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Ask HN: Can a politically exposed person in middle age become a CS researcher?

7 pointsby cs137vor 4 Jahren5 comments

Tech CEOs Seek to Create Public Permanent Record of Performance Reviews

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10 pointsby cs137vor 4 Jahren6 comments

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.).

I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.

My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.

> This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.

This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

There's a certain rhetorical device being employed here where a hopeless situation is being presented, followed by an intimation that, if workers fight for it, things can be different.

He's right, on the whole. The Office, the institution, gives executives a sense of place and purpose. What fun is it to be in charge if you can't make people squirm? It's not about money for these people (they have enough). It's about power. Of course they want their favorite toy back.

This being said, the Soviet system didn't fall immediately after Chernobyl and neither will global capitalism after Covid-19, but the process seems to be starting. It's possible that things will fall right back where they were; it's also possible that there will be opportunities to force change. I don't think we're even halfway through the Covid era, even if (as I hope) the worst of the disease itself is over.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> But to get there, office workers must organize, and take the goals and power of the Office into account. It does not want to be flexible, and it cares little for efficiency. If the Office makes concessions, they will be minor, or they will take time; hybrid work is not a revolution.

This is the central point, I think. The office can be changed, but it won't emerge through the gradual processes (invariably, out of a worker's favor) preferred by capitalism. The bastards in charge didn't even want remote work in March 2020; it will take a nasty motherfucker of a fight to get anything from them.

The problem is that five-day-per-week WFH is mostly a dead end. It can work if you have an independent, international reputation (of the kind that no employer, except in academia, wants a worker ever to get... and that, if you have, you will constantly be accused of favoring over your assigned duties) but otherwise, it's going to put you at a ceiling. If you're WFH all the time, there will be no investment in your career; you will not be perceived as a "go-getter" or a "high potential worker. You are just trading time for money, which no one really respects. Of course, 90% of y'all aren't going to get managerial investment in your career even if you do go into the office, but the fact that the creeping mutual disengagement isn't acknowledged is what keeps you in a job.

At the same time, spending 40+ hours per week in an office where managers (sometimes unintentionally, often deliberately) fuck with your fight-or-flight mechanisms is extremely unhealthy. So, five days per week of ass-in-chair is no good either. And for half of the population, the long-term illnesses it causes cancel out the benefits. Will it go away? Maybe. I'm worried, though.

I think WFH always be something you have to negotiate for. It'll always be "a privilege". (Reminder: under capitalism, housing and food are privileges.) You'll have to do what people did before 2020: start out on 5 ass-in-chair days, perform well, scale up (you're implicitly allowed one day/week of WFH per year) and perform better on your WFH days (feel free to down-moderate your performance on in-office days). That strategy will remain open, and the public sector may move to a more forgiving structure... but private-sector managers are always going to want, at least, the "right" to demand 5 ass-in-chair days as, if nothing else, a way to punish perceived low performers.

I hope I'm wrong. On the outside, I'm an athletic and good-looking middle-aged man, but I'm invisibly disabled (PTSD, digestive issues, Ashkenazi risk factors for even more serious diseases related to stress, etc.) and, while I should be able to live a pretty good life if I can avoid pointless [1] stress, ten years more of standard corporate culture would almost certainly kill me. I fucking hate corporate capitalism and would fight in a war to end it. Realistically, though, I don't think the office is going anywhere. RTO-ers will get the promotions and they'll make the new rules, and if the last fifty years are any indicator, the new rules will be engineered to seem like improvements but be subtly worse than the old ones.

