Where did I say that? Why is it impossible to have a normal conversation on this subject where you can process simple logic without spinning off into hyperbole? If you actually listen to climate scientists -- many of them anyway -- they are pretty damn reasonable about the limits of what we understand and sound a lot like me. But somehow I'm anti-science because I don't hold the position of hyperventilating politicians who wouldn't know science from a hole in the ground? Okay.
Snark aside, this is exactly right. When it comes to climate science, we have lost all humility for what we do not yet know, which is a critical element of science.
The explicit marking of sarcasm is there for people who aren't naturally sarcastic to the core and can pick up on the sarcasm without the explicit marker. I had no trouble understanding that the comment wasn't serious. It was quite an effective trolling, as proven by the reply threads.
It's just factually incorrect to say brexit will necessarily raise the costs of UK's goods. The EU makes it easy to trade within Europe but it puts a layer between EU countries and non-EU countries who wish to trade. There is nothing preventing the UK from establishing far more advantageous trade agreements with non-EU countries. And aside from spite, there is nothing preventing the UK from entering into the exact same or similarly advantageous trade arrangement with the EU.
Yes, a lot of buggy makers had to go on govt assistance when the car came around. Too bad government didn't ban the car or we could have saved those workers' jobs and avoided all that welfare expenditure.
Did I call scientists frauds anywhere in my comment? I didn't even imply it. In fact I went to great effort to explain how science can be corrupted without scientists deciding to commit fraud.
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The extra characters in Twitter should really move the needle on human progress starting immediately.
So, you're trying to tell me that scientists are mere mortals, with human tendencies like the rest of us? That they are not divinely inspired conduits of the Truth, who can solely interpret the cryptic texts of the Journals de Academe?
There are two major things ruining science. First, scientists are revered like priests, and the laypeople do not feel worthy to question them, even though at the end of the day it all boils down to logic and math. Laypeople even beat each other up for speaking out without the proper credentials. Are you less likely to be right about a study if you're a layperson? Of course. But this is still an important check on the system. Second, every clown PhD and pre-PhD who is avoiding the real world needs to publish publish publish in order to advance. This leads to ever more silly and esoteric journals full of silly and esoteric studies that nobody reads and very few can be bothered to try to replicate. And of course you get no credit for replicating a study, because credit = being published. So replication, another important check on the system, is diminished. And within the mainstream subjects, you have ever more pressure to come up with a new result, because there are many more PhDs looking to publish and only so many will. Scientific results, which were already susceptible to human biases, are victim to marketing spin and selective publishing. If nobody will ever try to replicate your results, who cares anyway. And if it's advancing interest in your field, which I'm sure you care about for at least some make-the-world-better reasons, then it's quite easy to convince yourself you're doing a neutral or positive thing.
The scientific method is solid. We just don't follow it anymore. And the #ifuckinglovescience crowd isn't helping.
That's not at all the argument I made. And in fact I objected to the machiavelli quote up the thread for the very reason it implied I am making this argument you suggest, and I clarified that I am not. But the prejudices of/. appear to be too strong
I don't know why/. can't listen to criticism of their childish PHB yapping without assuming the criticizer worships PHBs./. is just wrong on this, and I'm just saying so, because I've been here a long time and it gets old. You can have a few beers and believe you could be president of the US... even if that is "normal" in some sense, it doesn't mean you look like anything but an idiot doing it.
I think the real takeaway is that most people don't care about liberty as much as we like to tell ourselves they do. We all make a lot of trade offs, and the inconveniences required to take the liberty side of many of these trade offs just isn't worth it to most people. My threshold for inconvenience is higher than most, but I still lean toward convenience in most cases, if I'm honest with myself.
I don't understand your point. I did not suggest the Internet was a cure-all. I said that the decentralized and free nature frustrated many typical government control techniques. But the majority of users have voluntarily centralized.
