This is a good example of a positive, necessary conversation that was almost thwarted by an engagement-optimized article. It only happened (three quarters of the way down the HN comment section) because a few users were mature enough to not take the bait and actually discuss the issues at hand. Good stuff from both you and the parent poster.
Thanks for your kind words! I do think there are valid criticisms in the article, even if the overall framing isn’t productive.
While the tone and framing may make it especially good at attracting responses, I do want to clarify that I don’t think it was deliberately optimized for the engagement.
I think people get hung up on wanting to collapse developer productivity into a single dimension, usually for stack-ranking purposes. This, I think, is always going to punish good engineers and reward bad ones to some degree.
Measuring developer productivity should, in my opinion, have one dimension for speed, one for quality, and one for user impact. LOC can be fine as a measurement for speed, you just don’t want to look at it in isolation. You would want to also measure, for example, escape rate and usage for the features the developer worked on, and be willing to change or refine these if circumstances require it.
You also need to look for different profiles based on the developer’s level of seniority. A senior dev probably shouldn’t be writing as much code as a contributor, but their user impact should be high, and escape rate low. Analyzing differences between teams is important, as well. A team that has a lot of escapes or little user impact probably has issues that need management attention, and may not have anything at all to do with individual developer productivity or ability.
In brief, the numbers are there to help you make better management decisions, not to relieve you of having to make them.
While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).
I think the parent posters are misstating an argument made by Kaplan[0]. Kaplan argues that religious persecutions accelerated from 1550 onwards. He nowhere argues that the medieval European society was proto-liberal or wasn’t intensely allergic to heresy.
There was no liberal freedom or value of toleration as we understand it prior to the resolution of the wars of religion. There was, however, a variegated patchwork of ad hoc arrangements based on custom, convenience, common interest, charity, forbearance (notably NOT liberal freedom or toleration) that allowed people with different religious beliefs, practices, and levels of commitment to live together in relative peace over long periods of time.
He also gives material evidence of how the reformation, counter-reformation, wars of religion, and the emergent nation state systematically destroyed these intricate arrangements.
This is a totally fair perspective and I have no qualms with it, beyond an asterisk that the seeds that matured with the Reformation and its aftermath were planted during the Gregorian Reforms.
Horkheimer and Habermas, especially their later stuff, are actually pretty great and I think a lot of conservatives (especially religious types) could actually get into it. I wish the New Left had gone with that side of the Frankfurt school rather than the Reich/Marcuse side. Things might not be so divided right now.
It’s true that slavery was practiced by many civilizations throughout history, and it continues today. I’m also not a fan of the contemporary, “critical” approach, or at least the way it has unfolded in mainstream public life in the US (happy to elaborate as to why). That said, chattel slavery as it existed in the US really was exceptionally bad for a lot of reasons.
(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.
(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves.
The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.
(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.
This is not actually held together that well, sadly.
Your first point, I suspect, is almost certainly not true. The concepts of racial or familial lineage with divine connotations is pretty old. The entire "divine right of kings" and related hierarchies have long been there. I /think/ you are trying to say that it was a scientifically supported hierarchy and it was bad for that reason. I think that is defendable?
Not clear what point 2 has to do with US slavery? Similar existed in the Barbary area, where it was just a different religion being preferenced.
Your third point is the most amusing of them to hold against slavery as it existed in the US, though. Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. With the majority of those enslaved not going to north america...
I think I said this in another thread, but worth repeating. There is nothing at all "well actually" in what I'm saying. Slavery is bad. Period. I wish people didn't plaster over how bad it was elsewhere in a rush to attack the US, though.
I don’t think you’re defending slavery and I think the US is a good country. I dislike the contemporary progressive account of history. It’s the same genre of justificatory political manga as the Whig history it seeks to upend.
That said, I stand by every word of my argument.
I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic
to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).
When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.
As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.
So, yeah, my read is you are basically arguing that it was the first time "science" was used to try and justify slavery. I meant my "defensible" statement to be that I think that argument is defensible. But, largely because the scientific revolution was so recent. Before that, it was divinity that set up hierarchies of people. It was still based on "blood and soil," all told, though? In fact, I largely view that as trying to use the new tool of "science" to justify what the old system had setup? (Again, I think this argument has legs, so I'm not trying to completely "debunk" it.)