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[1] The funny thing about stress is that real stress is a lot less damaging to the body than the low-level dysphoric stress of office life. Being in a life-threatening situation isn't nearly as damaging as spending thousands of hours surrounded by people who have malevolent intentions (i.e., a willingness to deprive you of income, even for the slightest personal benefit) but being able to do nothing about it. It's being trapped that fucks people up.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

This. The other issue with peak oil is that people have been predicting it since 2005 (if not earlier) and the general picture has been, and still is:

    * we don't fully know when oil production will peak, because it's based on human behavior.
    * when we do pass peak oil, we won't know for a few years that we have. (It's possible that the 2019 local max was "the peak"; it's also possible that it was related to COVID-19 more than oil scarcity.)
    * very few of the issues caused will be attributed to "peak oil" at the time. Instead, they'll be blamed on state collapses, policy failures, economic depressions, and resource wars that will all be indirectly related to peak oil. 
    * peak oil is not necessarily a bad thing (although it probably will be, because the global system is already fragile and nearly universally despised) if we can find replacements in time--unfortunately, we're decades behind where we should be with nuclear energy, which for all its flaws is nevertheless the greenest energy source we've found thus far.

To the outside observer, "peak oil" seems like one of those things people have been worried about forever but that has not yet come to be and thus "never will".

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Unfortunately, people like us who respond to that sort of thing like a normal human (as opposed to a brainwashed corporate drone who lives in terror of the master's displeasure) tend not to do well in the corporate world.

The trick of corporate survival, as observed in those who can actually hack it, is extreme compartmentalization. They become two people: one who watches the abuse from a distance as if it were happening to someone else, and then a normal self that is functional enough to do the grocery shopping without bursting into tears. The problem is that very few people can sustain this compartmentalization (also known as: dissociation) for more than a few years. It tends to play out badly (memory issues, alexithymia, autoimmunity) in the long term.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Because they're not. One bad professional turn, health problem, or lawsuit and they are thrown out like garbage.

They're detested by both sides. The regular poor proletarians see them as kapos (and, quite often, it's the case) who have sold them down the river in order to get themselves temporarily pampered. The upper class, of course, has no respect for them. They've rejected their own tribe (the proletariat, the 99.9%) in the hopes of ascending into a new tribe that will almost certainly never actually accept them.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

The good news is that some of this is publication bias, not a devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don't know; we have no record of what they actually thought.

Therefore, we aren't necessarily in uncharted territory when it comes to lousy public mental health; it's possible that we were worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data, because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at all.

This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then, publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This establishes with high confidence that public mental health has worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest, we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately unstable status).

Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class, no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War) who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who believed their educational credentials and professional networks (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears about.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Although I think "impostor syndrome" is vague and over-diagnosed, it's a natural reaction to a diseased society such as ours.

Capitalism tells you you can be anything you want to be, if you're good enough. Of course, most people are never going to get anything good--the decent opportunities were mostly allocated before we were born. Watching this, the naive conclusion is that only the very best are going to get anything, and that everyone else just sucks. (And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck. Priors. Self-perception does not typically have enough resolution to conclude otherwise.) The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly corrupt, but to voice it makes a person sound bitter... and bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable, especially when one is right.

If it were a college, it would look like this.

    Person: Hi, Labor Market University Dean. I'd like to major in writing.
    Labor Market: No can do. We've got too many writers. 
    Person: I suppose I'll major in... machine learning sounds fun.
    Labor Market: No slots left. All taken.
    Person: What about business leadership?
    Labor Market: Hahaha, no.
    Person: Well, I have to do something. What've ya got?
    Labor Market: It looks like we've got room for you to major in... subordinate bullshit, subordinate bullshit, and... subordinate bullshit.

Of course, to speak of impostor syndrome usually implies that the person actually is competent (not an impostor). And so, it tends to be most prominent in people who (a) are quite good at what they're doing, and (b) have beaten the odds to achieve some recognition and success. The problem, at that point, is that you start to see so many charlatans who get just as much in the way of rewards as you do. What this establishes is that worldly success, rare as it is in anything worth doing, is not indicative of skill or talent, at least not in any field where there is even an iota of subjectivity (athletics are a different story). There's too much corruption and there's too much noise.

