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Shame Boy posted:did he need a passing grade to play Graduate Level Football or something, what the hell can you even be kicked out of a grad program by the time you're at your thesis? Like obviously your thesis can be turned down consistently, but if you have the money and the willingness is there actually a way in a grad program where they can evaluate your thesis and say "this is so bad that look, you're out. Don't come back."? If you had a trust fund kid who you knew would just be sucking up resources and no way to dissuade them, prob thats the easiest route (especially like this prof where you just have your students do the work, lmao). Finally, what does this say about the profs? Post-secondary is the absolute shithole of any pedagogy and is full of researchers who hate anything to do with teaching, so they go up and throw up some slides and ask you to write a couple essays that their TAs mark for them. I always question how much people throw shade on individuals over how "good" they are when the education across the post-secondary system is complete and utter garbage in terms of "teaching you" rather than "yeah teach yourself, here's the material".
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Jul 3, 2023 20:01
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Shame Boy posted:did he need a passing grade to play Graduate Level Football or something, what the hell It isn't great if you admit people to your program (with funding, in this case!) who can't hack it and eventually wash out. The university will see it as a waste of money and it looks bad on your program's metrics. It's not like it's a huge scandal, everybody knows it happens sometimes, but you gotta juice those numbers if you wanna get tenure Oysters Autobio posted:can you even be kicked out of a grad program by the time you're at your thesis? Like obviously your thesis can be turned down consistently, but if you have the money and the willingness is there actually a way in a grad program where they can evaluate your thesis and say "this is so bad that look, you're out. Don't come back."? Yes, every program has a maximum time to degree criterion. Varies school by school, but if you drag out your 2-year master's program to (e.g.) 5 years by continuously failing classes and having your thesis rejected, the school can say you're done, no more chances, go try something else. Also you can get kicked out for academic dishonesty, of course. A few years ago we had a grad student expelled for repeated plagiarism in his thesis drafts. Honestly it was just kind of sad. I don't think he ever really understood what he was doing wrong, right up to the end. Got warned several times, had to take remedial classes, and just kept doing it, and after he was formally disenrolled from the program and expelled from the university, he emailed a bunch of us asking how he could apply for readmission the next year. Just confusing and sad. But if it's the professors telling the students that they need to write another student's thesis for him, well... Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 20:37
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finally caught up on this thread, good stuff as always
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Jul 4, 2023 15:49
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Oysters Autobio posted:Yeah this is one of the difficulties in bridging the gap, expectations get very inflated when we interact with products made by a specialized organization designed around solely shipping an app tthat does one specific thing well (and from same company that was just the output of survivorship bias rather than anything revolving merit). It's like, yeah we could probably make an app that intuitive when their team that solely does the UX and business analysis research s the size of our entire IT branch. the fix for this is you design the software agnostically of its inputs and visualizations in such a way where making changes is very easy, and you have enough interaction with your users where you understand how they work and adjust those things accordingly done right, it reduces bitrot and ensures you can continually improve the product over time in a way that's reasonably consistent don't write poo poo that's easy to extend; write poo poo that's easy to delete if its easy to delete, its easy to replace and therefor easy to iterate and iteration is the best teacher; context over dogma: ux and hfe might teach you things (often good life-saving things), but they are models to point you in the right direction reality is not a model, and there will be failure modes and success modes you cannot yet imagine the beginning of the end for all things made by human hands is a catastrophic failure of imagination only if you can survive CFOI, can you learn those lessons at all Expo70 fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 12:12
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Expo70 posted:the fix for this is you design the software agnostically of its inputs and visualizations in such a way where making changes is very easy, and you have enough interaction with your users where you understand how they work and adjust those things accordingly “you don’t need documentation if you write better programs” is on the same level of delusion as “self-documenting code”
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Jul 12, 2023 12:42
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don't worry she has lots of complaints about how documentation is written too
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Jul 12, 2023 14:11
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Sagebrush posted:The explanation that finally made sense to me went like this: This is a good way of explaining it and I think another thing to point out that actually makes it intuitive to me is that: if you always change your answer after the door reveal the only way you could lose is if you picked correctly on the first guess. The odds of that happening are 1/3 so your odds of winning with this approach are 2/3
