Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org
Computer programmer
"From what we can tell, Haugen works at Google. So much for "Do no evil."" – Kent Anderson
Joined Mar 2023
tl;dr – What is a good name for the thing people are criticizing with labels like "CRT" or "SJW" or "woke" (or in olden times "PC")?
There's a certain flavor of activism/politics that has picked up steam in the Left in the last 10 years, and especially the last 3 or so. The ideas aren't new, of course, but I think it's fair to say their market share has grown quite notably in recent years.
The core is:
* Concern with identity-based oppression: a lot of problems in the world are because some group with power is oppressing some other group (white->POC, cis->trans, rich->notrich, het->gay, etc, etc, etc) Ideas like intersectionality and so on.
* To address the above, question core liberal ideals that have failed us: if equal treatment under the law ends up not being so equal, then maybe stop trying and instead do something to enforce outcomes. Think: Kendi's anti-racism, as he so eloquently describes it. Or think: the "critical" in "critical theory".
Some additional comments: there's an emphasis on whose narratives we listen to – after all who best to talk about the problems faced by the oppressed group other than someone from that group? The oppression is systemic – not necessarily someone deliberately oppressing. It infects us all. Anticapitalist, usually.
So: leftist idpol, but with a skepticism of liberal values (here by "liberal" I don't mean Left as the word sometimes does in US politics)
It seems uniquely difficult to name and categorize political philosophies like this; it's never going to be a clean taxonomy, in a sense, where each person rigidly adheres to a menu of positions. Add to that a lot of the names given to these kinds of things are pejorative.
Given that, is there a good name for this? "Critical theory" & "western Marxism" describe adjacent scholarly traditions, but maybe not the pop-politics part of it, so maybe not ideal? "cultural marxism" is used for ~this, but is probably not accurate (it's not all that Marxist, etc) and might make people think you're an anti-semitic conspiracy-monger. "critical social justice" maybe?
Erik Haugen
boosted
“The open access movement is fighting to get rid of paywalls altogether, and we are making progress. But in the meantime, thanks to Alexandra’s courage and creativity, researchers around the world have SciHub. It is my honor and privilege to recognize her with a 2023 EFF Award.”
@freemo @JonKramer @Free_Idealist @pyranose @georgetakei I do not want to weigh in on what counts as "left" or "right", but just what is this: "(66%) of the GOP beleive abortion should be legal under extenuating circumstances such as a dead fetus" – no! Pretty much absolutely nobody wants to ban whatever surgery is indicated for miscarriages/etc. Yikes!
This reminds me of something. Awhile ago, there was a poorly-worded bill in CA that righties were saying was going to legalize infanticide. When this was pointed out, it was immediately fixed of course to clarify that it didn't do that. But this didn't stop some people from continuing to scaremonger about CA democrats wanting to kill children or whatever. That scaremongering is absurd, and a ridiculous thing to do.
Spreading this idea that republicans want to force women to carry dead fetuses is equally asinine. You all should stop doing it.
@TruthSandwich @freemo ok this happening actually sounds somewhat possible.
@TruthSandwich @freemo to me the part that isn't comparable is that Stein (and possibly West) was in the general, and Kennedy won't be. So he is unlikely to take many votes from a contender in a swing state in the general.
@TruthSandwich @freemo I'm having a failure of imagination. How does his candidacy help Trump?
@rmathematicus @josephwelch @Sheril Yeah, I get filmmakers have to change things to fit the format, but do they really need to change this much? Especially when it's tarnishing Turing's and Denniston's reputations.
Erik Haugen
boosted
Academics: stop being coy about #SciHub and start treating it like basic research infrastructure. If you dont include it in your syllabus already as a normal way to access research, you should start. No more winks and nods, just link directly to it and accept no criticism for doing so from the researchers that necessitate its continued existence by their publishing practices
@ratel @Strandjunker They'd quickly be blocked from some big instances if they were outed.
@onideus@med-mastodon.com @Strandjunker https://theintercept.com/2021/09/11/september-11-saudi-arabia/ conspiracy mongering; or, at best, calling the Saudi Crown Prince "the people behind 9/11" is pretty silly, at least based on anything we know publicly.
