Paul M. Jones

Leaving this here for later: http://freenortherner.com/2013/05/17/dark-enlightenment-reading-list/

People who seek sexy work are often members of what I called the Jeffersonian middle class in an earlier post -- motivated by creative self-expression and a sense of personal dignity rather than economic survival.

... Sexy work is attractive to those who like their social identity to be harmoniously integrated within itself (what your mom thinks of you and what your boss thinks of you are not in conflict) and with your private identity (you don’t feel misunderstood). There is consensual external validation of your internal sense of self-worth. You feel authentic.

Sexy work is easy to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is downhill psychological work: it is the cognitive equivalent of muscular atrophy. You have to choose to make it hard for yourself. You can cash out some status and attention even if you’re not making any money. It does not test your sense of self-worth significantly.

Schlep work has the opposite characteristics along all four vectors. It is harder to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is uphill psychological work for a social species. It is hard whether or not you want it to be. It is hard to cash out status and attention even if you’re making good money. It tests your sense of self-worth every day.

Somehow, over the past decade, we’ve gone from a useful heuristic (“focus on your strengths” and “find flow”) down a slippery slope of use-with-caution ideas (“work smart, not hard” and “follow your passion”) to the idea of work as a kind of consumption that should be chosen based on the pleasure one can derive from it.

Sexy/schleppy is to my mind, the most natural way to break down human preferences for work. They arise from fundamental desires and aversions. In choosing consumption behaviors or conspicuous production, we tend to feed desires and starve aversions. In schleppy work, we do the opposite: we defer gratification and accept, even seek out, a degree of pain based on the no-pain-no-gain heuristic. A little nudge from a plausible “play to your strengths” philosophy is enough for us to choose the easier way.

Unfortunately, the entire current conversation around work is confused because we prefer a less meaningful distinction, creative vs. uncreative.

Via You Are Not an Artisan.

Imagine a hypothetical YouTube where the videographer burns a Koran and urinates on the ashes. We in the modern West consider this kind of thing an act of free speech.

Would that act be offensive to Muslims? Absolutely. It be offensive to Jews if it were a Torah. It would be offensive to Christians if it were a Bible. It would be offensive to United States patriots if it were the Constitution.

Do Jews, Christians, or United States patriots use that kind of speech as a pretext to riot or murder? If so, would their violence be met with sympathy from the West? No, no, and no. Burning a Koran, and reactions thereto, should be no different.

But here's the thing: you feel *safe* when you criticize Jews, Christians, and United States patriots, because you know they don't consider it acceptable to do violence in response to offensive speech. You *don't* feel safe when it comes to Muslims, because you know there is a non-trivial number of them who *do* consider it acceptable, even a requirement, to do violence in response to offensive speech.

The vast majority of Muslims reading this are civilized, and recognize that violence is not a civilized response to offensive speech. But there are some Muslims, and their sympathizers, who believe that offensive speech must be answered with violence, and who will use offensive speech as a pretext for riot and murder. The behavior is uncivilized, premodern, and barbaric, and should be recognized as such.

Cafe Coca from De-Phazz (YouTube) samples some movie lines at about the 2:00 mark:

And in the end we'll meet in one of the seven circles.
And I'll be there for not doing what I could to help you.
And you'll be there for doing what you could to stop me.
You'll blow my brains out.

It always stuck with me, and after some searching it appears to come from a 1993 movie called "Dangerous Game" or "Snake Eyes." Google revealed it from Subzin.

I liked this mostly because it exposes a lot of "fans of science" as mostly tribal, not as actual adherents to a methodology or approach. The varieties are:

- Science as Method

- Science as Production and Stewardship

- Science as Authority

- Science as Belonging

- Science as “Progress”

- Science as Aesthetic

- Science as Dispassionate Sensibility

- Science as Nihilism

- Non-Experience of Science

Via The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

I have had it in mind to write up an article about the TSA as an implementation of the Milgram experiment, but it's apparently old ground already covered:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=tsa+milgram

(Posted from inside Newark Airport, at which security was pleasantly civilized: no taking-off of shoes, a metal detector instead of a body scan, and of course a bag scan.)

