> Not sure if that article is really about shifting risks from corporates to workers and weakening their protections.
Jacobin articles are rarely 'about' anything. Their primary mode of reasoning is like folk etymology on a discourse level. There's usually a fair amount of factual evidence included, but it's forced through a narrative -- that's there for the sake of appearing novel -- into a conclusion that doesn't logically follow from anything presented.
(I haven't read this one yet, but if it's anything like Against Chairs[1], my criticism should apply. Admittedly I'm doing the same thing in this comment that I'm criticizing Jacobin for doing.)
It only matters if you're still asking that rabbit hole of a question.
> Do you mean consequentialism in the philosophical sense - as in, to be contrasted with deontology?
I suppose that's accurate enough for this context. The LW threads where consequentialism has been discussed[1] are probably the only way to get a good idea of what I mean by it.
I'd probably be better served by using the word less in favor of a phrase like "longterm rationality".
There is no good, simple to understand word or phrase that gets across the idea of "ethical strategy is more important than anything, and that doesn't mean what you think it means, because my strategy involves willfully, permanently altering my identity whenever necessary (and practical)". The common language of ethics is stuck in the early 20th century (at best) and its pre-computational aspirations.
I'd be more interested in a heat map of Political Compass[1] results or something similar. It's not a great model, but it's slightly less terrible than a bunch of pre-globalization labels.
And ultimately, I've stopped caring about how people define themselves politically. No matter how deep into activist milieus I got[2], my politics were always consequentialist. And to actually be a consequentialist you have to shut the hell up, strategize, build and iterate. Introspective and social identities are no exception to that.
Nearly every time the Tyranny of Structurelessness is posted to some activist's facebook wall these days, a link to the Tyranny of Tyranny is in the first few comments. Then the discussion devolves into rehashed bickering, though never about the actual content of the pieces.
> It's a good point, that different interpretations of the same sentence can lead to pointless debate.
I'd take it even further -- different interpretations of the same sentence always lead to pointless debate except to the extent that such debate is expressly aimed at maximizing mutual understanding of the semantic interpretations (rather than the derivative views) of all parties involved. The focus should be on dissolving the question[1], then opinion comes into the picture whenever dissolution fails.
> Unfortunately, I guess the main way to improve semantic clarity around an argument would be with more information up front, which would simultaneously raise the barrier to entry.
True. Right now the size of the discussion is inversely proportional to its complexity. I think we all overestimated how much that would change due to the architecture of the internet.
> Perhaps the answer is to allow 'splitting' an debate when it becomes clear that more than one issue is really being discussed. That would mean you could retain the simplicity and low barrier to entry, while avoiding situations where discussions get off topic.
It makes me really optimistic that your mind went directly to that. "Semantic threading" as a replacement to "people threading" is the core of what I'd like see in a discussion platform that actually hopes to achieve the goal of "meaningful, balanced debates".
Taking that to the extreme, I've long wanted a platform that takes the form of a single discussion, where structured branching and merging from various parts in the discussion makes a lot of the actual writing redundant. Though I'm not sure what sort of effects on motivation that would have -- people like to feel like they're contributing in a more substantive manner than "me too", and there's often an unwillingness to quote oneself which could dramatically slow down conversation when the community is still small. If I ever get around to specifying a protocol or building a service like that myself, I suspect that it would make the most sense to specify the protocol as an extension of git or build the service on top of github.
I see the main barrier to developing a "platform for meaningful, balanced debates" as one of semantic clarity, not discourse-level organization.
I cannot truthfully answer most of the questions I see on the site, because they have variable answers depending on what amount of game theory I apply to my thought processes:
* 1-step strategy: I answer by interpreting the words and phrases in the question exactly how I, personally, define them, with no regard to how widespread an interpretation like mine is.
* 2-step strategy: I attempt to discern the majoritarian interpretation of the question and answer accordingly.
* 3-or-more-step strategy: I attempt to mix my own interpretations with majoritarian ones to answer in a way that will maximize the propagation of my actual view and all its nuances.
