> I’m not exactly sure why this happened, but roughly a year ago there was a substantial vibe shift in Silicon Valley which holds that most large technology companies are massively overstaffed.
Many, if not most, tech companies are extremely reluctant to fire engineers for performance reasons until they run into a cash flow issue and have to do layoffs. You’ll find this general consensus across tech forums (e.g., Hackers News). I believe this is the case for a multitude of reasons.
First, engineers are among the most expensive employees to hire and onboard. A lot of resources go into recruiting, including numerous interviews with existing engineers and managers. And many candidates get rejected or reject the company. This adds up to a lot of time and money (guessing high 5 figures) just to hire one engineer.
Further, it can take months for an engineer to get up to speed at an established company due to all of the proprietary tech and knowledge. And engineers grow in value for years as they pick up more tribal knowledge of the firm’s codebase and systems.
Second, engineers on the same team become non-fungible due to working on different projects. We certainly try to minimize this by rotating people on to different projects so that they can gain more tribal knowledge. Yet every team member becomes the canonical expert on different systems since they simply have worked on different projects.
Third, there rarely is any short term value to firing a low performing engineer. Yes, some of us are an actual net negative by worsening the codebase quality or breaking things that require other people’s help to fix. Yet that is rare. More likely is a “quiet quitter” that makes some minimal, yet positive contribution. You’ll find numerous self-reporting on Hacker News of engineers only working 10 hours a week at FAANG firms.
Fourth, engineers have short tenures, commonly jumping to another firm in two years. It’s an open secret that an internal promotion at almost all tech companies is harder than simply getting hired at that higher level at a comparable firm. There’s a lot of debate among engineers about whether that is due to a failure of internal promotion processes or a failure of the hiring processes. And of course the most ambitious and highest performers are jumping firms more frequently.
So in summary, engineers are expensive to hire, possess valuable differential tribal knowledge, are almost always a positive contribution to the team, and constantly leaving anyways. So there’s just no reason to manage out low performers unless the firm runs into cash flow issues.
This matches my own experience reasonably well also, though one thing I would add is that it also burdens a team to onboard a new hire, especially a junior engineer. Would my life be easier if my team added another skilled engineer who understood the system? Yes. But to get to that point, it would be at minimum several months of making my life harder, potentially more, even if they were a great employee.
I endorse this comment, but I think it's also really impossible to understand FAANG hiring practices without understanding hiring as a competitive tool.
FAANG and similar companies spent a decade plus aggressively hiring everyone under the sun and aggressively pushing up engineer comp. Did that make their engineering teams quantum levels better? No, probably not. Marginal improvements. But it did put a lot of pressure on their up-and-coming competitors. The days of being able to find a talented engineer who's willing to take a kind of disappointing salary plus some equity that could be a lot of money but is more likely to be worth zero are pretty far in the past, when Google will give that same engineer a non-disappointing salary plus equity that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year *today*, and a solid bonus on top of that. And during this decade-long period, the FAANG companies were enjoying big revenue growth with fat margins, so that's an environment that favors competition. It's easy to get off the ground in an expanding, attractive market (capital is easy to buy, growth is easy to sustain, and unit economics are easy to make favorable). So it makes sense for the incumbents to spend some of their own attractive economics to put pressure on their competitors.
I actually think what you're describing can be applied to lots of white-collar jobs. Replace "engineer" with "underwriter" or "insurance adjuster" or just "analyst" and I think a lot of the same analysis applies. Reality is in a lot of "white collar" jobs, getting up to speed on all aspects of your position can take 6-12 months. Knowing who to email for different situations. Learning where various documents can be found. Literally, just memorizing the names of the people who you need to interact with (and learning tendencies and personalities).
