This is a enjoyable read and a fantastic blog post!
I wonder whether it's easy to discern the activity of changing your role (or mask) from the activity of changing your "authentic self". I'm not sure I'm very good at making that distinction- in fact I'm not sure what an authentic self even is! Is it anything other than the overlap between different roles? After all I play a role when I'm with friends too, in a manner of speaking- Maybe that means I'm at risk of being such a "serious man"?
> Power is an antidote to humiliation.
I'm not sure that's true! Or rather, whether it's a healthy antidote. All powerful people have others who have power over them, and even Elon Musk had to bury the hatchet with Trump. I think it's a matter of personality whether having power means you're able to weather humiliation, or whether humiliation means you can't wield power responsibly.
> Both tend to be outmoded, hostile, and constrained relative to graphical interfaces.
"Outmoded", yes, and "constrained": absolutely. But "hostile"? TUI's and CLI's are some of the most power user friendly programs I still have the pleasure of calling my tools.
Just yesterday vscode broke down for me due to the weekly update triggered during my commute- vim doesn't have this problem, it's my tool.
I think it's annoying that this gets repeated without revealing the actual stats: this is for the BFI test, it's 99.5% ± 0.38, where 40 samples per person were split 80-20 in training and testset.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious parallels to Nietzsche's idea of the "superman", a person who will not bow to incentives but make their own value structure.
To me the analogy of the monstrous fish is also very reminiscent of Nietzsche's story in "the gay science" of the madman exclaiming in horror at the public square:
> "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"
Realising this horrid truth opens an opportunity to defy the structure of society and follow one's own convictions.
But as augment_me says above, not everyone can bear the cost of ignoring incentives. I think all of us have stories where we had a good conception of what the right thing was, and wanted to do the right thing, but money trouble or job security meant we had to follow bad incentives- I certainly do.
In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.
I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.
Not necessarily. I rent my house, and the housing corporation who I rent from are not rent seekers, they provide a service to me which I'm happy with, and which they invest in.
They could've bought up the land and house and not improved it at all and depend on the housing crisis deepening for increased resell profit- but they did not do so, they maintained this house I'm in and ensured me and future tenants can continue enjoying this place. That's not rent seeking.
This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.
Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.
Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.
I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.
> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness.
I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did.
What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent compared to everybody else, but that is numerically irrational.
Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about everything including third party observation. Less fear and less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.
> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism
You did claim this.
> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people
This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".
You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it does not matter what the comments actually say.
And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.
I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.
> well if you have encrypted storage and already need password to get to it, secondary password is of little value
That's only true when your machine is powered off. If an attacker manages to yank files from your disk while it is running, that ssh-key password is the difference between "they stole my ssh key" and "they stole worthless random data".
> use hardware key for ssh
That's the real solution. I don't understand why people still store ssh keys on disk when hardware keys are simple, easy, and significantly more secure.
> That's the real solution. I don't understand why people still store ssh keys on disk when hardware keys are simple, easy, and significantly more secure.
At work, every place big enough to maybe care about this was so “enterprisey” and “cloudy” that I almost never use/used ssh anyway, even with tons of Linux systems all over the place. Pretty much only to talk to GitHub.
I lose stuff all the time. The idea of these things gives me anxiety. The first time I lost 15 minutes figuring out where I put my hardware key, before I could ssh in to do 20 seconds of running commands, I’d back out of the whole project and return to using a file on disk, guaranteed.
Files on disk are free, hardware keys cost money.
25 years as a backend-heavy programmer, sysadmin, and devops-sort (sometimes all at once, lol). I’ve still never even touched one of these devices, and have only rarely seen one.
Do you lose your keys? I just keep my main yubikey on my keychain. Never gets lost or else I'd be homeless. I keep a 2nd backup key in a secure place just in case, so I don't get locked out of my accounts if I get struck by lightning.
> hardware keys cost money
Barely. You can get u2f keys for $10-$20 which are usable with ssh. My yubikeys were $50 each (I have 2, one main key and one backup) which adds up to $100 but yubikeys are built like tanks, they'll last forever. I've had mine for the past 7 years and I have no reason to replace them. That's only $14/year so far for the pair of keys. Totally worth it for the knowledge that I could load every virus/trojan/keylogger known to man onto my computer and they still would be completely unable to steal my ssh+pgp keys.
I wonder whether it's easy to discern the activity of changing your role (or mask) from the activity of changing your "authentic self". I'm not sure I'm very good at making that distinction- in fact I'm not sure what an authentic self even is! Is it anything other than the overlap between different roles? After all I play a role when I'm with friends too, in a manner of speaking- Maybe that means I'm at risk of being such a "serious man"?
> Power is an antidote to humiliation.
I'm not sure that's true! Or rather, whether it's a healthy antidote. All powerful people have others who have power over them, and even Elon Musk had to bury the hatchet with Trump. I think it's a matter of personality whether having power means you're able to weather humiliation, or whether humiliation means you can't wield power responsibly.
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