Or, with one bit flipped: https://status451.com/2017/11/11/radical-book-club-what-righties-can-do/
From that post:
Some Righties talk about the idea of a post-political world — the idea that a system with less citizen input, on the continuum from Singapore to monarchy or neocameralism — would be more stable. But in a world without elections, there would still be shifts in power. It’s just that the mechanisms by which power shifts wouldn’t have occasional moments of relative transparency.
So, reflecting on that, I agree with his premises – that mechanisms by which power shifts happen would have less transparency. But I disagree with his conclusion. It’s not clear to me that autocratic states are inherently less stable than democracies. Yes, autocratic states crumble (as we saw in the Arab Spring revolutions). But democracies crumble and collapse as well. Russia was fairly democratic in the ’90s before collapsing into Putinist autocracy. Thailand had a fairly robust democracy before it was locked down by a military junta. Turkey and Pakistan have flipped between military rule and democratic governance multiple times.
And on the flip side, dictatorial China, despite all its internal problems, actually appears to be a more responsive state to its citizens than democratic India. While Delhi still has the worst air pollution in the world, the Communist Party has quietly cleaned up Beijing, in response to citizen unrest.
I think, up until a certain point, competence matters more than representation. As it turns out, people don’t really care by what mechanism the government listens to their needs, as long as it implements policies that improve their daily lives. The hypothesis is that once an economy has fully industrialized, it’s impossible for government to be appropriately responsive to all the diverse interests of the country without democratizing. But the continued existence of autocratic China makes me doubt that theory more and more with each passing day.
My natural response here is to compare this to my job, and to the description rsaarelm linked of a food plant. We don’t have the rapid-fire series of deadlines that the dabbawalas do – our shift has one deadline per day; other shifts have a few more, but that doesn’t make much of a difference – but unlike the food plant, we do have extensive cross-training: everyone is expected to learn all the basic job functions. There’s specialization in practice, but if the system goes down for three hours and everyone needs to be thrown at making up for lost time so we don’t miss the deadline, everyone can be thrown at that with no problem.
And I mean everyone. The highest-level manager in the entire building has come out to do the same stuff we make barely over minimum wage for, because the deadline necessitated the addition of a few more labor-hours.
The lord of men has two difficulties to face: If he appoints only worthy men to office, ministers will on the pretence of worthiness attempt to deceive their ruler; if he makes arbitrary promotions of officials, the state affairs will always be menaced. Similarly, if the lord of men loves worthiness, ministers will gloss over their defects in order to meet the ruler’s need. In consequence, no minister will show his true heart. If no minister shows his true heart, the lord of men will find no way to tell the worthy from the unworthy.
For instance, because the King of Yue liked brave men, the people made light of death; because King Ling of Chu liked slender waists, the country became full of starvelings; because Duke Huan of Qi was by nature jealous and fond of women, Shu Diao castrated himself in order to administer the harem; because Duke Huan liked different tastes, Yiya steamed the head of his son and served Duke Huan with the rare taste; because Zikuai of Yan liked worthies, Zizhi pretended that he would not accept the state.
Therefore, if the ruler reveals his hate, ministers will conceal their motives; if the ruler reveals his likes, ministers will pretend to talent; and if the ruler reveals his wants, ministers will have the opportunity to disguise their feelings and attitudes.
That was the reason why Zizhi, by pretending to worthiness, usurped the ruler’s throne; and why Shu Diao and Yiya, by complying with their ruler’s wants, molested their ruler. Thus Zikuai died in consequence of a civil war and Duke Huan was left unburied until worms from his corpse crawled outdoors. What was the cause of these incidents? It was nothing but the calamity of the rulers’ revelation of true hearts to ministers. Every minister in his heart of hearts does not necessarily love the ruler. If he does, it is for the sake of his own great advantage.
In these days, if the lord of men neither covers his feelings nor conceals his motives, and if he lets ministers have a chance to molest their master, the ministers will have no difficulty in following the examples of Zizhi and Tianchang. Hence the saying: “If the ruler’s likes and hate be concealed, the ministers’ true hearts will be revealed. If the ministers reveal their true hearts, the ruler never will be deluded.”
– Han Feizi, Ch. Vii, “The Two Handles”, tr. W. K. Liao (with, of course, the Wade-Giles converted to Pinyin)
Excellent essay!
