Noah is simply wrong. There is nothing sustainable about low IQ immigration. It doesn't make the country a better place. "Backlash" is simply people noticing this and trying to stop it.
Noah can't comprehend that "backlash" is a factually correct evaluation of immigrations effect on the country, so all he can think of is "how do I bamboozle these rubes to get what I want anyway."
In addition to his HBD denial, this likely relates to his being a leftist and seeing increased immigration as a way to increase leftist power (not that he would admit it, but its what will most likely happen by default).
I don't know who writes the Facebook posts announcing the protests, but there most certainly are plenty of Muslims turning up - and recent immigrants or their children of all stripes, not to mention the BLM crew. We have seen the pictures! Sure, you've got your rabid white lady preschool teachers and gov. and university employees; but a substantial chunk - most? - of the Jewish left which comprises the backbone of the left - is obviously sitting this one out. His math doesn't work. He's being weaselly here, when he needn't be. He should be happy at the changing of the guard to his preferred classes.
They never want to admit when the thing they want - is working.
He is not simply wrong, he's complicated partisan Dem anti-Trump wrong. His emotions say 'Trump is against illegals, Orange man bad, immigration is good', but he's smart enough to see that massive illegal immigration is both unpopular and leading to cultural problems. He doesn't allow himself to see that the problems are because of the immigration, because the big thing for him is that being against illegals, like Trump is, is popular.
"we are in one of our anti-immigration moments right now, and the political impact could potentially be huge — the return of Trump, and all of the institutional chaos that will inevitably entail."
Like most who suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Trump, he can't help but include something bad about Trump. Trump's return - 'institutional chaos".
Illegals, and choas, and Trump - oh my! What could be worse???
Smith is an immigration enthusiast, in keeping with his Leftist human universalism, and wants to see "sustainable" immigration that won't cause a backlash, sustainable presumably meaning as much as possible. Some modest amount of immigration of talented people who are not unassimilable, can be of benefit, but this must be weighed against the harms to other countries of having such people stripped away from where they may be most needed. Mass immigration that leads to enclaves of culturally alien and hostile populations is disastrous.
He's patently false, though. He treats the desires of one group - to come here and reap material gains, or capture our threatened songbirds to export back home for their singing competitions - as manifestly reasonable; and the desires of the other - those hoping to preserve something of their own culture, material and otherwise - as operating out of pure emotion.
I’m also curious how the reciprocal of Conway’s Law applies to religious doctrines. For example, take any one religious doctrine - New Testament, Old Testament, Quran, Book of Mormon, etc. - give it to a group of people, including kids, have them discuss it every week. What will you end up with?
Dogmatic doctrines beget dogmatic communities.
Violent doctrines beget violent communities.
Open inquiry and open discourse beget? Who wants to find out?
“If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life! Whoever will not carry the cross that is given to them when they follow me cannot be my follower."
"Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
My niece managed to faithfully attend the usual suburban South girls' weekly Bible study without feeling the need to give away her $400 shoes or her $7 smoothies.
Which puts her, as far as I can tell, squarely in the mainstream where receiving Christian dogma is concerned.
I believe that the word “perfect” meant what is meant by “complete” in modern English. This was in the context of someone asking how to literally start traveling around with Jesus. So Jesus was saying “if you want to do what I am doing, this is how.” That is, you have to go all in. He wasn’t recommending that everyone live as an itinerant holy man does. At the same time, there’s a deeper meaning to his words, which I take as meaning that your commitment to a life in Christ has to be primary. But at that level, the manner that you exercise that commitment is not the same as the manner you would exercise it if you literally started following Jesus around. Or so it seems to me.
"But at that level, the manner that you exercise that commitment is not the same as the manner you would exercise it if you literally started following Jesus around."
Hers was an ordinary broken-household, with no inquiry of any kind, intellectual or more mundane, though a healthy interest in the doings of other people in the rather wide social circle. Pretty normal, though not without its measure of suffering - and a constant living-beyond-one's-means, which doesn't seem to have registered with her.
As far as country, she lives in a country where freedom of religion has been easy to practice because the adherents of the Gospel pick and choose a bit, rendering their religion wholly compatible with runaway materialism. Indeed, materialism is become kind of another virtue along with the big three. If there should be anyone who remembers Jesus' words on the subject, they would likely be met - after much inquiry, no doubt - with something along the lines of: "Aw - he don't mean it!"