The third option, in this case, is leading me to eschew voting and commenting on the platform altogether.[1] Though I am glad that it's led me to organize my thoughts on this matter.
What I'd really like to see in a discussion platform is more tightly networked semantics. Something more powerful than straight hyperlinking. Something that automates the conversion of broadcast and multicast text blocks (like forum posts) into tailored unicast ones (like private messages). Something that gives each user the background and definition set they need to interpret the content accurately. An API for people -- a PPI?
I really don't know how to make this happen. Arguably it's the sociological question of the century, the P vs. NP of human interaction. Maybe even the best first step is a platform like Saysaw. It's hard to say. But right now, I feel like there hasn't been any real progress since email or phpBB.
[1] This is also what made me stop using OkCupid. If anyone wants to take these thoughts on discussion platforms and apply them to a new dating platform, that'd be fantastic.
I think there's two things wrong with this comment exchange:
* you're not interpreting the quoted phrase literally enough;
* I'm being way too generous with the definition of 'inflation' to expect myself to be understood.
I say "inflation" is innate to the cryptocurrency environment, because the environment's very existence encourages the perpetual creation of new coins with new features.
This should be distinguished from traditional inflation — perhaps "meta-inflation" is a better term — to represent the fact that existing currencies lose value when mining power is redirected towards new ones.
As more currencies are created, each one becomes less able to reach its mining cap. (This ignores the extremely significant social ramifications of cryptocurrencies becoming more popular every day as a result of this, but those network effects are a fairly predictable S-curve.)
You're absolutely right that we've yet to see a preference emerge, but you're also modelling it as a choice between two options. In an environment where new currencies are being created daily, I doubt that the existence or lack of a mining cap will be of much relevance. I suspect that new generations of currencies will repeatedly overtake older ones (either as general-use currencies like BTC or specific-value ones like NMC) long before mining of the older currencies is cut off.
I don't think we'll ever settle into a one-coin environment, and I don't think that would be healthy. In fact I would hope that the opposite situation occurs — a world where currencies take on semantic value due to the way their particular featuresets interact with human nature. Value and wealth should maintain some amount of non-universality. That effectively dissolves the question of capped vs. uncapped mining as ideals.
> Bitcoin would help because it is a fixed-supply currency. If the world switches to it, no government anywhere will be able to practise inflation anymore.
Correct, no government could, but inflation is innate to the cryptocurrency environment as a whole, even if the current popular coins have capped supplies (dogecoin being a notable exception [1]).
It's not just about words. Written media is no longer limited to a few basic structures and voices. Grammar needs to be able to shift away from English in-line while maintaining semantic clarity, and sometimes that means the reader needs to distinguish between graphemes without any of the typical contextual cues that classic written languages provide.
The most common issue is hand-copying a piece of text between devices, such as a cryptocurrency address or a URL. Sure, it would be great if those sorts of non-linguistic bits of information were always tagged appropriately such that they show up in a different font, but that rarely happens in reality. Even here, on Hacker News, we can only talk in plaintext with a few minor markup features.
A general-purpose web font should be able to handle a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strings and not choke up on edge cases. In that respect, I really like the differentiation between a capital I and a lowercase L in Clear Sans, no matter the inclusion of 'Sans' in its name.
Because setting up a shortcut once for many hundreds[1] of sites is more demanding work than typing ! each time.
There's a bang for almost every site I frequent, and when a site changes its domain or search URI the bang is updated to reflect it almost immediately with no work on my end.
After a few weeks of acquainting myself with the bang system, I started to see web search from a completely different perspective. I think of a search engine now as less of an "everything index" and more of an "index of contextual searches". My mind, instead of just thinking "I'll google it", thinks "I'll choose a context for it".
Google is like a system-wide grep whose output is altered by advertising, and DDG w/ bangs is like a vast collection of commands piped into a grep.