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Jul 12, 2023 15:07
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ADINSX posted:This is a good way of explaining it and I think another thing to point out that actually makes it intuitive to me is that: if you always change your answer after the door reveal the only way you could lose is if you picked correctly on the first guess. The odds of that happening are 1/3 so your odds of winning with this approach are 2/3 oh that's a good one yeah
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Jul 12, 2023 15:49
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in a well actually posted:“you don’t need documentation if you write better programs” is on the same level of delusion as “self-documenting code” at no point did I say software doesn't need documentation if anything, the documentation should be so good that you could provide it to another company 10 years down the line if your provider goes bust and get the software made again without ever reading the source-code. go one better: include *why* decisions were made, so when this inevitably happens, some smartass who thinks they can out-think the solution (which should be means tested itself) isn't out there taking risks or repeating past mistakes out of their own loving ignorance and stupidity one thing i deeply hate is when i look at a codebase written by 20 different people and not only is it wildly inconsistent but i have no idea who did what because everybody is terrified of owning up to their own work, or admitting what their process was when writing something or why they made certain concessions. a style-guide serves only to conceal the aesthetic of the inconsistency, not how the compiler sees things. people still have to decipher the problem. it makes it very hard for people to pitch in or help each-other, or to recognize when some people have specialist skills which make them better at certain tasks. you end up under-utilizing someone on a team. you should be happy to leave a note with your username on it, not dreading that you're going to get 40 messages a year down the line pestering and asking what the gently caress you were doing or what something means, because you should have guessed those questions or left enough hints behind in comments that it becomes self-evident. instead, there should be a design history (hyperlinked from within the project's comments), detailing what their process was when writing something or why they made certain concessions. a design history. even if its brief, countless hours get wasted with programmers playing archaeologist to idiots when writing the entire thing from scratch would take less time but wouldn't have the iterative knowledge that came from someone else overcoming the project's past fuckups it doesn't have to be dense or precise, or even well formatted: the design history just has to be decipherable. if you pulled some poo poo from stack exchange, admit it. if you're scared for your head for doing that, something is seriously wrong. self-documenting code is essentially a coder saying "i refuse to wipe my own rear end because i'm so special and important" because they have no theory of mind anybody that selfish on a tea should have their uvulas in crocodile clips to stop them from speaking unless spoken to because they deserve no input on a project beyond making code appear where none existed previously so it can be scrapped when they inevitably introduce bitrot that can't be fixed the code should be *practically self-documenting* in its variable and function names. practically. not actually. it should then also have comments. and documentation. as a separate thing. and with it, a design history. the fact most computer-touchers have no loving clue what a design history is shows they don't deserve to call themselves programmers -- they're just coders and they absolutely do not deserve to call themselves software engineers. time saved early is time wasted multiplied later. early mistakes compound. not documenting what you do is an early mistake. yes the project might take slightly longer to make, but it will last much much much longer and you'll have a stable product indefinitely that's infinitely easier to port. make your projects survivable, or your company is going to grind to a halt in 5 years as human time is squandered wiping the asses of your unsurvivable code. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 19:03
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see, i told you
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Jul 12, 2023 19:12
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Shame Boy posted:see, i told you almost all of this is poo poo i had to figure out to get around my memory issues future me will read my code and go "what the gently caress was happening in your brain when you did this?" past me has to have been kind enough to provide an answer i'm literally dealing with an alignment manager and state machine for a simulated vehicle's balance control mechanism to add a compensation state for when it has to wade through water including states where it skims across the top, or is submerged, and if i did not document the process or where i got the ideas or any of it, i would be so confused by what i am dealing with
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Jul 12, 2023 19:16
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how many software projects have you actually worked on with other peeps? i thought you just did your mecha game thing
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Jul 12, 2023 19:16
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bob dobbs is dead posted:how many software projects have you actually worked on with other peeps? i thought you just did your mecha game thing i get roped in sometimes to help others with their games. i am regularly displeased by what i see. i'm also, for reasons i do not understand, a sponge when other people speak about their own grievances. i wish i could remember mine anywhere near as well. i also like breaking other people's projects over my knee and seeing how they work in decompilers. even in asm, you can see bad habits. e: i've just been told privately i'm fairly naive and the private sector is an entirely different beast here's to being unusual. better to be an edgecase than a basketcase i guess. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 19:18