As humans, it comes naturally to find patterns when they aren't actually there. If we fail, it's too easy to accept society's narrative that we deserved failure and aren't really fit to be more than a business subordinate. If we succeed, we see both (a) the failure of people as good as, or better than, we are, as well as (b) undeserved success of incompetents even at the highest levels. The first case is one of perceiving a spurious pattern; the second is a case of watching the pattern break down and concluding that external indicators of one's competence carry almost no signal, thus falling back into an I-know-nothing state... which tends to make a person feel incompetent... because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're good[1]?

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[1] In reality, there is at most a weak correlation between one's competence and precise confidence thereabout; however, if we make certain assumptions of rationality that sometimes hold and sometimes fail, we are led to expect that they would correlate.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Everything you're saying about the Soviet health system is true of capitalism's health system now. The difference is that, in the US, we go into debt for our mediocre care.

The main reason for the discrepancy in care quality during the midcentury is... drumroll please... that the Soviet Union was poor, due to initial conditions. It encompassed countries that had long been impoverished. The US had a middle class to build on; the USSR did not. It built a middle class where none had ever existed. Not to mention, the US was in the historically rare situation of winning a war (since, in economic and humanitarian terms, wars are negative-sum and most often only have losers). The USSR, on the other hand, consisted of nations that had taken a beating in World War II.

If you compare Kyrgyzstan to Alabama, the Soviet Union looks bad, but that's not really a fair comparison. Capitalism, as a sea empire, could dominate people from afar and keep them in nominally separate nations while exacting tribute; the Soviet system, as a land empire, could not. It had to integrate them. That's a harder problem. If you make a fairer comparison--say, if you compare Kyrgyzstan to Honduras or Haiti, the picture lines up a lot better. I imagine the quality of healthcare in the poorest countries under capitalism's thumb is even worse than it was in the poorest SSRs as of 1989.

This isn't to say the USSR was great. It was an authoritarian regime, and it launched some really ugly wars (such as the one in Afghanistan). It remained poor (relative to the West) throughout its lifespan because, ultimately, there is no magical economic system that guarantees 12% annual GDP growth--doesn't exist, never has. Socialism solves one set of problems--and a big set of very ugly problems--that capitalism lets fester, but does it automatically bring about utopia? No, not even close. On the other hand, socialism iterates toward a better standard of living for the common people; capitalism, unless heavily checked (as it was in the Cold War) iterates toward a worsening standard of living. So, on that dimension alone, capitalism loses. Everything said above about shortages and nosocomial infections and substandard care applies to capitalism's medical system today.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

We can't be sure about alternate timelines, but it's a strong possibility that, had the USSR been left in peace, it would have achieved an even greater prosperity by now. The USSR was on a path to moderation: Khrushchev was not Stalin, and Gorbachev was quite moderate (to a fault, some would say, given the results of his tactical mistakes). They might have actually achieved something like communism by now. We'll never know; we didn't let them find out.

I do agree that Russian jingoism was a problem with the Union, especially for "buffer states" (e.g., Poland, Hungary) whose citizens were treated badly in the midcentury. This likely would have moderated over time under socialism. (Under capitalism, for countries still within Russia's reach, it has not.) In fact, even in the SSRs considered "lesser" than Russia, approval for the USSR and the desire to remain were well over 50% even up to the point of dissolution. The people wanted to fix the Soviet Union, not break it.

As for the prosperity in Eastern Europe, that tends to be the case in countries remain mostly socialist, like Czechia. It's true that they have mostly escaped the horrors of the post-Soviet 1990s and 2000s. What is less clear is how stable their well-being is. I hope this forecast is wrong, but I'm afraid that the EU is not that far behind the US on the path to corrosion, corruption, and ruin. What is happening in the US, I'm afraid, is coming for everyone. Where do the worst people in the world--figurative reptilians, literal pedophiles--meet up every winter? Not in the US, but in Davos, Switzerland. This is a global problem.

