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Related video by Jordan Peterson, on how liberals and conservatives need one another because liberals (high trait openness) innovate, but conservatives (high tr

Related video by Jordan Peterson, on how liberals and conservatives need one another because liberals (high trait openness) innovate, but conservatives (high trait conscientiousness) maintain things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ho5VZp_ps4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ho5VZp_ps4

Upvoter33 9y ago
Generally I would agree. But this past election cycle turned a number of things on its head -- Trump was the "innovator" and HRC clearly the "maintainer". But your point is well taken - it would be so good to get back to two parties, opposed but working together towards a better outcome.
- whytaka 9y ago
  I don't think it's so clear cut that blue is left is liberal and red is right is conservative (or whatever permutation you want). If you asked a retired Evangelical Christian whether HRC was a radical, what with her gay-love and abortions-for-all banner (I kid), I think they'd agree. But of course, they would've spotted that the "left" have signalled a stronger willingness to go in that direction and have cemented their position over the last 8 years under Obama. Does 8 years make you the establishment? And of course Obama had helped push forward a trade policy concocted as early as the Reagan era. Does 30 years make you the establishment? That just touches upon just two surface level ideas that fragment a person's perspective about these candidates and parties. Painting HRC as the maintainer and Trump the liberal is with too broad a brush.
Tenhundfeld 9y ago
Interesting topic, lots of sweeping generalizations being thrown around. Personally, I've found my politics have not changed substantially as I've aged. As a 20 year old, I was liberal, and in my mid-30s with a mortgage and a family, I'm still quite liberal. However, I've found my professional proclivities have changed. I value maintenance and conscientiousness much more than I once did. I think that's due to a few reasons. For one, I've been through a few big rewrites, and inevitably, I've seen them fail or be much harder than anticipated. But also, my focus has shifted from using cool new technologies to delivering value through working software. It's often much less effort to maintain and slowly improve software systems than it is to innovate your way out of a mountain of technical debt. It's hard for businesses to understand this. Often, the expensive "A team" builds new software, while the cheaper "B team" maintains it, but the reality is that in short order, that software will effectively be written by the "B team". Software would last much longer and just function better in general if you kept the "A team" on to maintain, upgrade, refactor, etc. Of course, this isn't totally business's fault, because maintenance is seen as a career killer. So if you try to have the "A team" maintain, many will leave for greener pastures where they get to build new systems in new tools. As an industry, I wish we cared more about the longevity of systems, rather than what new tools are used. We seem to be impressed when we hear someone talk about building a new system in React, Elixir, and Kafka (or whatever's new and shiny at the moment), but nobody wants to hear someone talk about a system they built eight years ago in, say, Java that is still working well, still helping users, still meeting the needs of the business.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Maintenance and green-field development are different skillsets. Green-field development requires that you can envision what doesn't exist and hold it in your head long enough, and precisely enough, to build it. Maintenance requires that you take what already exists and improve it. Green-field development tends to be more intuitive, and it requires the ability to balance many trade-offs and consider many possible solutions in your head. Maintenance programming requires less creativity and to some degree less short-term memory, but more attention to detail, more logical thinking, more communication skills, and more ability to read & make sense of existing code. I've worked in both situations, but I'm better at one than the other. It's very rare to find someone who is excellent at both. You do get the benefit of accumulated domain knowledge when you keep the initial developers on to maintain the system, but oftentimes they don't have the temperament or personality to be happy and successful in that role.
  - Tenhundfeld 9y ago
    So, I think I agree with you, in general, that people can be better suited to green-field or maintenance, both from a skillset and personality perspective. But I also think good, active maintenance can have a lot of creativity and require, as you say, envisioning what doesn't exist. If we're just talking about bug fixes and level-2 support or something, sure, that's mostly about attention to detail, etc. However, maintenance is much more than that, in my experience. Maintenance involves keeping a system up to date and functioning in the face of changing business requirements. So, you have a new customer come onto the system or a department wants to change a business process, and now you need to change the system. What was once a single implementation of some feature now makes more sense as an abstraction with extensibility points. Or maybe just the system has more data than anticipated, and a good developer might realize that instead of putting a bandaid on the Postgres search, it's better to integrate a dedicated search solution like Elastic. The point is that software is never done, as long as it's being used. Drawing a line between development and maintenance is often just an arbitrary distinction.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
pjc50 9y ago
So who are all those people going on about the inherent awfulness of government and how it should be replaced by private businesses?
- draw_down 9y ago
  Conservatives, of course! Oh wait, now we've blown up the whole premise of innovation vs maintenance as regards left vs right. Hmmmmmm.
  - carsongross 9y ago
    There is more meat to the argument than you are giving credit. Peterson has done quite a bit of psychological research on ideological differences and the behavioral manifestations of them. Jonathan Haidt has as well. Both are worth reading and watching. It's interesting stuff and I would recommend approaching it with an open, non-ideological mind as best you can. (Certainly I'm no saint when it comes to leaving my own biases at the door: we are all all too human.)
- carsongross 9y ago
  The new nationalist/globalist split emerging/subsuming the fading conservative/liberal split is shattering this trope. I don't see any particularly ideological reason conservatives (high conscientiousness, border and rules oriented) shouldn't be in favor of plenty of government. And good and hard, at that. I have said before we are entering the era of post-modern politics, where values will invert (e.g. free speech) and maintaining coherent narratives will be increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, I think this means people will cling to whatever stable identity they can ever more tenaciously.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    What's the demarcation of post-modern politics?
    - carsongross 9y ago
r00fus 9y ago
So-called "Conservatives" have been much more "egg-breakers" for the past 30 years - they've gotten more done, and most of that results in a mess (two examples - Reagan: outspent Russia, ballooned national debt/deficit, Bush2: started 2nd Iraq war - we're still paying for it) If you remove politics from your point, I'll rephrase as "we need both maintainers and innovators" but that doesn't get the page-hits, does it?
maxxxxx 9y ago
This may be true for the original meaning of the words but I don't see how today's conservatives are maintainers and today's liberals are innovators. It's probably closer to the opposite.
- carsongross 9y ago
  I am using Peterson's psychological definition of liberal and conservative temperaments, which I think holds regardless of the current manifestations of (and abuses of) the terms. He has theorized that the core political, and in fact philosophical and perhaps even more deeply, religious, battle in the west is between people who think there should be borders (physical, e.g. between nations, conceptual, e.g. between sexes, etc.) and those who do not, which revolves around these two psychological axes. Interesting to think about.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    This makes more sense to me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