CEOs are people too. And just like you will work with shitty programmers, you will work with shitty CEOs. But the childish PHB chuckling here suggests there is something uniquely incompetent about CEOs. This is a very arrogant view, and is more about envy than reality. Most people who think they should be king are so out of touch with reality that they don't know they're wrong. The famous chart showing confidence graphed against knowledge applies here. When you don't have any idea what it means to be a CEO, you think you could do the job. Once you start realizing you're not ready to do the job, it's a sign of sophistication and understanding, and you're on the path to being ready eventually.
I'm sorry, but this is a very immature view. There are very different types of CEOs and different organizations need a different type, perhaps changing as the organization and its market evolves over time. You seem most familiar with the internal organizational CEO, who spends most of his/her time on organizational structure and either inspiring others himself/herself or bringing in people who will. There are also very externally focused CEOs who spend most of their time on sales and partnerships. There are also finance focused CEOs who spend all their time engaging investors and potential investors. And then there is a huge variable of the board. Sometimes there is no board, or the CEO is the only real board member. Sometimes the board is a rubber stamp. Sometimes they are a very strong entity. Sometimes the CEO spends a good bit of his/her time engaging with the board.
Talk to a private equity person for 15 minutes about CEOs and how he/she finds the right CEO for one of his/her portfolio companies. The topic is much more complicated than you suggest.
Yes, indeed. There are many cases of execs getting into details they don't understand, and they should leave that to the experts. And I know exactly what you mean by the buzzword bingo excitement. I could sell the exact same idea to a tech exec, in one situation attaching a cool sounding buzzword (eg microservice architecture) that may or may not actually apply, and in the other situation just playing it straight. The former will be way more effective. I don't fully understand why, but it is.
A big part of the us vs them silliness here at/. is that you can't make fun of the "us" without everyone thinking you're on the side of "them". It is almost impossible to have a rational discussion on the subject here. You must pick one side and both sides are silly.
Some will control information. But it is also a natural result of any organization. If everyone must know everything in order to do their job, you are not organized. That's just not a scalable model beyond a few person company.
Your quote does not apply. I did not say that you can't discuss strategy unless you're a CEO. I mocked the ridiculous attitude that many technical people have about how CEOs have no idea what they are doing and the software developer has it all figured out. It is the lack of humility I am mocking, plus the ignorance of the very real fact that people lower in the org only have partial visibility on one or two silos of business operations, and have no access to financial statements. There is a reason for financial reporting, and people without this data will make conclusions based on things they see (eg, the premium coffee service being canceled) and generally end up making the wrong conclusions. So why would your first assumption be that the people who have all this information and do have experience with strategy are idiots and have it all wrong?
That's what I am mocking. And the magnitude of this egotistical silliness is unique to tech.
Index-ability is not the issue. The issue is we have managed to take a decentralized Internet, where govt has been forced to adapt its ideas toward freedom due to the infeasibility of endorcing their usual anti-freedom views on their role in speech, commerce, etc, and say: no thank you, I would like to interact with the internet via apps from 5 govt-partnered large corporations.
I'm always impressed that software devs and project managers and database architects understand business strategy so well that they only need about 10% of the contextual information about what's going on in the business, and no access to financial statements... and yet can tell that the C-suite has it all wrong. Have you ever thought about being CEO? We would love to have you.
You appear to have read a lot of words in my comment I never wrote. For example, you are telling me Walmart isn't going to be unprofitable due to the cost of human labor. Well, I never said they would, so that's a strange counter-argument. Your "major insight" is that Walmart is trying to maximize profit. Amazing intellectual contribution!
Maybe you can't follow because I'm too stupid to write at your level.
Automation doesn't just happen randomly. It is the result of capital investments made when the benefit outweighs the cost. Walmart has to deal with ACA, FMLA, new overtime rules, hikes in he min wage, and their recent voluntary company-wide min wage increase. They first beat up their suppliers to extract savings from them. And then they looked for savings elsewhere.
Automation is inevitable as the capital cost falls. But increasing the cost of human labor accelerates the process significantly. Creative destruction is a good thing, but it does hurt individuals temporarily who will need to retrain and adjust. So the pace is no small thing, and accelerating the transformation is not benign.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did I say that? Why is it impossible to have a normal conversation on this subject where you can process simple logic without spinning off into hyperbole? If you actually listen to climate scientists -- many of them anyway -- they are pretty damn reasonable about the limits of what we understand and sound a lot like me. But somehow I'm anti-science because I don't hold the position of hyperventilating politicians who wouldn't know science from a hole in the ground? Okay.