To a certain degree these aspects also apply to a lot of "blue collar" jobs. If you have been a server for 5 years and you move to a new restaurant. It will take you time to get to know the various quirks about how a restaurant operates, typical type of customers, knowing the cooks names etc. But I think I feel pretty confident in saying "getting up to speed" in most "blue collar" jobs is going to a lot less time than in a lot of "white collar" jobs on the whole. We can have a separate discussion as to which jobs are more stressful (physical vs. mental stress, the stress of being lower paid vs. stress of high demanding clients. etc.). My money is on "blue collar" jobs being much more stressful on the whole than "white collar" jobs. But the job security on the "white collar" side I think has a lot to do with the how long it takes to get up to speed at the job question.
Not saying that any of this is wrong, though perhaps it’s not universal. But Elon explicitly said that the issue is that the ratio of managers to engineers is too high, which seems plausible to me. I’ve worked at organizations where the ratio of people working on the product to people who get to have opinions on the product is like 1:5.
"Team lead" is the language in our org. Somebody who's still doing line-level work, but also onboarding new hires, assigning tasks to direct reports/removing obstacles that are hindering success, and reviewing team work product.
I wonder if this is regional. I'm retired now, but I was an engineering VP at a large networking company on the east coast and we regularly purged the bottom 10-15 percent of engineers even in the best of times.
We'd call it a layoff or reduction in force (RIF), but in reality it was performance based. In fact, if in a given cycle, only 5% of the engineers on a team weren't performing, their manager could ask to have their target number of cuts reduced and the request would often be granted.
Stack ranking is highly disfavored because the incentives make Goodhart’s Law very aggressive.
Every major company that has used it also ended up a tire fire as a result. Most infamously, GE, its progenitor, became a tower of fraud as people scrambled to make the cut.
Stack ranking is also terrible for morale. My personal take on it is that it's a good idea about once every five to ten years -- there can be significant value to a large org in cutting the genuine deadwood to make room for new and more productive headcount, but if you're doing it every year (as MSFT was for a long time) you not only risk turning it into a Goodharting charade but also find yourself in a position where you're almost guaranteed to be cutting muscle along with fat because it was only a year ago that you ostensibly tried to attrit out everyone at the bottom of the stack - which just makes the morale problems even worse!
That's always been my issue with cutting the bottom 10% automatically at the end of each year. At the end of the day, there are only so many employees who are truly bad at their jobs. At a big enough firm, the performance of your employees is extremely likely to follow a "bell curve" like so many other phenomena involving large groups of people. Meaning, it seems likely to me that you can probably identify the very worst performing employees pretty quickly if you do it once. But if you're doing this exercise only 12 months later, it seems very likely you're getting to the point where you're deciding between a whole lot of employees who are likely performing at or around the same "average" level. Meaning deciding upon who is kept and who is fired is likely being done on some pretty arbitrary grounds. Which just creates some pretty terrible incentives to "game the system" as you say.
Once you start fine-slicing you’re heading further into luck and structural questions, like whether someone works on something easily evaluated (or whose evaluations are easy, like just showing up a lot).
I’d forgotten about morale. Eventually you also get a sorting effect where you’re tilting ever more toward people with the over-confidence to believe they’ll always make the cut. That’s not a great result if your firm isn’t struggling with risk-aversion.
My experience with this was that as long as we got the number of cuts right, the result was usually an increase in morale. The key is that after it's done, the engineers left behind should feel like it was justified and even necessary. You can't have too many close calls or even sad story cases or I agree it can hurt morale and also create weird team dynamics.
OTOH, leaving team leaders to deal with marginal workers on their own, those not quite bad enough to terminate for cause but still very troublesome, can cause all manor of morale issues and strange team dynamics.
I think the issue may be just a difference in hiring philosophy. This approach makes sense if you also open yourself up to a higher risk of false positives and then the cuts are generally needed, and you gain the advantage of a less stressful hiring process and more ability to take risk on borderline candidates. Coupled together this is a sensible system.
Yes, I’ve heard about practices like stack ranking at firms like MSFT back in the day, but I get the impression that this is less common now. Contemporary tech is just too incentivized around growth over margins; until recently it has been growth at all costs.
