I'm wondering to what extent social working has to be within a company.
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?
If you work at a bank that's basically impossible. Most people will deal with data to some degree, anyone else in the room needs to be cleared for that data (i.e. employee of the same company).
And banks aren't the only companies where that applies, anyone dealing with customer data cannot just use a shared office with people of other companies. If you deal with code that can also apply to some degree.
I've often enough seen confidential data on trains/planes because people were working on the go and not using proper screen protectors (in the past those were mostly consultants). Luckily that never included sensitive customer data. The more people work in public places, the higher the risk for data breaches.
I love working from home but I think it has to be either home or office for many, cafes or co-working spaces aren't a viable solution and a nightmare for anyone in IT security.
It sounds like you are describing co-working spaces that have already existed for a few years. Some are subscription, others are drop in (e.g. if you work from home but want to book a nice room for a meeting). I assume each has their own culture depending on their clientele.
I don't disagree with your conclusions. But I think it is easy to oversimplify this. Until it is obviously just... obvious. I think reality is more interestingly complicated.
> ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?
One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.
> You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies
Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.
Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.
No physical item can be copied exactly with the same arrangement of atoms. There will always be an original.
Digital items have no original. The bytes are constantly copied, even in the creation itself. And every viewing creates another copy. And these copies have perfect fidelity. That's the difference.
> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.
Boom.
So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?
> Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.
Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.
>Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”.
>I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?
Yes. YouTube deserves a little bit of credit for preserving a chronological view, but this is perhaps cancelled out by their draconian restrictions on what you are allowed to publish.
I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes.
> it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association
I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant.
> It's complete bullshit,
It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea.
I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately.
I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.
> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that?
Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true.
The people who are looking at a word like "blacklist" and thinking it in a negative racial way are the ones that are the problem. They are the ones grasping at straws trying to find things to be offended by. It's a choice people make and it's only offensive because someone chooses to be offended by the word. You have to remember when being offended by words like this it means ignoring the context.
It's just silly is what it is. Language policing is absolutely insane.
> Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true.
It's not just whites but east asians, jews as well. The whole idea derives from the notion that its okay to be racist if its upwards. People associate those groups as being affluent and automatically people think its okay to "punch up".
There are certain groups that we are not supposed to "punch down". There is a rise in anti-semitism, anti-asian, anti-white imho because wealth gap is increasing and people who are on the bottom tend to be not of those groups so they feel its justified and its okay to be racist not even being conscious of their actions and thoughts.
Like many Koreans during the LA riots knew exactly who were looting their stores but its forbidden and "racist" just like the victims of a subset of BLM rioters who decided to loot businesses that can't mention the demographic despite video footage evidence, anecdotes and that overwhelming group behind the protests.
It's getting ridiculous like when I was playing Battlefield and was permanently banned for saying "niggardly use of ammo packs" as the person was not cooperating and refusing to drop ammos.
The whole thing about master branch, master bedroom also has turned North America into a laughing stock. I can't wait to leave this puritannical shithole.
> was permanently banned for saying "niggardly use of ammo packs"
As a non-native english speaker, if I didn't look up the word in dictionary, I would likely assume it was a derivative of that other word. I can see how that would lead to a ban if moderator didn't bother checking, especially if they are moderating 13 year olds mostly.
I guess if you didn't know how to play chess and you heard white moves first, you'd think that was racist too. Especially since you might be inclined to think adults are too busy to play games.
Oh yes, groups like Asians are being heavily targeted yet they get almost zero attention. We even saw the case at Yale where Asian and White students were being doc'ed points on admissions.
There is even research showing how in many different situations Asians actually have many more cases of hate crimes against them compared to black and Hispanic:
> In general, hate crimes are most likely targeting young adults at ages 18–34, male, and local residents in all three groups. Asian American victims however, have a higher chance than African Americans and Hispanics to be victimized in places where they are not local residents (24% vs. 16.8% for African Americans and 16.3% for Hispanics). Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans also have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics).
> With regard to the incident characteristics, Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers (39.2% vs. 30.7% for African Americans and 30.1% for Hispanics), are less likely to be offended in their residence (23.7% vs. 34.4% for African Americans and 29.5% for Hispanics), and are more likely to be targeted at school/college (17% vs. 8.9% for African Americans and 11.2% for Hispanics). The variables of time, weapon use, injury, and substance show similar patterns for the three groups.
I personally do not think movements like BLM are progress inducing at all. In fact I think they do the opposite. I think movements like BLM put the blame on things like white people and police. It's easy for a politician to use the police as a scape-goat and reap in the votes for being a big BLM supporter. But talk doesn't mean anything. I have yet to see many politicians actually do anything to address some of the root causes of problems such nearly 3/4 of black babies being born to an unmarried mother (https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/9429/chad_sc...).
And there is a lot of research showing how huge the single-parent factor is on crime rates:
> States with a lower percentage of single-parent families, on average, will have lower rates of juvenile crime. State-by-state analysis indicates that, in general, a 10 percent increase in the number of children living in single-parent homes (including divorces) accompanies a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime.
I find it wild how the blame will be put on police over-policing areas rather than the root of the problem which is the higher rates of crime in these areas due to factors like the one above.
Overall it seems like America (and some of Canada) is becoming super sensitive and easily offended. It makes it hard for anyone to ever bring up the serious problems affecting different communities. This data isn't racist, the same effects are seen across racial groups including white people. And this is exactly why I hate seeing the weird anti-white, anti-jew, anti-asian wars that are going on. Because the reality is that this is a problem that can affect anyone who ends up in these kinds of situations.
I'd love to see a politician who focused on the roots of problems rather then focusing on making the loud mouth Twitter users happy. It's sad that often times even just mentioning these kinds of stats would be considered a conservative view and probably would end up being called insults and some Twitter users trying to cancel you.
Agreed 100%. The fact that people are downvoting just shows how ridiculous the double standard is when it comes to racism.
First, racism is not the olympics. Nobody wins. Even when its people "punching up". However, it is quickly becoming acceptable.
Take a look at Western Europe and the the level of anti-semitism from the Muslim, Arab and some local community. It's disgusting. You'd think that Europe would have rooted this shit out after WW2 but that isn't the case. Especially in France, people who lived there for generations are moving to Israel and other countries. When I look at that I think of the struggles of Asian Americans and other groups that haven't gotten as much attention because it doesn't fit the traditional racism.
This forced diversity and "punching up" movement like BLM and ACAB are only increasing animosity towards those represented groups. Many employers who used to hire people from the ghetto can't do it anymore because they've been A) looted B) minimum wage is forcefully raised to unsustainable levels C) refreshed animosity towards those groups as a result of the violence witnessed or experience
Lot of African Americans wonder where this racial tension comes from the Asian & other community are either willfully ignorant or incapable of accepting reality-its not racist to assume a a certain patron will steal or commit violence when the overwhelming demographic is responsible for it. It's called risk management similar to how you don't venture beyond a certain street in some American cities or walk into a favela in Brazil. So already trust was very low towards African Americans and other similar groups, now after BLM, its at an all time low. In fact, it has hurt progress. It's going to be hard for businesses damaged by the abuse of trust from those demographics to ever trust them again and it's going to lead to more underserved ghettos, more poverty, less jobs. This sucks for honest folks of those community who see their opportunities ruined because the uneducated ones suddenly were empowered by an asinine political movement.