She believes, I think - there is no reason not to - and the social framework it provides her is not to be scoffed at.
I am certainly not singling her out except that your mention of "weekly" and "kids" prompted the thought.
Conway's Law implies that very large conglomerates with diverse product lines will tend to make products that are duplicative and work poorly together due to the difficulty of preventing middle-management careerism and internal rivalries at that scale. At Google this was proverbially true of, for example, our payments and chat app efforts, and was known as "shipping the org chart".
One additional wrinkle is that for any organization there is the de jure, formal, official, explicit, published org chart with its neatly described hierarchy of rank and influence and the roles, responsibilities, and authorities of each position, and how they integrate into the process by which decisions are made.
And then there is the Real org chart, the de facto way thinks actually work in the organization.
The deviation between the Real and Fake can be small or large, and can also be something the org leadership things untreatable and tries to minimize on the one hand, or a false illusion the leadership knowingly perpetuates and tries in practice to expand even further, on the other.
In USG the deviation is huge and intentional, so doing Conway-correspondence analysis from afar by using the original charts is fraught with peril.
The broader phenomenon is that texts purporting to prescribe or describe how human org processes work are in fact very poor at doing so absent the rare and special circumstance of effective, zealous enforcement. This is not necessarily a bad thing! Some text rules are inherently unreasonably hard to follow in furtherance of the intent without engaging in some reasonable but not technically authorized flexibilities. The question is always what one can get away with in terms of anyone leveraging the text to push back.
There is also the corporate soap opera social dramas of cliques, alliances, rivalries, favor debts, who is sleeping with whom, who knows where the bodies are buried and needs to be paid off to keep quiet or take one for the team, who will get you a spot on the board down the line, and on and on.
But there is also the way one naively imagines that people in no way near the center of power "do what they are ordered to do, because otherwise there would be swift and severe consequences" but on close inspection they often don't, and then, nothing much seems to happen, at least, overtly. There are several meta levels of passive resistance and passively-resistant counter-passive resistance and so on.
Great insight. Perhaps Silicon Valley's move fast and break stuff motto is the only way to get anything done in a climate of overdeveloped administration, whatever one might think of the results.
I can't help but point out, re Khan on Khan, that millions of people share his surname. I know (I guess) this doesn't mean anything - but maybe it means a little something? Far fewer bear the surname King.
Google names that mean king. Razib's Y haplogroup is of Steppe origin R1a-Z93. He is very explicit about this and that it is likely Scythian in origin and not Mongol. At some point his family attained the aristocratic title of chief or ruler, Khan. If there are fewer variants for king in that part of the world it is probably a testament to and function of the Mongols vast reach.
Sorry, I meant "King" the actual name, in the West.
An Indian neighbor I had once told me her family name, which I've forgotten, arose in the diaspora because if you've moved across an ocean, why not call yourself "king".
I’m curious about the reciprocal nature of Conway’s Law. That is, if you take a piece of software and give it to a group of people to reverse engineer, will they form a communication structure that mimics the structure of the software?
And does Conway’s Law apply to AI?
And what about the reciprocal nature of Conway’s Law applied to AI?
The reciprocal works like this. Let's say you are head of a research program to study some phenomenon, maybe one only recently accessible via some new instrument. You start by allocating your people and resources in a kind of rough and clumsy way by your best guesses about the level of complexity, importance, difficulty, detail, etc.
As you go about the project, the shape of the fractal structure of information starts to come into focus and you learn where the big mysteries remain, what parts were more easily and quickly resolved than you thought with not much left to mine, etc, and then you reallocate, repeat, refine again, in an iterative process.
When all this starts to mature and stabilize, you will end up with the allocation of human capital in the nooks and crannies of sub-specializations (maybe think of a school in the academy), and the integration of information from specialties, and the learning curve flows from common root to distrinct branches, having a shape that metaphorically resembles the shape of the thing being studied.
That's pretty abstract, but even stated so generally it can go really badly in practice if you spread yourself too thin and are trying to bite off more than you can chew. A typical libertarian / conservative point is that even in ideal circumstances with saints at the helm, a government trying to do too much ends up not being able to do anything well.
