Evidently, even HN could only keep up the pretense that tech development is amoral and apolitical for so long.

And you appear to believe this is a pretext for humans to ignore their own laws and commit atrocities, when they could choose otherwise.

It may be reality that jungle law is currently how humans almost always handle conflict at nation-state scale. Non sequitur that it should remain so.

The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.

Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?

Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.

The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility.

You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…

When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.

It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.

Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.

Seems much more straightforward than faffing about with unrealised gains.

Remote: preferred; hybrid okay

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: C#, Python, SQL flavours, GCP + BigQuery, ASP.NET MVC, bash/zsh, HTML/CSS/JS.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bring-data

email: elliot.grinstead@protonmail.com ………………………………………………………………………………… Data scientist, consultant, and researcher. 6 years turning data into knowledge, and knowledge into commercial automations - or plain old profitable decisions for key stakeholders - at startup, SME, and entreprise scale. Anglo-French bilingual with econ/finance & stats background. Empathic listenership user, in stakeholder requirement elicitation as in junior mentorship. Enjoy public speaking to diverse audiences of different sizes, and levels of technical understanding. Proactive approach to personal and team skill development that balances present OKRs with long-term success goals. …………………………………………………………………………………

For me, this explains why some compulsively managerial types are incredibly averse to conceptual abstraction in conversation: it comes off as a bamboozlement attempt!

Alice: “I need you to do X.” Bob: “OK, I’ll do X.”

Not much negotiating, but Bob has aligned to Alice’s request.

More subtle:

Carla: “Do you think we should do X or Y?” Danny: “I’m leaning X but Y might have the following benefits…” Carla: “I’m leaning Y for those exact reasons. Why do you think X?”

And so on, until alignment is reached. Hope this helps!