People keep using poverty, intergenerational trauma due to slavery but these are just fucking excuses. Asian Americans have gone through all of those things back home from the feudal corrupt agricultural lordship of that only ended around 19th century (but some countries still have militant authoritarian power forcing people in squalor conditions in factories making goods for the West), regional war and poverty. Yet these hardships were never allowed to be used as an excuse to break bad, blame other race groups, and other external factors and NEITHER do successful African Americans.
In fact Charles Barkley put it so eloquently
"We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people,"
"For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. It's a dirty, dark secret in the black community.
"There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful. It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man."
Very good points! These are the same kind of points I have tried to bring up to commenters on Reddit before and I get called racist and told I don't understand. Of course they never try to help me "understand" whatever their "problem" is, but they sure know how to lay out some insults and use their "ism"s.
I think the Malcolm X quote is a very powerful one that accurately represents what is currently going on. I'll quote a snippet of it here but I think the full paragraph is interesting to read:
> “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man. Let me explain what I mean by the white liberal. In America there is no such thing as Democrat or Republican anymore. In America you have liberals and conservatives. The only people living in the past who think in terms of I’m a Democrat or Republican, is the American Negro. He’s the one that runs around bragging about party affiliation. He’s the one that sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican. But white people are divided into two groups, liberals and conservative. The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative.
His quote so accurately describes what is currently happening it's kinda disturbing. I find it hilarious how a well educated and successful black person warns of exactly this kind of thing and yet we still see it happening. We see businesses, liberal politicians, and liberal supporters who spew BLM love everywhere they go and act like such huge supporters of BLM. Yet when Obama was president very little was ever done to help these black communities. Some even argue Trump's policy changes did more to help black people than Obama's changes did. But no liberal would consider that as it doesn't fit the narrative.
It's easy for a politician to make big talk, but when they ignore the stats and the root cause of the problem then it really is just talk and it's useless.
People think that by pointing out things like we have mentioned that we are racist. But in reality we are just able to see the factual/statistics that demonstrate the real issues. And we can see how the politicians and companies utilize racial justice to increase their wealth and power. I personally would love to see all races treated equally, but current BLM movements have not shown any factual progress and have only shown further negative effects such as more incidents of hate crimes.
What people often don't realize is that calling something a ghetto or low income is not racist. Just because one particular area happens to be made up mostly one particular race doesn't make it racist to address that it is a problem. People like to act like police are the problem and that black people are being arrested in higher numbers because of racist police. When in reality black people are often in low income areas and low income areas are well researched to have higher levels of crime. Thus of course there are more arrests in such areas. But I don't know why people need to blame it on race. Why can people not identify that the 1% bleed everybody dry, and particularly take advantage of the poor. Why can we not fight against the root of the problem, why does it always have to be this race against that race?
I just find society now so disturbing with how someone can shit on one race in order to pump up another race and that somehow makes them gain more power/wealth. Someone should not benefit from being racist, yet that is exactly what is happening. People should benefit from actually making change and addressing the real problems.
It's funny because you see people like Jordan Peterson get called and "alt-right nazi" yet I have never seen a video of someone actually making a valid rebuttal to anything he has said. Just listening to videos of him talk you can tell he has a pretty high intelligence level and knows very well what he is talking about. I find in today's society when someone makes valid and factual statements it has become common to just dismiss them by calling them something rather than trying to debate/discuss what they said. Nobody is open to addressing the actual concerns and would rather do hand waving and police people from saying certain words. It's only free speech when it's for a woke liberal movement nowadays.
One day maybe sanity will come back, but I can't see that happening for awhile. It makes me curious if there are any countries that do have some more sanity and operate on a more statistical based playing field rather than an emotional based one.
While I don't agree with Peterson (I think he's a pseudo intellect looking for power grab from the conservative side like Malcom X described) I do agree with Malcom X's accurate analysis and its frightening how much of it rings true
I will have to read/watch more documentaries on Malcom X. It's sad that many African American youth have abandoned the warnings of MLK to not descend into violence and break bad because he knew that would be used as tools for oppression.
Also I don't disagree with BLM in it's entirety I do think it started out of good faith but its evolved into something totally unbecoming.
They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative.
Now you replace the football with other minorities and you have our modern North American political landscape and the whole Carlsen's #MoveForEquality virtue signaling, banning the user of "master" in github and real estate, the whole "amen and awomen" thing, professor getting chased out because Chinese filler word he used sounded like the N word and non-Chinese American students
found it offensive, going to another country as American and demanding the same values and morals from the locals while not bothering to take the time to learn the customs (the constant shaming and review bombing of Japanese Only or Koreans Only establishments in those respective countries because they had unruly foreign patrons who re fuse to learn the language and respect their customs) are all turning North America into something of a foolery. It's being destroyed from within with its cancel culture, placing the individual above society, echo chambers. It's like watching an American remake of the Cultural Revolution that took place in Mao's China.
The virtue signaling industrial complex in North America is getting insane in North America. It is big business and in fact its destroying and moving us away from progress.
I think that one day where everything returns to normal is a distant future and its better off living in another country where they don't tolerate the vilification of critical thinkers.
Why? I don't have anything to prove to you. Anytime I have chosen to engage with someone who has given a response like yours and chosen to give sources and examples I am met with a ignorant response saying something like "you can't be racist towards white people".
It's just not worth it for me to engage like that anymore. How about bringing a discussion to what I said rather than asking for random proof of what I said. Look literally anywhere on the internet and you'll find it pretty easily.
Stuff like that is just one of hundreds of examples. That article is what I'd consider more of a "casual racism" whereas I also see a lot more direct racism as well.
I'd personally rather be in a world where someone doesn't feel a need to specify someone's race before everything. People will add in race when it has no relevance or facts behind it.
I am sure you have heard the phrase "privileged white male" before. I can't even count on both my hands how many times I've been told that. And I'll be told that without the person even knowing my level of privilege, my gender, or my race. When you oppose the current politically correct fad you'll be called racist and people will assume your gender and race and use it as a derogatory/racist statement. It will be used to dismiss and invalidate an opinion.
For me personally my test is often pretty simple. If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black? To me they both are racist and just as bad in my mind. Neither is acceptable. Yet in todays society we know which one would be acceptable. As long as it's shitting on a white person or a male you're good to go.
> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black?
It would depend on the content and context of the opinion itself, no? Why not just ask the dismissing person why they say that? We’ve come to the point where we generalize and characterize instead of understanding, then simply disagreeing.
> Yet in today’s society we know which one would be acceptable. As long as it’s shitting on a white person or a male you’re good to go.
White men are getting shat on but still represent or control nearly all economic and political interests (at least in U.S. and it’s empire). I’m really curious to why you feel this way? It’s not like women and Black people have been getting a pass in exchange. I just think social media has made it easier for white men to be (or feel like) targets of vitriolic, but protected speech. Welcome to the club.
