I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with "Carbon Dysphoria".

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with "Carbon Dysphoria".

for me, transitioning has solved the immediate "I fucking hate it when people refer to me as a guy, who I am not" problem, but didn't change much of anything else.

I don't enjoy eating food in the way the rest of this society does it (I just eat the ~same thing every day), I'm aroace, and while there's quite a few books and media I have opinions on, lately I've shied away from the ones that are particularly emotionally provoking: my life has been emotionally provoking enough all on its own, without external stimuli

however, I have never been a fan of existing as 'pure intelligence'. not only is there good evidence that intelligence must be embodied, but also I've always been intensely connected to the material world: I've been more proud of my achievements with computer hardware, electronics, chemistry, machining, and so on more so than I've been proud of my achievements in software (and the latter have mostly served to fuel the former). furthermore, in today's world it is more important than ever that all of us remember that both us and our enemies have blood and bones and flesh, for this flesh is the cornerstone of power.

what I haven't been particularly connected with is my body. to me it's just a tool. food is just fuel; it is better that I like it (so that I actually, you know, eat) but I'm not into it to the extent to which I've seen people be into kink.

and I don't think there's anything so wrong with this that it is indicative of underlying pathology ("dysphoria"). nor do I want to change it. I think the obsession people can have with food is as strange and alienating as the obsession with sex; and as someone who's been coerced into eating food others thought was good, I think the results of it are pretty gross, too.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

I am, however, in unqualified agreement with the core message of "it is probably bad to build spaces where many types of self-expression that are common and important in this society are deemphasized or outright penalized". it is just that there is nothing wrong with not personally valuing these things in first place.

an effective leader, who tech leaders are overwhelmingly are not, would reconcile their own lack of interest in these things with the interest others have by figuring out how to make the two coexist.

[jason@logoff.website]

@whitequark I also wasn’t really sold on this problem being either unique or just especially pronounced in tech.

Many fields are full of people that had an ideal of what they’d be doing when they set out but are surrounded by people who actively devalue this ideal to their faces and encourage conformity and silence and masking.

Maybe software is especially distorted but idk, this can be a problem with work for pay generally, and that observation isn’t exactly new.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@jason I do actually get the impression that people in tech are uniquely susceptible to ending up in cults (speaking as a cult survivor)

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason The impression I get is that that's because tech is infinitely labile and manipulable in ways that other fields simply aren't. The computer does resist, but it doesn't resist in the same way that, say, steel or concrete does. Even the cultiest engineer is fundamentally restrained by physics, and if the cult tells them that, say, low-grade steel is actually fine for a bridge... well, reality will quickly prove otherwise and they *know* that.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason I've seen this argument put forward a lot (as well as its sister argument: that software engineering is inherently less deserving of the name "engineering" than other engineering fields), and I am unconvinced: if you can't meet your 16.6ms timing target, things will stutter and everyone will know, much the same way as if a bridge falls, everyone would know—although with much less injury; and the sister argument has been studied in the field from which I took away the conclusion that no, it's in many ways on the same level, and in some it exceeds other engineering fields in rigor. naturally, I don't mean to imply that SWE is perfect or better than those other fields either.

I do think there is merit to it going in the other direction: people whose minds are already malleable—outcasts, abuse survivors, someone who did a little too much LSD—might find computing and its malleability appealing, in the same way that you tend to select for people with traits similar to yours. this trait, coupled with a general lack of socialization or background that would make you resist getting in a cult, has the predictable outcome of ending up in the first trap you find appealing and then staying there until it becomes unbearable

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason anecdotally, people around me have been joking a lot that I probably went to work on FPGAs because I find it pretty easy to adapt my mind to whatever circumstance I find myself in quickly to the point of seeing it as a technology in its own right

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason (as an aside, I do actually think that there is one thing where SWE is uniquely bad, and that's layman expectations. people expect bridges to stay up and not be rusty the moment you build them. people absolutely do not expect software to be fit for purpose; if anything it's closer to the opposite, people have such low expectations for software that they try to avoid forming mental models of it at all. I'm not sure how this feeds into the overall dynamic but I do think this is clearly bad for the mental health of every party involved.)