I’ve got a comment and a question..
Comment. See also: PHP vs. insert your favorite web-app-appropriate language here.
Question. Does this pattern mean that no financial incentives exist that are strong enough to overcome this individual-hacker independence? Can the power of Lisp not be harnessed, by a group, for profit? Why not?
Edit: Perhaps the answer is here:
The Lisp Curse does not contradict the maxim of Stanislav Datskovskiy: Employers much prefer that workers be fungible, rather than maximally productive.
The author attributes this to the “venality” and “close-mindedness” of managers, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. The expected productivity of an employee, after all, is his productivity × his reliability… and this is exacerbated by dependence of a team on any given employee’s work, etc. Selecting for fungibility preferentially to maximal productivity seems to me to be nothing more than perfectly rational optimization on a manager’s part.
(Of course this is different from employees whose main value is to be sources of ideas, etc., such as in research labs and so forth, or for designers (especially design team leads), etc.—but that’s hardly the median case, and anyway is irrelevant to the subject of programming languages.)
I don’t know how much of a case this is with Lisp, but a lot of Forth programmers say that while Forth makes for excellent productivity for a capable single programmer, it’s often quite impossible for any other Forth programmer to work on the first one’s program. The programs end up idiosyncratic private languages that are impenetrable without deep study. So it’s less about workers not being maximally fungible but possibly not being able to hire any new productive workers at all for an existing system.
Maybe the whole programming system should be set up in something like this with a new kind of module system. The inside of a module is full of maximally productive weird hyper-expressive language shenanigans, and then somehow there’s a mutually comprehensible interface layer between the modules so that the software can be assembled from these interacting fiefdoms. That’s sort of how Unix and Unix programs worked, with the interface layer being plaintext streams. I’m not quite sure what this should ideally look like. The current libraries and APIs approach isn’t good enough, you’d want to be able to exchange structures, idioms and sublanguages, not just provide a black box with buttons to push. Also you would want to avoid boxing single components in a large system into suboptimal architectures by imposing too many constraints from the surrounding area, this part gets really hard.
Maybe Alan Kay is on to something with the whole “cells receiving chemical signals and deciding what to do, not circuits receiving electrical impulses and reacting with lockstep determinism” metaphor he’s been trying to push for the last 40 years. (Also sorta related, Functional in the small, OO in the large.)
Maybe Alan Kay is on to something with the whole “cells receiving chemical signals and deciding what to do, not circuits receiving electrical impulses and reacting with lockstep determinism” metaphor he’s been trying to push for the last 40 years.
Do you have any links/references about this? It sounds really interesting, and I’ve not heard of it before!
There’s a bit of it in the Programming and Scaling talk that was linked here a while ago.
Some emails about the origin of OO, more on messaging.
By the way, “Functional in the small, OO in the large” is a big part of how Swift works. (Well, how I write Swift, anyway. Non-functional (heh) approaches are certainly also available.)
Does this pattern mean that no financial incentives exist that are strong enough to overcome this individual-hacker independence?
So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment. Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we’d be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things in our software that they couldn’t do. And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn’t need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually go out of business. That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.
What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly, it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features. Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn’t have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon– that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something. In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was leaking news of their features to us. We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible.
Yes, I’ve read that essay too, but—why only that example? Where are the others? If Lisp is so good, why isn’t everyone using it? Surely the fact that Paul Graham, of all people, used it, to make money, and now sings its praises, ought to spur a whole host of people to check it out, discover it, put it to use, and profit thereby? Why isn’t it way, way, way more popular?
It seems like when people try to use it, they find the ecosystem nasty. The very visible classic example of people buying pg’s Lisp evangelism, actually building a thing in Lisp and getting burned was the original Reddit. Another report of a reasonably capable newcomer trying to grab onto Common Lisp and bouncing off was Steve Yegge. It seems like you really need people building a common ground of solid libraries nowadays, and can’t really build solid stuff in an ecosystem where everybody has their own 80 % solution and the venerated standard solution was informed by 1980s computing practices.
I have issues with that essay. Paul Graham never seems to acknowledge the selection bias that using Lisp imposes. It’s entirely possible that the reason ViaWeb did well isn’t because it was written in Lisp, but because it attracted the sort of people who learn Lisp. It’s entirely possible that if he’d attracted those same programmers, but somehow managed to get them to use Perl, he’d have been just as productive.