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feel like "video games" is the problem there then
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Jul 12, 2023 19:20
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bob dobbs is dead posted:feel like "video games" is the problem there then
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Jul 12, 2023 19:21
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the thing i told you privately was that your idea that in 5 years unmaintainable code will cause a company to grind to a halt was a bit naive and i'm sure plenty of people here (like me, for example) are grinding away at garbage, inscrutable codebases. it's a waste of time and effort sure but rarely does it become such a big waste that it justifies redoing everything, let alone redoing everything in a really strict, formal, fully-documented and nice way now the other thing is, videogame programming is its own special dumb thing, because with videogames maintainability is sorta... secondary. most games have a lifecycle where you need to get it out, patch it maybe 2-3 times, maybe add a DLC pack or something, and then move on to the next project. investing the amount of effort you're suggesting in making the code clean and maintainable and fantastic just doesn't make sense for something that isn't going to be maintained in perpetuity
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Jul 12, 2023 19:28
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like idk maybe we should make all software to the standard of quality demanded by a space ship guidance computer, that sounds great, just good luck getting anyone to pay for it 
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Jul 12, 2023 19:30
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yeah, computertouchers have a total cost of like 70k usd p/a in a poor country to 200k usd p/a in a rich country to 400k usd p/a and up in figgielands. just because you endure penury doesnt mean all touchers or even very many touchers do
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 19:33
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Shame Boy posted:the thing i told you privately was that your idea that in 5 years unmaintainable code will cause a company to grind to a halt was a bit naive and i'm sure plenty of people here (like me, for example) are grinding away at garbage, inscrutable codebases. it's a waste of time and effort sure but rarely does it become such a big waste that it justifies redoing everything, let alone redoing everything in a really strict, formal, fully-documented and nice way I work with this many hours a week and have had to scrap the entire thing twice because "living with my work" is hard since 2016, and I've been applying the lessons I learned since to make sure it doesn't happen again. the upside is i've got unlimited access to myself the downside is that access isn't reliable
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Jul 12, 2023 19:43
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i bet you'd be served better with an automated test rig than this sort of documentation discipline, because automated test rigs are my usual spiel to feral coders who restart projects a lot
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Jul 12, 2023 19:51
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bob dobbs is dead posted:i bet you'd be served better with an automated test rig than this sort of documentation discipline, because automated test rigs are my usual spiel to feral coders who restart projects a lot I've been meaning to learn about automated functional testing for a while now. i'd rather be a designer than a programmer to be brutally honest, but "hey i have a game idea" and a design document does not a game get made. i enjoyed asm, but blueprints are a headache. i don't care for c++'s syntax, and i don't like those kinds of syntax because i have the dumb brain that can't read symbols good. there's just so much unnecessarily obfuscated poo poo with disgusting truncated words that aren't self-evident. i dearly miss lisp, but nothing big plays with it. i miss when i could just read the code and it felt like a sentence. its all self-evident. full words. actual declarations. some how c-likes can truncate words into incomprehensible jibberish and still fill more space on my screen. is it really that hard to say "static constant character", or "typedefinition or "typename"? i know its a stupid childish pet-peeve but it annoys the hell out of me. i hate guessing for brackets-types, or if something is a semicolon or a colon, or if something is a comma or a period. sometimes i wonder if lisp was made by someone who had dyslexia. it reads so drat comfortably. the only question is where are they, and how many of them. and gently caress, i really *really* miss when i could edit the function in runtime, without having to go through compile-time so i could iterate lightning fast. it just "made sense", and languages as i deal with them feel like i'm wading through mud to get anything done at all. i know this is very very very silly of me. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 19:56
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lotta peeps do better w repl langs than otherwise, but its not just lisps with a repl this century. every p-lang has a repl nowadays, even if they dont go as hard as lisp repls. python, perl, pruby, pjavascript...
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Jul 12, 2023 20:13
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Expo70 posted:I've been meaning to learn about automated functional testing for a while now. Ok, so Erlang is very bad for you. Have you tried embeddable common lisp?
