When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
> Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things
Last time I looked, Sapir-Whorf is almost universally discredited among linguists and cognitive scientists.
The wikipedia summary:
"The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them. "
It does not matter if a hypothesis is discredited if it helps you build an effective model that works. If you use a discredited hypothesis to make bread and make a great tasting and edible bread, then the hypothesis has value. Even if it is "wrong". Because it works.
Here are some question for you: can you think of any things you cannot think of in your language? Hints. Beethoven, Van Gogh, 7. Can a democracy evolve from FaceBook? What kind of political system can evolve from FaceBook? Is there a language for Democracies? The important thing is not the answer, but the thinking.
No, it doesn't work. Humans (at least) are very powerful metaphor users, and it is typically possible to discuss things for which there is no direct language in terms of metaphors (and analogies). We do this all the time, and it pretty much removes all bounds on what we can talk (and think) about with language.
Lots of poetry makes no sense if you consider it to be a series of words to be literally interpreted according to a grammar rules and a dictionary. But it can often hint at meanings and ideas that can't be expressed directly.
Of course, there are some things that always remain that are harder to get rid of. That's not "lack of language preventing you from thinking things", but rather "assumptions so deeply built into language that it is hard, though perhaps not impossible, to escape them".
Look, I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was great when I learned about it, too. I love the movie Arrival (and the Ted Chiang story it's based on). But if you aren't a social scientist, it can be very appealing (and self-defeating) to latch onto a specific concept you heard about and try to create some grand theory of the world. This is fine, but it's sophistry, not deep thinking.
Twitter is organized around tags, which are all right, I suppose. It's greatest weakness that it is rooted in short messages -- sound bites -- which are not conducive to reasoned debate. Though they removed that technical limitation, the culture was solidified at that point.
> What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
I'm taking this analogy for myself :)
> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?
In my experience over the last year, these things are true...
First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.
Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."
Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.
Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.
The point about trust and respect is a good insight. Especially in the context of our current internet. A friend once said to me "trust is the one thing you can't get on then internet". So how would one bring that trust to the internet?
And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very funny very long after the fact.
Good points all. Trust, respect, reputation.
I'm beginning to suspect HN also needs such a bill. Maybe it is not AI content, but so many prominent posts on HN feel like advertising. Perhaps that is the good thing about AI is that it decreases the trust level. Or is that really a good thing?
Yimby vs Nimby is yet another divisive jingoism - simply putting tags on things and then using them as if significant.
The situation is more complex. The forces about housing right now are incredibly destructive. Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution. In other cases Rich People want to prevent affordable housing. In this case YIMBY is the correct solution. But blindly applying these terms provides a cover for a complicated situation. We have cults of personality, and now we have cults of Jargonism. Neither helps us.
Being outraged because lawyers don't want you to speak is great. The issues legal and housing issues are far more complex and important.
Affordable housing itself is typically used as a poison pill because it makes it harder to turn a profit building. My biggest pet peeve is when some 5 over 1, 9 foot ceiling, crappy finishes, bound to be ghost-town ground level retail, apartment building is characterized as "luxury" by NIMBY who then proceed to say that it needs to have an affordable component. Guess what? It's going to be so clapped out in 15 years that the rent will have to have gone down (inflation adjusted).
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes.
Rich people want to make more money by blocking homes from being built, thereby driving up their property values and making all housing in the area more expensive.
You present a very simplistic view that does not begin to capture the complexity of what's actually happening in practice:
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution.
Why would NIMBYism ever be the answer here? What values does it represent? Allowing rich people to build housing for rich people means that the rich in need of housing don't take away more affordable housing. And when rich people are forced to pay for more affordable hosuing, what used to be affordable becomes unaffordable.
Ensuring that rich people's money goes to new building that doesn't hurt less rich people is the correct solution, if one values keeping housing affordable. One should only block that rich housing if one wants the existing housing to become more expensive.
As far as I can tell, you responded to someone literally saying "The situation is more complex." and attempting a refutation of your absolutist view, by accusing that this is a "very simplistic view" — and then generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all nor considering more than one possible strategy for accumulating real estate wealth.
The "refutation" is the common view tha has been repeated for years and years, and is not complex at all. It in fact misses the dominant trends that have made US housing situation so unaffordable, and is only a tenable view if one has an overly simplistic and narrow view of the players in housing, specifically from the viewpoint of a home owner that does not struggle with the current high costs, and in fact implicitly benefits from those high costs that increase their wealth while locking the next generation out of the opportunity they had.
I don't think my views are absolutist at all, but please do point out wha you think is absolutist if you believe that is a fair criticism instead of a passing swipe.
> generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all
I did nothing of the sort, but I did point out that if the basis of opposing something is because rich people benefit, well, that is an argument to support more housing. If somebody is saying that only certain slices or classes should not benefit but that other rich people should benefit, then let that person make that argument, rather than the overly simplistic "rich person" argument. And let them add enough complexity to concretely state the profits: a homeowner is making 5% a year on their home due to scarcity by locking others out of opportunity, while the developer makes their investors 10%-15% over 2-3 years by adding productively to society and benefiting lots of new people with access to economic opportunity and housing.
Yes, different people are profiting, but one strata is doing it by making others wealthy at the same time, and their profits are to a REIT, and one times. Whereas the landlord and homeowner getting compounded annual returns at a high rate by increasing economic inequality and segregation, through rentierism and exclusion. When developers build an apartment building, investors profit but so does labor and the new residents and city coffers through new taxation.
The comment I was replying to did not present a single shred of complexity, and their petite bourgeois naïveté presents themselves as the only people in the world deserving of profit or consideration or agency or influence. They did not refute my world view at all, and my entire worldview on housing has come about from their same overly simplistic starting point and then learning that there's a vast world out there beyond it.