A response to Jamil Elie Bou Kheir's comment on Facebook (presumably jamilbk on HN), because I do not have Facebook:
> hello from hacker news. thoughtful article! i think it's not the mere intelligence, beauty, or wealth that defines someone. perhaps it's the reasons and difficulty through which they are achieved. suppose i endure years of hardship and suddenly, in a flash of creativity, uncover a specific life path which i choose to follow. if the journey down that path necessitates an increase in intelligence, then wouldn't that conscious pursuit of intelligence qualify as a viable aspect of my identity? similar points can be raised about beauty and wealth.
> accordingly, i think no real identity is assumed when an individual gets these things "for free". enthusiastically expressing one's beauty, intelligence, or wealth that have existed since birth (or a lucky event) is actually rather distasteful... so yeah delete those qualities kthx.
You've made negation your identity the same way that others define themselves through beauty, intelligence and wealth. This is neither unique nor particularly useful, and I've found it to be generally unhealthy.
Entrench yourself in any region's activist scene and you will be surrounded by this mentality. Despite being a higher level abstraction than beauty, intelligence and wealth, it is equally commoditizable given enough time and positive feedback. For instance, consider the phrase "social capital".
The original post does not strike me as a rejection of one end of an axis in favor of its converse. Rather it is a dismissal of the axis itself, of an entire model of thinking, its conclusion resting in rational, subjective passivity. To ascribe any particular aesthetic about how things "should be" or how people "should act" is to miss the point.
I would summarize the original post's conclusion thus: stop projecting; question abstractions; remove inconsistencies from the bottom, up.
That conclusion invites a plea. We all have a utility function, and it will eventually fail; how do we best extend its (and our) relevance, and do we even want to?
> One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others.
I agree. I'm very grateful to have a common name. Nate Perkins is about as generic as it gets. Global searches for my name come up with a variety of people completely unrelated to me.
Still, there are potential downsides. For instance, searching for "[my name] [my city]" brings up a mugshot of someone who isn't me. And of course, Stephen Law of the original post has a much more frustrating issue.
None of us are really in a position to say with certainty "it's better to have a common name than an uncommon one" or vice versa.
I would argue that pseudonymity is necessary to overcome negative situations arising from having a common name or having an uncommon name. But this argument is strictly from my own experience and should be taken as such.
Like most things, it comes down to the importance of teaching kids to think critically about how their choices will affect themselves and their environment rather than accepting truisms not backed by relevant statistics.
> And if it becomes technically or illegally impossible to operate under a pseudonym or to change your legal name in 10 years? That this won't happen is the assumption I challenged, not some social obligation not to choose to use a pseudonym.
Then we should work to make that future unlikely. Even if things come to be as you describe, we should build in strict social/technical safeguards of (at the very least) pseudonymity until we much better understand the development the human mind.
[edit in response to your edited post] It seems we're pretty much in agreement, just coming at the issue from different points of devil's advocacy.
No, but that doesn't imply that it shouldn't hold true for the entirety of the child's legal childhood.
There's always been a feature of childhood that I feel is paramount: the freedom to alter one's identity. The child is still in beta; they're a person that's not officially released to the public.
Forcing them, from the start, to stick a single identity can be problematic psychologically and socially.
Encouraging situational pseudonymity is not equal to the revocation of one's legal identity, from now until death.
I can say with certainty that, had I not had the benefits of pseudonymity offered by the internet of the 90s and 00s, I would be a fundamentally broken person.
I would recommend that parents encourage their children to use a variety of usernames on the major social platforms, none of which are related to their legal name.
I'm in the process of transitioning to a single username everywhere based on the domain ngp.io, which itself is essentially "[my intials] I/O". I like the elegance and conciseness of it. But I'm extremely glad that I didn't do something like this earlier. My childhood online (as well as my "online childhood", if you catch my meaning) remain obscure to all but those with the necessary time, resources and motivation.
That's surprisingly powerful when you're surrounded by swarms of people whose entire histories can be looked up in a matter of minutes.
