Author: Amalgamated Contemplation

Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt, by Kevin Simler

Source: Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt, by Kevin Simler

One of my main goals for writing this essay has been to introduce two new concepts — merit beliefs and crony beliefs — that I hope make it easier to talk and reason about epistemic problems. … it’s important to remember that merit beliefs aren’t necessarily true, nor are crony beliefs necessarily false. What distinguishes the two concepts is how we’re rewarded for them: via effective actions or via social impressions.

 

I found Kevin’s introduction of his concepts of merit and crony beliefs to be interesting and potentially useful, and I recommend reading the rest of his post. However, I complain that his “Identifying Crony Beliefs” and “J’accuse” sections sometimes confuse his merit/crony beliefs concept(s) with the immediacy and severity of potential consequences:

I disagree that “perhaps the biggest hallmark of epistemic cronyism is exhibiting strong emotions … These emotions have no business being within 1000ft of a meritocratic belief system”. For example, if I am with another person in a vehicle (as driver or passenger) approaching an intersection at speed, I probably have a strong opinion about whether or not my vehicle should be breaking to stop at the intersection or not; I will also have strong emotions if the other person is insisting that I am wrong. Similarly, I have no strong feelings about whether or not X, but the only conceivable value to believing that would be social, not practical, so it must be a crony belief.

Strong feelings are indicative of a belief’s high consequential value (positive or negative, social or practical), not of a belief’s social-ness.

How to Build Good Software | Civil Service College Singapore

Source: How to Build Good Software | Civil Service College Singapore, by Li Hongyi

How useful a piece of software can be is usually limited by its complexity rather than the amount of resources invested in building it. … Building good software involves alternating cycles of expanding and reducing complexity.

There is no such thing as platonically good engineering: it depends on your needs and the practical problems you encounter.

Software projects rarely fail because they are too small; they fail because they get too big.

A good engineer has a better grasp of existing software they can reuse, thus minimising the parts of the system they have to build from scratch. They have a better grasp of engineering tools, automating away most of the routine aspects of their own job. Automation also means freeing up humans to work on solving unexpected errors, which the best engineers are disproportionately better at. Good engineers themselves design systems that are more robust and easier to understand by others. This has a multiplier effect, letting their colleagues build upon their work much more quickly and reliably. Overall, good engineers are so much more effective not because they produce a lot more code, but because the decisions they make save you from work you did not know could be avoided.

The Real Problem At Yale Is Not Free Speech | Palladium

Source: The Real Problem At Yale Is Not Free Speech | Palladium, by Natalia Dashan

This is a story about an institution and an elite that have lost themselves.

Pretending to be poor is a lot easier than pretending to be rich—just because there are so many different ways to be poor. … But lying about anything is tricky—you risk being found out—so what were these people trying to accomplish by acting broke? And this raises the broader question: why pretend to be of a social class you are not?
…
Poor people pretend to be rich to look cool. … Rich people pretend to be poor to fit in.
…
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. … They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not.
…
conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures. … But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, … you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. … They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it.

The elite are expected—by everyone else, and by each other—to use their power to make sure society works properly. That is, they are expected to rule benevolently. The reason they are expected to do this is that if they don’t, nobody else can or will. The middle class and the poor do not have the powers and privileges that the rich and elite do, and cannot afford the necessary personal risks. But without active correction towards health and order, society fails. … When they misunderstand both the nature of power and their own power, how can they be expected to coordinate to use that power to rule well? How can they be expected not to abuse it?

Yale students, if they weren’t powerful when they came in (and most of them were), they gain power by being bestowed a Yale degree. What would you do with this power? You don’t want to abuse it; you’re not outright evil. No, you want something different. You want to be absolved of your power. You are ashamed of your power. Why should you have it, and not somebody else—maybe somebody more deserving? You never really signed up for this. You would rather be somebody normal. But not, “normal,” normal. More like normal with options and vacations and money “normal.” Normal but still powerful.

The Costs of Reliability | LessWrong 2.0

Source: The Costs of Reliability | LessWrong 2.0, by sarahconstantin

“Why can people be so much better at doing a thing for fun, or to help their friends and family, than they are at doing the exact same thing as a job?” … I think it has a very mundane explanation; it’s always more expensive to have to meet a specific commitment than merely to do something valuable.

The costs of reliability are often invisible, but they can be very important. The cost (in time and in office supplies and software tools) of tracking and documenting your work so that you can deliver it on time. The cost (in labor and equipment) of quality assurance testing. The opportunity cost of creating simpler and less ambitious things so that you can deliver them on time and free of defects.

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems | JSomers

Source: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems, by James Somers

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.
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The general rule seems to be: systems which eat items quickly are fed more items. Slow systems starve.