From my perspective, it seems in finance, real estate and politics, going along with the “privileged white male” perception (even if an untrue of the person in question) still seems like the best way to take advantage of markets and institutions. And I suspect that’s why, given a megaphone and platform, everyone else is piling on.
You actually answered this question yourself with your next paragraph :). Currently being racist towards white males gives businesses, influencers, and politicians more power. And I fundamentally disagree with this notion. I do not think shitting on particular groups of people should make someone excel. I think it should show what kind of negative person they are and they should lose not gain.
Some of my problem stems from the fact that these phrases are used to dismiss peoples opinions. I am far from being conservative, and also wouldn't consider myself liberal. I hold many views that fall under both spectrums. Some may even be considered more radical on both ends.
If I made a conservative sided comment online how do you think it would fair? Now if I made a liberal based comment how do you think that would fair in comparison? I think that the liberal ideology would gain me woke points and give me praise. Whereas that conservative view would get shat on, may be called some "ism", and then likely also would be called a "white privileged male". This would of course be used to dismiss the opinion/fact despite how true or accurate it may be. It is also making assumptions on race and gender simply based on a single opinion on a topic.
My main issue is that this kind of thinking creates a divide. It's hard to have a conversation on many websites because people hurl insults and don't care to actually have a constructive conversation. I try and come into a conversation being open-minded. The problem I have faced lately is that I feel like I have been becoming more and more jaded and against the other "side". I really dislike this and have been working to try and avoid doing that. But everytime I hear these kind of rude comments it further affirms my believe while also preventing me from hearing what intelligent people on that "side" actually have to say.
For example, people quite violently oppose Trump and Trump supporters. What doesn't make sense to me is why people would rather attack the group of people instead of trying to share their opinion. If there opinion is based on facts/research/science you'd think they would want to engage with the other side and try and get more people to share their opinion. But instead social media and society lately discourages this. It always has to be them versus us. There is no middle ground. Hell people get called "alt-right" and "nazis" for some pretty tame conservative views. I personally think calling someone a "nazi" is very extreme, yet the word gets thrown around like it means nothing. As a side note I find it quite ironic that these same people using these extreme words also will try to police what words others can use that they deem "offensive".
Definitely agree with the us vs. them mentality that is often perpetuated in the media. Most people are practically not far apart, but people also don't want to confront the past and an us vs. them dichotomy is a lot more accessible.
FWIW I just see shitting on white men as some kind of catharsis for women and people of color. There is a lot more deep pain that needs to be expressed before any real racial healing. Ironically, to your point it may have the opposite of intended effect, but I don't think repressing the emotions that come with unpacking Western society's history of racism is a productive move either.
My main issue is more based on how unproductive it is. The media and social media I believe is tearing apart countries and creating huge divide that continues to grow and grow. I find it disturbing that these companies profit off of creating this divide and continuing to spew anti male and anti white sentiment.
> FWIW I just see shitting on white men as some kind of catharsis for women and people of color.
What's funny is that half the time I hear it, it's a white male shitting on white males. I'll hear a white male podcast host complaining about white males. I often feel like it's less about people doing it to feel better about themselves, it seems more like they are doing it to "look good". Kinda like giving themselves a pat on the back for saying a "woke" line. Or I'll see people like A-list actors shitting on white males despite them being an incredibly privileged individual.
And now we even see females being given political position because of their gender and not necessarily their merit. Our Prime Minister in Canada when he got elected made the cabinet 50/50 male-female. The problem I'm starting to see with this kind of stereotyping is that it is starting to put gender over things like ability.
When a politicians first sentence about why they put someone in a position is "because they were x gender or y race" rather than "Because they had xyz skills and were the most qualified" it points to a problem in my books. In my area we had fire departments that had lower requirements for females than males. However the requirements indicate they are what a firefighter requires to be able to successfully meet the standards of the job and keep themselves, their coworkers, and the public safe. So it seems silly when the that "minimum" to get the job done suddenly gets lowered for a group. It's the same job, but one group doesn't have to meet the same standard? Luckily now I have seen these requirements have shifted to use new testing methodologies that better tests candidates against job requirements and is equal for all genders and ages. I got on a bit of a tangent with this, but my overall point is that because of these norms being pushed by the media often-times the politics and PR becomes more important than having the skills required. This is just one side-effect of many that is caused by this kind of weird PC culture that has been going on.
> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black?
Context matters... if you are in the position of privilege and saying things that you can only say because of your position. Then I can see why some people would dismiss it.
The difference is: if you try to dismiss someone in a minority position for saying things that would be okay to say in a privileged position. Then you are just doubling down on that privilege.
This isn't about "white privilege" vs "black privilege" this about privilege in general. Really empathy is the answer and understanding where they are coming from will help you not inadvertently offend them.
Not in this context. When "let's not base our judgements on race" is responded with "you're a privileged white male", we're never going to reach any agreement. It's simply not going to happen.
Yeah this is exactly the kind of idea I am getting at. How can someone ever try and understand other peoples point of view if they are told "you don't understand" anytime they try and understand.
Whenever my opinion is dismissed using my race/gender/or perceived privilege it instantly creates divide. It naturally is going to make me feel more correct in my views and more correct avoiding those kinds of people. This is exactly why we see such a huge divide now in America. People are unable to discuss stuff. And this is also probably partially due to the fact that often times people don't actually have any stats to back up what they think. Often times people are just following trends now and copying what their favourite woke influencer does. I find little people I engage with actually grasp what they are talking about and just regurgitate the same lines over and over.
I've got to the point where I barely ever comment on any political sounding reddit post because I know the conversation is going to go nowhere and be filled with name-calling. And I hate that I feel like this. I want to be able to converse with people and try and understand their point of view. But unfortunately I just feel constantly attacked.
Hell I mod a couple subs over there. If I make a comment that sounds conservative leaning upset banned users will go post it on subs I mod on acting like I am a "racist mod". Now I have to delete my reddit history often and use alts a lot more. Nowadays you can barely say anything without offending someone.
Cool, bye, thanks for your worthwhile contribution to the site? I don't get the point of your comment, just leave, I don't need to hear an announcement from you.
You came at me saying "List me some “racist things being said about white people” you have seen on the internet so we can all see...". I provided you an explanation and link and your response is that you're leaving now. If you're that upset by me saying some facts/opinions then maybe avoid comment section, I don't know what to tell you.
I figured that would be the feel of the objection.
Maybe I should be grateful as a white person that that's not the world I find myself in. Happy to pick my variable names.
I can't help but feel that the antagonism here is very similar to the antagonism I mentioned about Gendered language. The anger seemed mostly caused by being surprised by being asked to think about something.
The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it. I'd argue that you are the one who needs to think about it a bit more instead of blindly calling others names and trying to police the grammatically correct words someone uses.
Just because you think and associate something with a negative racial implication when you see a word doesn't mean others are. I personally am able to look at a word and understand the context surrounding the word. I'm able to think about that word and know that calling my git branch a "master" doesn't mean that I am a slave driver and or that I agree with it. I am able to think on my own.
> Just because you think and associate something with a negative racial implication when you see a word doesn't mean others are. I personally am able to look at a word and understand the context surrounding the word.
