Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

shh

:)

brb going to frame every thread in terms of fifty shades of grey. it's derivative, but it wears it all on its sensible dress

Plato refers to Socrates as the "gadfly" of the state (as the gadfly stings the horse into action, so Socrates stung various Athenians), insofar as he irritated some people with considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness. His attempts to improve the Athenians' sense of justice may have been the cause of his execution.

could you maybe determine how that work figures into context first?

there are contexts and there are contexts, but as a favor to you I will figure it all out for you if you like, once you tell me your priorities, so I can get it all straight in my head.

so I have this silly party game deck from one of those tech thinky groups, you know the one, people who have good cred but aren't highly-connected fund millionaires

the cards are three sets
DESIGN ACTION | ATTRIBUTE | OBJECT
it's tiresome for a good portion because wtf who wants to think about this, and other times it is a little too true, and then.. I just pulled it out and drew

TWEAK | ANTI-SURVEILLANCE | FRIDGE

aw this is good shit

mh, I have a feeling there is a context for your comments that you haven't shared. For example, have you read the Cyropaedia? How much of Plato have you read? In what context did you read them? Did you draw conclusions from what you read? What were they? Do those conclusions conflict with what I said? Or conflict with what you read into what I said? If the latter, what exactly were you reading into my statements and where do your ideas conflict? Be brief, if possible, but comprehensive. Thx.

lol

You know who is a better tortoise than everyone else? Diego of Galapagos.

this is what ticks me off most about that stupid insistence that all government research have concrete results - it gets things exactly backwards. publicly-funded research is at its best when its goal is not results or market driven but exploratory. when it tries to transform theoretical findings into concrete benefits it will nearly always be inferior to market-driven "innovation". this is what good entrepeneurs truly excel at - turning theoretical improvements (which it is unlikely to find on its own because there's no money in it) into stuff people will actually want.

I assume the only reason the GOP hasn't turned "all government research funding should be run like the CIA's In-Q-Tel" is because there's too much jurisdictional pork in the National Labs and the DoD would scream if you threatened their precious FFRDCs

fwiw this is why I was o_O when I went to that Orioles page caek recommended

http://imgur.com/An2F0Mn

http://i.imgur.com/An2F0Mn.png

I have the following 4* characters at 12 covers:

Cyclops
Nick Fury
Hulkbuster
Gwenpool (I have had 5 purple for a while; this past month, I pulled 3 purple Gwenpool covers in a row from classic legends)
Riri

C4rol is at 7, Medusa at 6, Bl4de at 10

wait until you see part 4 xp

wtf how did that happen, I could have sworn I was in the MPQ thread

PPfS 4: Boss Level
*picture of shirtless, blindfolded caek holding katana*

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/technology/education-partovi-computer-science-coding-apple-microsoft.html

Every time i see pictures of kids in US classrooms with laptops in articles about the direction of education policy, i want someone to ask a) what proportion of US students between the ages of, say, 10 and 17, have a school-provided device, b) what proportion of US classrooms have the wifi infrastructure to support web-enabled learning and c) how do those stats break down by race and parental income.

I just can't stand every SV exec on some crusade to make everyone and their mother learn to program like it is going to save education/future/world/etc. Teach everyone spreadsheets instead.

no shit, basic computer literacy goes a hell of a long way

what proportion of US classrooms have the wifi infrastructure to support web-enabled learning and c) how do those stats break down by race and parental income.

One of my work clients is a publisher of ESL literacy programs - most of their customers are rural school districts in the US Southwest. Quite a few are still dependent on faxes, snail mail, and dial up connections. Not a chance in hell of that changing any time soon.

Rural USA lags well behind urban USA in terms of infrastructure, despite receiving far more in state and federal spending than they pay back in tax revenue. Much of their local infrastructure is supported by the local county tax base.

Jeff and MH otm, I'm going to wind up teaching a brown bag series on Stupid Outlook Tricks to my current office because these kids don't know how to search with quotation marks or use the scheduling assistant on appointments or anything

I just can't stand every SV exec on some crusade to make everyone and their mother learn to program like it is going to save education/future/world/etc. Teach everyone spreadsheets instead.

― Jeff

goddamn right, don't teach programming in high school, teach them how to make _pivottables_.

and how to fix printers and network connections goddamit

#1 thing I tell people at job fairs who are looking for jobs in IT - have you worked the helpdesk?

Love too fix computer!

This is fabulously stupid.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/reid-hoffman-mark-pincus-wtf-2017-7

I like interviews about the ideology of Silicon Valley:

--
This Is Hell! | Beware the welfare market: The case against Silicon Valley's techno-libertarian UBI.

https://thisishell.com/interviews/961-julianne-tveten-paul-blest

---

The linked article is okay. The point she makes about the tech version of UBI is astute. I don't buy that Zuck or Cuban are dumb enough to run for President, though.

yeah zuck's not running imo

everyone i know how knows him or works at FB says the election shook him up, and he sincerely thinks of this swing state tour as product research

when all you have is a hammer

so...

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320?rev=1501965015200

so has anyone publicly outed who the writer of that rant was?

sort of crazy that given an even playing field, women excel at science and engineering, but given all the resources in the world there are men who don't understand social interaction

https://medium.com/@catehstn/we-know-who-he-is-596fdd93d7c2

http://www.kylieerin.com/lets-talk-about-google/

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788

yes it's https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-damore-b277b62b/

I can't help laughing at this Googler's misogynist manifesto because it reminds me of what one female Uber HR rep told me

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

She told me that, in her experience, there were more Asian women in accounting because Asian women are just really good with numbers.

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

Likewise, she said, there were more white men in engineering because white men were simply more suited for engineering than others!

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

(woman who wrote the "strange year at uber" thing)

"Black people would be great in Customer Support roles because Black people know how to talk to people." ~Investor who will remain nameless

— EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) August 7, 2017

“You should be able to say that women are bad engineers. But sharing salary info will get you in trouble.” - Googlehttps://t.co/sKpCTPrpIT https://t.co/Qr050oBQki

— Elizabeth Sampat (@twoscooters) August 6, 2017

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110526/images/nj7348-545a-i2.0.jpg

also last i heard is that this google guy's manifesto is an internal nightmare for higher ups who are still figuring out what to even do

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

employee revolt vs legal nightmare plus validates what people already latently believe about engineers and tech anyway

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

for some reason I was assuming the writer of the rant was older than me, which is definitely not the case

thank you for your aggregation and reportage, caek!

forgive me but i looked up his publications. he didn't finish his phd afaict (which makes the "he's a biology phd, he knows what he's talking about" line less useful). this is the most cited of his two papers, and it's seems to be a screed about people not being logical enough. you can sense that he had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies open in the next tab while he was writing.

*this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176967/

microbial cooperation is very interesting and people are writing about it more and more

so this guy's education/career route followed the princeton -> research science -> oh shit I want the silicon valley money -> software engineering -> google route

this is not unique among people I've talked to

there but for the grace of god go i. but i find it ... noteworthy that he seems to have written purely polemical papers (not even theoretical, much less working with actual data) and quit before it got hard.

you actually had a career that morphed over time, though, right?

the other confounding thing I heard from someone who used to work at google is that, if you're not in the software development track, your opinions on app ideas or what might be interesting products to develop are ignored. because software developers are the ideas people.