I'm far too removed from any time in my life where I was reading history documents, but the christianity slant is still odd to me. Specifically, I remember reading back in the day that some anti-slavery groups were instrumental in converting slaves to christianity in an effort to undermine it. That, in turn, was itself coopted, such that it was not necessarily a success. (And I'll throw in the caveat that I didn't find history that engaging.)
My gripe on the "nowhere else had hereditary slavery" is that this is complicated. Firstly, many places basically ended bloodlines of their slaves. Castration and executions were the norm. So, hard to see that this is really a comparison that you'd want to stake a "which is worse" debate on. They are both abhorrently evil. (And, not shockingly, serfdom has its own curve ball to this debate. That was hereditary and while slavery has obviously worse aspects, I don't understand why people seem to think serfdom was mostly fine.)
Bringing it fully to this general topic. The slave narratives being a US literary thing is largely because that is allowed in the US. Do I think the US should get a pass and kudos for amplifying voices of people that they used to enslave? Complicated question.
Well, sorta complicated. I can firmly say "get a pass and kudos" should be dismissed as a silly statement. But, it is frustrating that places that almost certainly did worse things heavily censor their histories. This isn't even really debated. But, because people hear the US criticisms and the others are largely silenced, so many people take the view that there are only US criticisms.
Edit: Meant to say thanks for the opening. I know this is a topic that is prone to yelling way too easily. I'd also be interested in reading any texts you recommend reading.
I really think most of the education debate in elides the central issue, which is that there is no coherent vision of what education is for. We’re going to keep changing things with no progress until that’s settled.
To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.
Inceldom, along with most of the recent rise in extremism, is a negative, damaging manifestation of a complex process of social disintegration that is quite real. One can acknowledge the it without approving of its consequences.
That’s one way to interpret the post. Another is that there used to be substantial permeability between high and low culture, and now there isn’t. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to suggest that least part of this divide originated in a misguided retreat on the part of high culture from the hoi-polloi.
I’m no expert, but iconoclasm is a pretty common trope in western music, and it tends to come with some amount of disdain for audiences.
Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards.
In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow.
Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal.
I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.
The "you are all awesome" or "say hello to new york" or "hands up all my people" are waaay more common. Actual real world artists go out of their way to please paying audience to the max.
Stravinsky should probably be the start of your argument, and someone like Cage/Reich as your midpoint and Glass as your populist revisionism endgame/full circle. Gould on Igor Stravinsky, followed by Bernstein/Gershwin/Copeland, if you want to get deeper into the new world bastardisation of the genre.
"only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games"
You mean the two dominant forms of funded and marketed media in the contemporary age? What argument are you tryin to make exactly?
"jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point"
I mean there's so much to unpack and address there it's hard to even know where to start - so I'll talk about my own direct experience in the European Domestic market. Jazz accounts for about 1% of streamed music (about the same for Classical) but accounts for closer to 5% of ticketed live music in Ireland and the UK.
There's also a huge cross-pollination in the UK Jazz/Hip-Hop scene - with particular emphasis on Grammy award winner Venna and his collaborations with the likes of Knucks etc... The South London jazz scene is also similarly dominated by the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Kamaal Williams, who do a huge amount of collaborations and released the seminal 'Black Focus' album, as well as featuring on cultural touchpoints like Boiler Room etc...
London Jazz Festival pulls in 100,000 people alone annually.
2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracted over 100,000 visitors in a Metro area of 300,000.
Yeah, as I said I’m not an expert, but I did choose Wagner instead of Stravinsky to be provocative ;). It’s an important point, often missed, that the decline of classical music from public relevance to background music begins in the excesses of Romanticism. Wagner really did think his audiences and most of his composer contemporaries were a bunch of drooling morons. While he is now considered “canonical, but a bit of a Nazi,” in his time much of his music was received as the insult he intended. Stravinsky was more good-natured, had his whole neo-classical thing (which is very underrated imho), and really, I think, just wanted to establish his independence from Rimsky-Korsakov.
As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).