We also only get change requests for the associations that point in one direction.
It's called "in the black" when you're making a profit. Is anyone trying to get accountants to stop calling it that?
Here are some synonyms my thesaurus lists for "white": blanched, bleached, frosted, pasty, achromatic, bloodless, chalky and ghastly. "White noise" is sound without meaning. "White flag" means to surrender. "White label" means you're too cheap for the name brand.
If it's a problem then it's all a problem.
Or, if we're going to change something, we could stop calling people "white" and "black". Where do I submit the pull request for that?
> If we're going to object, shouldn't we object to all of it?
Unfortunately in todays society people policing words only pretend to care to get their woke bonus points. If it's not a current trending word of the day to hate then it doesn't get any attention.
I find the word policing hilarious because like your example illustrate, there is no logic to the hatred.
In this thread someone is trying to justify not liking the word "blacklist". By that logic "black market" should also be a bad word to use. Yet nobody uses the word "white market", but they do use the word "grey market". So what word here is bad? Is using "black market" bad? Then why would "grey market" be okay? It wouldn't make sense. It means they are for some reason associating black with the race, yet are associating grey with a colour. Logically that doesn't make sense.
Yet if "white market" was a thing I bet there would be trouble. Most scary things in horror movies use darkness to set the mood. A scary creature that is pretty much all black like the Slenderman would not look scary if they were almost all white. To us humans we associate different colours with different things. We also use these words as synonyms for different things.
Like you indicate, white is also used for "negative" things as well.
Overall I just can't follow along with the word policing culture. There is no way someone is going to convince me it is "correct" when it logically and consistently doesn't make sense. My mind can't understand why blackmarket would not be offensive but blacklist would.
> The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it.
Please be a bit more careful. Please don't assume you know what or how much I'm thinking.
I think the situation isn't as binary as you seem to be presenting it. The context of the word is a metaphor. The metaphor is commonly used for 'good versus bad'. This being a common metaphor in western language might not be helpful to some people. It's not difficult to be more explicit or to use a different metaphor.
> you are the one who needs to think about ... I am able to think on my own.
:) You know the classic idea: "I know I'm right, therefore you are either less intelligent or haven't thought hard enough!"?
You know how easy that is to think and why our brain gets us to think that way?
No but that is the problem. It's not really a metaphor if it's a dictionary word that has had it's meaning for centuries. It's a word used to describe something.
What you are doing is using an old historical definition for a word that was used in a different context.
A word I use is meaningless if you exclude the other words around it. You exclude the context in order to feel offended by the word.
And you're using your subconscious racial prejudice to look at a word and feel offended by it. When I look at blacklist I think of the colour black and how the colour is darker. Darkness is commonly a negative thing. Thus if I don't want something I put it on a blacklist. Where as the colour white is the brightest option and is something normally associated with positive.
Do you complain when a movie uses darkness to create a scary atmosphere? Would a Slenderman that is white be as scary as a Slenderman that is black to you? No. Because colour is used to trigger different emotional and psychological responses. But this has nothing to do with race. Nowhere did I need to mention or think about race here.
You're choosing to associate a word with a negative when others who don't have these kinds of racial prejudices are able to look at the words context and instantly understand what it means without ever thinking about a race.
Trust me, your word policing is not going to fix a problem with racism. All it does is reveal how you feel when you see a word.
When I see blacklist I'm not thinking about race. When you see blacklist you are. To me that indicates a racist ideology.
Do you feel using the phrase "black market" is wrong? If so then what about "grey market"? "White market" isn't a word that is used so there is no opposing "positive" colour to "black market". So is the phrase still bad to you?
If somehow black market is okay with you then your logic against blacklist makes no sense. And if black market is not okay with you then it also makes no sense logically because grey market is not based on a race.
Interesting how you associate these words with race yet their origins don't relate to race at all but instead a colour.
I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense.
That said, if you're white in China/India/Kenya/etc... 100% there is a heap of racism directed at you and I feel for you
I believe you 100% can. If someone's opinion based on solid facts is being dismissed by calling them a "privileged white male" I definitely believe that is very racist. They are making assumptions based on negative stereotypes to dismiss what someone is saying. Even if you don't agree that it is racist you should at least agree it is not productive at all in a conversation. The only objective with a comment like that is to be rude and dismiss them. It's not going to bring anything positive to the conversation. It's not going to help the other side understand how they feel or what they think. All it does is create more divide and more hate.
When someone calls me these names without even knowing my race, gender, or status it's pretty rude. Is it going to make me agree with them more? Is it going to make me support any of their causes more? Nope. It's going to increase my dislike for that "side". And if you get hammered with that enough it is going to create hate.
In my opinion I think the current woke landscape is actually creating more racism. I think it is counter-productive.
Does someone who is vegan yelling and screaming blocking you from getting a burger make you want to join their side? Or would it make you want further hate them and want to oppose them? Would a vegan sitting down and having a no namecalling conversation with you be more effective? I would think so. This is the exact same concept.
Also just because someone is a white male for example absolutely does not imply their status. I think that dismisses how much work someone may have put into life to get to where they are. That person doesn't know how hard they worked to get where they may or may not be, yet they are making that assumption.
Someone’s opinion based on solid fact? So is it a fact or an opinion?
If you view their reply as not productive and they view your statement as not productive... then maybe stop having that discussion until you can both bring more empathy to the table.
If you read the conversation I did stop having discussion with them and told them to stop having a discussion with me.
Facts don't always tell a story or explain the "why". Often times you have to form an opinion based on the facts and that is what you're bringing to the table when discussing stuff. I don't see why I need to explain this concept on a site like this.
The "why" can be more facts but it is not always. Sometimes people create opinions based on facts when a causation is not known.
People also create factually incorrect opinions such as implying police are racist towards black people because they are arrested more. This is them deriving an opinion from a fact about incarcerations. Except the causation is already present, which is that lower income areas simply commit more crimes.
Now I'm not trying to argue about whether you think those facts are correct or not, but I'm using it to illustrate a point. A fact can also be wrong. Maybe the fact was derived from bad research. Opinions and facts can go hand and hand together. I don't know why you're trying to be so binary about it.
I also don't understand how this conversation is productive or is useful in anyway? It seems like we are debating meaningless semantics rather than the heart of the issue.
You clearly aren't out to have a productive conversation. You have an axe to grind on this issue.
I'll take your bait though, see how hard you believe these falsehoods.
Yeah, Police in the US (in some states at least) are racist, now I don't mean individuals necessarily, though I'm sure some are, but institutional (dare I say systemic) racism exists in the system. Incarceration rates are a good correlative bit of evidence, arrest rates, court dismissals for whites at a higher rate than blacks... like take your pick. No evidence (or fact) supports your position at all. Happy for your to bring the data to prove me wrong here.
You can hide behind economics if you like and try to argue "poor people commit more crime" - but then how do you explain incarceration rates of blacks given there are more poor white people than poor black people in the US?
You haven't illustrated any point. Just that you have opinions, with little fact, and seem triggered by people referencing white male privilege.
> I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense.
It makes sense for two reasons.
