Virgil Kurkjian

In The Gervais Principle, Venkatesh Rao argues that the show The Office "is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore."

In this post, I argue that viewing academia through this lens can be equally revealing. But first, we need to discuss the lens itself.

Rao develops this theory of management around the comic Company Hierarchy by Hugh MacLeod:

The theory begins by dividing people in an organization into three categories: Sociopaths at the top, Clueless middle managers, and the average workers as Losers. For... (read 5275 more words →)

Replying toBillionaire Economics

Great, thank you!

Replying toBillionaire Economics

This is really helpful, though I always find these breakdowns to be a little disappointing. Do you know of any sources that break down government funding by program in a more detailed way?

Replying toBillionaire Economics

It's not clear why we should expect government to do a better job; this is explored in some depth here.

Replying toBillionaire Economics

I think that statement reads pretty clearly as both a hypothetical and as a joke; I don't consider "universally evil" to be an especially likely explanation.

I have progressive friends in my circles and so I see a lot of stuff like this:

As well as somewhat more eloquent takes like this one, and a number of similar things I haven't bothered digging up.

But I notice that I'm still confused. The entry-level mistake (which some progressives do make) is thinking that having a net worth of $48 billion means that you have $48 billion sitting in a bank account somewhere. It's clear that none of them have that kind of liquidity. I've even seen, very occasionally, back and forth takes on these issues. So not everyone is making this mistake.

Ok, I'm still confused. What is going on?

Possibly estimates like

... (read 266 more words →)

Replying toSomething about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Something about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Yeah, I saw that too. Definitely good for Pinker and more suspicious data about the letter.

A very jaded perspective could be that this is indeed a false flag but the whole end goal is just that Pinker wants to write a book about the subject and needed a way to insert himself into the conversation.

Replying toSomething about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Something about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Wow, very interesting finds. That does make it seem even more like a false flag. Could you share the link to the article (even though it's paywalled)?

Also, would you mind if I added some of your points to the main post, for posterity?

Replying toPersonalized Medicine For Real

Personalized Medicine For Real

Do you have a citation for that thing about Tenenbaum?

Replying toSomething about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Something about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

Interesting points. Part of why it seems so fishy to me is that, personally, I have a lot of experience with far-left lists of demands and takedowns. They're certainly not perfect, but in my experience they are reliably 1) longer, 2) better researched, 3) better written, and 4) more vicious.

Again I will offer examples like the attempt to remove Hsu and the recent list of dozens of demands at Princeton. On easily-measured scales, such as number of demands/pieces of evidence, the letter to the LSU is a clear outlier. It's hard for me to imagine them stopping at only 6 complaints. On less easily measured scales, like how damning or aggressive... (read more)

Something about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious

The Devil Made Me Write This Post Explaining Why He Probably Didn't Hide Dinosaur Bones

Something about the recent attempt to cancel Steve Pinker seems really off.

They problem is that the argument is suspiciously bad. The open letter presents only six real pieces of evidence, and they're all really, trivially weak.

The left isn't incompetent when it comes to tallying up crimes for a show trial. In fact, they're pretty good at it. But for some reason this letter has only the weakest of attacks, and what's more, it stops at only six "relevant occasions". For comparison, take a look at this similar attack on Stephen Hsu which has, to put it mildly, more than six pieces of evidence. There is plenty of reasonable criticism of Pinker out... (read 1417 more words →)

The Right Way of Formulating a Problem?

Recently, Scott Alexander has been blogging about how to figure out what theories to support when you can't easily perform empirical work to distinguish between them (here, here).

Scott is a nuanced thinker, but in this case I think he's overcomplicating things. This problem has a simple solution.

I. Proof of Elegance

Scott suggests that when faced with two theories that make the same predictions, we can make the case that one theory is simpler or more elegant:

I think the correct response is to say that both theories explain the data, and one cannot empirically test which theory is true, but the paleontology theory is more elegant (I am tempted to say “simpler”, but

... (read 775 more words →)

-1

David Chapman Writes,

Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it.

I agree with this intuitively, and I feel like I have seen this principle at work in my own work and in the problems I have tried to solve. However, when I try to convince others of this idea, I struggle to find examples that they can connect with or that they find compelling.

I suspect that programmers find this idea appealing because we routinely work with formal systems, and all of us know the experience of making a minor change in perspective and seeing an impossible problem turn into an easy one. So... (read more)

Counterspells

Back in the early days of the internet, when New Atheism was king, people would collect and catalogue various logical fallacies. Then, when getting into an argument on some forum, they would identify and call out all the logical fallacies being used by their opponent; Ad Hominem! Appeal to Emotion! Tu Quoque! Post hoc, ergo propter hoc!

These days we tend to know better. Appealing to these lists of logical fallacies and their Latin names doesn't help you, and it doesn't help the conversation. The problem is that to the person you're talking to, throwing around the names of these fallacies just sounds like an Argument from Authority—

Wait! I mean, it just... (read 2834 more words →)

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Leto among the Machines