This article starts to get at an interesting controversy about the definition of value. Is the value of a project equal to the amount of labor time it saves over previously used methods? Or is it equal to the amount of labor time it took to create the project? I think most software devs would intuitively pick the former, and that is what the article sides with and also what the market awards to innovations in the short term, but I think there is merit to the latter and people should at least consider it. The article presents an apparent contradiction (the author's side project was coded in a few hours and has arguably had more of a positive impact than their entire day job career's output) but that contradiction is resolved by the latter definition of value, the labor theory of value.
The labor theory of value explanation for this is straightforward. In general, LTV asserts that the value output of some work approximates the amount of work that ordinarily has to go into it, or more precisely, of the socially necessary labor time going into that work (ie, the time it would take an average worker to do it without slacking off). This is because if you wanted that work done and didn't care how it got done, the socially necessary labor time would be the real cost of doing it yourself or paying someone else to support themselves while they do it (before various market dynamics and other distorting factors - it is an idealized model). I.e., in an assembly line, the cost of a part is the cost of raw materials + the cost of the labor added to them. This seems straightforward for assembly line work, but is a little less intuitive when the actual work is about making other people's work more efficient, which a lot of software dev falls into. But if someone simply said to themselves "I need the functionality of mammoth.js", the core idea still applies - of being able to replace the worker, hire a generic software dev, and get comparable work (or at least, good enough work), for a similarly low amount of value. Another way to think of it is that mammoth.js might save a lot of people a lot of time, but getting some version of mammoth.js implemented is probably historically inevitable and has a fixed and much smaller cost to actually do.
How does this resolve the contradiction in the article? Well, mwilliamson's day job career labor output might possibly have saved less time of other people's work than mammoth.js. But their day job career labor output probably couldn't have been replaced in any way but by a similarly large amount of time and effort from other developer(s). Meanwhile, mammoth.js could be reimplemented in a similarly small amount of time by someone else, maybe taking a couple of tries to get it right. If mammoth.js hadn't been written at the time it was, maybe that would have happened.
This isn't to discount ingenuity or insight going into this side project, or the usefulness of something like mammoth.js being in the right place and time. But I think it is a more precise way to think about how much value and what kinds are being added to the world by larger or smaller amounts of effort. In other words, devs shouldn't feel bad about having worked hard on stuff that is less neatly labor-saving than a small widget, as long as that hard work turned out to be useful.
political and class ambivalence is also a way to spin things. which the original comment itself did. this is a navel-gazing, meaningless criticism. if you disagree substantively you should just say so.
Class ambivalence? Who is upper class here? Jeff Bezos? He was born to single mother out of wedlock in highschool. Or is class something you can buy your way into now?
Before he started Amazon, Bezos had already been already an SVP at DE Shaw, so it's not like he would have any trouble finding another quarter million from investors.
> Or is class something you can buy your way into now?
In America, class has always been something you can buy your way into. Take a trip to Newport some time, and visit the mansions of the robber barons: each is stuffed with mediocre classical and neoclassical mimicry. The purpose of these ostentatious displays was to prove to each's neighbors that they were sufficiently landed, wealthy, and worthy of their class designation.
Edit: But of course note: wealth is neither necessary nor sufficient for class; it only makes it much, much more accessible.
Yes. Social mobility is one of the hallmarks of a class system.
If you can’t spend your entire life improving yourself from the circumstances of your birth then you don’t have a class system, you have a caste system.
no, class (in the marxist sense, everything else is meaningless cultural signifiers) is not about "upper" or "lower", it's about either getting paid for wage labor, ie being working class, or getting paid for other people's use of property you own, ie being capitalist class. this is extremely basic and is the fundamental divide under capitalism.
> While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene.
I found this to be a very helpful description of a specific kind of sloppy argumentation I have seen a lot of (usually about politics) in the last few years. It seems like it's made worse by anonymous online group arguments - one person will make one trivially true claim, another person will make a farther-reaching, incorrect claim and say it is proven by the first, a third person will defend a critique of any bad claims by just defending the first trivially true one, and bad ideas thrive in the space between all these people.
That's just a sentence that isn't afraid of using long words, they're all pretty precisely, neatly used IMO. Not ironic at all. This would be a mouthful to say or understand out loud but it seems like normal writing to me.
Completely agreed. Honestly, I despise the superficially objective and neutral concern troll approach to this. I can't see this article as anything but a dishonest way to say: "what if someone used private communications to do something bad? let's get rid of private communications". Except it doesn't own up to the fact that that's ultimate what it's proposing. It stops at fearmongering.
Also, I commented this above, but there's a different way to solve the problems of polarization and radicalism. It involves solving people's material problems, and the US has been slowly getting worse at this and decaying for a while now. Instead, the political establishment is doubling down on surveillance, the silencing of dissent off of any platform with reach, and ultimately physical repression, through the increased funding and militarization of police.
Right now this is claimed to be targeted at the far right.. but it doesn't take a genius to compare the police reaction to BLM vs the capitol riot to see where it is going.
What is surprising to me is that the politicians and bureaucrats seem to think bad actors are supreme idiots. They aren't. The overt nature of a criminal mind whose cloaks themselves in church going taxpayer in suburbia is the reason why no agency in the world can predict tragic acts of domestic terrorism.
If someone is going to plan a Charlie hebdo-esque operation, no intelligence can help you. They can just meet at the park for a cold drink and discuss which weapons they are going to use. Intel agencies rely very much on tip offs from civilians and private interests like banks and shops/malls "guy came in looking dodgy and bought a ton of slightly dangerous stuff" kind of thing.
