hammerzeit

If you see a piece in the NYT that's making fun of those weird tech nerds, odds are high it's in the styles section. Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker, took over the section last year, and since then there's been a rash of pieces akin to this one. Not exactly hit pieces but it's hard to miss the wry condescension throughout.

Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true:

1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.

2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.

My spouse is a doctor as well, and I've also observed the issues the author discusses. I don't think your read of the causes here is correct.

It's worth reading more about the history of medicine to truly understand what's going on here -- the culture of abusive overwork in American medicine goes at the very least back to Osler and the invention of the modern residency program, and has as much to do with cocaine than any corporate malfeasance. Certainly hospitals and the medical industry profit from this culture, but they hardly created it.

Also, on what basis do you say that longer hours with fewer tradeoffs don't improve patient outcomes? You frame it as though it's obvious but is there any evidence to back that up? My wife and most other doctors I know all claim they'd rather have longer hours with fewer handoffs.

I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.

We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.

I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.

But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.

Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.

What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.

This is a really interesting question to ask, but survey-based responses only tells us how venture capitalists think they make decisions. Obviously this is a secretive industry but I think the far more interesting question to answer is around revealed preferences rather than self-assessment.

This is a problem we've managed to solve for dozens of other dietary preferences, from kosher status to gluten-free, without insisting on mandatory labeling. Why is GMO so special?

It's hard to believe the sincerity of your claim, given that you can reasonably infer anything not advertising itself as "non-GMO" contains GMO.

That's ridiculous. Excluding the subway, there's still approximately 110k riders each way on the LIRR[1] and 90k each way on NJ Transit[2]. Plus amtrak, you're talking about ~450,000 daily rail passengers. That would still make Penn Station one of the 3 busiest train stations in Europe, for context.

[1] http://transitdocs.com/files/data/lirr/2012RidershipBook.pdf [2] http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/FactsAtaGlance.pdf

This article, and its reflection on the creative process, on the insecurities felt by those who take part in it, on the pain of how long it takes to get anything done resonated very strongly with me. I think there's a lot to learn here for those of us in the business of creating software or businesses.

It's also written by one of my personal heroes, Robert Caro.

I have a young child at home. He eats bamba, peanut butter, and a worrying amount of New York City dirt.

That said, this is such a dangerous article, and I'm honestly surprised the NYT published it. It's written by a non-scientist making a "common sense" claim, and it even closes with a paragraph-long variation on the "how much can we really trust science anyways?" claim.

My understanding is that there has been a single study, done among a largely homogenous population, that has indicated Bamba's benefit. Maybe Bamba does help inoculate against peanut allergies -- I think it's plausible, even likely. But it's certainly not anything approaching scientific consensus, the author is not a scientist of any variety, and I think this article has a real danger to mislead.

100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well-defined that everybody has a consistent definition of it, meaning you will inevitably have a situation where 2 people are doing directly contradictory things in the name of the company culture. The whole situation at GitHub from a few years ago with a founder's wife running reckless is a perfect example of this.

Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit Centrifuges.

There's already an internet-scale mechanism to avoid seeing ads while ensuring that publishers are compensated for the content they're creating -- it's the very ad exchanges that show us all the terrible ads we see. All you'd need to do is set up a pixel retargeting yourself, match it against the exchanges, and then bid an uncapped amount against it while displaying a blank creative.

Admittedly this won't block 100% of ads, closer to 50-60%, although it would most likely block all of the worst offenders. Likely net cost would be in the $1-$3/day range, distributed amongst the sites you patronize. And, again, all of the infrastructure to do this already exists. You wouldn't need to do deals with publishers or anything like that.

I've always wondered why nobody's created this yet; I've always assumed it's because people using ad blockers would not actually pay for an ad-free experience. Other ideas?

Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics.

If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you anything? What value do you represent to them? Why should they believe you?

But... why? I don't understand why an entrepreneur would prefer crowdfunded money to venture capital. And if he can't raise venture capital with the glut of money in venture right now, that's doubly worrying.