Are the people of the FSU better off now than they would have been, had the USSR persisted? It's impossible to know for sure, but I think a strong case can be made that it would have developed a limited market economy, one that avoids our issues of extreme inequality but provides the benefits market systems can (e.g., increased consumer choice). Of course, the USSR did have a lot of problems, especially toward its end, though a number of those problems were caused by external forces (capitalist aggression). On that, and on the notion that capitalism's victory might itself be evidence of our economic model's superiority... I have strong doubts. History tells us that geographic and technological forces have more to do with which side wins a war than having the better economic system, and in the case of the Cold War, this was a matchup between a sea empire (capitalism) and a land empire (the USSR). A land empire has to try to assimilate people, which is hard; a sea empire can dominate them from afar (cf. Latin America). The Soviet Union started from behind, both because it had to integrate some very poor geographic regions, and because it bore the brunt of the casualties in World War II. It was never going to catch up, not unless we let it (which we didn't).

Although we can't know for sure what a 2022 Soviet Union would have looked like--Russia itself would probably be far less belligerent--we do have more than 30 years of data on the trajectory of capitalism, once this threat to it was vanquished... and those data are ugly. For at least two decades and arguably three, the reigning economic system has produced nothing but a devolving culture, absurd political polarization, and a collapsing standard of living.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Right. We didn't actually "win" the Cold War. As soon as "communism" (though it was never actually achieved) was perceived as defeated, the capitalists no longer had to justify themselves, which gave them license to tear town the regulations that restrained their worst impulses.

This led to the dismantling of the "middle class", which is and always has been a state creation. Once the capitalists saw the end of an existential threat--the idea that socialism might work [1] due to its ostensible prominence elsewhere in the world--they realized they no longer needed one. So what is now the former middle class was left to twist in the wind.

The US contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend the bulk of its resources on its military. Granted, the Soviet system was suboptimal in a number of ways, but the constant threat of imperialist/capitalist aggression didn't help... war benefits capitalists and arms dealers, but is historically bad for the common people. It didn't help that a number of important figures within the USSR's final years (e.g., Yeltsin) were corrupt (ideologically and personally) and sought to undermine the system from within for their own financial and political gain.

Capitalism's "winning" of the Cold War was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our time. It enabled the end of "nice guy" capitalism and the dismantling of the US middle class, but it also created widespread poverty while it stripped hope from the people of the former Soviet Union. (The reason Russia has done so much evil shit over the past 15 years is that hopelessness creates a market for hubristic imperialism of the kind Putin is selling.) It enabled an attempt to reconfigure the global economy into a for-profit police state that has cost millions of lives in the Middle East. The bipolar war-economy world was a pretty awful place, but the unipolar capitalist world is even worse, and the only thing that has kept us from seeing it is inertia--people who still believe in capitalism have already parted ways from the cliff, but haven't looked down yet.

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[1] Although, of course, the failure of the Soviet Union didn't actually prove that socialism can't work. It existed in a state of siege socialism from which it was never able to extricate itself. Given the harsh conditions from which it emerged, as well as the fervency of the far-right (capitalists, fascists) in their will to kill it, the accomplishments of the USSR are considerable. However, it wasn't a great place to live. It remained mostly poor (because of said initial conditions as well as necessary but massive war expenditures) and was authoritarian to a fault; its great sin was that it was a system of economic totalitarianism--the economy literally controlled everything, from where people could live to what they could say--but, then again, so is ours.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

This is a ridiculous take. Veterinary medicine is not some capitalist utopia. Most vets are miserable and, unlike doctors, most of them don't even make any money for their suffering.

First of all, a substantial portion of the job is putting animals down, and I'm not talking about 20-year-old dogs with so many health issues that it's a mercy. A portion of the animals are in this case, of course; but a lot of the time, these are animals who'd be fine with proper treatment, and the issue is of owners who either don't care (yuppie shits who can afford the treatment, but who bought the pet for the kids, who are now in college, and see the pet as "just an animal") or who can't afford treatment at all. The idea that veterinary medicine is some capitalist utopia just because the prices are more reasonable (for now) is absurd... because the fact is that we live in what free-market capitalism has reduced (due to runaway wage collapse) to a third-world country, and so most people can't even afford basic services for beloved pets, even at the relatively low service prices of a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand, because so many Americans don't even have that.