One could argue that the rigorous barriers to internal promotion partially address the issue. We simply have way more info about current employees relative to potential hires. If someone is barely performing at their current level then their manager can at least withhold promotion. Whereas on the hiring side we all gotta make our best guess and aren’t incentivized to correct mistakes.
As an aside, I have gotten to work with an old school tech team when the startup that I was at got reverse acquired by a firm founded in the 60s. (I.e., parent company moved assets and teams to us and then sold everything else—including the parent company’s name—to another firm.) That team had what I’d consider a culture of costs and benefits rather than growth at all costs. They had been through layoffs and recognized the value in managing out low performers to control their costs.
In merging into the eng org, the OGs adopted its tech culture for compatability, although they could certainly joke about some of the absurdities. Yet I imagine they all still have their hard-learned lessons, and it’s not surprising that their top manager eventually became the VP of engineering a few years post-merge. I imagine that eng org is now particularly well positioned as we exit the current tech boom and cost/benefit trade offs matter again.
Not much of a thing, partially because of what Matt Hagy said, but also because MSFT and others figured out with yearly bloodletting, many people were (rightly) solving for the equilibrium. If they were ranked above their peers, they kept their jobs, so there were plenty of instances of sabotage and other Lord of the Flies type stuff.
I can't speak to Matt's situation, but my engineering team isn't big enough to do that. We're at roughly a 6:1 "flatness" from level to level. Firing the bottom 10% of my team every year would be... loud, bloody, and illegal.
I think this is all spot on. Just to add a few more things from my experience.
During the scale stage of startups, especially with the really big funding rounds we've seen over the past few years, there is a lot of pressure to hire really quickly. The hiring is often done without much of a plan or coherent organization design behind it. So you get teams of tons of engineers with very little direction and managers who are over stretched because they just hired too many people without building the organization or leadership necessary to provide direction.
And the famous quote from the Mythical Man Month: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" seems to be true in practice. As others have mentioned, onboarding new people slows down the existing team. It also adds communication overhead, and as the engineering organization grows, complexity increases, and it often increases faster than the inherent complexity of the product due to the disorganization caused by hiring so fast.
You can end up in a kind of mythical man month spiral, where you've added a bunch of new engineers but aren't utilizing them effectively, actually making your product harder to develop. This creates more pressure to hire more, but you're getting diminishing, if not negative returns for each engineer you add due to the increased training and coordination overhead, and poorly organized work adding complexity.
And letting under-performers go is hard. HR teams tend to be fairly risk averse in my experience. Even though California is an at-will state, HR can be very worried about wrongful termination. So you need to have quite extensive documentation of the performance issues. This can be really hard in the context where you're already overly stretching your managers with too fast and poorly thought out hiring.
So it's often a really challenging process to let an under-performer go. The main case where it does happen is when they have a seriously negative impact on team moral due to being very hard to work with or abusive to others. Or they actively break things due to incompetence.
While this is definitely true for startups, I wonder about the degree to which this is true of Twitter --- it hasn't been in startup mode for at least a decade, and hasn't been growing headcount _that_ rapidly either. (Then again, looking at their rate of product change and the size of the company, I've also often wondered exactly what it is all their employees do, so ... *shrug*)
I get it, but this logic is very odd to me. I work for an old-school industrial company that’s quite sclerotic but always trying to get with the times. But the idea that more headcount=growth=good is strange and backwards to me. If business is good, and we have more work to do, we have to hire more people- usually reluctantly. But the demand comes first- specific projects that don’t have enough people to accomplish them. Though when we work on govt-funded projects, things can get upside down and we staff up to match a budget then scope the work from there. Is the problem that these tech companies are over-valuated, and have more money than they know what to productively do with?
Makes some sense- still seems like you'd develop a slate of product ideas with the top-notch talent you already have, then go hire programmers to execute on those ideas?