I suspect there are areas of mathematical and natural law that are inherently so hard to chew on that no fruitful research program can be organized greater than the idiosyncratic functioning of undirected genius minds working independently with only occasional and voluntary informal exchanges with their contemporary intellectual peers.
This is quite analogous to Hayek's argument about the impossibility for a centralized structure like this to even discover / generate the information which would direct it efforts to maximum effect (which is itself barely knowable / discoverable). It seems to me that his argument and its corollaries generalize to several important areas not directly associated with economics. The first which came to my mind is American-style mission command in the military vs strict top-down planning characteristic of some other notable military establishments. The information discovered and generated here pertains to military opportunities, needs and requirements. The second is, for want of a better word, Rolodex trading: discovery and trade in information about which people exist, what they are worth and what for, relationships and so on. Rolodex trading becomes important in communities that are very much super-Dunbar. People who deal in people information are analogous to merchants of the ancient world and they, too, tend to be feared and resented for very similar reasons. R&D appears to be another such area. Hayek compares these extended orders / information discovery processes to biological evolution, which from the POV of living things is of course an incomprehensible extended order and which discovers and generates information. If this is more than a surface similarity, as seems likely, then observations of evolution of biological communities coming i.a. from paleontology (such as community construction-destruction cycles driven by adaptation and specialization) should provide insight into human extended orders.
ETA: One objection to considering these other extended orders as analogous to the economic extended order described by Hayek is that it is not easy to see what (if anything) plays the role of exchange medium (money), so critical in the modern economy, in mission command, Rolodex trading or R&D. However, trade in goods has functioned for thousands of years without a defined exchange medium.
Noah is simply wrong. There is nothing sustainable about low IQ immigration. It doesn't make the country a better place. "Backlash" is simply people noticing this and trying to stop it.
Noah can't comprehend that "backlash" is a factually correct evaluation of immigrations effect on the country, so all he can think of is "how do I bamboozle these rubes to get what I want anyway."
In addition to his HBD denial, this likely relates to his being a leftist and seeing increased immigration as a way to increase leftist power (not that he would admit it, but its what will most likely happen by default).
I don't know who writes the Facebook posts announcing the protests, but there most certainly are plenty of Muslims turning up - and recent immigrants or their children of all stripes, not to mention the BLM crew. We have seen the pictures! Sure, you've got your rabid white lady preschool teachers and gov. and university employees; but a substantial chunk - most? - of the Jewish left which comprises the backbone of the left - is obviously sitting this one out. His math doesn't work. He's being weaselly here, when he needn't be. He should be happy at the changing of the guard to his preferred classes.
They never want to admit when the thing they want - is working.
He is not simply wrong, he's complicated partisan Dem anti-Trump wrong. His emotions say 'Trump is against illegals, Orange man bad, immigration is good', but he's smart enough to see that massive illegal immigration is both unpopular and leading to cultural problems. He doesn't allow himself to see that the problems are because of the immigration, because the big thing for him is that being against illegals, like Trump is, is popular.
"we are in one of our anti-immigration moments right now, and the political impact could potentially be huge — the return of Trump, and all of the institutional chaos that will inevitably entail."
Like most who suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Trump, he can't help but include something bad about Trump. Trump's return - 'institutional chaos".
Illegals, and choas, and Trump - oh my! What could be worse???
Smith is an immigration enthusiast, in keeping with his Leftist human universalism, and wants to see "sustainable" immigration that won't cause a backlash, sustainable presumably meaning as much as possible. Some modest amount of immigration of talented people who are not unassimilable, can be of benefit, but this must be weighed against the harms to other countries of having such people stripped away from where they may be most needed. Mass immigration that leads to enclaves of culturally alien and hostile populations is disastrous.
He's patently false, though. He treats the desires of one group - to come here and reap material gains, or capture our threatened songbirds to export back home for their singing competitions - as manifestly reasonable; and the desires of the other - those hoping to preserve something of their own culture, material and otherwise - as operating out of pure emotion.
