ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
when they have tasted success, you teach, adding "why" to "how" and praising their results
Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean that instead of "Please do task X which includes items A, B, C, and D" you say something like "Please do task X so that we can accelerate our progress on task Y?"
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Someone recently pointed out that with the advent of tools like GitHub Copilot, we will reach a point where most of the code Copilot is trained on will have been generated by Copilot or other, similar tools.
What weird/negative effects do you predict this will have on tools like Copilot and ChatGPT? Will successive generations of AIs mindlessly amplify small quirks in the original human-generated data set? Or will AIs become good at detecting AI generated content and assign it a lower weight? Or will something else happen?
Thanks, this is helpful.
Delegation is almost done, I think. I'll be fully out of IC tasks by next week, and from then on I'll only be working on low-priority tech work to keep my skills sharp (my boss encourages this).
I'm taking copious notes during 1:1 because I am indeed bad with kids' names and birthdays. But more importantly I want to be able get into their heads as you describe and motivate them by findng cool career building opportunities and stimulating work for them.
What's your strategy for feedback? I'm thinking of asking for written feedback quarterly in the vein of "What are two things I could be doing differently to better serve you and the team?" but also asking for opinions on individual during our weekly 1:1s.
Direct communication of deadlines and task assignments is something I'm not too worried about since I've never really felt guilty or awkward about it. I've personally always liked terse, direct managers because it keeps the interaction short so that I can go back to what I was doing. I think it also helps to know your people so that you can triage work to people who will enjoy it and anticipate pushback from people who might not. Any potential pitfalls I might be missing due to my inexperience, though?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
What advice does The Motte have for someone who has never managed people before?
I'm starting a new manager role. I will have 4 reports who are customer facing engineers.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
No, because any government-led social transformation project will suffer from assuming terminal goals that not everyone shares, whether intentional or not. And I think it unlikely that these values would overlap with my own, so my default position is to oppose any such utopian projects.
If it were up to me, I guess I would reintroduce shop class and home economics, return dangerous and fun equipment to playgrounds, and perhaps try to offer some sort of apprenticeship/mentorship program in partnership with local businesses like you mentioned. It couldn't hurt, and those things were awesome. But even then I think the best possible outcome would be a marginal increase in resiliency. The vast majority of these traits just need to be taught in the home. How do you teach someone to be honest? Empathetic? Conscientious? Adventurous? Brave? You do it from a young age at home by modeling the behavior. Unless agents of the state substantially or fully replace the parents as the child's primary caretakers and role models, there not much that government intervention can accomplish.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Do you have a recommended rundown of the development of doctrine relating to usury? As a fellow Catholic I've always been curious.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
By instilling terminal values in parents that incentivize them to expose their own children to doses of adversity at each age and to foster in them a sense of responsibility for their choices and for those circumstances over which they can exercise control. I think that's the only way, unless you want to go full Plato's Republic.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
This is my favorite Mottepost all year. Can you recommend any good books on this history of NOLA and the Cajun triangle? I've got ties to the area and have always been enamored of its unique culture and history.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Learning that universal suffrage was universally regarded as insane prior to the mid-19th century (and even then, the only change was in the U.S.!) is one of those things I can't "unsee." It just explains so many liberal democratic dysfunctions (see Legutko's book).
Fair point about not being able to read minds. I don't want to take my original point too far; I don't think that the people I'm talking about are literal p-zombies. Of course they have an inner life and (IMO) share with me the inherent dignity (in the old sense of "honor and duty") of being made in the image and likeness of God. But maybe they shouldn't be involved in the political decision making process.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
To me, even that rudimentary cause-and-effect thought (if I shout the right slogans, covid will go away) would be comforting because it would mean that there's at least some thinking going on. But my uncomfortable, reluctant suspicion is that a sizeable minority (at least?) don't even engage at that level. They're simply not engaging at all.
I think we all actually kind of do this sort of thing in certain situations. I know nothing about sports other than what I've gleaned from others' conversations and watching my dad yell at the TV growing up. That said I can still make comments in a casual conversation along the lines of "Yep, that's our $NFL_TEAM, choking at the 1 yard line, as is tradition, haha." When I say that, I'm really just making mouth noises that convey "We are similar! I wish to be friendly!" I'm communicating zero information about my opinions or thoughts on sports, even though it might seem otherwise. I'm not actually engaging my brain at all.
Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.
I could have written this post, I feel the exact same, the whole thing made me even more cynical about the average person. But what creeps me out the most is
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore.
What does this phenomenon really tell us? To me, the implications are quite disturbing.
When I've gone around loudly proclaiming to be right about something (online or IRL) and then turn out to be wrong, I feel highly embarrassed when I get called out after the fact. In my better moments I respond with humility, and in my worse moments I respond with rage or misdirection. But the point is that I respond somehow, I feel something.
But a lot of the covid fanatics seem to simply not care at all that they were wrong. When you call them on it, you might get a shrug and a "things were different then," or even just a vague confused stare -- why are you still talking about that? Don't you know it's $currentyear? Haven't you heard about Putin?
When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument. But was I wrong? Were the vast majority of people literally just making mouth noises that simply signalled their alignment with the current Correct Opinion? I'm not being metaphorical here -- the Covid hysteria makes me wonder whether a large majority of our population just parrots slogans to jockey for status without engaging their thinking brains at all (outside of status calculation I guess)? If so, this would explain their apathy about their argument being wrong. "What argument?" they might respond.
Yes, it's not news that the average person is not a deep thinker. Everyone here is aware of that. But to me, the above implies that many people are not just "not deep thinkers." If they were, that wouldn't bother me much -- they and myself would be essentially the same in that we both think, just to different degrees.