The first is that a huge amount of the "anti-white racism" is directed by "white people" against others nominally in the same group, implying that they aren't actually in the same social group and correspondingly that the targets don't have a majority. As evidence of this, notice that people can be canceled over petty nonsense, e.g. Gina Carano. How could this happen if there was actually a social majority which should nominally be exerting pressure in the opposite direction and winning?
The second is that there are plenty of contexts where the majority doesn't even exist on paper, e.g. only 40% of California is "white" so a "white person" who lives in California is a minority. That state is also the place where a disproportionate amount of the attacks happen. And the same is true of many major US cities, e.g. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston.
The actual power is in the hands of the elites, so a minority. Just because you happen to be a part of the largest demographic group doesn't mean you hold any power. For example, would you say the same thing about Africa back when it was under white rule?
That's stage-2. I.e. after the "minority" becomes the "majority". Then different excuses and "historic" racism is used to justify persecution against a minority.
> > It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist.
> it is not just not intentionally racist -- there is no way any normal person would construe the term 'blacklist' as racist. it is as logically coherent as banning 'black pudding' for racism. it is purely an arbitrary exercise in power, making others submit to show them that they must.
Exactly this. Addressing one issue does not trivialise everything else. 'Addressing' something that isn't actually one of the issues at all[0] trivialises everything else.
0: And there are plenty of actual issues to pick from!
They said banning one was "as logically coherent as" banning the other, not that one was functionally the same as the other. (But since we're on this tangent, the only black pudding I've encountered was (admittedly dark) red, not black. Also revolting, but supposedly that's normal?)
> But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'?
The inverse solution to this stop calling people with darker skin "Black"?
I kind of agree with what you're saying, but also it isn't true:
- Blacktie
- Black friday
- Blacktop
- Back in black
- Orange is the new black
- Men in black
All of those use black in a positive connotation. In my head black/white list has always been a metaphor for light/no light. As in black list can't see, white list can.
In asian Culture white is often associated with the colour of ghosts / the dead... So it'd get awkward if we keep modifying language to suit cultural references especially as English is a global language and while slavery was(is) a global problem it persists only really in the US as a current popular cultural issue.
In replying to you I've convinced myself at least the solution here can't possibly be to change all of the possible references of black to something else... it verges on new speak.
it is purely an arbitrary exercise in power, making others submit to show them that they must. it is obviously trivial, obviously contentious, and changes literally nothing about the material relations between groups. the entire point is to force you to do something stupid to show you that you don't have a choice.
>But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that?
It's not just a language thing. It's an extremely deeply rooted symbolic system. You can't arbitrarily change it, and even if you did... what improvement does shifting the symbols around yield ? That's just increasing the noise to signal ratio.
Even then, isn't the real problematic part assigning elementary colours to skin tones ? Can't you just try to change that instead of contorting the deepest part of a culture on a Procustean bed ?
Peach-pink people aren’t white, and brown people are not black in the first place. Why do self-styled anti-racists not seem to have any problem with that? Why not start there instead of changing the deep symbolism of the colors black and white?
> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'?
No. That's how it's always been in European culture and it doesn't have much to do with race. It's probably true of many other cultures as well, although I can't say for sure.
I think there are two slightly different approaches.
Your point is completely correct. As is the other comment here at about night and day. The lists are frequent. And not unique to European cultures.
But it's also not reasonable to say that in our particular culture, meaning as a political and social context.
Because I'm trying to make a bigger point than just race, I could imagine reading a similar things to what you're writing back in the late-C20 saying that 'Man' has been nongendered for centuries and in many cultures and in all kinds of language. Hi wouldn't disagree.
But then the next step: so women shouldn't have been worried about companies wanting to hire businessmen. That just doesn't seem ok.
So I definitely think that 'Black equals bad, white equals good' Has all kinds of historical significance, non racist links, and would not have been considered weird until very recently. But in our context I'm not offended that it would be something we find alternatives for.
> I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else.
Yes, it does. On my Twitter I have "racism" and "race" including many other trendy SJW keywords blocked. The reason is I simply don't have the time and energy to tend to every single accusation of racism or whatever-isms is out there. And most these accusations have nothing to do with racism. It's just some bully has found a new target to harass.
"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."
Or... you're wrong.
[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."
I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.
There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).
I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.
There's something intoxicating about the idea of building worlds out of systems, feeling like you've captured infinite permutations of some phenomenon in a simple set of rules. This idea of writing worlds into existence with the flick of a wrist is the thing that first got me into computers. In some sense it's the dream that still keeps me going.
My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
The egoism on display here is pretty offputting, but I feel kinship with the "dreamer" mentality underneath. This guy had a vision, and he was uncompromising in his pursuit of it, and even if the end result wasn't worth much to anyone else, some part of me has to respect that.
I'm reminded of The Room (movie)'s Tommy Wiseau. Another creative who thought he was a genius and poured his blood, sweat, and tears into his life's passion project, and it turned out to be pretty objectively bad. But it was meaningful to him, and there's something to that. There were no ulterior motives; he wanted to put this piece of himself out into the world. There's a purity of spirit. I think what's missing for these individuals is the self-awareness to know that this thing is mostly just for them, and to be okay with that idea and embrace it. That way lies happiness, I think.
This is not egoism, but indeed straight narcissism. And it matches overstating a "vision". The intoxicating part may be the dream of recognition and importance. I don't think this is a good metric to assign value, at all.
> My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior... it's not that we cannot necessarily capture the former, but that our concept of computer is far too tiny to run those rules in enough depth or breadth. It hasn't lessened the interest for me though. The more I understand the less those childish ideas of "grandeure" make sense, to the point that my instinct is to be suspicious of ideas focused on exploitation rather than exploration, although they can be good seeds for exploration in the form of "what ifs".
>Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior
I concur with this. The emergent behaviour is usually the only thing we can observe, so we model our systems according to it.
The most beautiful (and usually the truest) models lie in the simplicity that causes the behaviour to emerge.
I wouldn't say our computers are too tiny, just that our brains aren't used to thinking in those terms, but we discover it by deep thinking and "deep iteration" in the topic and have to approach it from multiple sides.
Imagine yourself as a kid sitting at a chess-game, playing against Magnus Carlsen. You don't know who the guy is, you were just sitting at the sundae bar when the dude at the next table said "hey", pulled out a chess et and asked "Wanna play?". So you naively say ok, you got some time to kill while waiting for mom to pick you up.
And you start playing. You kinda know the basic rules and what the figures do. So you make a move, he makes a move, you make a move...a minute later, you eat his pawn. Ha! He did not see that coming. Soon, another one. You're killing this guy. 2 moves later, you're left with nothing but the king, running around the board. What the heck even happened?
Our minds are used to the "Eat figures = Win games" outlook, where simple steps lead to simple outcomes. While for Magnus, the figure you ate was a sacrifice that opened up a spot he will move his queen through in 3 moves. He knows the common patterns, permutations, defenses and can see moves ahead.
Our minds aren't used to thinking ahead and seeing what the sideffect of a sideffect does to the result of the sideeffect of the sideffect. Maybe once we were better at it, but we have
more interruptions so less time and depth to it (in general).