As someone in big tech, who is in a non-engineering function, this rings extremely true. Our labor strategies are absolutely designed around maximizing talent retention in the engineering space. But maximizing retention in a core function with highly contested talent bleeds into bloat in less core functions, as the primary focus is on retention, not efficiency.
I think the bigger issue with Twitter specifically (speaking as an outsider with no inside knowledge of Twitter's system) is that their basic product just....isn't all that conceptually complex. At the core, it's sharing 140-280 characters with a push/pull subscription mechanism. It's not rocket science.
In one sense, even as I say that I'm sure it's gross oversimplification: the infrastructure and data frameworks have probably grown to be incredibly large by now just due to the data volume being processed -- and, in turn, everything customer-facing has to be coded in a way that plays nicely with whatever Twitter's complex backend looks like -- but it's the kind of thing where you can imagine building your own proto-Twitter with like two dudes in a garage with some javascript and a SQL server. I think you run into the problem that no matter how cute you get with it, the infrastructure engineering team is probably indispensable, and the algorithmic "what tweets you see" team likewise seems damned important to value-add and to entice spending, but at the end of the day you could get away with a shoestring set of front-end devs just because of how simple the basic product is.
TL;DR: as an outsider, it's easy to imagine that Twitter does have a lot of important engineering jobs, but the basic simplicity of the product suggests that there's a pretty low ceiling on the amount of value that a lot of engineering jobs really *can* add, and that in turn makes it easy to imagine a world in which Twitter has too much headcount relative to their basic proposition of "a blog or chat platform except with fewer characters allowed."
You might be overlooking some areas of complexity. There's a lot of software complexity not involving tweets. First, the basic product of Twitter is not tweets; it's ads. That's what Twitter is selling. So there has to be a complex system of ad management. Second, compliance: there are various legal regimes all over the world whose regulations have to be complied with.
That said, it's not like Twitter does everything in house. They use AWS and GCP [1] for a lot of their heavy lifting. I'm sure they handle some compliance (e.g. making sure EU data is stored in the right locations).
Great thread and lots of stuff I agree with here. I also wanted to mention a widely held suspicion in Tech that big tech companies also like to overhire just to take potential start up founders (and potential future competitors) off the market, and to raise costs of start ups that do get started. Just another reason why what looks like 'over hiring' may be done for rational, strategic reasons.
I think there is a fundamental difference between left-wing and right-wing speech norms.
Left-wing norms are about the sentiment; what a ban on "misgendering" amounts to is a ban on expressing the position that trans women are men; it doesn't matter what language that you use to express that sentiment, you are not allowed to say it.
Right-wing norms are about specific words. The question right-wing people ask, often, is "what words can I use?". Their mental model is that you can say that a trans woman is a man, but you can't use (list of slurs) to say so.
To pick an issue where the badness of the sentiment is less controversial:
Right-wing norms on race are that you can say that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people (they mostly think that this is incorrect as to fact, but it's acceptable to say it), but you can't call them by a slur.
Left-wing norms are that the sentiment that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people is, in itself, outside of the norms.
I should add that this is consistent: if an atheist says "there is no God", then right-wingers do not take offence (they disagree, often vehemently, but they don't take offence); if they use what is intended as disparaging language, like talking about "invisible sky fairies", then right-wingers do take offence at that.
You'll often hear right-wing people asking what words they can use to say what they want to say - and they rarely hear the truthful answer, which is that there are no words through which it is acceptable to the left to express that sentiment.
You can hear this culture clash all the time: right-wingers objecting to people using George Carlin's seven words; left-wingers happily using all of them and objecting to The Bell Curve, which never once uses a racial slur, but expresses a view of black people that is utterly abhorrent to the left-wing mindset.
The only word I can think of where left-wing people object to the word itself rather than the sentiment is the N-word. I'm aware that there is some discussion about two versions of this word, but as a speaker of a non-rhotic dialect, I can't actually hear the difference. Other slurs you can usually quote directly or talk about (the use/mention distinction).