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Jul 12, 2023 20:16
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bob dobbs is dead posted:lotta peeps do better w repl langs than otherwise, but its not just lisps with a repl this century. every p-lang has a repl nowadays, even if they dont go as hard as lisp repls. python, perl, pruby, pjavascript... I'd disagree with putting perl on that list. its got this really nasty habit of hiding its context the same way c-like languages do, which undoes one of the major benefits of repl which is comprehension via clear context. nobody should ever have to deal with perl. i would rather eat hair and drink fingernails than be forced to be productive in perl. it is absolutely disgusting and anybody who dares consider it useful or good needs to explore their emotional needs in a much safer and healthier environment, with a dominatrix and if that doesn't work they should consider military service as its potential for harm is much lower than perl. Its literally the straw that broke the camel's back leper khan posted:Ok, so Erlang is very bad for you. Have you tried embeddable common lisp? the tool i'm working in doesn't play well with it so i'm stuck with whatever unreal engine will let me use. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 20:24
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bob dobbs is dead posted:lotta peeps do better w repl langs than otherwise, but its not just lisps with a repl this century. every p-lang has a repl nowadays, even if they dont go as hard as lisp repls. python, perl, pruby, pjavascript... this is glossolalia.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:37
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Sagebrush posted:this is glossolalia. it makes sense in the context that i made a jab at languages not completing the names of things earlier its still readable, it just also takes longer and looks like cat-sick
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Jul 12, 2023 20:39
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nah, we started making p-lang jokes late bush jr admin 'repl' does sound made up but, regrettably, all words are made up and its a legit term of art
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Jul 12, 2023 21:08
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corroborating that p-langs, refering to scripting/interpreted langs that are very popular if not quite performant or elegant (and usually having a name beginning with p), have been a localized slang here for quite a while yes
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Jul 13, 2023 14:48
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I’m dropping by during my vacation because a post I wrote a few weeks ago finally got published: Carrots, Sticks, and Making Things Worse it’s about how adding incentives, whether positive or negative, don’t necessarily help much when dealing with challenging situations like incidents, and instead add complexity, and risk driving reported behavior more than actual behavior.
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Jul 14, 2023 00:20
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This week I've read real cool paper from Ben Lupton and Richard Warren titled Managing Without Blame? Insights from the Philosophy of Blame. They take the idea of "no-blame" or "blameless" approaches to organizational learning, note that it's often really challenging to put in practice by various organizations, and decide to go and check out what various philosophers have written about blame to try to suggest possibly better alternatives. The authors first define no-blame as: quote:[...] an organizational approach characterized by a constructive attitude towards errors and near misses’. Central to this is the idea that human error is inevitable, but that systems are open to improvement. In a no-blame approach, the focus is moved away from identifying the perpetrator(s) of the error (often with associated shame or punishment) to identifying the lessons that could be learned so that processes can be improved. The focus is on organizational learning. In short, the idea is that blame discourages the reporting of mistakes and near-misses, and hinders learning. Error-reporting that feels safe, inclusive, looks at broad sets of potential causes, and has a culture of involvement and sharing knowledge, would on the other hand be more conductive to learning. An extra concern around blame is that innovation and risk-taking are often linked together (you must deviate from standard procedures to do something new), and it can therefore create a sense of caution stifles innovation, encourages deflecting blame to others, which in turn causes even more of that same caution. Most of these ideas come from High Reliability Organizations (HROs), such as airlines and nuclear power plants, which have a need to learn to prevent large-scale disasters. In short, the benefits of the learning are so great they can't afford to be blameful. The authors point out that this trade-off is not necessarily as obvious when there isn't such a risk for catastrophes, citing a study that mentioned train drivers who readily accepted errors being attributed to them in a no-blame system, which made it harder to investigate systemic failures. What is Blame? Four visions are explored: blame as sanction, blame as a reaction to relationship impairment, blame as an emotional response, and blame as a power dynamic. We first start by taking a look at utilitarianism, where blame is seen as a socially useful sanction: there is bad behaviour, and expressing disapproval can be calculated as mitigating or improving that behaviour. It's a light punishment. However, this vision of blame only holds if people are actually able to choose differently next time, and if the target accepts it as justified and want to change their behaviour. If you apply blame when the choice isn't really modifiable, or if it hinges on people's character, then blame isn't as useful under the utilitarian lens. We then look at Scanlon's contractualism, which frames blame as a way to recognize that a relationship between people has been impaired by someone's acts or attitudes. It's something you do when you feel you have been let down. In this view, blame is a necessary part of human life, because arises from rational obligations of what we owe to each other; not blaming people is