugh long into the night together about how bad a boss Adams is!"
Then he tries his hand at writing philosophy, which he is also terrible at. The article spends two long sections describing just how bad his books "God's Debris" and "The Religion War" are.
Then the article describes how Adams claimed himself to be a master hypnotist/manipulator in the most delusional and cringey way possible.
Then the article talks about Adams' many terrible political predictions. E.g. "His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year”."
Then there's how he responded to liberals beginning to see him as an enemy when he was predicting Trump would win the 2016 election: "As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t"
Then in 2023, Adams stupidly gets himself cancelled.
> There are plenty of quotes like this one
No, there aren't. While the article/eulogy says a number of positive things about Adams, that very faint praise at the beginning is the only place the article describes him as being even only-slightly-above-average intelligence at anything other than Dilbert.
What it does mention several times is that Adams thought himself cleverer than everyone else. For example (describing Adams' thoughts):
> Thesis: I am cleverer than everyone else.
> Antithesis: I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
> Synthesis: I was trying to be rational. But most people are irrational sheep; they can be directed only by charismatic manipulators who play on their biases, not by rational persuasion. But now I’m back to being cleverer than everyone else, because I noticed this. Also, I should become a charismatic manipulator.
But the tone here is mocking Adams and not endorsing his view.
Thanks. I often think of it as a minor character flaw in myself that I spend the time replying to things that really aren't important. Your comment made me smile.
You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."
Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
It is surprising that the author don't mention a very important point: you want to be able to modify your tool quickly to adapt to the evolving world.
That's a strong reason we want modular, concise, clean code: because tomorrow, we will want to solve a slightly different problem, and if you have a nice clean base, you can reuse it. If you don't, you need to rebuild from scratch (which may not be a problem with vibe coding) and rebuild the trust that the new tool is doing what it is supposed to do (which is a problem).
The only reason AI can do anything good is that it's been trained all this clean, modular, and well designed code. What happens when it stops existing?
Even in my own use of AI, letting the AI get away with shit code means that it continues to do a worse job. When it sees examples of good code, it does better. What happens when there's nobody at the wheel?
The problem is that “clear”, “modular”, “well designed” and all pretty abstract ideas.
I personally like builder style when doing oop new Client().withTimeOut().ignoreHttpErrors()
Not everyone would consider that clean when using it in your code base.
And let’s face it all code has hacks and patches just to get it out before the deadline then there are more things to do so it will just stay that way.
That might be true. But unclear, non-modular, and poorly designed is actually much easier to identify.
I don't know if I like the builder style; I could go either way. But if I saw that, I'd still consider that clear and well designed. But I've seen some truly ugly code from both people and AI.
But same is true about "good food": some people will prefer some specific food and someone "good food" may not be the taste of someone else.
And yet, it would be ridiculous to pretend that we cannot say that there is an advantage in avoiding cooking a dish made with dirt and toxic waste. The fact that we cannot define an absolute objective "good food" is not at all a problem.
> rebuild from scratch (which may not be a problem with vibe coding)
I've thought about how I could possibly vibe code from scratch something I've built and I just don't think it's possible. So much of the API contract and UI behavior is implicit that there is no way you could clone it without missing edge cases. And that's assuming the prompt is take this code and do X with it. Starting from scratch, like blank slate... Impossible.
You simply can't adequately describe a sufficiently complex app in natural language well enough to get a perfect copy. You'd have to detail every business rule, every quirk, everything that makes your app work. Try and condense the hundreds, thousands of tickets and bug reports into prompts.
Folks hedging on GenAI just constantly rewriting from scratch when they declare technical bankruptcy are in for a rude awakening (and tons of bugs).
Isn't the 34 counts due to the fact that the trial concluded that Trump paid Daniels via Cohen but hidden the payment as "legal expenses" and therefore falsified 34 different documents?
It is not like they invented extra fake actions that Trump did not do, it is all part of the same fraud. Either you recognize that Trump was guilty in this affair, and he gets X counts of fraud, X being a large number due to the number of document involved (and maybe someone can argue on the exact count, but 34 or 28 is not a big difference, so it is a different argument that move the goalpost), or Trump was not guilty at all. You cannot really say "well, Trump is guilty for the first 2 counts, but then not the 32 other counts": how can he be guilty in one document and not be guilty in the other which is basically identical except for the date?