It's clear that some people have done some bad things, and they used the internet (mostly facebook but whatever) to communicate.
There are 2 approaches to fixing this.
1 is to undercut the roots of radicalism and polarization. I would say to do that by radically redistributing wealth and democratizing government. Yes, the capitol stormers mostly weren't poor, but Trumpism is in large part a reaction of horror by small business owners at being squeezed by monopolies, and what popular support they have would evaporate if the government fixed things instead of being run as the public relations firm and personal military of all the large companies put together.
2 is to instead double down on physical repression (by funding police) and digital repression of dissenting viewpoints by abolishing any right to privacy. This seems to be the direction we're heading. It already happened in large part under the last few presidents but Signal is obviously in the crosshairs.
I'm not mad at you. But I am frustrated that this obviously bad approach has support - of not dealing with root causes and material problems, but committing to suppression of beliefs on both the right and left that are obviously a reaction to those root causes.
I'd switch to firefox but it is noticeably slower loading facebook and twitter, the sites I go to most often, and I trust it only like 25% more than chrome. :/
Amazon exists to increase shareholder profits. The reviews are not exempt from that. They exist to encourage customers to buy things and to increase sales volume. When Amazon was up and coming against a lot of other competitors it was relatively more important that reviews provide a good signal for customers. Now that they are more hegemonic, that is less important relative to facilitating increased sale volume, and there is also more incentive for sellers to fake them.
Everyone's incentives are cleanly aligned for the short-medium term, except for those of consumers and workers.
I don´t know why you are being downvoted. Amazon could very easily invest in decreasing fake reviews and fake items but they don't. They don't care because it doesn't give them any more profit, instead it will give them unhappy sellers.
ah man. good luck having long-term political success with this attitude. this is the sort of insanely condescending attitude that is partially responsible for the rise of right wing demagoguery.
Yeah, it turns out that property rights come into conflict with human rights a lot, and this is why property rights should not be fundamental.
The people in responses saying owners "should" be able to do anything with stuff they own - well, the owners of property certainly think so. What about the majority of the population? I expect people's opinions about this will change rapidly, in a radical left direction, when the COVID eviction and foreclosure wave hits the US.
I have a good friend who is a Law Professor and we had a pub conversation about the concept of "property ownership" a few years ago.
It was really mind blowing- I had never really thought about how abstract the notion of property ownership actually is, especially when you factor in inheritance. We should definitely be more critical of political systems that seek to justify concentrating property in the hands of the few.
It's a pretty crazy thing. An interesting question for libertarians is where did private property originate? Like, taking libertarian assumptions, once you own it, hypothetically you can expand your property profitably. But how did the first resources and land, which before private property were all used more or less collectively, become privately owned?
Right? Its pretty crazy. And extrapolating further, you can show that the concept of private property is what necessitates tax, since the modern state is in large part an apparatus for enforcing the concept of private property. Therefore libertarian complaints about taxation quickly fall apart under close scrutiny.
The question I posed, with 2 very clear answers, is: should property rights or human rights be supreme? I know what I would say in the common case of a poor person being evicted.
A big issue with property rights is that one person using their property can harm other users indirectly.
As such, it makes a lot of sense to curb property rights.
Humans not having property seems to be the premise on which this whole society is built. Why else wod people work at eg Walmart? Because they really like greeting people and stacking shelves?
The resolute defenders of property rights would argue that this infringes on the rights of those who already own the things including virtually all land.
But there are other issues with this like the massive, inescapable trend towards centralization of ownership under capitalism.
The labor theory of value explanation for this is straightforward. In general, LTV asserts that the value output of some work approximates the amount of work that ordinarily has to go into it, or more precisely, of the socially necessary labor time going into that work (ie, the time it would take an average worker to do it without slacking off). This is because if you wanted that work done and didn't care how it got done, the socially necessary labor time would be the real cost of doing it yourself or paying someone else to support themselves while they do it (before various market dynamics and other distorting factors - it is an idealized model). I.e., in an assembly line, the cost of a part is the cost of raw materials + the cost of the labor added to them. This seems straightforward for assembly line work, but is a little less intuitive when the actual work is about making other people's work more efficient, which a lot of software dev falls into. But if someone simply said to themselves "I need the functionality of mammoth.js", the core idea still applies - of being able to replace the worker, hire a generic software dev, and get comparable work (or at least, good enough work), for a similarly low amount of value. Another way to think of it is that mammoth.js might save a lot of people a lot of time, but getting some version of mammoth.js implemented is probably historically inevitable and has a fixed and much smaller cost to actually do.
How does this resolve the contradiction in the article? Well, mwilliamson's day job career labor output might possibly have saved less time of other people's work than mammoth.js. But their day job career labor output probably couldn't have been replaced in any way but by a similarly large amount of time and effort from other developer(s). Meanwhile, mammoth.js could be reimplemented in a similarly small amount of time by someone else, maybe taking a couple of tries to get it right. If mammoth.js hadn't been written at the time it was, maybe that would have happened.
This isn't to discount ingenuity or insight going into this side project, or the usefulness of something like mammoth.js being in the right place and time. But I think it is a more precise way to think about how much value and what kinds are being added to the world by larger or smaller amounts of effort. In other words, devs shouldn't feel bad about having worked hard on stuff that is less neatly labor-saving than a small widget, as long as that hard work turned out to be useful.