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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • This isn’t a paradox. It’s the ordinary and expected outcome of you have a junior whose work you can never trust.

    Regardless of what your profession is, if you have a source of “work input” that requires specific instruction for near every task and whose output must be carefully examined, then the part of your job which is reviewing drafted work would necessarily increase.

    This is especially true in engineering fields, where the things that can be abstracted into repeatable tasks usually are. Computers saved structural engineers from having to do all their math separately and higher-abstraction languages saved programmers from having to futz around in assembly, but neither of those had to be manually checked.




  • Yes. Having any one person 'in charge" who is not an immortal with superhuman morality and judgement will eventually lead to tyrannical suffering or the waste of a bloody civil war.

    Lemmy (and piefed) is a great example of human societies done correctly. There are people who run things, and while they can establish whatever rules they want for the parts they run, everyone else is free to either ask for a change or go elsewhere.

    For bad actions, options range from immediate negative feedback (downvote) and.corrective speech (public comment or private message), to negative consequences from those in power (ban account from instance), which can ultimately rise to community separation (de-federation). Heck, even the underlying software can be forked or replaced.

    Of course, the stakes here are essentially trivial. Which means the consequences are too, but also we all have less incentive for bad action than in the real world where poverty and death are a possibility from bad action.


  • Putting the mob in charge is the least-bad form of government humans have ever conceived of.

    Experts can and do establish reputations to persuade the masses or those chosen by the masses.

    When we try putting the experts in charge directly, they invariably become corrupt and stop being as skilled.

    There is a reason why America’s founding fathers put a wall between church and state. Not because they thought religion was bad, but because they learned from history that when you give a topic-expert political control they stop being good at either function.


  • Censorship is suspect, not inherently bad.

    Freedom of viewpoint expression is a key part of democracy and modern society. But it’s not an absolute right of unfettered communication, since that would lead to no recourse when a racist troll projects a deep fake of you raping small children on the side of your house.

    Being able to sue someone for libel is censorship. Property rights allowing you to control what happens on your house are censorship. And, yes, the government arresting that hypothetical racist troll for the production of child pornography is also censorship.

    Of course, we could just define censorship as “suppression of protected speech” or something similar, but that just hides the game and helps folk who actually want to censor political ideas they don’t like get away with it.




  • This looks like one of those “well, duh” scientific studies that feels obvious but hasn’t necessarily been done before.

    Kin to “heterosexual men are aroused by lesbian porn” or “support for banning trans girls from sports decreases among those who actually know any.”

    Basic fairness says if the rich aren’t paying their fair share, we should either raise their taxes or lower everyone else’s. (Which could lead to hyperinflation for all most of us care, except that the rich are better suited to fleeing inflation.)