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It seems like maybe abstraction runs contrary to the concept of not being shitty, because while abstraction is meant to neutrally essentialize people, as often

It seems like maybe abstraction runs contrary to the concept of not being shitty, because while abstraction is meant to neutrally essentialize people, as often as not, the abstraction process is used to identify aberrations for individual treatment, rather than to streamline creating individual treatments for all. Put another way, we typically tend to sort first for assholes, then maybe sort for other things later.

patcon 3y ago
Ah interesting. I guess when I think of abstraction, I think of a boundary over which complexity is reduced, and therefore information is lost. My more personal sense is that a ton of human misery comes from poorly chosen abstraction. Or abstraction where there should be none. The idea of "the tyranny of the database" was where I first encountered this: > At a higher, more semantic level, a subtle distortion in how we perceive reality took hold: things that were hard to represent in databases became alternately devalued and fetishized. [...] Once in awhile a technical counter-current would take hold and try to push back on the tyranny of the database, but the general trend held firm: if it does not fit in the database, it does not exist. > You may not think you know this world of databases, but you live in it. [...] Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-article-youre-going-to-understand-blockchains-in-general-and-ethereum-a-next-e11df6a1d7cf#:~:text=At%20a%20higher,as%20punched%20cards https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-....
mym1990 3y ago
Or: people who are hiring their future co-workers sort for people who will not make their life hell(or their co-workers life hell), and then evaluate for actual expertise.

patcon 3y ago

Ah interesting. I guess when I think of abstraction, I think of a boundary over which complexity is reduced, and therefore information is lost. My more personal sense is that a ton of human misery comes from poorly chosen abstraction. Or abstraction where there should be none. The idea of "the tyranny of the database" was where I first encountered this: > At a higher, more semantic level, a subtle distortion in how we perceive reality took hold: things that were hard to represent in databases became alternately devalued and fetishized. [...] Once in awhile a technical counter-current would take hold and try to push back on the tyranny of the database, but the general trend held firm: if it does not fit in the database, it does not exist. > You may not think you know this world of databases, but you live in it. [...] Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-article-youre-going-to-understand-blockchains-in-general-and-ethereum-a-next-e11df6a1d7cf#:~:text=At%20a%20higher,as%20punched%20cards https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-....

mym1990 3y ago

Or: people who are hiring their future co-workers sort for people who will not make their life hell(or their co-workers life hell), and then evaluate for actual expertise.