treating them as irrational. The authors point out that we don't necessarily attribute blame only in the context of relationships: people we don't know can also be our targets. A variation of the framing offered here is that blame is more of a protest, about how a standard has been transgressed. These variants seem to ignore the emotional component out of blame, so we turn toward an "affective" account of blame, which is more or less feeling bad because someone acted bad. You stop extending your good will. In this form, blame is a natural response to being wronged or let down, and it's an essential part of how human relations work. There's a stronger suggestion here that blame ought to be more like a "disappointed sadness" than anger, and is more constructive for relationships in that form. Finally, we look at blame that is seen as a system of power relations. Based on determinists, blame can only be useful if you can change your behaviour in the future. For others, blame relies on the idea that the blamer and blamed share similar values and reasons on how to act (and their actions breaking these standards), and maybe we aren't actually entitled to that assumption—to blame is to impose your own values and frameworks onto other people and judging them by it. Finally, Nietzsche's view is brought up: our feelings of frustration at wrongdoing are due to feelings of powerlessness and envy in relation to others and our systems of morality. Blame is a way for us, as weaker people, to exert power over others. Reconsidering Blame The no-blame stance taken by organizations is consequentialist: the future outcomes define whether blame is worthy or not. While this could match with the utilitarian viewpoint and discussing the nature of blame could therefore be irrelevant—just get rid of it—it's not clear whether it is actually justified or possible to ignore blame altogether. After all, if you believe you can suspend blame, why not also believe you can suspend only the harmful effects of blame and keep the beneficial ones? And if blame is reactive and hard to control, how good of a job are you going to do anyway? Asking people to forego blame can also play against their sense of justice; demands can be ignored or stimulate even more anger. In some cases too, blame could be constructed as a mechanism by which organizations police, preserve, and sustain sets of values and priorities, which could be useful, were it not from the tendency (within organizational settings) for people with power to shore up their own position and deflect attention or liability away from their own responsibility. The authors then offer further challenges, asking the question "is philosophy actually relevant to the question of blame in organizations?" In a nutshell, they consider whether the perceived morality of an action is relevant to blame (it is an ethical issue regardless, so philosophy is relevant), and that while it is important to consider whether blame comes with punishment or not, it does not prevent to consider blame through the lens of philosophy for organizations. In fact, they offer an interesting way to split up responsibility in wondering whether it should also result in different types of blame:
So while you can do the straightforward thing and protect people from blame in a causal sense, they add that: quote:In terms of realizing the espoused organizational learning benefits of no-blame, releasing people from the fear of role and outcome blame will be as important as releasing them from the fear of causal blame. After all, in a learning culture managers themselves would need to be ‘freed’ to allow their staff to make mistakes, confident that they will not be blamed when they do. An Alternative to No-Blame The idea here is that the goals of no-blame might be addressed and attained without giving up blame altogether. There's a mention of seeking 'healthier' blaming practices, which equally rest on the idea that blame can be repressive and inhibiting, except that we are encouraged to accept that blaming is inevitable in human social interactions, and that it can also play a positive role. The authors repeat that blame can be part of an emotional response of someone falling short of standards, a judgment that someone impaired relations between people, or a firm reminder of certain values, standards, or codes of conducts. Each of these forms of blame can still be damaging, but under many philosophies, they can also play the role of sustaining communities. What they're getting at here is something we keep seeing in these papers: there are competing objectives, a goal conflict, and negotiating it requires being aware of the trade-offs. The paper does not get into the details of any practical approach, but recommends adopting restraint and tolerance as key mechanisms, in an attempt to avoid "a failure of interpretative generosity". (note: this seems vague from the authors, so I'm taking the liberty to insert my own example of "interpretative generosity" here. Before incident reviews, I ask that when people see something that appears unreasonable or unacceptable taking place, that they instead question what made it seem reasonable to the people involved at the time. Investigate that vision rather than just stopping at that constructed error. This changes blame from being a stopping condition and turns it into a jumping point for further understanding) The authors mention "encouraging a culture of intelligent risk-taking" and "reserving blame for acts of recklessness" (if you want to go that way, I suggest reading Sidney Dekker's Just Culture for a deep-dive on how challenging this is to do right) In terms of developing this approach, they caution that it should be located within communities of practice, as professionals reflecting and influencing their everyday work among each other. This, they say, is the appropriate place to develop appropriate responses to transgressions, and attaches it to professional values through shared norms and practice, but also slowly trains everyone into being more productive with blame. While once again recommending more clarity on what we mean exactly by blame, and its potential value beyond the role of "sanction", they conclude: quote:[W]hile no-blame might be practicable and desirable in some restricted organization settings, an acceptance of blaming, but a tempering of its application, might be more realistic and productive more generally.