Also, isn't a large number of counts of conviction pretty common in case of fraud? (for exactly the reason I've given: the falsification of each document counts for 1 count)
People who claims that 34 counts of conviction is the result of a political persecutions seems to have no idea that 1) this is usually how it works, this is usually what people get for fraud, there was no special treatment for Trump, 2) pretending that it was maybe 1 or 2 counts of felony but not 34 does not make any sense, 3) even if they wanted, it would not have been possible for the trial to conclude "just 1 or 2 counts", and it is therefore ridiculous to pretend that this number is the result of a political bias where they choose the higher number just to be mean toward Trump.
But in practice, having another human cheating for you was often unpractical: people don't usually like helping cheater, and simply trying to find an accomplice may get you in trouble. Because of that, it is relatively inefficient and therefore not a real problem and not a real impact on the final quality of the evaluation.
LLM is indeed just the same, except that finding an accomplice is now easy and without risk.
"Everyone can cheat" is not making the poor equal to the rich, not at all.
The rich gets 2 things: they can pay for stuffs and they can get away for stuffs just because they are rich. The fact that no one is paying does not mean that magically the poor can get away for stuffs.
The things they can get away with includes, for example, the fact that they don't get fired when they don't know their job. The poor still gets fired, the fact that they can now cheat more easily just mean they are shooting themselves in the foot.
The rich and connected adjacent to accounting and willing to cheat would have most probably already worked somewhere else money-related and making an order of magnitude more money.
What is, according to you, the political interest?
There are countries that have interest of having gas or oil bought from them.
It is not clear if they are pro or against other countries going nuclear: on one hand, nuclear will replace part of their market. On the other hand, lobbying to move towards nuclear may impede progress in replacing gas and oil by renewable (a strategy would be to lobby so that the nuclear project starts and then lobby so that the project stagnates and never delivers).
There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear adopted because they have a market for the ore extraction or waste processing. There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear not adopted because they have a market around other generations.
Finally, some countries may want to see their neighbors adopt nuclear: the neighbor will pay all the front bills and take all the risk (economical but also PR, or the cost of educating experts, ...), and if they succeed, they will provide import energy very cheap that can fill the gaps the country did not wanted to invest in.
So it is not clear if there is just one stream of lobbying. The reality is probably that every "sides" does somehow contain manipulative discourse from foreign countries.
Discrimination is not bad in itself. A scientific approach is to apply discrimination over biased sample to compensate the bias. The difficulty is how to compensate fairly. And when you compensate fairly, you will have people who will say you compensated too much and other people who will say you compensated too little.
When I look at the other opinions and values of the majority of people who say that DEI compensate unfairly and too much, I either see that 1. they don't even accept to consider that maybe there was a bias, 2. they also defend policies quite marked politically. These two things make me think there is not really a compensation that it is too big, and that it is just the people who have different values that say they disagree. If it was indeed unfairly balanced, they would be more "pro-DEI on principle" that would react on the dysfunction. (not saying they don't exist, but they are just too few)
If they actually wanted to correct the bias, they would push for standardized testing. Instead, they parasitically push for their own positions, salaries, and to put on good theater. I see the difference and I am not amused.
So what you are saying is that you see a bias against males, or a bias in "pro-DEI" people's behavior.
But where is your standardized testing to prove that? Does it mean that you are not interested in finding the correct correction, but rather to push for a situation that profit you (either because it is directly advantageous, or because it says that "your side" is right and "their side" is wrong)?
This is what I don't understand. Saying "bias = 0" is as much a critical decision as saying "bias = 17". But it looks like people can both say "they say there is a bias of 17 but they don't test it enough to my eyes so they are bad, we should act as if the bias was 0, and I don't do any testing but it is ok because my critics against them don't apply to me".
(edit: also, I think that your argument "standardized testing" is just in bad faith. A lot of DEI policies come with method to measure the impact and process to adapt the correction level based on how things evolved. You may not like these methods, but these methods would simply not even exist if indeed they were not interested in finding the correct correction. It feels like it's an easy argument "they do stuff, but let's just decide it does not count unless I arbitrarily decide it does")
I'm not saying it is not a problem and the left is not to blame. But I don't see why you explain the situation because of the "all or none" of the left, rather than the "all or none" of everyone in the US: left and right.