Great list, and most of those don't involve big tech. I think what your list illustrates is that progress is being made, but it requires deep domain expertise.
Technology advances like a fractal stain, ever increasing the diversity of jobs to be done to decrease entropy locally while increasing it globally.
I would wager we are very far from peak complexity, and as long as complexity keeps increasing there will always be opportunities to do meaningful innovative work.
1. We may be at the peak complexity that our population will support. As the population stops growing, and then starts declining, we may not have the number of people to maintain this level of specialization.
2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.)
3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.
1. Human potential may be orders of magnitude greater than what people are capable of today. Population projections may be wrong.
2. Kardachev? You think we are at peak energy production? Fusion? Do you see energy usage slowing down, or speeding up, or staying constant?
3. Is the evidence you're seeing appear in society just evidence you're seeing appear in media? If media is an industry that competes for attention, and the best way to get and keep attention is not telling truth but novel threats + viewpoint validation, could it be that the evidence isn't actually evidence but misinformation? What exactly makes people feel dehumanized? Do you think people felt more or less dehumanized during the great depression and WW2? Do you think the world is more or less complex now than then?
From the points you're making you seem young (maybe early-mid 20s) and I wonder if you feel this way because you're early in your career and haven't experienced what makes work meaningful. In my early career I worked jobs like front-line retail and maintenance. Those jobs were not complex, and they felt dehumanizing. I was not appreciated. The more complex my work has become, the more creative I get to be, the more I'm appreciated for doing it, and the more human I feel. I can't speak for "society" but this has been a strong trend for me. Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact. Maybe people who are caught up in huge complex companies tossed around doing valueless meaningless work feel dehumanized. That makes sense to me, but I don't think the problem is complexity, I think the problem is getting paid to be performative instead of creating real value for other people. Integrity misalignment. Being paid to act in ways that aren't in alignment with personal values is dehumanizing (literally dissolves our humanity).
Not even close. I'm 63. You would be nearer the mark if you guessed that I was old, tired, and maybe burned out.
I've had meaningful work, and I've enjoyed it. But I'm seeing more and more complexity that doesn't actually add anything, or at least doesn't add enough value to be worth the extra effort to deal with it all. I've seen products get more and more bells and whistles added that fewer and fewer people cared about, even as they made the code more and more complex. I've seen good products with good teams get killed because management didn't think the numbers looked right. (I've seen management mess things up several other ways, too.)
You say "Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact". And that's real! But see, the more complex things get, the more the work gets fragmented into different specialties, and the (relative) fewer of us work directly with customers, and so the fewer of us get to enjoy that.
Yes I see your point better now, however I still think this is temporary. It's probably something like accidental/manufactured complexity is friction, and I'm this example the friction is dehumanizing jobs. You're right this is a limiting factor. My theory is that something will get shaken up and refactored and a bunch of the accidental complexity that doesn't effectively increase global entropy will fall off, and then real complexity will continue to rise.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here and conflating system design with economics, sociology, antitrust, organizational design, etc. Not sure if this makes sense but maybe in this context real complexity increases global entropy and manufactured complexity doesn't.
Manufactured complexity oscillates and real complexity increases over longer time horizons.
So what you see as approaching a limit (in the context of our lifetimes) is the manufactured complexity, and I agree.
My point is that real complexity is far from its limit.
I'm a lot less confident, but suspect, that if real complexity rises and manufactured complexity decreases we will see jobs on average become better aligned with human qualities. (Drop in dehumanizing jobs)
Not sure how long this will take. Maybe a generation?
I see your point better also. I'd like to think you're right, especially about the accidental complexity getting removed. That would do much to make me feel more positive about the way work is.
And in fact, if you have multiple firms in competition, the one that can decrease accidental complexity the most has a competitive advantage. Maybe such firms will survive and firms with more accidental complexity will die out.
That sounds right to me. It also makes me wonder whether artificially low cost of capital (artificially low interest rates) would result in more manufactured complexity.
How many of them do you think started their companies out of “passion”?
Some of the ones I spotted checked had a couple of non technical founders looking for a “founding engineer” that they could underpay with the promise of “equity” that would probably be worthless.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that there's a shit ton of founders out there looking for a quick pay day (I'd guess the majority fall into that category). Just pointing out there are exceptions, and the exceptions can be quite successful.
My criticism with this article is that the author seems to lump all time alone behavior into the 'bad' category. What about the guys spending time alone to work on their guitar solo, dive deeper into a branch of AI math, or how about spending hours reading plato?
I too was surprised by the author's tendency to suggest that alone time is inherently bad. If you aren't particularly interested in the society you live in, there is nothing wrong with spending time alone. I don't really suggest you take up gambling, smoking, or drinking to pass the time. But spending time alone is just fine.