Snark aside, this is exactly right. When it comes to climate science, we have lost all humility for what we do not yet know, which is a critical element of science.
Adam Duritz, is that you?
The explicit marking of sarcasm is there for people who aren't naturally sarcastic to the core and can pick up on the sarcasm without the explicit marker. I had no trouble understanding that the comment wasn't serious. It was quite an effective trolling, as proven by the reply threads.
How can you still fall for a trolling even after someone explains to you that it's a trolling?
It's just factually incorrect to say brexit will necessarily raise the costs of UK's goods. The EU makes it easy to trade within Europe but it puts a layer between EU countries and non-EU countries who wish to trade. There is nothing preventing the UK from establishing far more advantageous trade agreements with non-EU countries. And aside from spite, there is nothing preventing the UK from entering into the exact same or similarly advantageous trade arrangement with the EU.
Yes, a lot of buggy makers had to go on govt assistance when the car came around. Too bad government didn't ban the car or we could have saved those workers' jobs and avoided all that welfare expenditure.
Ironically, it is not logically necessary for most laypeople to be well versed in logic and math for my criticism to hold.
Did I call scientists frauds anywhere in my comment? I didn't even imply it. In fact I went to great effort to explain how science can be corrupted without scientists deciding to commit fraud.
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The extra characters in Twitter should really move the needle on human progress starting immediately.
So, you're trying to tell me that scientists are mere mortals, with human tendencies like the rest of us? That they are not divinely inspired conduits of the Truth, who can solely interpret the cryptic texts of the Journals de Academe?
There are two major things ruining science. First, scientists are revered like priests, and the laypeople do not feel worthy to question them, even though at the end of the day it all boils down to logic and math. Laypeople even beat each other up for speaking out without the proper credentials. Are you less likely to be right about a study if you're a layperson? Of course. But this is still an important check on the system. Second, every clown PhD and pre-PhD who is avoiding the real world needs to publish publish publish in order to advance. This leads to ever more silly and esoteric journals full of silly and esoteric studies that nobody reads and very few can be bothered to try to replicate. And of course you get no credit for replicating a study, because credit = being published. So replication, another important check on the system, is diminished. And within the mainstream subjects, you have ever more pressure to come up with a new result, because there are many more PhDs looking to publish and only so many will. Scientific results, which were already susceptible to human biases, are victim to marketing spin and selective publishing. If nobody will ever try to replicate your results, who cares anyway. And if it's advancing interest in your field, which I'm sure you care about for at least some make-the-world-better reasons, then it's quite easy to convince yourself you're doing a neutral or positive thing.
The scientific method is solid. We just don't follow it anymore. And the #ifuckinglovescience crowd isn't helping.
That's not at all the argument I made. And in fact I objected to the machiavelli quote up the thread for the very reason it implied I am making this argument you suggest, and I clarified that I am not. But the prejudices of /. appear to be too strong
I don't know why /. can't listen to criticism of their childish PHB yapping without assuming the criticizer worships PHBs. /. is just wrong on this, and I'm just saying so, because I've been here a long time and it gets old. You can have a few beers and believe you could be president of the US... even if that is "normal" in some sense, it doesn't mean you look like anything but an idiot doing it.
I think the real takeaway is that most people don't care about liberty as much as we like to tell ourselves they do. We all make a lot of trade offs, and the inconveniences required to take the liberty side of many of these trade offs just isn't worth it to most people. My threshold for inconvenience is higher than most, but I still lean toward convenience in most cases, if I'm honest with myself.
I don't understand your point. I did not suggest the Internet was a cure-all. I said that the decentralized and free nature frustrated many typical government control techniques. But the majority of users have voluntarily centralized.