That is why we can't figure out the simple rules at first - we can't see the trees from the forest.
Is it even self awareness or a lack of editing? Like okay, yours is a game that doesn’t get a lot of traction, but you know what else doesn’t? Board games in general. No one said you have to be entirely selfless, and one’s conviction would appear just as fraudulent if it came in the guise of piety.
Here’s what you could have done: Find five other great board games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this class, and why you are proud to be in that group.
It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it’s time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
The funny thing is that most creators experience this, if they put their work out there: What they think is their greatest piece often isn't really perceived as such and some random thing of theirs might struck a nerve in others. This applies to a lot of things: blog posts, Tweets, videos, music, paintings, and obviously games.
I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it.
here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
...
well says i pete
bill s plays are highly
esteemed to this day
is that so says pete
poor mutt little he would
care what poor bill wanted
was to be a poet
Well, the first 4 books are some of his best writing, I think... The final 3 suck terribly, and were a great disappointment (to me, of course, maybe some people actually liked them)
Overall I agree, but I actually quite like the ending of the series. I've read lots of folks online who absolutely hated what ultimately happens to Roland - I thought it was a cool ending which was very much in keeping with the sort of "cosmic cycles" theme of the books. That said, there is a _lot_ of junk in those final three books, and the seventh one in particular drops the ball in several disappointing ways before it ends.
This is painfully true. I put my art on Twitter/IG and the most popular things overall are nowhere close to my favorite. I genuinely can’t even comprehend why they are. I’m not sure I could even attempt to “pander” by making more of the same subject matter, because I’m not convinced I’d replicate the correct thing lol
Apex Twin (the electronic music producer) put hours and hours of unreleased work[1] out for free a few years ago. One striking thing about the release is the number of true gems in there that outshine published work.
You must admit that the flower shop scene was a tad unrealistic, in that he was able to find a free illegal parking space right out in front of the store in San Francisco, and he didn't even get ticketed.
I admire you taking a stance for The Room but when a movie is generally lauded as one of the worst movies ever made, you are kind of on the losing side. Maybe there's good parts in there and sure, what is bad depends on the viewer. Yet sometimes you just have to admit that even with all the subjective bias removed something is just bad.
Generally lauded as a bad movie does not make The Room bad art.
Have you seen the film at a sold out crowd at cinema 21 in Portland?
There is a culture of the film and its participating attendees Marvel movies do not match.
You can say it is a bad film or you can say you don’t like that it doesn’t fit with your idea of what makes a movie objectively good. But it is absolutely not bad art.
Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history - wikipedia
Anyhow, art is subjective. You can interpret it as you like, because its how it makes you feel. And you can argue for or against a point, but it doesn't really matter. As its almost like arguing what flavor of ice-cream is the best.
Art is not entirely, 100% subjective, or else there would be nothing to say about it, nothing to discuss. Authorial intent is not the last word but it can be interesting, and it can impact the interpretation we come away with.
I believe the most troubling thing about Crawford's path is simply in the inability to develop self-critique of his own philosophy. His thoughts on a subject seem to terminate in the thing of having a mathematical model of a topic, not what we get out of that model. It does not seem to matter if the model is inscrutable when presented within a system, or if the system degenerates into a single strategy. (I have a memory of playing "Balance of the Planet" and after struggling for some time, discovering that the model did not restrict my taxation of dirty energy. Therefore I could gain a nearly infinite budget to clean up the planet on turn 1 with no negative consequences beyond "people falling off roofs while installing solar panels." I'm not even kidding - for some reason roofing accidents are ranked up there with deforestation and carbon release as very important things to model about our impact on the planet.)
Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though. This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.
My first thought on reading him talking about equations to estimate numbers of fighters based on a few parameters is that there are entire subfields of academia devoted to debating regularities like this: most of economics, most of modern IR theory, substantial parts of psychology, sociology and politics. And the standard criticism (within the subfield, at least) isn't that there is something inherently wrong with expressing part of the world as a mathematical model, but that the mathematical model chosen is wrongly specified. The world isn't hostile to the concept of simulations, but it does have a horrible tendency to produce data that casts doubt on their accuracy.
Do you have advice on how one can get more into reading interesting research papers in Computer Science and Software Engineering? I've previously tried subscribing to ACM but found that too many of their articles weren't of much interest or relevance to me. I definitely do feel like I've gotten lazy and that I don't challenge myself enough, but it's hard to break out of these patterns so I'd welcome any suggestions or recommendations which could help me grow.
I usually start reaching for research papers when I'm aware of a specific problem and I'm looking for the different approaches that have been taken to try and solve said problems.
Every few months I visit the NIST website and I browse through their catalogue to pick out interesting articles and publications to add to my queue.
Most papers are available on author websites or arxiv. I'd check out the titles of papers in recent software engineering conferences (ICSE is a great starter) and read what you are interested in. For CS more broadly you'll need to start with a field and then find conferences since conferences are broken up by topic.
I like to check the award section of “best thesis paper” of my local university for fun and then at work I have to read research papers in my area but then I just use a search engine to find it.
Start small and don’t take it too seriously! Little by little, just as learning a new language.
> the main reason for this is that I’ve made no attempt to sell the idea. I simply wrote it up and put it on my website. I suppose that, were I to jump through the appropriate hoops, I could garner more interest for the idea. But that is beneath my pride; I am a thinker, not a salesman. I refuse to promote myself. I put the idea before the world and the world can take it or leave it. The world mostly leaves it.
I've heard some other people blaming a lack of "sales" for their ideas not spreading. As if you can not sell. Any sort of presentation is sales, if your product or idea is out there, it is selling itself.
Maybe the focusing on sales would, ironically, bring the understanding of what people find impressive in ideas, in games or products, and it might be completely different from what we thought before.
The most important bit of doing any kind of complex sale is listening to others.
Reading the "most important" idea article that he made no attempt to sell is also illuminating. It's a mildly thought-provoking blog about how many fields have concepts of state and state change, and the concepts are interdependent and blur at the edges, leading to an unsupported conclusion that we think too much about data and inputs and not enough about CPUs. It would probably get a few upvotes and a few confused replies on LessWrong, but there's not really much for the computer scientists and creatives he clearly hopes will take notice to work with. Perhaps they might find a different version or some of his other ideas more valuable
Sales is morally bad: this idea that in order to sell, you must manipulate. Eg: “Used car salesmen” (said with disgust)
Money is evil
A bit to the side of the OP, but I feel like these two narratives have been particularly damaging to our planet’s long-term growth. To your point @amatic: If the author had let go of pride and at least explored the idea of effective communication with people as a way to spread ideas (aka sales), he may be far more objective in his self-appraisal and certainly gain perspective on how his ideas can be applied by others.
>Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
>quite out of fashion
Yeah I don't get the impression this guy is into intellectual fads. If anything he's a contrarian and will deliberately take the opposing position to the mainstream.
Evo Psych is out because a bunch of idiots (and self proclaimed non intellectuals) use it to justify and explain everything and anything with stories and no evidence. Meanwhile real research continues but is sidelined due to this bad reputation.