Upvoter33 9y ago

Generally I would agree. But this past election cycle turned a number of things on its head -- Trump was the "innovator" and HRC clearly the "maintainer". But your point is well taken - it would be so good to get back to two parties, opposed but working together towards a better outcome.

whytaka 9y ago
I don't think it's so clear cut that blue is left is liberal and red is right is conservative (or whatever permutation you want). If you asked a retired Evangelical Christian whether HRC was a radical, what with her gay-love and abortions-for-all banner (I kid), I think they'd agree. But of course, they would've spotted that the "left" have signalled a stronger willingness to go in that direction and have cemented their position over the last 8 years under Obama. Does 8 years make you the establishment? And of course Obama had helped push forward a trade policy concocted as early as the Reagan era. Does 30 years make you the establishment? That just touches upon just two surface level ideas that fragment a person's perspective about these candidates and parties. Painting HRC as the maintainer and Trump the liberal is with too broad a brush.

Tenhundfeld 9y ago

Interesting topic, lots of sweeping generalizations being thrown around. Personally, I've found my politics have not changed substantially as I've aged. As a 20 year old, I was liberal, and in my mid-30s with a mortgage and a family, I'm still quite liberal. However, I've found my professional proclivities have changed. I value maintenance and conscientiousness much more than I once did. I think that's due to a few reasons. For one, I've been through a few big rewrites, and inevitably, I've seen them fail or be much harder than anticipated. But also, my focus has shifted from using cool new technologies to delivering value through working software. It's often much less effort to maintain and slowly improve software systems than it is to innovate your way out of a mountain of technical debt. It's hard for businesses to understand this. Often, the expensive "A team" builds new software, while the cheaper "B team" maintains it, but the reality is that in short order, that software will effectively be written by the "B team". Software would last much longer and just function better in general if you kept the "A team" on to maintain, upgrade, refactor, etc. Of course, this isn't totally business's fault, because maintenance is seen as a career killer. So if you try to have the "A team" maintain, many will leave for greener pastures where they get to build new systems in new tools. As an industry, I wish we cared more about the longevity of systems, rather than what new tools are used. We seem to be impressed when we hear someone talk about building a new system in React, Elixir, and Kafka (or whatever's new and shiny at the moment), but nobody wants to hear someone talk about a system they built eight years ago in, say, Java that is still working well, still helping users, still meeting the needs of the business.