It can also be damning; I'm reminded of the line in Mad Men referring to Don Draper, "He has no people! You can't trust a person like that." Being the mysterious man from out of town might be alluring from a sexual stance, but business-wise it's still difficult to advance without strong geographically-rooted social networks, and the first step to creating those nowadays is often glancing at someone's Facebook or Twitter and exclaiming "hey, I know that person too!" Personhood is partially defined by your connection to other people, so having a visible interpersonal history is, in a sense, required for passing the Turing tests you're subjected to by those around you. Gaps in your history, on purpose or by accident, can result in being treated like a subhuman.
> The whole thing started to look like a random selection disguised as an exclusive elite fancy club.
In starting a few "exclusive elite fancy" internet clubs over the past decade, I've noticed that random selection is usually sufficient for an initial batch of members. The trick is to quickly grab a chunk of those first members and invite them to think on what membership criteria will best serve the community.
> What made me stop? The field was asking my Google+ account. They say the community will run on it, that is optional for now, but I will have to have one. As I don't have and don't one, I stopped right there to think if it would be worthy.
I agree that Google+ is an annoying barrier to entry. A private subreddit is my first choice for these sorts of things, but it would probably be a bit limiting in this scenario. Higher bandwidth communication between individuals with strict, human identities is clearly desired, and Google+ is designed specifically for this.
If I were looking to start a limited-entry online community today, I'd probably start with a Gazelle[1] instance and build off of it as necessary.
When I think "optimal language", I don't think "optimal combination of natural languages". This is partly because I've been experimenting with constructed languages (conlangs) since the age of eight and partly because my ethical and aesthetic desires lead me to different (or at least more elaborated) goals than "better communication between the peoples of the world as they exist today".
There are many conlangs for various purposes. Esperanto and Interlingua are useful for facilitating communication between people, acting as geography-blind APIs. Lojban is useful for communication between humans and computers, as well as fostering a strict logical mindset similar to the effects of working with programming languages, mathematics or symbolic logic. Klingon, Elvish and many other languages of various semantic/syntactic comprehensiveness are created for aesthetic and/or fictional purposes.
I've been working through a new conlang idea in my head the past few days. It builds off of Lojban in that its tenets are (1) universality, and (2) ease of I/O by both humans and machines. But it adds onto that (3) an easy-to-use, potentially unconscious system of real-time abstraction.
We do this to some extent with all human-human communication, when we inflect or affect or twitch or sigh or use other non-verbal linguistic cues to impart semantic value onto entire complex utterances. The way that a hyperlink imparts the contents of its destination onto the meaning of the information between its opening and closing tags.
This could be significantly sped up through use of more standardized multi-sensory linguistic components, either attached directly to individual people or attached as a metadata layer readable by nearby people through an AR technology of some sort (glasses are the obvious choice, but let's not limit ourselves).
For instance, a speaker could say the word "lu" multiple times in the same monologue. Those around the speaker would grok the intended meaning of "lu" each time due to whatever technological cues were broadcast along with it. The cues could be a string of words on a HUD or a color tinting the image of the speaker or a soft harmony in the listener's ear or a distinct pattern of buzzes from piezo elements in an ankle bracelet or even direct electrical stimulus causing a particular mental state.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The point is that this is the sort of thing I imagine "language optimization" to be. And this example is just scratching the surface of potential optimizations, because any optimization that allows for general abstraction opens up all the doors of Turing completeness.
Esperanto and Interlingua are patches. They are certainly useful for some things[1], but we can't know what they're optimal for unless we're also experimenting with entirely new systems not based solely on natural languages. We need to be able to treat real-time language as scripting — anything less and we'll be limited by the language rather than by our cognition.
Jacobin articles are rarely 'about' anything. Their primary mode of reasoning is like folk etymology on a discourse level. There's usually a fair amount of factual evidence included, but it's forced through a narrative -- that's there for the sake of appearing novel -- into a conclusion that doesn't logically follow from anything presented.
(I haven't read this one yet, but if it's anything like Against Chairs[1], my criticism should apply. Admittedly I'm doing the same thing in this comment that I'm criticizing Jacobin for doing.)
[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/against-chairs/