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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Hierarchy doesn't actually work that way. As you move higher you get more power and less accountability, whereas if you are at the bottom you're worked like a slave (often literally) and accountable for every moment of your time.

Taps Sign

If responsibilities/consequences for failure don't scale proportional to one's authority and power, asymmetries will come to threaten the whole system.

The system can remain asymmetric for longer than you remain viable.

Challenge accepted.

And it's less about me and more about designing systems (subsystems, if you like) that are robust and are likely to survive the supersystem's collapse and possibly supplant it. Whether I'm there to see it or not.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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