I don't think that this is right at all. Left wing humanities types seem to have a very strong belief in the power of words and language, which Yglesias went into in his piece about whether the Ancient Greeks could see the color blue.
The whole Latinx hubbub is based on this. The insistence on man and woman referring only to identity and biology is a part of that as well.
Isn’t LatinX consistent with what Richard is saying. Inherent in its use is a sentiment. Basically everyone who uses LatinX is expressing a sentiment that language rooted in gender is wrong because gender is so nuanced.
BTW - I am not defending the sentiment, just observing. Many people use language to send signals about who they are. Use of LatinX says “I’m a good liberal”.
This is similar to putting your pronouns in your signature block. It’s a tactic used by liberals in the culture wars. I do find it interesting how many clearly leftist people don’t put pronouns in their signature block. I would love to interview a bunch of people and see why some do and some don’t.
I'm liberal, not leftist, but I don't do anything with my pronouns because I just don't think that has a future. People are going to continue to rely on the highly accurate ways we already have of guessing gender.
That's not even clear with the term. Using LatinX is also consistent with not wanting to always default "male" and be more inclusive - whether there are 2 genders or not.
(This is separate from whether it's a good term since it also doesn't work in Spanish at all - but all the first uses I heard of it I thought were just to not say Latino when you also meant Latina)
I've also heard it astutely pointed out that the whole thing is even more farcical when it comes to the U.S. because English naturally lacks grammatical gender -- you could just say the word "Latin" as an adjective and Bam! Problem solved, right? How is "Latinx" somehow *less* contrived than a gender-neutral construction everyone is already familiar with and that actually forms the basis for the terms Latino/Latina/Latinx in the first place?
As Aaron Sorkin had Leo McGarry say once, “The left’s come full circle, hasn’t it?” We started saying Latino rather than Latin or Hispanic so we would be using the terms the community uses for itself. Now we use an unpronounceable bastardized term instead of those handy gender-neutral English terms we abandoned.
I disagree. It is clear the use of some words send messages about who you are. When one chooses to use LatinX as opposed to Hispanic or Latina it sends a message. Homeless vs unhoused, undocumented vs illegal immigrant. These words express a sentiment that goes beyond their basic definition.
But most words don’t politically message your values. For example, Apple or tree, or nose, etc.
Humanities types of all political persuasions tend to believe in the power of language , but not in a simplistic , strong Sapir-Whorf version you seem to imply. On the contrary, some humanities scholars (linguists) have pretty conclusively refuted the strong versions of that theory.
I don’t buy the “left wing” “right wing” attributions here, but would observe that the kind of attitude *you* call “left wing” here is totally antithetical to free speech and indeed amounts to classifying a whole bunch of thoughtcrimes. We must be allowed to express and debate every idea , and I think freedom loving people of all stripes agree on this fundamental principle.
The people calling to censor that satirical piece - whether right or wrong there - are *not* doing so because it expresses the idea that gender is sex determined but because it is “punching down satire” I.e. it is intentionally *ridiculing* a marginalized group. Most of them would not oppose an earnest discussion of the topic and some of them would love to try to enlighten you about the differences between sex and gender.
Well put. "Punching down" is one of key dimensions. It incents being a victim, and thus, allow one to express outrage, and garner sympathy, while avoiding engaging on the points of difference. A NYT piece on Sati was an excellent example. The resulting problem is that everyone wants to be a victim - evangelicals included.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily endorsing the “no ridiculing marginalized groups” line, just pointing out that it is radically different from the one Richard Gadsden proposed as the guiding logic for “left “ attitudes on speech.
I think there are two things happening here 1) simply being rude/impolite/inflammatory and 2) right belief. I think most people agree that you should attempt to avoid the first. Being hurtful for it's on sake is stupid and cruel. Right belief is actual philosophical differences about the truth, natural law and appropriate rights.