I mean, there are other pretty serious concerns we maybe should have with the Saudi government, don't get me wrong.
@danluu Are there data for this sort of thing about other respiratory illnesses as well? I know flu/etc can cause long-term problems as well, but I suspect not at these rates.
@rudy How would an LLM get this correct? I would assume if it got it correct that it saw the puzzle in its training data and is essentially parroting the answer. Isn't that how it answers questions like how to code quicksort or whatever?
@antares @georgetakei For president, pretty much yes. check in on electoral-vote.com to make sure your state is still in the "swing" category. (I'd maybe include North Carolina and make it 7 at this point?)
But if you live in California or Wyoming vote for whomever makes you happy. For president.
@danluu Or maybe I'm still misunderstanding you: maybe a more charitable reading of Redacted's "more participants, more revenue etc" is: "hobbies/sports that haven't languished, but instead have 'grown' are generally going to be such that today's 16yos are roughly at world-class 1970–80s level". IOW: you two are saying basically the same thing: training/etc has matured for a lot of sports since that time. (except for hobbies where it hasn't.)
I think the problem around "that could've been done by a SWE-2" has to do with the relative difficulty of telling how good someone is in software engineering vs. other fields.
For SWEs, it's easy (relatively) to recognize a complex system. It's quite a bit harder to recognize that a simple solution was simple because of the brilliance of the designer, and not because it's a simple problem. (That's my assertion here, anyway!)
It's kind of reminiscent of the "streetlight effect": we look at the easy thing to look at because we're better at looking at it.
It's critically important to combat this when designing an evaluation process for SWEs. If you're a SWE evaluating other SWEs, you need to be self-aware around this. If you are a SWE at a firm, leave if they get this wrong.
I think this is the right way to look at it: You want to promote people who (1) work on hard problems and (2) do the work well. (There's also leadership and various other factors, but let's just consider 1 and 2 here.)
(1) is important – another way to put this is that if SWE-2s can do all your problems, then you can just hire SWE-2s. (And they should be wary of working at your firm for long – there's little growth potential; they aren't going to learn much.)
(2) can be accomplished by finding a really simple solution that nobody else could think of. e.g. sr. folks built something really complex to do the job because they thought it was necessary, or "everyone" thought we needed a complex system, and then this candidate redid the system in a really simple way that worked at least as well. You have to go out of your way to be open to recognizing this.
Worth noting: "that could've been done by a SWE-2" might be legitimate! Maybe it just wasn't a hard problem. IOW: would a SWE-2 have recognized it as something they could do? If so, no promo.
@danluu Did you know that the best HS swimmers today can beat Spitz' times from 50 years ago?
Does this cause you to reconsider whether this comment is obviously absurd?
@danluu I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about Redacted's null hypothesis. It *sounds* like you're saying it's stupid because it should be obvious that a 16yo today should be nowhere near as good as an elite athlete 50 years ago, even in a sport that grew in significance?
In more than a few sports, high-schoolers today could roll with elite athletes from 40–50 years ago – even sports that were pretty big back then – so that assumption seems like a "wrong to anyone who has contact with the real world" kind of thing.
@burgerdrome @SubElement I was thinking that, too, but the barrel is not plastic. 😂
@NatureMC @stefano open an incognito window or a different browser and you can easily read that person's posts. With Mastodon it's even easier: just use a different instance that you aren't logged in to – no incognito window required.
"Logged out of the Fediverse, you can see more than my public posts?" – ah, I only had public posts in mind with what I wrote. I have never used non-public posts with Mastodon, so I have no idea; if that's what you were referring to beg pardon.
@NatureMC @stefano "If you block haters, depending on the instances, often they can still see your profile and read your posts." <-- This feels impossible to fix. maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part or a different set of assumptions, but if it's possible to read your posts while logged out, then it's fundamentally going to be easy for me to read your posts while logged out after you block my account.
Computer programmer
"From what we can tell, Haugen works at Google. So much for "Do no evil."" – Kent Anderson
Joined Mar 2023