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Jul 29, 2023 01:36
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I've just finished reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish in its original French (Surveiller et Punir), mostly because smart writers I like kept quoting and citing it and I had to see what it was about. I wasn't disappointed, although the structure makes it take a while before getting to the good stuff. Most of the material I've seen referenced is about disciplinary societies, which sandwiched between two book parts on pre-prison justice generally applied via corporal punishment and public torture, and on prison and how it is applied. There’s a point being made that modern society’s discipline, as derived from military roots, aims to create a normalizing set of pressures: abilities, performances, and acts are to be comparable to each other. Individuals are then ranked by that scale, which represents a model, a lowest acceptable boundary or an optimum to attain. Quantitatively measure people on the scale and assign them a rank, which values or de-values them. Discipline requires very little actual punishment because the penalization is structurally built into the hierarchy and constantly part of everyday life, turning justice’s punishments from power asserting itself into power making most effective use of the bodies it rules in its economic and social system. The organization of education and training is tightly regulated as well; instead of being the apprentice to a master and gaining your own master title by showing a work of art after having helped them in their craft for years, school (and life as a whole) is structured and cut up in more manageable, comparable, predictable, structured parts that are more productive, and more amenable to the normalizing forces that aim to make everyone comparable to each other. Other interesting bit, he compares how power is traditionally displayed: shows of force, parades, creations. It’s an act by which those who hold the power make themselves visible and present to others. Power is projected, asserted. In discipline, the relationship is turned upside-down: power is invisible, and it is the ruled (instead of the ruler) who makes themselves visible, observable, measurable: exams, examinations, tests, and so on. Power is applied by a mechanism of objectivation, and discipline demonstrates it works by having the targets of power showing themselves as meeting its desires, ready to be fitted within a wider mechanism. He states that this inversion is the precise mechanism by which power is uniformly transmitted from top to bottom. I think he compares the practice to a sort of social panopticon where the source of authority can’t be evaluated but constantly evaluates you. I think he’s also making the point that criminal justice is sort of just a side-show to the actual normalizing power of the modern state (school is a bigger one). And so any claims of reform or more humane punishment isn’t necessarily rooted in the purported reasons (being more humane), and instead emerges as a structured reinforcement of discipline (via prison and labour) of the most irreducible elements until they are either removed from or shaped back into following the structure. But by having the prison as the endcap of society, you define the final frontier of which behaviors are acceptable or not and turn the people who don't fit the norm into delinquents; it isn't the acts you punish but the individuals for who they are. Some crimes are defined as worth punishing by prison time (often those committed by lower classes or workers who threaten the structure itself) and some aren't (they align with the structure; white collar crimes). By shifting the boundary of acceptability, you both keep discipline working, and define an ordered world people live in, but which constantly reminds them of what is outside its limits as unacceptable and as a possible threat. The construction of delinquents who keep returning to prison to leave again on probation also provides surveillance and disciplining mechanisms in parts of society that are usually impenetrable, and is mentioned as a potential useful side-effect to people applying power. This, Foucault supposes, would explain why prison never managed to attain the objectives it had, and why every reform tries to meet the same objectives and always fails. The role it incidentally plays in maintaining a disciplined society that largely self-polices itself into higher productivity is simply a bigger benefit than asserting power directly. Anyway, this is serious food for thought. I get why he's cited so much, and the inversion of power into the continuous self-reinforcement of a figurative structural panopticon to keep us all productive and well-behaved (as opposed to a society that is more contractualist or based on reciprocity) is wild in the context of the modern tech industry.
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Aug 12, 2023 18:50
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foucault is always about how peeps talk about prisons, never the actual prisons. how peeps talk about power, not the actual power. this is how he becomes one of the top cited social scientists in all history but with orders of magnitude less outside impact than marx or weber or whatever. he had no significant intellectual influence in '68, for example
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 19:10
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everything he says is also based on stuff before 1840 and very centric to France, and afaict he had to go back and mention how over-eager he was in his points, but all his models and views are very seductive, and they sort of insert themselves very nicely into common interpretations of power dynamics.
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Aug 12, 2023 19:31
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bob dobbs is dead posted:he had no significant intellectual influence in '68, for example Also I wonder if part of the reason he has less practical impact is also because he never proposed any solution, like defeatism about what he describes has always been one of the major criticisms against him from what I've read?