AI is the poison pill for corporations. They cannot resist the idea that with no people to pay they will make even more profit. If you think about that, and understand that AI is about search, then you see that there will be enormous opportunity to build software that is built to help people not make profit.
Even if you don't really like programming, the takeover by Artificiality will mean that the value of Actuality will increase dramatically. So go for actual value in what you do.
Enough already. The way to determine what kind of manager a person is, is to listen for the context they use. For an extreme hypothetical example, if you hear a manager talk about locking their team in their cells every night, you will know something about their context.
If the manager says "They look to you for leadership and clarity", you know something.
It they quote Jeff Bezo, that provides more definition.
The lesson to learn from this article is not the words, but the context. What is the context you find in this article? How does this person talk about other people? What assumptions are inherent in this article? If you find this normal, what does this say about your assumptions?
What I have learned from my years of being an engineering manager is that the corporate model of software development is fubar.
I find myself referring to my contractors as: Workers.
What does that mean about me?
I can't call them employees. I read the communist stuff a while ago and decided I didn't want to be exploited, so I thought this was just the proper terminology.
But people on the internet loath being called a worker and have called me out on this.
Meanwhile I yoyo between to nice and too hard... I think I'm naturally too nice to the point of failure. I seem to only be 'too hard' for a few months before I go back.
Thank god my industry is high demand, I think even with bad management we will survive. (I got a masters in Engineering Management + read 10 books, but management/supervision orthodoxy is diverse and contradictory.)
I do not want my technology tied to some person I consider of despicable character. Would I buy a cell phone, even at a good deal from Putin? No. Corporations have increasingly become political. Thanks, United vs FEC! So we see them taking a knee to gain commercial advantage. And as in this case harm to our democracy.
In my opinion, no discussion about Starlink is complete without considering whether the money you pay will be used to profit people or causes you do not want.
If you need this, then great. But I have other choices, just as I would not touch a tesla even if you gave it to me. I just am not that desperate.
I’m always amazed how much people attribute to citizens united, a ruling that overturned portions of a law that was only on the books for 7 years at the time.
Hmmm. The ruling had a far greater impact than simply that law. It established that corporations have the same right to free speech that ordinary citizens do as a general principle.
What is the result. We now have a situation where a candidate cannot be elected without a large amount of funding. You will need to either be a billionaire or a corporate toady to get elected. Who is the elected official beholden to? What does the elected official have to do to improve their chances of re-election? Do better by the voters do better by the corporation. This is simple logic.
Added to that you have corporations and the rich controlling the media. Murdoch, Bezos, Musk. If the common citizens want to have a living wage be the minimum, Jeff Bezos does not. How willing is the Washington Post to raise the banner of changing the US minimum wage? This is a rhetorical question as the answer is obvious.
And any media that are not outright owned by the greed afflicted, most media receive a substantial part of their income from advertising, they are also not beholden to common citizens. The New York Times wants to appeal to the rich because that is the market for their advertisers. That is why you see stories in the NYT about "How much second vacation home will two million buy you in Maine". And that is why you do not see stories about "How much hovel will minimum wage buy you in Maine".
I'm an ant. I want to tell you how the chemical trails work. Here is how the pheromones work....
Except. The main point of chemical trails, money or other implementations of the messaging bus of a complex adaptive system is THE COMMUNITY it creates. Think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but instead of language determines what you think, expand that to "your messaging bus language determines how your community functions". Yeah there is lots of stuff about money, but how it determines the form and function of the community (as in CAS) is the important part.
The other primary thing to think about money - once you get that it is a messaging bus - is the idea of making money from money. When you understand the function of the system you can then understand that making money from money is not a good idea. This is not a new idea. The concept of throwing the money lenders out of the temple has been around for a long time.
If you understand money, then you will be able to answer this question:
why is making money from money a bad (dysfunctional) idea?
Oh look. Something works. Lets not break it? How crazy is that?
I sometimes wonder if what happens is like this:
1. Have problem. Need higher level computer language.
2. Think about problem.
3. Solve problem - 'C'
4. Think about problems with 'C'
5. Attempt to fix problems with 'C' - get C++
6. Think about problems with C & C++
7. Get: Go, F#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, ...other
etc.
I tend to do this. The problem is obvious, that I do not repeat step #2.
So then I move to the next step.
8. Thinking about how to fix C, C++, Go, F#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, ...other is too hard.
9. Stop thinking.
Although Mozilla's reason to pay for Rust R&D was because of problems with C++ it's probably not most helpful to think of Rust (let alone F#) as an attempt to specifically fix those problems.
C is a Worse is Better language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better). The bet is that if it's simpler to implement then the fact that what you're implementing isn't great will be dwarfed by that ease of implementation. And it worked for decades which is definitely a success.
You can make a similar argument for Go, but not really for Rust. The other side of the Worse is Better coin is that maybe you could make the Right Thing™ instead.
Because implementing C is so easy and implementing the Right Thing™ is very difficult, the only way this would compete is if almost nobody needs to implement the Right Thing™ themselves. In 1970 that's crazy, each Computer is fairly custom. But by 1995 it feels a lot less "out there", the Intel x86 ISA is everywhere, Tim's crap hypermedia experiment is really taking off. And when Rust 1.0 shipped in 2015 most people were able to use it without doing any implementation work, and the Right Thing™ is just better so why not?
Now, for an existing successful project the calculation is very different, though note that Fish is an example of this working in terms of full throated RIIR. But in terms of whether you should use C for new work it comes out pretty strongly against C in my opinion as a fairly expert C programmer who hasn't written any C for years because Rust is better.
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
reply