Veterinarians have an astronomically high suicide rate. They are right in the firing line of this shitfucked economic system that should have been overthrown forty years ago when it stopped functioning for the people who do the actual work.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

The fact that private equity firms aren't being bombed for the shit they're pulling now--i.e., the way they're moving into the housing market--is an embarrassment to us as a people.

When they were playing abstract numbers games, it was easy and well enough to ignore them; now that they're getting involved in things that affect human life, it's time to take action.

That said, I don't think pet insurance itself is a bad thing... no one should have to give up on their pet because of bullshit money concerns... but I think insurance should be universal... and we should solve human health insurance first.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Which leads to antibiotics being over prescribed because parents don’t want to leave the doctors office without something to do afterwards.

You're not wrong, but sometimes this is purely preemptive and might still be a sound decision. For example, influenza almost never directly kills anyone--the monster flu in 1918 is an exception--whereas secondary bacterial infections (leading to pneumonia) can and do. Antibiotics are often prescribed as an extra precaution; given the atrocious financial resources of most Americans, most doctors know that they only get one shot with most patients, because they can't afford the copays or get the time off work, and that if they under-prescribe and are read to have missed something, they'll face malpractice suits from the desperate. So, they err on the side of immediate caution, since antibiotic resistance is one of those diffuse long-term problems.

Life is worth living well, but it’s also worth accepting the end, something to which many people are openly hostile.

Part of the problem is that capitalism creates a collapse of trust from which there is no recovery. Is the hospital denying or rationing care based on sound medical reasoning (i.e., that the requested procedures won't work, and will divert resources away from people who need them) or because they don't think the patient will be able to pay? Is the doctor performing a surgery because it will improve the patient's quality of life, or because he needs to generate fees? I'm sure most doctors are ethical and try to make the best decisions for the patients--I imagine, at least 90 percent of them do--but, as soon as the profit motive gets involved, distrust becomes endemic and personally mandatory.

Medicine is, to put it bluntly and factually, too important to trust to the profit motive and capitalism.

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

What you're saying isn't wrong, but there are obvious solutions in front of us. We implement a universal basic income (indexed to inflation, so it absorbs any inflation it causes) to keep the minimal living standard high, we increase basic research funding by an order of magnitude or more, and we tax the hell out of the rich. The only reason this isn't happening is because so much of the putative "leadership", in every organ of society, is corrupted by the hyperconsumptive billionaire vampires that these institutions are supposed to regulate (or, better yet, prevent from existing in the first place).

We face, in 2022, a number of problems that are actually pretty easy to solve, but the people in charge won't let us. Well, history tells us exactly what to do when we face that particular problem...

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Part of the problem is that the way we conceptualize money leads us to treat it as if it's a real thing, as opposed to an accounting system the state creates for various purposes, some of which are desirable and some of which are not.

If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society. Where will we get the money for a universal basic income? There are an infinitude of options--the state literally made the stuff up. The question isn't why there is so little money for so many important things, and so much money wasted--the question is why, despite being ostensibly democratic, we are so bad at statecraft (and have been since the Boomers took charge).

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Something I've learned is that most people are only really good (that is, good enough to contribute notably and distinguish themselves) at one thing. A few of us are good at two things, but even there, those two things tend to be related more closely than it seems at first. This is part of why our society has such horrible leadership, especially in the private sector. People who are good at climbing bureaucratic hierarchies, most typically, are not good at anything else: not very smart, not very ethical, etc.

Academia was supposed to protect people from having to do the things they're bad at--such as sell their ideas to people who lack the ability to deeply understand them--and, unfortunately, it went derelict in that duty a long time ago. Salesmen, in any field other than sales, are like an invasive species who outcompete the natives with their superior social polish, but who struggle to actually do anything, which leads to systemic underperformance and the erosion of trust, which only makes the competitive necessity of salesmanship even greater, setting in motion a death spiral from which a private entity (or, in the long term, an entire industry) almost never recovers.