The only thing that makes any sense to me at least is a marketing angle -- by getting lots of people as "shareholders" you now have a base of evangelists to advocate for your car.

While this doesn't invalidate his arguments in and of itself, but it's worth noting that John Gray's core philosophy seems to be diametrically opposed to even the idea of Pinker being right.

Gray's philosophy, at least at the coarse level I understand it, seems to be predicated on the idea that humans are incapable of improving on ethical or moral dimensions beyond their inherent nature [0]. His truck with Pinker is not ultimately about whether it's currently true or not that we are becoming less violent, but whether or not it is ever true. Gray is approaching this from an a priori, non-empirical perspective, rather than attempting to meet empirical evidence with empirical evidence.

I'm not sure if he's ultimately right or not, but I don't find abstract rebuttals to empirical arguments to be particularly compelling.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Pol...

I'm sure there's a point you're making here, but I'm not interested in finding it among all the insults you're slinging my way. Chill out, dude.

There are certainly plenty of folks in silicon valley who could care less about quality as long as it hits the numbers. It may or may not be the case that the new management at TNR are folks like that -- if it is, that's depressing to say the least.

But there are also plenty of folks in silicon valley creating and empowering new forms of content and thought. Even buzzfeed, everyone's favorite target, has produced some awesome longform work to complement their listicle crap. To say nothing of the Mediums of the world.

To argue, as Wieseltier does, that this first group is indicative of a silicon valley ethos, is where he goes off the rails. By what right does he get to make that claim? Because Google hired Ray Kurzweil?

The most generous interpretation is that he's simply unaware of the humanistic side of the internet.

What worries me is the more likely claim that this stems from a certain form of engineer essentialism -- that technologists are inherently unable to appreciate a work of art or cultural criticism. He himself writes this:

"The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers."

Wieseltier seems to really believe that a bunch of pocket-protectored math geeks have taken over his beloved humanities and are trying to reduce it to a bunch of equations. To do so is, I still find, extremely shallow and deeply insulting.

Evgevny Morozov is a great place to start; he can go a little off the rails but much of his critiques of technological determinism are well-located.

I don't fully subscribe to all of Model View Culture's political aims but their arguments need to be engaged with.

In a different direction, what the Long Now foundation does with trying to reframe our focuses on the ultra-long-term is powerful.

Outside of that, I see much (maybe too much of it) happening on twitter, not enough written out. Definitely a challenge to improve.

There are many, many critiques of silicon valley that are relevant and problematic and need to be heard and engaged with more.

This is absolutely not one of them.

If Wieseltier's aim was to provide an ex post facto justification of what went down at the New Republic, he's certainly nailed it. The strawmen he constructs without a whit of evidence wouldn't pass freshman comp; that he's accorded greater privilege demonstrates just how high the shit must have been piled at The New Republic's stables.

What's interesting is we're starting to see the outlines of the narrative that will define the intellectual critique of silicon valley, and it's an old chestnut.

It's the line that silicon valley is all machine and no soul -- a group of folks interested in success only without any capability for reflection, intuition, emotion. That in the quest to ask 'does it work,' we fail to ask 'should it work?' Robots and nerds, in essence.

It's a line that can be traced back to Doug Bowman's '41 shades of blue' post[0] -- itself beginning to define the narrative of Google (and Marissa in particular) as pencil-necked spreadsheet jockeys who wouldn't know good taste if it hit them over the head.

This narrative is, frankly, bullshit. Anybody who's worked on any sort of technology product knows the limits of data in decision-making -- I have yet to see any place where gut feel didn't radically dictate the shape and vision of every company. Similarly, to argue that the Internet is anything other than the most effective device for the production of the same humanistic, intellectual material that Wieseltier bemoans the loss of is to demonstrate an utter unfamiliarity with the internet and how it works.

No, what Wieseltier bemoans is one thing and one thing only: That the means of distribution are no longer so dominated that he automatically, uncritically earns a right to them. The world doesn't need that any longer and we are the better for it.

