Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2024

The ongoing encrapification of the internet – “When I hear the phrase ‘web platform’ I reach for my gun”

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia used to be a techno-optimist, eagerly looking forward to ever-improving online experiences. He, like so many of us, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that those hopes are fading out of sight:

I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world — and have some fun along the way.

When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.

But look at me now. When I hear the phrase “web platform” I reach for my gun.

Where did it go wrong? Did I just get old and embittered? Or did something change in the tech world?

Let me share a story that might help us decide.

What kind of business spends hundreds of billions over 10 years — just to get worse?

This is a story about the birth of the search engine.

There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web”. Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list — and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.

They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations”, Yang later explained.

But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly — but nobody bothered to pick it up.

Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?

Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.

Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.

But it was a community and had millions of users.

That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms — they formed online communities.

It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game — although early investors hated it.

Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo”. Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo”.

Investors always hate those kinds of things.

But a new web business, back then, was expected to have a silly name. Here are some of the websites launched in the mid-1990s.

Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.

Troubled by Rob Henderson

Filed under: Books, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Stephanos Bibas reviews Rob Henderson’s autobiography Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class for the University of Chicago Law Review:

Life at the bottom is troubled. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and many others have long shown us that. To understand criminal justice, education, and family law, we lawyers typically look to social scientists, and their external expertise does teach us much. But we often neglect lived experience. Occasionally, we should toggle from the dry regressions and clinical detachment of social science to the internal perspective and expertise of those who live through family breakup, foster care, disrupted schooling, drugs, and crime. And that is what Rob Henderson’s breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us: a window on troubled youth.1

Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he managed to make his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. His eye is as keen as his intellect, recalling and reporting how adults in his life kept abandoning him and his fellow foster children and how they in turn acted out. As an outsider to the elites who dominate the Ivies, he also turns his critical eye on the groupthink and victimhood culture that is strongest among the most privileged. And building on literary historian Paul Fussell’s work, Henderson develops his own critique of the shibboleths that educated American elites use to set themselves—ourselves—apart while ignoring the harm to the rest of society.2

Henderson has much to teach us lawyers and legal scholars. He shows us how much we miss by focusing public policy on educational attainment and cost-benefit analysis, overlooking what is priceless: love and emotional attachment. The most important things in life can’t be quantified; at best, outcomes are mere proxies for them. We are more than our résumés! His account undermines our persistent habit of viewing humans as fully informed rational actors — a habit that makes much more sense in corporate law than in criminal law and the like. He showcases how poorly used adult autonomy harms children, leading to broken homes, drug addiction, numbness, and rage.

Lastly, Henderson critiques “luxury beliefs”, the term he coins for sociological opinions that are popular only among those who need not worry about their own survival. These beliefs are status signals to the educated elite who are not harmed by the fallout from any cultural shifts they might cause. But these beliefs corrode the social structures that children need to develop. (He could do more to develop the causal nexus to social harm, but his claims are still powerful.)

In short, Henderson’s memoir powerfully challenges prevalent views of education, family policy, and class. It shows how we hyperfocus on educational outcomes and other quantifiable goals at the expense of softer emotional goods. And it does it all in a plainspoken, understated voice that illustrates his points from his own lived experience and that of his buddies. Many will disagree with Henderson’s conclusions, of course, but scholars should grapple with his challenge.

Part I of this Review summarizes Henderson’s long journey from foster care to Yale. Part II canvasses his argument that adult instability breeds chaotic childhoods, leaving neglected kids to raise themselves in Hobbesian competition, impulsive indulgence, or reckless rage. Part III then develops Henderson’s signature concept of luxury beliefs and how nonjudgmentalism backfires on those at the bottom. Though one can quibble with some of his causal claims, his thrust is compelling. Finally, Part IV considers how Henderson’s account suggests reorienting some criminal justice, education, and family law reforms toward children’s need for stable structures to guide them.

    1. Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (forthcoming 2024) (on file with publisher). All further citations to this work are by page number in parentheticals in the text.

    2. See generally Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983).

It’s not lying lying

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Homewood on how Brits are propagandized through slanted reporting on the weather (which has always been a topic of interest in the British Isles):

Storm Gerrit arrived the day after Boxing Day, accompanied by the usual headlines: “85mph gales barrelled down on Britain”, screamed the Daily Mail.

As usual the public were being deliberately deceived. The 85mph claim was based on one site in North East Scotland, at the top of a 400ft cliff overlooking the North Sea, marked in red below.

Inverbervie, Kincardineshire

A few miles away at sea level average wind speeds never got above 30mph. The Met Office never reports any of this, preferring to publish its favourite sites on clifftops or halfway up mountains.

It was the same story a week later, when another system of low pressure came along to be given yet another silly name, “Henk”.

“94mph winds pummel the UK”, shrieked the Mirror. This time the wind speeds were measured on the Met Office’s go-to weather station, the Needles, off the Isle of Wight. As this column has discussed before, the Needles sit at the end of a long, narrow peninsula, and the station is on top of a 260ft cliff. Winds there are routinely 30mph higher than even exposed sites nearby, such as St Catherine’s Point. Meanwhile average winds inland were typically around 30mph.