The problem with pronouns is that it pushes people outside of their held beliefs in order to avoid being rude. I have no issue using a neutral pronoun to avoid being rude and but we may have fundamental issues on the nature and flexibility of gender. I'm not going to give ground on my position to appease you, especially if I think that appeasement is individually and socially harmful.
I think the secular left gets similarly uncomfortable with religious norms: removing your hat in a church being a simple example. Some folks on the right will get upset about casual use of OMG and similar mock religious expressions, especially by clearly unreligious people. I can understand the frustration with abiding by reverence you find harmful or vacuous.
Basically, language matters and while you can avoid being directly rude, you can't completely talk around deep ideological divides.
Except we may try to find a middle ground. I think most of us naturally shift our language register and vocabulary based on context. Many won’t swear in front of children, or their grandparents, for instance. Similarly I can see a certain space for avoiding certain religoysly offensive terminology *while* engaging with a religious person sensitive to that . Calling someone the pronoun they request, just like the name they request , sounds to me like common courtesy. It doesn’t concede objective realities, it’s simply giving the courtesy of the premise that a person knows their own identity best unless there is a strong reason to call it into question (it’s not too different from misgendering a cisgender person who might present ambiguously- that happens too and you would course correct there immediately with apologies not argue ask for proof! )
This is all different however from arguing in generalities or the abstract. When talking about absent individual we have a grey area i suppose (eg I feel there is a strong case to refer to Ezra milller by as a “he” since it’s relevant to his purported pattern of aggression towards women and his request to be given non binary pronouns might help obscure the fact- but that’s an extreme outlier case)
I think I'd disagree with the statement that people know their own identity best. Your identity is primarily communal and relational, not individual self perception.
I do not perceive myself as rude and judgemental, but many people do. They're probably right, but that doesn't at it's core change how I perceive myself when responding to people. What's the truth? The actions as perceived by the community are more real.
You cannot perceive or wish yourself into changing your essential or social reality. That's the crux.
“Identity” is doing some work,there. “Am i a nice guy” is one identity question. Indeed one the individual is not best to answer. What’s my name? What’s my birthdate ? What’s my gender? All questions that in polite society we would, under most circumstances, assume (or at least pretend to assume) the individual knows best. I reiterate that this norm has *always* been the case. If an ambiguously presenting individual would correct you as to their gender 50 years ago (eg on the phone) you’d immediately apologize not doubt them.
If someone's proclaimed identity is not in line with obvious evidence, this is not accepted by society. If I claim I'm 12 to order off the kids menu, I should be challenged. More interesting, religion is very much a part of someone's identity, but you claiming to be part of a denomination does not make that fact; it's the community which accepts and identifies you. Same logic applies to political affiliation. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's no chicken. I can't claim to be Black and should be ridiculed if I do. Even if I feel deeply attached and empathetic to Black culture, I'm still not Black.
Is gender different than age, party/religion, race or disability? Not really other than the use of gendered pronouns and the deeper social and physiological differences between men and women related to procreation, child rearing and physical defense. The case for not self identifying gender is stronger than race or age.
How old you are is a matter of objective fact so in that respect it is certainly different from gender.
Your religious example is also not apposite. Members of a religious community might choose not to count someone as part of that community, but in *polite society,* not in the context of that community, it would be considered rude to question it. If someone at a party says they're Jewish and you start trying to determine if they're *really* Jewish—"Do you keep kosher?"—that would be considered inappropriate.
I kind of agree, but I get there differently. Left-wing people tend to think more systematically, at a community level, and are more skeptical of traditional mores. They are inclined to calculate right/wrong from secular first principles based on potential harm caused to others, especially groups they deem to be especially vulnerable. Because they’re often too smart for their own good, they dream up all kinds of potential harms to come up with and enforce new rules. Right-wingers are more individualistic and traditional. They prefer clear rules that have stood the test of time, that can be followed at an individual level without much hemming and hawing or reflecting on potential harms.