N.b.: I am the author of the Action-Domain-Responder paper referenced in this article.

In his post on MVC alternatives (including Action-Domain-Responder), Anthony Ferrara makes a claim that is central to his discussion. While I agree with much he says in that and related articles, I believe that one claim is in error, and while it does not discredit the essay as a whole, replacing the erroneous claim with a more accurate one gives the essay a different flavor.

The central mistake I think Anthony makes is near the end of his post, where he states (in talking about MVC, ADR, et al.) that “All Pretend To Be Application Architectures.” That assertion strikes me as incorrect.

While it may be that developers using MVC may mistakenly think of MVC as an application architecture, the pattern description itself makes no such claim. Indeed, Fowler categorizes MVC as a “Web Presentation Pattern” and not as an “Application Architecture” per se.

Sure, MVC is described in book called “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”, but MVC itself is a presentation pattern within an application architecture. Here’s another example of the distinction: we would not call “Table Data Gateway” an application architecture, even though it too appears in the same book. It is a data source pattern within an application architecture.

Fowler's categorization and description of MVC define it pretty clearly as a user interface pattern. ADR, as a refinement of MVC, is likewise a user interface pattern. Neither is an application architecture in and of itself, although they are the outermost part of an application architecture. So when Anthony’s article states elsewhere that ADR’s “coupling to HTTP that it becomes difficult to make a non-HTTP interface” my response is “Well, obviously – it’s a user interface pattern centered around HTTP.”

Anthony then goes on to say:

And that’s the biggest reason all of these “patterns”, “architectures” and “concepts” are a bad joke. They solve the easy problem, and throw the hard problem over the fence.

MVC, ADR, et al., solve a user-interface problem. That may be an easy problem for Anthony to solve, but to say that user-interface patterns “throw the hard problem over the fence” strikes me as starting from the wrong set of expectations. MVC and ADR, as user-interface patterns, aren’t supposed to be dealing with core business logic in the first place.

It might be better to say that the underlying application that is presented through the user interface is not really the user interface’s problem in the first place. The user interface code probably should not care too much about the internal operation of the underlying application code. If it does, then the application code is bubbling up too far into the user interface.

In summary, I think the assertion that “All Pretend To Be Application Architectures” is just not an accurate categorization. It would more correct to say that “All Are User Interface Patterns, Not Entire Application Architectures” – or, even better, that “Developers Frequently Misunderstand Them To Be Application Architectures”.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

Mainstream economists appear to me not to appreciate the two most important arguments that we have. One is the socialist calculation argument. My sense is that mainstream economists either do not believe that the socialist calculation problem is real, or they believe that it only applies to socialist dictatorships. In fact, any government program to spend, tax, or regulate will encounter the socialist calculation problem. That is, government planners face a fundamental information problem themselves. Knowledge is dispersed. What planners do not know is important, and indeed it can be more important than what they claim to know about market failure.

The second argument is the public choice argument. This is often over-simplified as “government officials act based on self-interest.” The deeper issue, which Boettke mentions in his post, is that markets and government should be looked at in parallel as institutions. The market process has certain strengths and weaknesses. Government has other strengths and weaknesses. The mainstream approach simply assumes away all weaknesses of the political process. Once an economist identifies a market failure and a policy to treat it, the next step if to play fantasy despot and recommend the policy.

All emphasis mine. Via Pete Boettke on Ideology and Economics | askblog.

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.

via Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism – Telegraph Blogs.

I really do not understand why people think that democracy is so great. Its chief advantage is that it provides for peaceful transitions of power. I continue to believe that markets, imperfect as they often are, produce better outcomes than voting.

I come to appreciate this view more and more. Democracy, even Republic, is not necessarily so good for decision-making. There's a lesson here for managing projects and organizations as well.

via My Election Take | askblog.