Paul Bloom (the author if this article) is pretty legendary in the psychology realm. This is not your average run of the mill writer looking to tap into the doomer vibe.
He makes a pretty detailed argument about why loneliness can be a much bigger and more complex problem than its tame name suggests, and the subtle ways in which AI has the potential to exacerbate it.
> Paul Bloom (the author if this article) is pretty legendary in the psychology realm.
Even though the headline caught my attention and agrees with my own intuitions, I was committing the all-too-common HN sin of going through the comments without even having clicked on the article—I am too lazy by default for a full New Yorker article, however much I appreciate their quality.
However, as soon as I saw you mentioned it was written by Paul Bloom, I made a point of reading through it. Thanks!
I don't think I've ever heard of the guy, but I came here to comment that I really loved his style of writing in this article - it seemed really empathetic to all viewpoints of the issue of using AI to cure/prevent loneliness, instead of trying to argue for his viewpoint.
Psych is one of the few fields that is funding replication studies and throwing out concepts that don't pass muster. But because of this research you see headlines about it for psych and conclude the entire field is crap.
People feel hurt and lied to after decades of diligently studying a curriculum who's foundations turned out to be completely fake. Our mental garden must be protected from pests. Some pests even imitate benign bugs like ladybugs, in order to get in.
Imagine if tomorrow, it was announced that atoms and gravity don't exist, the motion of heavenly bodies don't even come close to Newton's laws, and physicists have just been lying so they can live off our tax dollars (but hey, we have a plan to one day start doing real physics experiments! Any day now, you'll see!).
I hope I'm not too dramatic, just felt defensive for some reason. If only there were a real science that could help me understand those feelings. Oh well, gotta keep the aphids out somehow.
There is nothing wrong with being dramatic occasionally! I wish there were a real science to help us understand ourselves more reliably too - but there isn't. But maybe we are slowly entering the enlightenment after the dark ages of psychology?
I think in today's world it is easy to become a cynic, and being a cynic is one way to feel safe. Depending on what your utility function about the world is, being a cynic might actually be the most "rational" approach to life - new things are more likely to fail, and if you always bet that something will fail, or is flawed, or worthless, or a scam, you will be right more often that you will be wrong. In the right circles you might be considered a wholesome, grounded, put together person if you are like that.
But perhaps we could get the best of both worlds? Have a little corner of your garden that is entirely dedicated to experimentation with ideas - keep them there, see how they interact with a sampling of your actual garden, and after you feel confident enough, promote them to the real garden, and let them nudge your life a little. If it turns out for the worse, tear them out and throw them,
I'm thinking of what the replication crisis means for figures like Jean Piaget and Marie Ainsworth. Go take a psych class and they'll be among the first you learn about. None of their stuff replicates. The curriculum I took at community college was mostly fake.
This looks like a reductive view of the field’s broad shifts from psychoanalysis to behaviorism, and again to cognitivism. The impact to practice in the 21st century has been minimal since the latter shift began in the mid-20th and most of the older intellectual vanguard are dead.
This type of pseudo-intellectual skepticism seems typical for HN, but the truth is that the NYC subway is an absolute horror show compared to the subway systems of equally or more corrupt European/Chinese cities.
I am actually baffled that this is even up for debate... Have you seen/smelled the NYC subway? Yes, it's NYC's most used public utility other than perhaps water and electricity, but people use it despite its qualities.
I'm not questioning that NYC's subway is a disaster. Yes, I've spent time in it and have spent time in a few specific European subways and am well aware of the difference.
I'm all for questioning why NYC's subway is worse than London's. I just think that questioning why "cities in Europe and China can afford all this stuff and we (Americans) can’t" is a bad framing: it's so general as to be meaningless and perpetuates misleading stereotypes about both sides of the pond.
The fact at hand is that NYC specifically is a deeply corrupt and extremely filthy city by any standard, European or American.
I wish it were more common for open source licenses to have an attribution clause, like Apache does with its (optional) NOTICE files. When you put years of effort into a work, you deserve credit for it.
Edit: Actually, using a library via a package manager would likely be considered "linking" and not a Derivative Work, so I don't think even Apache's clause would apply in many cases.
The big question is, can we find counterexamples to your model of reality in actual reality. And if we can easily do that, what does your apparent over-confidence about your statement say about you?
To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time.
Great professionals exist. They produce great work that is tough to reproduce. Your "helping" them does not mean they couldn't have done it without you.
Fabrice Bellard is not a counterexample you think he is. He is brilliant, but he doesn't stick around the projects he starts off. Someone has to triage bugs, setup CI, tag releases, keep the website running and all the other boring stuff.
I have contributed to one of the projects he originally authored, and my mundane contributions along with other volunteers not as brilliant as him have ensured the continued success of the project. I'm with gp: teams ship software, not individuals. Individuals may ship bug-fixes or largish features, but for software in the large, that is the realm of teams.
I've been there & done that: I've been the person that crunches and turns around impossible situations, and I have also spent months cleaning up after a 10x engineer who shipped a feature in "record time" that made the company lots of money but caused countless support calls and bugfixes for months on end until it stabilized. Many so-called 10x aren't, and rely a lot on a supporting cast of regulars to enable their "outstanding" work
My main frustration with the person I was responding to is that a lot of the terms we are arguing about are ill-defined, and yet he's arguing them with a lot of vigor.
There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".
This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.
I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.
I don't mind that it has that many points - I actually really like the work that guy did. What I don't understand is why all the comments are so weird. It's like everyone who had a bad day decided to come here and take it out on this his work.
This isn't preschool where you present your work to the teacher to receive a gold star. This is someone presenting something to "professionals" providing critical feedback. That's always going to be ripe for someone getting their feelings hurt.
Sometimes, it's well deserved feedback that is not pleasant to hear, but if you get bent out of shape as a developer because of it, then you're just going to have a tough life. No developer is perfect. There is always room for improvement. If you think you're perfect and your Show HN is flawless, then please wait while I grab some popcorn.
For this specific example, it's data inadequate type of release. I would say the landing page needs more information, but it's just one page, so the "top portion" definitely needs some work. Great, there's an acceptable display of the various color "charts" that the product actually is intended, but there's no information on what it is, why it works, or why "internet lovers" would be interested.
For instance, the name. I had to internet search to find the meaning of the name to see if maybe that would provide some insight. Nope. That didn't help much at all. Although, I now know a new Japanese word.
This is something that looks to be developed by someone that is passionate about this, but overlooked that not everyone that would view their post as intimately versed in the topic. Let's face it, most devs might as well be colorblind when it comes to the results of their UIs. You can always tell when the devs/coders built the UI vs when a team with actual design skills were involved. Just look at the beginnings of pretty much every single *nix.
I am not sure if you are really young, but you definitely sound like either nothing quite earth-shattering has happened in your life, or maybe some stuff has happened, but you have chosen to be very selective about how you digest it.
Sometimes life hits you like a truck, and you get trapped under that truck for a really long time. Then, once you get flung in the ditch and think you just had the most horrible N months/years of your life, a whole colony of fire ants starts crawling on you and pulling you apart.
So, yeah, sometimes certain actions could be a sign of privilege, sometimes, they could be the tiny thread giving a person a lifeline.
Being able to only optimize for proximity to retirement could be a more "privileged" state to be in, than having 80k in Canada in certain contexts.