Understandably contrarians see this happening and immediately take the position of Evo psych because it allows them to do a lot of hypothesis generation (their favourite pass-time) and because it flies in direct opposition to current political and academic movements.
I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.
I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.
Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.
Yeah, the article comes across as rather arrogant.
And he doesn't really make the case that there's no demand yet for his ideas; his ideas involve simulationist games of some sort, and there's tons of demand for that.
It is true that many of these sort of games used to take really ugly shortcuts in the 1980s, but where SimCity just faked traffic, City Skylines simulates every person in the city, including the traffic resulting from that.
If you want to see a game with complex interactions of simulated systems, check out Europa Universalis. It simulates every country in the world, its armies, ideas, economy (tax, production, and trade resulting from production). In combat it simulates how the units of those armies interact. How trade flows around the world is incredibly complex (but also too hard-coded in my opinion; I think it could still be improved).
Seems to me that plenty of games are incredibly successful doing the sort of thing he did. If he does have a misunderstood genius that these games can't touch, he's not making that case in this article. It sounds more like he has a rather overblown sense of the importance of his work, and a lack of appreciation of the work of others.
Of course the first HN comment has to be something negative, derisive and lacking in compassion. When there's blood in the water the sharks come, but when people are being vulnerable and exposing themselves (by saying something that's easily ridicul-able) like this, there's no need to be cruel. Not saying you're wrong just like, why not...look for the good, and why not that be the first HN comment. This place...Maybe everyone's just so scared of vulnerability..."innocence cannot exist underground, it needs to be stamped out." -- Prisoner in Bane's prison, Dark Knight Rises. Man it would be great to come here and be surprised. "Hackers" are commonly so intellectually arrogant, it's funny they attack anyone who's doing it in a vulnerable way...sigh sad.
People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji
I don't see the vulnerability you speak of. It sounds more like arrogance. Claiming to be a misunderstood genius is not presenting yourself as vulnerable, it's a shield to defend yourself against criticism or the lack of praise, to enable you to continue to see yourself as the genius that nobody else recognises in you.
I don't know, in just the previous blog linked on top "am I a genius?" he says "I am reluctant; I hate having to depend upon anybody else for anything. I don’t want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet." I don't think it does him any good to encourage the bitterness that leads people to post things like that.
OA is being narcissistic not vulnerable. There is a big difference. Instead of proving his theories by developing new games and showing the world how to do it, he gets upset that nobody recognises him as a genius, based on him doing a few somewhat successful games many years ago.
Maybe the author of the article missed the simple fact that game designers want to come up with their own rules and mathematical models, because they enjoy the process more than reading 500 pages of explanations from a genius.
Especially in a game context, you usually have to pick a few details from the real world to simulate to make a compelling game. Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to track what's the cause and effect of what is happening.
It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web. For some reason he does not accept that as validation of his vision, but as a poorly designed rip-off.
> It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web.
Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
Comparing oneself with Neo Einstein to start with led me to write a rather scathing reply here. A moment of reflection led me to delete it.
I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games.
I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
We also know that today's games feature much more "realistic" and complex systems than the affine or multiplicative equation the author gives us. After all, interdependent agents on different levels produce results that can rarely be described by such simple measures. Getting a well-defined, realistic, complex yet FUN game system from such agent-based approaches is hard, but ultimately the goal of most game designers.
It seems to me that the author may have had some initial insight, and got snubbed in the mid-eighties by other designers or successes. It further seems that he has since then not reevaluated the state of the game industry. Or, perhaps, he lacks the ability to describe his unique insights in terms the reader can understand?
> I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games. I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
You definitely lack context. I think Crawford's artistic program is completely in the wrong, that the Erasmatron is a joke, and that narcissism is largely responsible for leading him down this path.
But Eastern Front and Balance of Power are seminal in wargaming and computer gaming, Siboot remains an oft-studied object, and the idea of the storytron was both reasonable and radical in 1993 even though Crawford ended up on a useless path developing it.
Crawford was a looming figure in the industry in the 80s, exited (rightly, and literally to applause!) to protest the commercial direction the industry was taking in the 90s, but then disappeared up his own ass for way too long. There's the oft-quoted line from Hamming about productive research, of which Crawford is probably among the most intense, and definitely among the most tragic, example:
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
That seems reasonable to me. Other figures in the game industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
His writings are difficult from my perspective. He claims to be a genius in quite a few areas, including AI. However, in each of these areas, history has passed him by. None of his ideas seem substantial or important from today’s perspective.
And this is not, how he claims, only our fault for missing his genius.
Instead, this person seems to be what we academics call "not well read".
His musings about AI do not predate the science. What he writes about, his work in the mid to late 70s, was already known in the 50s and 60s, as far as I can tell.
Similar to his insistence that game designers somehow do not know about systems, I think this is in part because he does not read or engage with work that is not his own.
It’s one thing to fail to communicate one’s work. It is another thing to ignore the work of other’s and use this to fuel one’s own impression of the state of the world.
Let me put it differently:
To be a successful researcher or, I'd argue, developer, you have to learn to deeply respect the contributions of other people. This includes being honest about them. One needs to see deficiencies, yes, but also allow for the possibility that there are many geniuses that share discoveries - as frustrating as that may be.
The second element of this respect is then how you engage with others. If one dismisses the approaches outright, one is not only usually unfair or wrong, one also quickly becomes disliked in any community. Internally, we all develop ideas, and we always like our own ideas. However, the process of science or progress is also fueled by interaction, and interaction requires respect. People with an overt superiority complex will always find it difficult to frame their contributions in a way that is accessible. And, with very eminent exceptions, will not really contribute to human progress.
Case in point, Crawford is obviously a deep thinker with important contributions to game development. I do believe you there!
However, from today's perspective, it is hard to find anything at all that one could consider important. Even if some inventions predate the state of the art at the time, our progress was guided by other people - people that were able to cooperate. From my perspective, his ideas were worked out either by people that predate him (or in parallel), or done better by other researchers in what followed.
So while I lack context, and recognize that my opinion does not reflect the truth, the simple fact that Crawford shows close to zero respect for other thinkers ultimately leads to a state of the world where I find almost nothing notable, revolutionary or important in his writing - be it wrong today's or yesterday's perspective. Instead, I find that his website does not lend itself to a very charitable impression of this person. Most of all, because he implicitly insults other researchers that have at least his level of genius, and which I deeply respect.
Instead, I need someone like you telling me that yes, this man is or was important.
I don't mean to give a charitable impression of him (I also don't have one), but only try to provide context I feel is missing here - a lot of people are reading this as "another indie game developer feels he didn't get his due" (boring) but the reality is "industry founder completely out of touch after 30 years" - which I think has more of a useful lesson for all of us. And that all of us (perhaps especially Crawford) should study modern history more deeply before passing any judgement.
> Other figures in the game industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
It's hard for me to think of someone from Crawford's cohort who has remained more well-known than him, to be honest. From Wikipedia's description of the first GDCs:
About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don Daglow, Brenda Laurel, Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Tim Brengle, Cliff Johnson, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a Holiday Inn at Milpitas, attracted about 125 developers. Early conference directors included Brenda Laurel, Tim Brengle, Sara Reeder, Dave Menconi, Jeff Johannigman, Stephen Friedman, Chris Crawford, and Stephanie Barrett. Later directors include John Powers, Nicky Robinson, Anne Westfall, Susan Lee-Merrow, and Ernest W. Adams.