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Aug 12, 2023 19:38
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in many ways the more charitable way to put it is that 68 influenced his thought more. he was a strong anticommunist by that time despite calling himself a leftist and you could not really characterize the peeps of 68 as anything but communists, with anti-american imperialism stuck in. his personal experience was with the tunisian revolts of 68, which were way more intensely anti-zionist in character for example in _The Order of Things_ he basically called marxism bourgeois and specifically of the 19th century where marxs ideas cannot be extricated from it. which is not really a welcome thing if you enact a general strike, erect the barricades, chase the president out of the country, etc etc in the name of the proletarian revolution and the year is 1968 that book is why sartre called him "last barricade of the bourgeosie". compare to marx callin henry george "last ditch of the bourgeosie" bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 19:44
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bob dobbs is dead posted:
he would have been a powerful poster had he lived a few decades later
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Aug 12, 2023 19:57
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right? even gay enough, too. big "are women bourgeois?" from disco elysium energy
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Aug 12, 2023 19:58
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considering the guy is behind some of the early texts on postcolonialism in europe in how knowledge is applied by power, he's certainly a land of contrast. anyway like most things in these texts, I never see them as a truthful, absolutely correct model of the world, but more like an interesting or contextually useful lens to look at things. considering how untestable hypotheses would be on that front due to how everything is interacting with everything, that's probably as good as it gets—sensemaking over analysis or something.
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Aug 12, 2023 20:09
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if philosophy starts getting predictive enough to give us some significant figures, it graduates to science. (ironically, we cannot actually get sigfigs for the consideration of what science is or not, so this itself is a viciously arguable but also very operationalizable definition and philosophy of science has been prominent for centuries) so philosophy of computation was barely born before graduating this way as peeps built apparatuses, but political philosophy has been a staple for millennia you read this guy, he aint putting off sigfigs bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 20:31
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This week's paper was yet another nerdsnipe. This is Sidney Dekker's The psychology of incident investigations: epistemological, preventive, moral and existential meaning-making. That's a mouthful of a title, but rather accurate since in this text Dekker looks at all four items and their respective relationships within any single incident review. This paper starts with a reference to how incident investigations can be politically motivated in a general sense—about pursuing agendas and protecting interests. Different agencies with different purposes and priorities will, with two equally competent authors analyzing the same incident based on the same facts and material, come up with divergent stories and conclusions. He mentions, for example, two investigations of the same 1995 aviation incident. One was written the airline whose aircraft crashed in the mountains, and the other by the civil aviation authority of the country in which the accident occurred (and who employed the air traffic controller whose airspace this was in):  The main differences are obtained by either choosing to highlight or omit different aspects of the accident, and Dekker points out they on their own represent a call for "plurality and multidisciplinarity in the investigation process so that multiple voices are heard and given legitimacy", which should help make it more visible where lines of reasoning come from, for example. Now back to the main thesis of the paper. The author mentions that psychological factors may as well be in play, and compete with each other to an even greater extent than the political ones: quote:Where the political explanation almost necessarily relies on competition between different parties or stakeholders, the psychological one suggests that competing meaning-making functions of accident inquiries can exist within single agents (e.g. an investigator) This can lead to possible compromise and contradiction in the narratives suggested by them even before they are submitted to political scrutiny and control. The four terms in the title, and which we'll visit one by one, can be defined as follows:
Epistemological purpose The Epistemological purpose of an investigation is to explain what happened. The assumption is that by digging deep enough, pulling on all the loose ends, you can get a fully analytical view of events. The explanation must be accurate, exhaustive, but also plausible by linking cause and effect in a believable way. Historically, this led to linear explanations, noting that effects and consequences required some amount of proportionality: broken parts can explain broken systems, and (if I can paraphrase) human error or loss of situational awareness can explain mishandling a situation. Dekker points out that in complex systems, a lot of effects emerge from the interaction of multiple parts—often normal, functional ones—rather than broken ones. Additionally, there's a limit to what can be taken into account for any specific description, which leads him to say: quote:a 'good' epistemology of a complex system does not claim that one description is true and that all others are false, but rather that multiple descriptions can and must be made at the same time — partially overlapping and contradictory. In complex systems, there is no proportionality between cause and effect. And by extension, a complex epistemology does not commit to a Newtonian proportionality between cause and effect. Small 'causes' can be amplified hugely by the normal interactions and interconnections and