Fixed typo! Yeah, alone time is inherently a male thing, and is probably what drove a lot of the historical breakthroughs in the past. This need to always be socializing is a very feminine construct and probably does more damage in the long run than people realize (i.e. to deep breakthroughs, case in point how science has now become a popularity game rather than a search for the truth). A more nuanced article would have delved deeper into the types of alone behavior that are beneficial vs those that are destructive.
Honestly all these cute websites give people a false sense that they're actually learning something. The only way to learn this stuff is get one of the million good LA books out there and work through the problems. But that's hard, so people look for shortcuts.
Yeah I think when students actually hit Calculus-level related rates, a small dim light starts to glow. Obviously it only gets brighter the less you have to hold onto and the more you have to mathematically present something that you are trying to reason about that all the tools start to make sense, the relationships are asking you “is this true in my case or do I need to take a step back?” and so forth.
I don’t have an axe to grind against the site I think it’s fine, but if someone wants to learn LA, a college level course followed by an intense grind of word problems and having to work backwards and forwards and finding flaws in answers might be a better way to develop the noggin for it. Just my 2c.
I never understood the obsession with Bruce Lee as a fighter (not considering his acting/stunt scenes here which deserve to be judged on their own merit), it seems any half decent Judoka or amateur boxer would have probably beaten him in a fight.
Tarantino wanted to prove that his stunt double character was a bad-ass, so he had him fight Bruce Lee on a movie studio back lot, and win. Tarantino said that Bruce Lee fans dragged him through fire, insisting that Lee would have won. Tarantino said, it's my fantasy damn it, my guy can win if I want him to!
That's consistent with your comment getting down votes.
In the flick Tarantino made it seem like Lee was all bluff, that he could just talk tough and make some fancy moves and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
> he could just talk tough … and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
It kind of does though? I was a bartender at a very, very popular college bar. Often I was the only employee working Monday/Tuesday. I was a very scrawny, nerdy child-looking 20-year old.
I had to learn how to kick out championship D1 football stars, even pro NFL (actual) stars, if they happened to become belligerent those nights. We had all types of customers, including ones who specifically came in with intention to fight.
There was always some specific way to interact with them to make them leave of their own volition. Often with the biggest guys, it was to be aggressive and psychically “larger” than them. The smaller “fighty” dudes were usually the toughest, as they often felt they needed to prove themselves and I had to use a different tactic.
But what you describe “talking tough” was by far the most successful with the “much bigger guys”.
On the one hand, in interviews, Tarantino always seems to have contrarian opinions about everything. When Kill Bill came out, he’d verbally knock Lee and praise lesser known movie practitioners.
On the other hand, if you watch the movie until the end, it’s obvious that the movie has an unreliable narrator. We all know how the Tate/Labianca murders actually turned out. Not at all like the movie…
That was supposed to be inspired by a supposedly Hollywood legend that claimed that Gene LeBell easily manhandled Bruce Lee on the set of Green Hornet.
There is also another story where Gene supposedly choked out Steven Segal (who claimed his training would prevent it).
I have no idea if either is true, but personally if I was required to place a bet on a contest between a well trained and experienced grappler/shoot wrestler that outweighed his opponent (Kung Fu practitioner) by 75lbs…my money is on the grappler all day long.
Well, that's the thing. He never fought any of those people in a real competition, so the question could remain in someone's mind whether he would have won or not. Combine that with the general mystique of Asian martial arts in the 1960s, and his early death, that has the makings of a legend.
I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
My interest over the years of Bruce Lee was much more from this perspective. Many stories talk about how hard he trained, and other aspects of essentially an underdog story. Combined with his communication[0], he comes across very thoughtful, and very grounded in many ways. Putting anyone on a “legend” status pedestal is always fraught with issues, but definitely a figure that inspired a lot of people.
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
That's what the Gracie family did with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Except they actually proved it worked by dominating the early years of UFC before they even introduced weight classes.
I think there's a story about him beating a white kid from a rival private school in a boxing match
certainly unreliable reports of him doing well in informal rooftop bouts amongst the various Wing Chun students in Hong Kong
there are also stories of him getting his ass kicked by William Chung and Wong Shun Leung (others of Yp Man's students) and being a petty little bitch and getting kicked out of Yp Man's school
There are still people alive who witnessed these events first hand.
I don't think first-hand accounts should be labeled apocrypha.
But... maybe it means you doubt them? Fair enough.
The only thing I'd ever heard of was him beating the defending scholastic champ in Hong Kong. But AFAIK that was the only boxing match where there is any sort of record.
I didn't say that they were not helpful; I said they have dangerous pitfalls. Also, they're not perfectly portable. My testing shows that only two compilers get lower bounds right in all the tricky cases that I know of.
Nothing really to add, but the NSA museum outside of DC is really cool. I think this is a good example of a museum that works well for adults/kids alike.
Yep, it's insane that SWEs working on products like pinterest earn more than engineers working on major infrastructure projects. Honestly without direct government intervention I think market forces will always lead to this outcome.
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