Might be easier to describe it as "the right is currently much harder to offend". Or "only the left is offended by ideas (and this is a recent development)" It's not they are very offended by the specific offensive words you picked out, it's just that they agree with the left AND the broader public that there is such a thing as impolite, offensive, unnecessary and inflammatory speech.
Probably worth noting that many on the right were genuinely offended by, say, Colin Kapernick's kneeling for the anthem, or "ACAB." They might have "banned" it if they had the power to (and certainly pushed the NFL to ban the kneeling to some extent.)
I think Matt is closer to the mark that it’s just a gap in how offensive different people find it to call someone who was assigned male gender at birth ‘a man’. There are certainly magic ‘more polite’ words some people try to use to express that some individual was assigned a particular gender at birth if that is what one wishes to express.
It looks to me like a large muddle actually, with a lot of cross pressures, disagreement on what the ‘asks’ are, and desire for broad standards of politeness. I myself have often noted people who ‘don’t feel the need to be polite’ about something actually be polite about it in practice. Many times. They often mean that they reserve the right to be impolite about it. That there are particular social groups where they are going to be impolite about it. Or they think that if they are impolite even though they actually don’t try to be, it’s fully justified! But the passion does come from the deep conflict you are pointing to.
I doubt there are many older people who would be “flabbergasted” with transgenderism. They would merely be confused about why anyone takes it seriously.
I wonder how many young single progressive men would loudly profess the "TWAW" orthodoxy but, if faced with the opportunity, refuse to personally date one.
Based on the number articles I've seen from Slate and other left-leaning outlets over the last several years explaining how bigoted cisgendered individuals are if they categorically refuse to date transgendered individuals, I'm guessing it's high, but I can't say that I've seen polling data.
This is one of the better things I've read recently about politics and language. Well done.
This is also why I am glad Matt has dived into substack. He's a great and prolific even when I disagree with him, which is frequently. He attracts a ton of smart readers who make points such as this one.
Consider slavery. Both right and left wingers think it is unacceptable to defend slavery, no matter the language you use. So the core distinction is not the one you made, language. It is the ideas themselves.
Conservatives tend to hold on to old ways, that's why they are called conservatives! Progressives like progress. Conservatives will hold on to old conceptions of sex or race or whatever longer, and that means expressing those old ideas remains acceptable longer. Progressives go the other way, that things we once accepted are not longer acceptable is central. That is how they define progress!
Values are the fight, always. Progressives, being more open to changing their values, will be the first to arrive at the conclusion that previously widely held-ideas are no longer acceptable to defend in civil discourse. Language used is a consequence of the primary dynamic, is is not primary.
“Progressives, being more open to changing their values, will be the first to arrive at the conclusion that previously widely held-ideas are no longer acceptable to defend in civil discourse”
The problem is that progressives are often wrong about this.
Hey, no one is perfect. Progressives prematurely try to declare ideas unacceptable and conservatives are slow to discard discredited ideas because tradition.
I think this give and take is unavoidable and society needs functioning progressive and conservative parties to check and balance each other.
So I agree with you that progressives are often wrong but I would generalize the problem: People are often wrong, conservatives and progressives alike. We need people of good will on both sides to limit the damage.
This is not both-sidesism. Right now we only have a functioning progressive party. The putatively conservative party has succumbed to fanaticism, is addicted to propaganda, and is, as Biden put it, semi-fascist. Responsible conservatives in their lust for power have abdicated their duty to marginalize the fanatics and nihilists.
Have you really never heard the attacks on "tankies"? I think that is absolutely the left routinely marginalizing the worst on their team. Stalinists and Maoists get marginalized hard.
I think a large part of the problem here is that the most extreme on the left are so thoroughly marginalized that many on the right don't even hear about their existence and think that the extreme left are people like Sanders or "The Groups" as MattY puts it.
Like: look how marginal Sirota and Grey (Sanders staffers) ended up when they made it clear that they were to the left of Sanders - Bernie is a very savvy politician who takes the exact left edge of the Overton Window.