I’m also curious how the reciprocal of Conway’s Law applies to religious doctrines. For example, take any one religious doctrine - New Testament, Old Testament, Quran, Book of Mormon, etc. - give it to a group of people, including kids, have them discuss it every week. What will you end up with?
Dogmatic doctrines beget dogmatic communities.
Violent doctrines beget violent communities.
Open inquiry and open discourse beget? Who wants to find out?
“If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life! Whoever will not carry the cross that is given to them when they follow me cannot be my follower."
"Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
My niece managed to faithfully attend the usual suburban South girls' weekly Bible study without feeling the need to give away her $400 shoes or her $7 smoothies.
Which puts her, as far as I can tell, squarely in the mainstream where receiving Christian dogma is concerned.
But zealotry she has none, so that's cool.
I believe that the word “perfect” meant what is meant by “complete” in modern English. This was in the context of someone asking how to literally start traveling around with Jesus. So Jesus was saying “if you want to do what I am doing, this is how.” That is, you have to go all in. He wasn’t recommending that everyone live as an itinerant holy man does. At the same time, there’s a deeper meaning to his words, which I take as meaning that your commitment to a life in Christ has to be primary. But at that level, the manner that you exercise that commitment is not the same as the manner you would exercise it if you literally started following Jesus around. Or so it seems to me.
"But at that level, the manner that you exercise that commitment is not the same as the manner you would exercise it if you literally started following Jesus around."
Much daylight there, then.
She must live in a country where freedom of religion is valued and in a home where inquiry, introspection and dialogue are nurtured.
No, no - she does not.
I wonder how rare she is then. How well do we stand up to dogma and what are the causal factor?
Hers was an ordinary broken-household, with no inquiry of any kind, intellectual or more mundane, though a healthy interest in the doings of other people in the rather wide social circle. Pretty normal, though not without its measure of suffering - and a constant living-beyond-one's-means, which doesn't seem to have registered with her.
As far as country, she lives in a country where freedom of religion has been easy to practice because the adherents of the Gospel pick and choose a bit, rendering their religion wholly compatible with runaway materialism. Indeed, materialism is become kind of another virtue along with the big three. If there should be anyone who remembers Jesus' words on the subject, they would likely be met - after much inquiry, no doubt - with something along the lines of: "Aw - he don't mean it!"
She believes, I think - there is no reason not to - and the social framework it provides her is not to be scoffed at.
I am certainly not singling her out except that your mention of "weekly" and "kids" prompted the thought.
No scoffing here.
Sustainable, yes, but focused on economic growth/pc income maximization, political "sustainability" being a constraint, not the variable optimized.
Conway's Law implies that very large conglomerates with diverse product lines will tend to make products that are duplicative and work poorly together due to the difficulty of preventing middle-management careerism and internal rivalries at that scale. At Google this was proverbially true of, for example, our payments and chat app efforts, and was known as "shipping the org chart".
One additional wrinkle is that for any organization there is the de jure, formal, official, explicit, published org chart with its neatly described hierarchy of rank and influence and the roles, responsibilities, and authorities of each position, and how they integrate into the process by which decisions are made.
And then there is the Real org chart, the de facto way thinks actually work in the organization.
The deviation between the Real and Fake can be small or large, and can also be something the org leadership things untreatable and tries to minimize on the one hand, or a false illusion the leadership knowingly perpetuates and tries in practice to expand even further, on the other.
In USG the deviation is huge and intentional, so doing Conway-correspondence analysis from afar by using the original charts is fraught with peril.
CS Lewis's Inner Ring?
Inner circles are just the tip of the iceberg.
The broader phenomenon is that texts purporting to prescribe or describe how human org processes work are in fact very poor at doing so absent the rare and special circumstance of effective, zealous enforcement. This is not necessarily a bad thing! Some text rules are inherently unreasonably hard to follow in furtherance of the intent without engaging in some reasonable but not technically authorized flexibilities. The question is always what one can get away with in terms of anyone leveraging the text to push back.
There is also the corporate soap opera social dramas of cliques, alliances, rivalries, favor debts, who is sleeping with whom, who knows where the bodies are buried and needs to be paid off to keep quiet or take one for the team, who will get you a spot on the board down the line, and on and on.