But maybe these people are not just shallow thinkers, but non-thinkers. The difference between thinkers and non-thinkers is huge, and I am weirded out by the idea. It almost feels like sharing a society with a bunch of p-zombies (EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually think these people are literal p-zombies). Recent memes about internal monologues and "The Breakfast Question" come to mind. If this model is closer to the truth, it changes my outlook on many things.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
That comic was the first thing that Nybbler's comment brought to mind for me. Looking back it seems like an early attempt to describe what would end up being called "globohomo."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
The therapist isn’t magic and doesn’t know exactly what you need to hear. The entire point is to be a nonjudgmental sounding board and even if it’s imperfect,
This makes me wonder -- would people take up an offer of two heavily discounted introductory sessions with ChatGPT (say $10/hour) and then have the third session with a live human who has read the transcripts? I'd probably go for this. I've always disliked paying for the first few "get to know you" sessions where nothing substantial is accomplished.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
This is an interesting point. I think I wouldn't respond well to this because the few times I've gone to therapy one of the biggest benefits to me was that someone, finally, was listening to me. Somebody cared, even if only because they were being paid to care. Talking to an AI would have probably just heightened my feelings of loneliness and invisibility.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
In Japan, it's simple: it's because everything is like that there. Normie Japanese people take a certain pride in being "normal," i.e. following all the spoken and unspoken rules. There's no real democratic tradition over here, no concept of "consent of the governed," and certainly no American-style anti-government/anti-establishment sentiment. If this sounds like I'm being uncharitable, consider that Japanese people IME mostly see this as a good thing. They seem to see the U.S. as violent, dangerous, unpredictable, and atomized, the same way an American might think of, say, a Brazilian slum.
Chinese people (in my now somewhet dated experience) tend to follow the letter of the law while unspeakably violating the spirit of the law whenever it suits them. So any significant mask wearing there is probably only done in places where people are getting filmed or watched. There are probably a significant number of Chinese people who mask up because they believe that corona will kill them, their mom, and their dog if they get it, similar to leftist hypochondriacs and tinfoil hatters in the U.S. I met many otherwise normal, sometimes well-educated Chinese folks who had normal beliefs about most things but insane paranoid beliefs about one or two things because the CCP/Global Western Conspiracy (depending on their political leaning) was covering up the truth.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I find 4chan shitposting to still be much more creative than Reddit's, so I don't always mind sifting through the crap to find the insightful stuff.
Something about Reddit shitposting always struck me as mostly inauthentic. 4channers (especially before 2016, now less so) seemed to mostly be the "geeks" from the infamous "mops, geeks, and sociopaths" article. They make geeky, often obescene jokes and memes that show true understanding of the subculture and are often original.
Reddit is where the "mops" often go because they can be accepted without having to become as knowledgeable and committed as the geeks while still getting to enjoy the cool stuff the geeks make (see: all the memes about the lifecycle of memes: 4chan -> Reddit -> Funnyjunk/9gag etc.). Then "sociopaths" show up and become mods and rule with an iron fist; opposition to hate speech is often a convenient excuse to exercise arbitrary power.
I hope 4chan sticks around in some form, because in a lot of ways it reminds me of the "old" (late 90s/early 2000s) internet more than anywhere else.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I think that a third worlder who could write well in English and cared to post on online forums would probably be of above average intelligence. I think it's just the smartphone and centralization of internet combining to allow any Anglosphere knuckledragger to effortlessly spam the web with every inane, low-effort, status-seeking comment that pops into their heads.
I can look around at my own family members -- they're all online and participating in social media and online discussions nowadays, when 15 years ago less than half would have been, and 25 years ago, when I first began posting, close to zero would have been. As much as I love my family most of them probably engage in the shitty uninteresting low quality posting people are complaining about here.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
How much would you pay (in money or time) to access the patrician internet where only intelligent nerds can post?
IIRC there are a few places out there (Gemini, and maybe Urbit?) where you need to invest some time upfront to get hooked into the network and to navigate it. Anyone know of any others?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
That always sounded like a folk etymology to me. Does anyone have thorough sources about the word's relation to homosexuals?
I'll confess that I pirate almost everything because I believe the money I'd pay will almost certainly end up under the control of powerful blue tribers who hate my way of life. As @Amadan said below, this isn't a principled stand, it's a "fuck you," and so be it. I rationalize this a bit because I donate a portion of my income to charity and send money directly to good ideologically-friendly/non-ideological creators whenever possible using Patreon, Bandcamp, etc. But it's still unethical I guess.
ETA: Another mitigating factor in my guilt could be that I don't watch or use >98% of the stuff I pirate. In the last two years, I've watched three TV series, one anime, and maybe 3-4 movies. I can't think of any pirated media I've watched this year, actually, except the last few episodes of Better Call Saul. So at least creators can take solace knowing that my stolen copies will almost certainly never be consumed.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
It does, for me. I've used coffee to mask bad eating/sleeping/exercise habits as an adult and it's tough to quit, it's too convenient a crutch. I want to teach my kids to examine and fix their diet and activity patterns before grabbing a stimulant. Might not work, but worth a shot. Or two.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Oh man, Commander Keen. Played tons of that around the year 2000 because they were free downloads on dosgames.com(?). I remember trying to learn the standard galactic alphabet in the game and getting wrecked by the dopefish. I still remember all the in game music... I might have to go back and play them now!
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Several threads on different sites say that MPC charges about $0.20 cents per card. I haven't checked the site yet to verify, but if it's cheaper than that I'd definitely prefer the convenience of getting all my cards from one source.
For me it was the police's ability to hold anyone in custody for up to 23 days without charges. I avoided police, and in the rare case I had to interact with them I was exceedingly deferential and polite.
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