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason I think I'd agree with you on the engineering matter: the point of difference I have is that I think that socioculturally, a lot of people writing software/doing tech aren't actually doing engineering. There's a noticeable cultural difference between "software engineer" and "person who writes software" and it's mostly the latter that dictate culture and that are going to be the biggest influence on the cult thing. And for them, they do experience it as labile in a way that

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason I can't quite get my head around. I think what I mean when I say "labile" is that software has failure modes that *look right* or *look compelling* in ways that other engineering fields don't.

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason Also, do tell me to shut up if you need to: I have a terribly bad habit of discussing things well past the point where the discussion ceases to be productive.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason nono I find this quite engaging actually!

[rakslice@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @iris_meredith @jason i do like the idea of cult survivorship as a framing device for interpreting the experience of having left software development (or let's say a certain part of it which was very apparently cult-like even at the time)

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason Oh, good! I'm glad

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason I think this is a good point! I would say that there's a big group of people who write software without being software engineers or "software influencers" (a term I'm going to introduce for the group you're pointing at): namely, all the other disciplines that just happen to need software for something else but which aren't involved, or actively don't care, about SWE culture. I think they're mostly unengaged here, and often surprised at how bad things have become.

I admit, I still feel like software isn't unique in having these failure modes. ASIC development—not sure how familiar are you with it—is chock full of ways to write code that falls apart if you need any kind of reliability but which can be patched together with software just enough to look good enough. (your GPU is probably one of those devices.)

I do think that maybe the combination of "the failure modes are subtle enough and the consequences externalized enough that one can convince oneself these aren't failure modes at all" with "there is zero barrier to entry and you can potentially earn a lot of money by emphasizing short-term gain" is unique, but I would have to think more about historical examples to consider whether this is the case.

this all reminds me somewhat of finance: if you're at the head of Enron, you can spend a lot of time convinced that you're gonna come out on top, until it all comes crashing down, and empirically people like that do tend to convince lots of others to stake their own lives.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@rakslice @iris_meredith @jason my experience of software development today is a guarded kind of existence where I spend a lot of my time making sure I'm not going to delude myself into something that would be convenient to believe. unpleasant but utterly necessary.

(I do want to change how I live my life so that I'm no longer in this position, but exactly what should I work towards is a bit of a mystery to me still...)

[alcinnz@floss.social]

@iris_meredith @whitequark @jason As someone who enjoys reading through all the code which makes our computers function...

I'll agree with you that most of us software devs aren't really doing engineering! The way we try to kid ourselves that our well-paid interior decorating is manly construction work does strike me as very dysphoric!

Heck, this metaphorical construction work tends to be underpaid & undervalued! Like much the labour labeled feminine.

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason I think the "barrier to entry" thing is a highly salient point: my field of study is engineering mathematics, and in that field, by the time you can meaningfully contribute you've spent at least several years absorbing social norms and being socialised by person-to-person contact with other experts in the field. That has its disadvantages, but it also tends to prevent some of the really weird stuff you see in software.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @jason yeah. I thought the combination of layoffs, the current LLM mania, and the (likely) upcoming bubble pop, while obviously tragic for people who have student loans or hoped for a good career, should the more blatant grift and profiteering much less desirable.

this reveals my bias in that I highly favor the kinds of work that involve maintaining something valuable over much longer periods of time than the hype cycle duration

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@iris_meredith @whitequark @jason software as a field is uniquely vulnerable to this type of thinking but webdev and its various offshoots — by far the genre of software most closely aligned with SV culture — are especially even MORE vulnerable to it. web software, particularly web backend software, is exceptionally labile *even for software* in precisely this way: it is one of the easiest places to mask missing a performance target