But there is also the way one naively imagines that people in no way near the center of power "do what they are ordered to do, because otherwise there would be swift and severe consequences" but on close inspection they often don't, and then, nothing much seems to happen, at least, overtly. There are several meta levels of passive resistance and passively-resistant counter-passive resistance and so on.
Great insight. Perhaps Silicon Valley's move fast and break stuff motto is the only way to get anything done in a climate of overdeveloped administration, whatever one might think of the results.
I can't help but point out, re Khan on Khan, that millions of people share his surname. I know (I guess) this doesn't mean anything - but maybe it means a little something? Far fewer bear the surname King.
Google names that mean king. Razib's Y haplogroup is of Steppe origin R1a-Z93. He is very explicit about this and that it is likely Scythian in origin and not Mongol. At some point his family attained the aristocratic title of chief or ruler, Khan. If there are fewer variants for king in that part of the world it is probably a testament to and function of the Mongols vast reach.
Sorry, I meant "King" the actual name, in the West.
An Indian neighbor I had once told me her family name, which I've forgotten, arose in the diaspora because if you've moved across an ocean, why not call yourself "king".
I’m curious about the reciprocal nature of Conway’s Law. That is, if you take a piece of software and give it to a group of people to reverse engineer, will they form a communication structure that mimics the structure of the software?
And does Conway’s Law apply to AI?
And what about the reciprocal nature of Conway’s Law applied to AI?
The reciprocal works like this. Let's say you are head of a research program to study some phenomenon, maybe one only recently accessible via some new instrument. You start by allocating your people and resources in a kind of rough and clumsy way by your best guesses about the level of complexity, importance, difficulty, detail, etc.
As you go about the project, the shape of the fractal structure of information starts to come into focus and you learn where the big mysteries remain, what parts were more easily and quickly resolved than you thought with not much left to mine, etc, and then you reallocate, repeat, refine again, in an iterative process.
When all this starts to mature and stabilize, you will end up with the allocation of human capital in the nooks and crannies of sub-specializations (maybe think of a school in the academy), and the integration of information from specialties, and the learning curve flows from common root to distrinct branches, having a shape that metaphorically resembles the shape of the thing being studied.
Which should give us optimism that if the thing being studied is good, the organization studying will develop a good order too.
I was thinking more in line with elementary school curriculum aimed at teaching kids the value of freedom, respect, entrepreneurship, hard work, etc.
That's pretty abstract, but even stated so generally it can go really badly in practice if you spread yourself too thin and are trying to bite off more than you can chew. A typical libertarian / conservative point is that even in ideal circumstances with saints at the helm, a government trying to do too much ends up not being able to do anything well.
I suspect there are areas of mathematical and natural law that are inherently so hard to chew on that no fruitful research program can be organized greater than the idiosyncratic functioning of undirected genius minds working independently with only occasional and voluntary informal exchanges with their contemporary intellectual peers.
This is quite analogous to Hayek's argument about the impossibility for a centralized structure like this to even discover / generate the information which would direct it efforts to maximum effect (which is itself barely knowable / discoverable). It seems to me that his argument and its corollaries generalize to several important areas not directly associated with economics. The first which came to my mind is American-style mission command in the military vs strict top-down planning characteristic of some other notable military establishments. The information discovered and generated here pertains to military opportunities, needs and requirements. The second is, for want of a better word, Rolodex trading: discovery and trade in information about which people exist, what they are worth and what for, relationships and so on. Rolodex trading becomes important in communities that are very much super-Dunbar. People who deal in people information are analogous to merchants of the ancient world and they, too, tend to be feared and resented for very similar reasons. R&D appears to be another such area. Hayek compares these extended orders / information discovery processes to biological evolution, which from the POV of living things is of course an incomprehensible extended order and which discovers and generates information. If this is more than a surface similarity, as seems likely, then observations of evolution of biological communities coming i.a. from paleontology (such as community construction-destruction cycles driven by adaptation and specialization) should provide insight into human extended orders.
ETA: One objection to considering these other extended orders as analogous to the economic extended order described by Hayek is that it is not easy to see what (if anything) plays the role of exchange medium (money), so critical in the modern economy, in mission command, Rolodex trading or R&D. However, trade in goods has functioned for thousands of years without a defined exchange medium.