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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4039 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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“Learn to code” has been the go to response to people laid off due to automation or other technological advances. What is going to be the equivalent if developers more or less become redundant with the rapid advances in LLMs? Learn to craft?

Learn to cater, I imagine.

I remember first hearing 'learn to code' after a study was published, where they trained some of the miners to code as a way to retrain them because coal mines were shutting down. This lead to smug twitter responses of 'learn to code' anytime someone brought up things like clean coal, towns shutting down, etc.

So now, I tell those people to 'learn to mine!'

We will probably need the lithium

Learn to entrepreneur.

Probably something about everyone being a carer -- eldercare, childcare, service jobs, without much thought going toward whether or not the displaced people are temperamentally suited to that, followed by even more "disabilities." The schools are already adding "social and emotional learning," in a way that assumes the recipient is already well socialized and doesn't need to explicitly be taught things like "don't say your unpopular opinions in public."

Ideally we will shift towards valuing and assigning status to people who build and maintain community. Women used to have this as their primary role, but after they entered the workforce there was a gaping hole where pillars of the community used to be.

There can be negatives to tons of community, sure, but I think we’ve found that the fetishization of individualism is just as bad, if not worse.

I think we’ve found that the fetishization of individualism

Really?

Yes, individualism has problems. But without it, who get to decide what's good for everyone else? Are we really going to ignore all the times authoritarianism has lead to problems?

Take free speech for example. Yes, some people say bad things. But historically, when we gave people the power to control speech to result was much worse. Just focusing on the bad thing people say and calling anyone who defends free speech as a fetishist isn't a good argument.

Individualism is not the same thing as liberalism or free speech, although they are definitely conflated. Ideally in a well functioning liberal community, people are prosocial and help others out. They focus on more than just their individual wants/needs.

I’d argue individualism is focusing on yourself to the exclusion of others, and is bad. Indeed, with porn and so much sensory satisfaction available, I’m comfortable labeling it a fetish.

Just focusing on the bad thing people say and calling anyone who defends free speech as a fetishist isn't a good argument.

Maybe I missed something; was that an argument anyone has made?

Not coincidentally, sites like this one will continue to revolt at the merest suggestion of activism.

For most activists, the end justify the means. You're really not allowed to be critical because it's more important to be a team player (the cause is more important).

You really can't be an activist and be rational.

That...is really not true. More important doesn't mean absolutely important; it trades off. On the margin, organizations which don't take criticism will bloat and fail. But that means getting replaced by groups and ideologies which don't, even if they hold the exact same fundamental beliefs.

That's purely a dictate from the mods, rather than the users.

To be fair, it would be even harder to attract a varied userbase if we were coordinating to do activism here.

I don't know.

This site is incredibly steeped in Internet liberalism. The obvious aspect is our free-speech policy, but more generally, having a community based around getting into (reasonably) civil arguments is weird. It's part of the Internet tradition going back through atheist discussion boards and federated BBS. Take away the "no recruiting" rule, stop moderating for it, and the community will die. Not because the activists win, but because they are incompatible with the interesting bits of the site.

There's a certain irony in saying "gosh this individualism thing is awful rough" to a community summoned by those principles.

"Put on the VR headset. Get in the gamer pod. And don't come out ever again."

I sure hope so. Retvrning to crafts would be a pretty optimistic scenario with few downsides that I can see.

I'm worried there will be a lot less market disruption, and a lot more mass scale digital surveillance.

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