To me, this is exactly what the LW community (and the broader progressive tribe surrounding it) needs to hear. This post, along with other developments of thought in the same direction, has caused a major shift in how I think about changing things.
The first quote is most important, and I find myself using it quite often if I’m met with a person my age (or even older) that dismisses a tradition as obviously dumb. Why do you think the tradition exists in the first place? If you don’t know, how can you be so sure it doesn’t serve some function?
If a piece of code you ran raised an error, it would be pretty dumb to just remove the statement that raises the error to fix your program. The only reason why Omega doesn’t break down that easily is because naive people like us have kicked at it long enough to make it a little more robust. That doesn’t mean kicking it makes it stronger.
This direction of thinking caused a major shift in my career, from trying to hack away at the margins of society to becoming a part of the establishment. I’m writing this from my office at a governmental bank. This post is the reason that it’s not some indie startup instead, and I don’t regret it.
To me, this is exactly what the LW community (and the broader progressive tribe surrounding it) needs to hear. This post, along with other developments of thought in the same direction, has caused a major shift in how I think about changing things.
The first quote is most important, and I find myself using it quite often if I’m met with a person my age (or even older) that dismisses a tradition as obviously dumb. Why do you think the tradition exists in the first place? If you don’t know, how can you be so sure it doesn’t serve some function?
If a piece of code you ran raised an error, it would be pretty dumb to just remove the statement that raises the error to fix your program. The only reason why Omega doesn’t break down that easily is because naive people like us have kicked at it long enough to make it a little more robust. That doesn’t mean kicking it makes it stronger.
This direction of thinking caused a major shift in my career, from trying to hack away at the margins of society to becoming a part of the establishment. I’m writing this from my office at a governmental bank. This post is the reason that it’s not some indie startup instead, and I don’t regret it.