Of those, I can only place Crawford, Moriarty, Westfall, and Adams off the top of my head. A few others I am familiar with their work if I follow through on the links, but can't easily associate the name with the product or company. Moriarty is the only one I would consider to have a current stature near Crawford's.
Keep in mind we're not talking about the usual "game dev ancient history" cohort of early PC developers - Romero, Carmack, Sweeney, et al. - here. This is a full generation earlier and for a set of machines that didn't come to dominate the world. Crawford exited the industry, after a long career, just as this phase was starting.
I absolutely take your points and share your sense that this is unfortunate both for him and, likely, for the industry as a whole.
I did not want to imply that he or his contributions are in fact unimportant.
Rather, the way he approaches communication leads to that feeling among the uninformed such as myself. The unfairness he feels seems to be, in part, a result of his own writing style.
I stopped reading after the first paragraphs because it felt like the author is at best a lazy writer and at worst an intellectual imposter.
I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn't art though and somebody using this lame reference today makes me question their expertise on the subject. The Matrix used ideas from Baudrillard & Borges. Both are cornerstones in post-modern literature while the Matrix is just an action flick rehashing the ideas from Plato's cave. The director hoped it would rub off on them so that they can shrowd themselves in philosophical wisdom. Everyone on the set was given a copy of Simulacra by the director to read. (this is often quoted along with Neo's own copy in the film and makes me question who actually read the book and how many of them read it enough times to understand it)
Baudrillard who was asked about what he thought about the film said it was merely another copy of Plato's cave allegory and it made no effort to actually touch the core-ideas of the book.
>> Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. ....
When somebody uses The Matrix in a blog post >20 years later I can't help but wonder why they chose it. Something tells me they have a poor understanding of the world. It's like somebody referencing a Mickey Mouse comic to talk about ducks. It means your audience are probably fools (and by extension the author). How can they be taken serious when they don't understand even their own self-chosen references/allegory.
I think the silly Matrix analogy is really telling.
Forget about Plato’s cave and Baudrillard for second, The Matrix is about that stuff the way tic tac toe is about drawing circles and x’s.
The Matrix is about ego. It’s about the fantasy that one day soon your unique magical gifts will finally be recognized. To the untrained eye you might appear to be another TPS report filing schmuck, but deep down you’ve always been a hero. Any day now your circumstances are going to change, and then your real life will begin.
This is not a path that generally leads to happiness or creative accomplishment, and I think its traces are pretty plain in TFA.
Okay now I’ve got Matrix on the brain. Going to self-indulgently reply to myself instead of just editing my first post bc this is totally off topic and I just want to spitball about The Matrix.
I think a lot of my problems with The Matrix are rooted in how it (mal-)adapts Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Here’s the basic outline of the hero’s journey:
- There’s a mundane (“real”, we’ll come back to that) world and a magical world. A problem in the magical world threatens the mundane world. (Sauron is rising in the east, Grendel is lurking in the forest, etc)
- A hero is identified in the mundane world who has the power to navigate both. (Luke is both a farm boy and a jedi. Neo is a programmer and the chosen one)
- The hero enters the magical world and resolves the problem.
- The hero (usually) returns to the mundane world, bringing power from the magical world. Even if the hero doesn’t return, the mundane world is brought to a new equilibrium. This is the real point of the story: the hero’s journey isn’t about the magical world, it’s about healing the mundane world.
The twist in The Matrix is that the mundane world turns out to be an illusion. But that’s a trick: the “real” world, unplugged from the matrix, is in a story sense magical. It’s a fantastical sci-fi world, just as far down the rabbit hole as the matrix itself.
So the last, most important step in the hero’s journey falls apart. You can’t heal the mundane world if it doesn’t exist. This helps move the focus of the story back to the first stages, the ego-fulfillment part where the hero is identified. Everyone remembers the red pill and “I know kung-fu”; not so much the incoherent sequels.
We’re actually circling back around to Baudrillard here, but I think maybe not in the way the Wachowskis intended.
I think you could also probably read Total Recall as an anti-Matrix. If The Matrix is about the allure of imagining yourself to be innately a hero, Total Recall is about the danger.
thanks for posting the followup. I'm very glad you took the time to write it. it's magical HN exists and such discourse is possible. it's a shame this gem will not get the eyeballs it deserves. I urge you to bookmark it as a reminder to use it on a fresh post one day when the topic comes up and it doesn't get lost.
My idea as well. The Matrix has a lot of allegories in it, and you can shoehorn a lot of your own ideas onto it. I would say the Matrix is great starting point to get you interested in philosophy though.
The Matrix is an interesting movie and I bet got a lot of people interested in learning more. The problem as you note is that the author in this case is 70 or so years old and doesn't seem to have moved beyond the reference.
I do not have a lot to add to the conversation, except some examples from ML, in particular, the Support Vector Machine was conceived much earlier than it was published but Vapnik's work was repeatedly rejected, yet SVMs are one of ML's brightest achievements.
Similarly, the Neural Network was repeatedly dismissed, with Minsky being a prominent example.
Not all ideas amount the same, but perhaps, at least in ML, we need to be open to exploring as many ideas as possible instead of performing grad student descent on the current consensus valley.
It’s often honestly much better to attribute it to luck and hard work (often because it just IS luck) - trying to get lightning to strike twice precludes you doing something new.
> There’s a grain of truth in these answers, but I don’t think that they capture the bulk of the truth, because I am dead certain that most other people have the native intelligence to understand the ideas I’ve been peddling.
The entire post, out of context, seems, as some people have called it, narcissistic or pretentious. I guess no one wants to hear someone laud themselves as a genius.
As someone who's designed many things 5-10 years before a market is available for those things, i have to constantly bite my tongue any time i have a "novel idea" - since i have no patents or published papers, why would anyone listen to me? Furthermore, the end result of bragging (even in this limited context, here) is that people like me less.
I think the linked text is interesting, although meandering. The author appears to understand that their approach to teaching / sharing their ideas is lacking, and seems to be misguided on why that is. Like the Simpsons image macro: "Could I be out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
I'm asking for specifics because I actually can't think of any apps where "undo" would make sense, but is missing. I'm probably not creative enough. But that's why I asked for examples. These are the things I thought of:
Text editor? Those have undo.
Image editor? Also have undo.
Video Games? Depends. Should you be allowed to "undo" in a game of minesweeper? Probably not- it kind of ruins the game. Should you be allowed to "undo" in Chess? Probably not. Should you be allowed to undo in Solitaire? Maybe.
Chat client? What would you undo? Can't unsend a message.
Web Browsers have back buttons, to the extent that those can undo.
I could see file managers maybe having undo. I honestly don't know if the popular ones today do or not.
Text is important, but its datum is rarely independent. More undo is useful than the text in the current text control. Anything else requires (and rarely gets) more substantial command undo/redo. I'm not making a black&white point, I am honestly surprised it so easily became "non-essential without apology".
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?