CEOs are people too. And just like you will work with shitty programmers, you will work with shitty CEOs. But the childish PHB chuckling here suggests there is something uniquely incompetent about CEOs. This is a very arrogant view, and is more about envy than reality. Most people who think they should be king are so out of touch with reality that they don't know they're wrong. The famous chart showing confidence graphed against knowledge applies here. When you don't have any idea what it means to be a CEO, you think you could do the job. Once you start realizing you're not ready to do the job, it's a sign of sophistication and understanding, and you're on the path to being ready eventually.
I'm sorry, but this is a very immature view. There are very different types of CEOs and different organizations need a different type, perhaps changing as the organization and its market evolves over time. You seem most familiar with the internal organizational CEO, who spends most of his/her time on organizational structure and either inspiring others himself/herself or bringing in people who will. There are also very externally focused CEOs who spend most of their time on sales and partnerships. There are also finance focused CEOs who spend all their time engaging investors and potential investors. And then there is a huge variable of the board. Sometimes there is no board, or the CEO is the only real board member. Sometimes the board is a rubber stamp. Sometimes they are a very strong entity. Sometimes the CEO spends a good bit of his/her time engaging with the board.
Talk to a private equity person for 15 minutes about CEOs and how he/she finds the right CEO for one of his/her portfolio companies. The topic is much more complicated than you suggest.
Yes, indeed. There are many cases of execs getting into details they don't understand, and they should leave that to the experts. And I know exactly what you mean by the buzzword bingo excitement. I could sell the exact same idea to a tech exec, in one situation attaching a cool sounding buzzword (eg microservice architecture) that may or may not actually apply, and in the other situation just playing it straight. The former will be way more effective. I don't fully understand why, but it is.
A big part of the us vs them silliness here at /. is that you can't make fun of the "us" without everyone thinking you're on the side of "them". It is almost impossible to have a rational discussion on the subject here. You must pick one side and both sides are silly.
Some will control information. But it is also a natural result of any organization. If everyone must know everything in order to do their job, you are not organized. That's just not a scalable model beyond a few person company.
Your quote does not apply. I did not say that you can't discuss strategy unless you're a CEO. I mocked the ridiculous attitude that many technical people have about how CEOs have no idea what they are doing and the software developer has it all figured out. It is the lack of humility I am mocking, plus the ignorance of the very real fact that people lower in the org only have partial visibility on one or two silos of business operations, and have no access to financial statements. There is a reason for financial reporting, and people without this data will make conclusions based on things they see (eg, the premium coffee service being canceled) and generally end up making the wrong conclusions. So why would your first assumption be that the people who have all this information and do have experience with strategy are idiots and have it all wrong?
That's what I am mocking. And the magnitude of this egotistical silliness is unique to tech.
Index-ability is not the issue. The issue is we have managed to take a decentralized Internet, where govt has been forced to adapt its ideas toward freedom due to the infeasibility of endorcing their usual anti-freedom views on their role in speech, commerce, etc, and say: no thank you, I would like to interact with the internet via apps from 5 govt-partnered large corporations.
I'm always impressed that software devs and project managers and database architects understand business strategy so well that they only need about 10% of the contextual information about what's going on in the business, and no access to financial statements... and yet can tell that the C-suite has it all wrong. Have you ever thought about being CEO? We would love to have you.
You appear to have read a lot of words in my comment I never wrote. For example, you are telling me Walmart isn't going to be unprofitable due to the cost of human labor. Well, I never said they would, so that's a strange counter-argument. Your "major insight" is that Walmart is trying to maximize profit. Amazing intellectual contribution!
Maybe you can't follow because I'm too stupid to write at your level.
Automation doesn't just happen randomly. It is the result of capital investments made when the benefit outweighs the cost. Walmart has to deal with ACA, FMLA, new overtime rules, hikes in he min wage, and their recent voluntary company-wide min wage increase. They first beat up their suppliers to extract savings from them. And then they looked for savings elsewhere.
Automation is inevitable as the capital cost falls. But increasing the cost of human labor accelerates the process significantly. Creative destruction is a good thing, but it does hurt individuals temporarily who will need to retrain and adjust. So the pace is no small thing, and accelerating the transformation is not benign.
Why is "your" in quotation marks? Does this mean you have no respect for property rights?