Lisp was not (and still is not) a “mainstream” programming language. That means you have to go out of your way to learn Lisp. The sorts of programmers who go out of their way to learn obscure programming languages and libraries are more likely to be more productive (or, in Silicon Valley terms, “passionate”) programmers who would be able to bring that additional productivity to bear no matter what language they were using.
Selection bias seems like it could explain a lot of this puzzle.
The question is, do we find the same effect for other, comparably obscure / non-mainstream languages?
Most of my books are stored at my parents’ house, but here’s what I have in my apartment:
Beowulf, dual-language edition, tr. Howell D. Chickering, Jr.
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling’s Verse
That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, by Yukio Mishima
Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima
Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima (the remaining two books of the tetralogy are in the mail)
The Satyricon, by Petronius, and the Apocolocyntosis, by Seneca
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
And Another Thing…, by Eoin Colfer
The HarperCollins Study Bible
Li Yong (1627-1705) and Epistemological Dimensions of Confucian Philosophy, by Anne D. Birdwhistell
The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill
The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, by Joseph Campbell
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Wing-Tsit Chan
America Bewitched, by Owen Davies
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, by William Hinton
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Pike, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
A Book of New England, by Zephine Humphrey
Cartesian Meditations, by Edmund Husserl
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
Russian Word Formation, by Charles E. Townsend
Zhuangzi, tr. Burton Watson
The last conventional war the US fought was the opening round of Operation Iraqi Freedom (the “shock-and-awe” phase of the current Iraq war). But that almost doesn’t count, because it was the US fighting at the near peak of its power against an Iraqi army that had never fully recovered from the massive defeat inflicted upon it by the Gulf War.
The last war the US fought against a functional military was the Gulf War, in 1993. While today, we look upon the US victory in the Gulf War as an inevitability, we must remember that it was a huge surprise when Saddam’s army and air force crumpled after just over two weeks of sustained combat operations. Saddam’s military, at the time, was the fourth largest in the world, and was combat hardened after the almost decade-long Iran/Iraq war of the ’80s. It was also far better equipped, relative to the US, than the North Vietnamese military had been in the ’60s. As a result, there were many who feared that the US was getting into another quagmire by attempting to liberate Kuwait in 1993. Instead, the world was treated to the largest military surprise since the German invasion of France in 1941. Never before had a military that large been destroyed so thoroughly in so short a time.
However, 1993, at this point, is 15 years in the past. While the US military has been distracted by the twin insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan, other militaries (notably China and Russia) have been studying the conditions behind US military’s victory in the Gulf War and have been coming up with ways to counter the advantages that the US displayed in that conflict. A distributed system like passive radar is one such way. Other ways include the usage of so-called “hybrid war” tactics displayed by the Russian military in Crimea, Donbass, and, lately Syria. China has been developing a system of tactics and technologies that fall under the umbrella of “anti-access/area-denial” (A2AD), which focus on keeping the US Navy at a distance, in order to secure Chinese control over the South China Sea and potentially keep the US from coming to Taiwan’s aid if China should choose to invade Taiwan.
The US military, in my estimation, is much like the British army prior to World War 1. The British military, riding high after its victories in the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean War, was confident in its own abilities and sanguine about the perceived weakness of its adversaries (rising Germany and the fading empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans). As a result, the British military focused on fighting “brushfire wars” against native rebellions in Africa, India and Afghanistan (lol). Because of this, the British army found itself ill-prepared and under-equipped to fight a “high-intensity conflict against near-peer adversaries” (to use the words of modern military analysts).
There is a school of thought that says that conventional war against near-peer adversaries is impossible, because any such war would inevitably escalate to nuclear weapons. I actually wish this argument was true. It would simplify our threat assessments greatly. However, whenever I hear this argument, I am reminded of all the arguments prior to World War 1 or World War 2 that suggested that a major war was impossible because of the unprecedented destructive capabilities of modern weapons.
Do I think a war is likely? At this moment, I do not. Can I tell when the next war is going to occur? If I could, I would be working for the CIA, NSA or DoD, with a top-secret clearance. What I do have is a vague sense of unease. This sense of unease comes from the fact that the world today is multi-polar and unstable. The US military no longer enjoys the unchallenged hyperpower hegemony that it had at the end of the cold war. Yet, it still acts and fights as if it does. I also remember that wars, when they do occur, can stem from causes that are extremely surprising at the time. Who would have thought that the assassination of the crown prince of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist would lead to a war that resulted in the deaths of millions?