[0] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.

Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?

To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?

Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].

Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b/enterprise startups.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-an... -- 167,400 musicians

[2] see http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php... -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw

I applaud this article for challenging the received wisdom in libertarian communities that our prison problems are a function of drug laws -- indeed, if there's one thing this article does well, it's establishing that we cannot solve our problems solely by dealing with nonviolent crime.

That said, this article makes a large number of controversial claims that it fails to support on anything other than a rhetorical level, including:

* The moral crisis in prisons is so severe that effectively any social burden should be borne for it to be fixed.

* In time, the increased public money from eliminating prisons will turn violent felons into peaceful individuals.

* The differences between the US and UK's social situations is a function of our prisons.

Ultimately, this article's vigor outweighs its coherence; it seems to oscillate between making ontological claims and moral claims, between libertarian claims and authoritarian claims (note the advocacy for more CCTV).

Is there any information about the actual incidence of this kind of thing? Best thing I can find is from the ACLU report, which suggests 5 non-suicide fatalities and 46 injuries -- but that's clearly from their limited subset.

The reason so many campaigns use "raising awareness" as a goal is because it is trivially, almost tautologically achievable. Let's say the numbers were 10% of what they are. Hey, raised awareness, success! Let's say they were 10x what they are. Hey, awareness!

Furthermore, to be more brutal about this, I think "getting an article in the NYT" can no longer be a success outcome for awareness in a world with such fast attention cycles. There's an adage in politics that an issue has to be in the press for something like 5 consecutive days for it to have real electoral impact. Seems like that is more akin to the target here.

Yes, it means we can't automatically declare victory, but it also defines a victory that's earned.

This response should be exhibit A as to why HN was better when PG was enforcing the no-politics rule.

It's phenomenally rude, emotionally charged, wildly unfocused, and somehow actively advocating being loud and uninformed. It's hard to engage with a post like this in any sort of rational way.

Posts like this crowd out people like me from participating at all on HN by creating an unhealthy environment for discourse.

You respond to the author's uncited claims and rhetorical flourishes with much of the same.

To pick at a few things: * I'm not sure about you, but I'd think that a bittorrent-like outcome is not a successful one. Bittorrent is certainly ubiquitous but its major use is still an illegal one; the analogous outcome for bitcoin would be one where its primary transactional value is on SilkRoad-like sites. Can you elaborate more on your analogy?

* You strongly imply that you have some sort of argument (and maybe evidence?) about how cryptocurrency will/could impact the unbanked in a positive way. Can you elaborate?

* Your last point seems to take it as a foregone conclusion that bitcoin is going to a high valuation and is here to stay. Do you really believe it's an inevitability at this point?

Math is a good analogy, because I think it illustrates the real question here -- to what degree should we care about the pipeline into the meritocracy?

Is a meritocracy effective if it's selecting the most deserving candidates from a skewed pool? Can we call it a meritocracy? Is it fair, for that matter, to evaluate a meritocracy by expecting an even distribution among attributes like gender or ethnicity?

We're living in an era of unprecedented airplane safety, as no American airline has had a mainline crash since 2001. I'm speaking largely as an outsider, but it seems probable that the increased automation has helped facilitate that trend.

We all have a desire to romanticize and glamorize the jobs we do and resist the belief we can be augmented by automation and process. Some of the pull quotes from this article seem to indicate that mentality. To wit, "Now that is being in command of a system, of wonderful computers that do a great job — but that isn’t flying."

Just like a good programmer should understand manual memory management even if he or she always will be writing in Python, I sympathize with the need to understand the underlying principles. But can we really say safety is at risk?

Easily. I know at least two people clearing $100k/year by being 'airbnb slumlords.' Real estate agents are keeping apartments off the market and renting them out as hotels.

Airbnb is clearly forcing a convergence between hotel prices and rents. This doesn't just mean forcing hotel prices down, it also means forcing rents up.

I wish the tech community could stop reflexively defending airbnb and engage with the question of what the costs it is imposing are or might be.