nostrademons 9y ago
Maintenance and green-field development are different skillsets. Green-field development requires that you can envision what doesn't exist and hold it in your head long enough, and precisely enough, to build it. Maintenance requires that you take what already exists and improve it. Green-field development tends to be more intuitive, and it requires the ability to balance many trade-offs and consider many possible solutions in your head. Maintenance programming requires less creativity and to some degree less short-term memory, but more attention to detail, more logical thinking, more communication skills, and more ability to read & make sense of existing code. I've worked in both situations, but I'm better at one than the other. It's very rare to find someone who is excellent at both. You do get the benefit of accumulated domain knowledge when you keep the initial developers on to maintain the system, but oftentimes they don't have the temperament or personality to be happy and successful in that role.
- Tenhundfeld 9y ago
  So, I think I agree with you, in general, that people can be better suited to green-field or maintenance, both from a skillset and personality perspective. But I also think good, active maintenance can have a lot of creativity and require, as you say, envisioning what doesn't exist. If we're just talking about bug fixes and level-2 support or something, sure, that's mostly about attention to detail, etc. However, maintenance is much more than that, in my experience. Maintenance involves keeping a system up to date and functioning in the face of changing business requirements. So, you have a new customer come onto the system or a department wants to change a business process, and now you need to change the system. What was once a single implementation of some feature now makes more sense as an abstraction with extensibility points. Or maybe just the system has more data than anticipated, and a good developer might realize that instead of putting a bandaid on the Postgres search, it's better to integrate a dedicated search solution like Elastic. The point is that software is never done, as long as it's being used. Drawing a line between development and maintenance is often just an arbitrary distinction.
  - nostrademons 9y ago

pjc50 9y ago

So who are all those people going on about the inherent awfulness of government and how it should be replaced by private businesses?

draw_down 9y ago
Conservatives, of course! Oh wait, now we've blown up the whole premise of innovation vs maintenance as regards left vs right. Hmmmmmm.
- carsongross 9y ago
  There is more meat to the argument than you are giving credit. Peterson has done quite a bit of psychological research on ideological differences and the behavioral manifestations of them. Jonathan Haidt has as well. Both are worth reading and watching. It's interesting stuff and I would recommend approaching it with an open, non-ideological mind as best you can. (Certainly I'm no saint when it comes to leaving my own biases at the door: we are all all too human.)
carsongross 9y ago
The new nationalist/globalist split emerging/subsuming the fading conservative/liberal split is shattering this trope. I don't see any particularly ideological reason conservatives (high conscientiousness, border and rules oriented) shouldn't be in favor of plenty of government. And good and hard, at that. I have said before we are entering the era of post-modern politics, where values will invert (e.g. free speech) and maintaining coherent narratives will be increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, I think this means people will cling to whatever stable identity they can ever more tenaciously.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  What's the demarcation of post-modern politics?
  - carsongross 9y ago

r00fus 9y ago

So-called "Conservatives" have been much more "egg-breakers" for the past 30 years - they've gotten more done, and most of that results in a mess (two examples - Reagan: outspent Russia, ballooned national debt/deficit, Bush2: started 2nd Iraq war - we're still paying for it) If you remove politics from your point, I'll rephrase as "we need both maintainers and innovators" but that doesn't get the page-hits, does it?

maxxxxx 9y ago

This may be true for the original meaning of the words but I don't see how today's conservatives are maintainers and today's liberals are innovators. It's probably closer to the opposite.

carsongross 9y ago
I am using Peterson's psychological definition of liberal and conservative temperaments, which I think holds regardless of the current manifestations of (and abuses of) the terms. He has theorized that the core political, and in fact philosophical and perhaps even more deeply, religious, battle in the west is between people who think there should be borders (physical, e.g. between nations, conceptual, e.g. between sexes, etc.) and those who do not, which revolves around these two psychological axes. Interesting to think about.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  This makes more sense to me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]