… the next time the US has to fight a conventional war
Is that considered likely anytime soon? When was the last conventional war? What will the next one be?
I haven’t always agreed with Lanier, but he’s spot-on in pretty much everything he says in this piece.
Bret Victor here discusses his notion that the primary challenge in building modern ‘Maker’ projects usually has less to do with putting the thing together and more to do with understanding behavior. For example, a robot that avoids light might not be technically complex to build so much as technically complex to design and optimize its behavior. As such he recommends makerspaces move away from a ‘machine tool club’ model and more towards a workshop for providing tools to analyze and predict behavior in the physical world.
I don’t know how much I agree with him on that particular point, but I did find the design ideas interesting.
I found this document interesting for its captivating description of the mystic vein of Hinduism. More relevant perhaps to us, this take has a transcendent quality that borders on being kin to the implicit doctrines taught by singularitans:
“Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions–a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?–was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: “Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again.” “Children of immortal bliss” –what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name–heirs of immortal bliss–yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth–sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter. Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One “by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth.””
I really wanted to like this. But unfortunately, it appears to be written in Elvish. Why does Gil-Galad need to know algebraic topology?
From that post:
Some Righties talk about the idea of a post-political world — the idea that a system with less citizen input, on the continuum from Singapore to monarchy or neocameralism — would be more stable. But in a world without elections, there would still be shifts in power. It’s just that the mechanisms by which power shifts wouldn’t have occasional moments of relative transparency.
So, reflecting on that, I agree with his premises – that mechanisms by which power shifts happen would have less transparency. But I disagree with his conclusion. It’s not clear to me that autocratic states are inherently less stable than democracies. Yes, autocratic states crumble (as we saw in the Arab Spring revolutions). But democracies crumble and collapse as well. Russia was fairly democratic in the ’90s before collapsing into Putinist autocracy. Thailand had a fairly robust democracy before it was locked down by a military junta. Turkey and Pakistan have flipped between military rule and democratic governance multiple times.
And on the flip side, dictatorial China, despite all its internal problems, actually appears to be a more responsive state to its citizens than democratic India. While Delhi still has the worst air pollution in the world, the Communist Party has quietly cleaned up Beijing, in response to citizen unrest.
I think, up until a certain point, competence matters more than representation. As it turns out, people don’t really care by what mechanism the government listens to their needs, as long as it implements policies that improve their daily lives. The hypothesis is that once an economy has fully industrialized, it’s impossible for government to be appropriately responsive to all the diverse interests of the country without democratizing. But the continued existence of autocratic China makes me doubt that theory more and more with each passing day.
So, the most relevant bit is this and I think it’s key that the average LWer comes to understand it:
“The first thing I noticed was that every once in a while the classifier would spit something out as ‘I don’t know what category this is’ and you’d look at it and it would be what we’re calling this fringe stuff. That quite surprised me. How can this classifier that was tuned to figure out category be seemingly detecting quality? “[Outliers] also show up in the stop word distribution, even if the stop words are just catching the style and not the content! They’re writing in a style which is deviating, in a way. […] “What it’s saying is that people who go through a certain training and who read these articles and who write these articles learn to write in a very specific language. This language, this mode of writing and the frequency with which they use terms and in conjunctions and all of the rest is very characteristic to people who have a certain training. The people from outside that community are just not emulating that. They don’t come from the same training and so this thing shows up in ways you wouldn’t necessarily guess. They’re combining two willy-nilly subjects from different fields and so that gets spit out.”
“During the winter of 1901, the brothers began to question the aerodynamic data on which they were basing their designs. They decided to start over and develop their own data base with which they would design their aircraft. They built a wind tunnel and began to test their own models. They developed an ingenious balance system to compare the performance of different models. They tested over two hundred different wings and airfoil sections in different combinations to improve the performance of their gliders The data they obtained more correctly described the flight characteristics which they observed with their gliders. By early 1902 the Wrights had developed the most accurate and complete set of aerodynamic data in the world. “
Oh, is that why high-level life players tend to keep diaries?
Oh, is that why high-level life players tend to keep diaries?