It rained as well last week! During the two days of Storm Henk, about an inch fell in parts of southern and central England. There is nothing at all unusual about this amount; it is the sort of thing which happens every year. Because the ground was already saturated, following wet weather last month, there was inevitably some flooding. But, for the most part, this was little more than flooded fields, overflowing river banks and localised flooding. Again, normal scenes in England. And as Patrick Benham-Crosswell pointed out in TCW this week, many houses built on flood plains were once again flooded. There was certainly none of the major river flooding which has hit the country many times in the past.

According to the Environment Agency, about 2,000 properties were flooded, a tragedy for everybody involved. But in overall terms, this is a tiny number. For instance, 55,000 were flooded in 2007.

Inevitably, the media jumped to blame it all on climate change. According to ITV: “Henk is the eighth named storm to have hit the country this winter and the pattern is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change. ‘This is climate change and the impacts we are seeing,’ the Environment Agency’s Tom Paget added. ‘We are seeing these increasingly wet and blustery winters. We are seeing storm upon storm which is exacerbating the issues’.”

Claims like this explain why the Met Office decided to start giving every low-pressure system a silly name back in 2015. But as it admitted in its State of the UK Climate last year, storms used to be much stronger:

    The most recent two decades have seen fewer occurrences of max gust speeds above these thresholds [40, 50, 60 kts] than during the previous decades, particularly comparing the period before and after 2000.

    This earlier period [before 2000] also included among the most severe storms experienced in the UK in the observational records including the “Burns Day Storm” of 25 January 1990, the “Boxing Day Storm” of 26 December 1998 and the “Great Storm” of 16 October 1987. Storm Eunice in 2022 was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.

Nor is there any evidence that December or the autumn last year were unusually wet.

We look like getting a few weeks of cold, dry weather from now on – so expect drought warnings soon!

History RE-Summarized: The Byzantine Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Sept 2023

The Byzantines (Blue’s Version) – a project that took an almost unfathomable amount of work and a catastrophic 120+ individual maps. I couldn’t be happier.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
“Byzantium” I, II, and III by John Julius Norwich, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome by Anthony Kaldellis, The Alexiad by Anna Komnene, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel, Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. I also have a degree in classical civilization.

Additionally, the most august of thanks to our the members of our discord community who kindly assisted me with so much fantastic supplemental information for the scripting and revision process: Jonny, Catia, and Chehrazad. Thank you for reading my nonsense, providing more details to add to my nonsense, and making this the best nonsense it can be.
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QotD: Brahmins and Mandarins

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Traditional Hindu society knew hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes, but all broadly fit into four major “varna” (“colors”, strata):

  • Brahmins (scholars, clerisy)
  • Kshatriya (warriors, rulers)
  • Vaishya (traders, skilled artisans)
  • Shudras (farmers)
  • The un-counted fifth varna are the Dalit (“untouchables”, outcasts in both senses of the word)

Historical edge cases aside, membership in the Brahmin stratum was hereditary, even more so than in the nobility of feudal Europe. At least there, kings might raise a commoner to a knighthood or even the peerage for merit or political expedience: one need not wait for reincarnation into a higher caste.

The Sui dynasty in China, however, took a different route. Seeking both to curb the power of the hereditary nobles and to broaden the available talent pool for administrators, they instituted a system of civil service examinations. With interruptions (e.g. under the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan) and modifications, that system remained in place for thirteen centuries until finally abolished in 1904. Westerners refer to laureates of the Imperial Examinations (from the entry-level shengyuan to the top-level jinshi) by the collective term Mandarins. Ironically, this term comes not from any Chinese dialect but (via Malay and Portuguese) from the Sanskrit word mantri (counselor, minister) — cf. the Latin mandatum (command) and its English cognate “mandate”.

Initially, the exams were limited to the scholar and yeoman farmer classes: with time, they were at least in theory opened up to all commoners in the “four occupations” (scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants), with jianmin (those in “base occupations”) still excluded. The process also was ostensibly fair: exams were written, administered at purpose-built examination halls with individual three-walled examination cubicles to eliminate cribbing. Moreover, exam copies were identified by number rather than by name. […]

In practice, the years of study and the costs of hiring tutors for the exam limited this career path to the wealthy. Furthermore, the success rate was very low (between 0.03% and 1%, depending on the source) so one had better have a fallback trade or independent wealth. In some cases, rich families who for some reason were barred from the exams would sponsor a bright student from a poor family. Once the student became a government official, he would owe favors to the sponsor.

Moreover, the subject matter of the exam soon became ossified and tested more for conformity of thought, and ability to memorize text and compose poetry in approved forms, than for any skill actually relevant to practical governance. (Hmm, artists or scholars in a narrow abstruse discipline being touted as authorities on economic or foreign policy: verily, there is nothing new under the sun.)

Nitay Arbel, “Brahmandarins”, According to Hoyt, 2019-10-08.

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