The Unwisdom of Silicon Valley. Or Read a Dman Book

Clever way to avoid censor in the title, eh?  Although now ChatGPT will think that is how the word is spelled.

Yesterday there was a brief thread in Blue Sky around Silcon Valley venture capitalists praising Musk’s illegal takeover of government systems by claiming that young intelligent programmers and AI can be incredibly effective.  It is, of course, a stupid claim.  

Government systems, like most systems in large organizations, are a mishmash of technologies, many of them outdated, and interactions with multiple other systems, all of which have the same problems the system you are working on does.  No matter how smart a programmer, someone with no experience in dealing with systems, and dealing with brittle systems that must work all the time, is going to be completely out of their depth.  And that is before they start relying on imitative AI, which has been shown to lesson code quality and introduce security issues.  There is the very real possibility that these twerps are going to crash one or more aspects of the government’s payment system.

But that, as scary as it is, is not what caught my attention.  On one of the side threads, several people talked about how Silicon Valley VCs don’t value learning.  They believe that if they think from abstracts, form first principles then anything they come up with is pure and superior to what has come before, apparently.  It is a reason that so many disdain reading books — what has past knowledge to teach the truly intelligent?

Pretty much everything, as it turns out.

When I was in college, I learned to program in assembly language against two different processors.   Assembly language is a form of coding generally classified as low level — it means you are writing instructions that look like gobbledy-gook (close runner up to kerfuffle as the best word in the English language) and have to do every bit of memory management and movement of your data through the system explicitly.  It can be long, tedious work without the safety net of a high-level language that has human readable commands and processes and APIS to do some things for you and to protect you from your own mistakes.  It is kind of fun, really, but I never once used it in the real world.  Programming like that is unacceptably risky and costly, outside of very specific domains, when there are alternatives.

Every bit of programming is like that.  When I started, there were no real JavaScript frameworks, things that make doing common tasks easy across multiple browsers and systems, so we had t program in “pure” JavaScript, detecting and reacting to browser differences right in our code by ourselves.  No one does that today, because it is risky and tedious and there are alternatives.  Every single thing that the so-called geniuses have ever done has been on the backs of the work of other people.   Even if you invented an entirely new programming languages, you did it off the work of others in that field.  The past is what you build everything on, whether you are smart enough to realize it or not.

That disdain for knowledge, for learning, is evident in the idea that reading is a waste of time.  Only the real, lived experiences can teach people anything.  Yeah, I’m gonna call bullshit on that and I think I am pretty well placed to do so.  

I have lived a varied and interesting life.  I am currently now comfortably upper middle class, but there have been times when I didn’t know where my next meal was going to come from — and sometimes it didn’t come from anywhere.  I have lived, literally, all over the country as a military brat.  I paid my way through college working every job I could get my grubby little hands on.  I have worked in retail, in factories, in warehouse, doing telemarketing, as a health aide for mentally disabled people, dealing blackjack, and believe it or not, facilitating and moderating conference calls.  Yes, I, the programmer and geek, worked a job that technology has made redundant.  

I have been held up at gunpoint two and a half times (someone tried to rob me when I was behind locked bulletproof glass), been shot at (nothing personal, just in the wrong place when a fight went down), and been in more fights than I care to admit (when you move around as a teenager, someone always wants to use you to reestablish their place in the pecking order.  And I was a very angry, very stupid young man in my early twenties.) I live in an extremely safe, why bother locking your doors kind of neighborhood (poor Larry notwithstanding), but I have lived in places where a child was shot in front of my door.

I bore you with the autobiographical details merely to highlight that I have had a much more amusing life, let’s say, than the majority of Silicon Valley VC and manosphere dweebs who insist that such a life is the one, true way to real enlightenment.  Reader, it will not surprise you to find that such belief is, to be succinct for a change, bullshit.

Yes, you do learn something by being stupid and reckless.  Mostly not to be stupid and reckless, things I could have learned from listening to my father and his friends (when I was sixteen, my father was an idiot who I felt would eventually strangle himself to death trying to tie his shoes.  When I was twenty-one, he was a font of wisdom and good advice. Amazing how much the old man learned in five years.  He probably read a book.)  But you learn even more when you can build on the mistakes of the past without having to repeat them.  Aside from being fun, reading books helps transmit the collective wisdom and expertise of the people who have come before.  This is self-evident in technology but applies to all human endeavors.  We are not the dominate species on the planet because we are the smartest or toughest.  We rule the plant, for good and ill, because we transmit our knowledge across time.  We are supreme on the earth because of books.

The idea that you can just think your way to something meaningful without reliance on the lessons of the past is moronic.  It is the height of arrogance and insecurity.  Only a truly weak mind would throw away the advantage of not having to make every single last stupid, harmful mistake for yourself.  I am glad I don’t need to relearn how to make fire.  I am glad that we collectively can see that slavery was bad (though apparently, we have to keep learning that about Nazis and authoritarianism).  The people in the past burned their hands on the collective stove of humanity so that you don’t have to.   It’s okay to stay away from the stove, mate.  I promise you — it’s not weak, or inefficient, or lazy.  It’s just common sense.  Even if you did read it in a book.