multipliers in a complex system. In short, because we can't get a full picture, a contrasting view of multiple perspectives tends to be better at properly describing what happened. Some of these view points may contradict each other, and many may sometimes be regarded as true at the same time. This, Dekker points out, may clash with the three other psychological purposes. Preventative purpose The next psychological purpose is the Preventative one, which is often seen as the most important one: making sure this does not happen again. The paper uses the terms explanatory variables for the things in the epistemological aspect of the report that explain the failure, and change variables for things that could be amended or changed to prevent the failure next time. The psychological and epistemological purposes can often align well, but not always: a focus on explanatory variables can sometimes lock attention on specific instances of issues in a way that makes prevention more difficult. An example given is one of hand injuries in repairing megatrucks used in the mining industry: quote:Careful investigation of each instance revealed explanatory variables: the variety of places in the machinery where hands were most likely to get hurt, during which procedures, and with what shortcuts and improvisations that contractors applied. What these insights and subsequent interventions (e.g. more stringent procedural compliance demands) did not do was prevent the same injuries from occurring, nor did they reduce the injury frequency. [...] The change variable introduced in the business [that finally was effective] was to significantly invest in preventive maintenance — replacing parts and systems on specific (and short) intervals rather than running them to failure. Preventive maintenance takes places in hangars and workshops — controlled, well-lit, better-resourced and well-equipped environments where injury risk has traditionally been much lower. Explanatory variables, in other words, had little sway over the eventual change variable. Basically, knowing what went wrong in a specific incident does not give you surefire improvements, and you may have to try many things before any works (which means you may have to have many repeat incidents). Moral purpose The moral purpose of an incident investigation is mostly one of maintaining boundaries on behaviour: quote:Reports [with a moral purpose] act as boundary-maintaining devices in the sense that they demonstrate where the line is drawn between behavior that belongs in the special universe of the group and behavior that does not They highlight deviance to perform cultural work: transgressions being pointed out while reaffirming and clarifying rules or ways of accomplishing work can be useful to a group of practitioners. Incident reports of this kind will often make allusions (to professionalism, for example), denounce acts or deviations, and provide instructions. Dekker has few positive words for this, saying that this type of language is often disguising judgments from bureaucratic enterprises patrolling their own boundaries as if they were epistemological causes. Rather than seeking to understand the mechanisms behind transgressions, the moral purpose helps reinforce and protect the organization's structure. Existential purpose The last psychological purpose is the existential one, which aim to give meaning to suffering. By identifying risk and making it understandable, it gives the hope of containing or controlling it. This is because from this point of view, suffering should not happen, and it should be possible to eliminate it (the author points at zero vision type programs as an example here). This approach tends to link suffering due to accidents to some moral calculus, even in preventative cases. The issue here is that when you don't find human choices or transgressions, or that you can't find anything that's broken, the investigation becomes upsetting and feels broken even if all the epistemological rules were followed. Citing Snook's report on a friendly fire accident in Iraq in 1994, every time the investigators found something that seemed like a failure and started digging, he kept only finding people doing normal things as part of normal work: quote:[Not finding transgressions] becomes unsatisfying on all other counts. It may be a really good (epistemological) story, a story of complexity and emergence. But how do we control risk, how do we prevent recurrence? Whom do we hold accountable? And how do we explain the suffering caused by 28 deaths if there is no ‘cause’ to point to? Was that suffering in vain? It is in the conflict between these psychological purposes that accident investigations have to make meaning out of a bad outcome. (note: I checked the sources and I believe the actual number of casualties was 26, not 28—I even quickly searched for things like 2 people dying out of grief/self-harm adding to the official figures and found nothing) Conclusion Dekker repeats that all psychological purposes can and do play a role. The problem, however, is that they are not all compatible with each other. The epistemological purpose may align well with the preventative one, though it sometimes turn it bothersome or shows prior interventions weren't effective. Specifically though, the epistemological purpose is in a far more direct tension with both the moral and existential purposes. If you are forced into more complex narratives, conflicting views, and away from more obvious broken boundaries, then there are few ways to hold people accountable, and few ways to reassure ourselves it won't happen again. He concludes: quote:Perhaps the lesson is this. We should desist from seeking the meaning of suffering in the past, in explanatory variables. We should locate it in the future, in change variables. We should demand from investigations not a backward-looking, but a forward-looking accountability. We should seek solace not in trite (and surely false) assurances that ‘this will never happen again,’ but in an understanding that error and failure are inevitable by-products of pursuing success in a resource-constrained, goal-conflicted world. At the very least, disambiguating the four psychological impulses that guide incident reviews might be a good starting place.
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Aug 20, 2023 02:10
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