Even things like Defund the Police (which was the compromise position of the hard left; the original was Abolish the Police) is being pushed to the margins by the mainstream left.
Once upon a time, I participated in once of the early internet-based, member-moderated discussion forum communities. A running joke developed that was too often deployed as a response to a comment criticizing a right-of-center position: "Have *you* denounced Stalin?!!"
I suspect that a lot of people would disagree with you if you defended slavery (without using slurs) rather than saying it's something you should be kicked off of social media for saying.
There's a huge difference between ideas you disagree with and ideas whose expression you want to punish people for making, and that was the distinction I was trying to make.
If someone was arguing that slavery was what those n-words deserve for being n-words, then sure, everyone would object.
But if someone was arguing that, say, slavery was a more efficient economic system than free labour and, while it clearly was worse for the slaves, it was better for society as a whole, and that the problem with antebellum slavery wasn't the slavery, it was that the slavery was racially based, and slavery would be fine if it was in proportion to the races [and I feel the need at this point to point out that this is very much not my view; slavery is evil] then I think you'd get exactly the left/right or progressive/conservative difference I described on whether the publisher of the book making this argument should have published it.
You can't discuss an idea without stating it. If you want to convince people that trans women are women, you need to discuss with them, and they need to be able to state that they believe it isn't so.
However, when people use known slurs, they're mostly just being deliberately antagonistic/provocative and NOT open for discussion.
If someone thinks children shouldn't be exposed to the idea that kids sometimes have two dads, I can talk about that with them. If they call me a f***** what's the point in discussion?
I mean, sure you can write something really offensive about me without using that word but in general, the kind of people who would do that would probably just use the word too.
Not really? The extreme example is someone trying to save my soul and tell me that being gay means I'm going to burn in hell. I think they're misguided, but charitably they're trying to help? After I came out(25 years ago) I had a friend try to be supportive but also tell me that he kinda felt being gay was wrong. I obviously didn't agree with him but he wasn't trying to be mean(I knew him well enough to know he wasn't trying to be mean - he was pretty devout)
Plenty of people thought being gay was wrong and came around on it - and now my marriage enjoys majority support. (Since he was just a college friend I have no idea how my friend feels now but I can easily believe he'd be more supportive now)
If someone says "f**" then they're being deliberately offensive.
I agree with the idea of a euphemism treadmill that deciding we should say "people experiencing homelessness" instead of "homeless people" will eventually revert to the mean.
_However_ - please note that even "homeless people" isn't intended to give offense. Maybe not even "illegal aliens"
But if someone used "bum" or "wetback" you'd be pretty sure they were intending to be offensive, no?
Someone using the f-word is intending to be offensive - they've picked the term for offense.
Someone saying they think being gay is wrong might or might _not_ intend to be offensive - and I think intent matters - I can have a discussion.
So no, I wouldn't say it's the "meaning" behind the word that is offensive, I would say it is the "intent" behind the use of the word that is offensive.
* Side note: I really hate that word. I've specifically avoided typing it out, as has the commenter("Just some guy") below me. I believe in the use/mention distinction but that doesn't mention I wouldn't appreciate fewer mentions.
No. Because choosing the word was an intentional choice meant to start a fight. It’s like the difference between saying, “I disagree with your position,” and yelling, “go to hell, mother f’er!” Both of them get you to functionally the same place in terms of communicating disagreement, but the affect is radically difficult, and affect (the feelings wrapped around the meaning) is half or more of in-person human communication. (Affect is also why you can communicate in situations without language, like with pre-verbal babies.)
F***** is a word with specific affect. Someone who uses it has probably chosen that word not just for its meaning, but for a set of attached emotions that are potentially dangerous (anger, disgust, mockery, etc.).
“left-of-center people…need to get used to the honestly quite banal idea that many successful and capable businesspeople have right-wing political views.”
Failing to understand this has made a lot of liberals total marks for corporations faking progressive values. It’s embarrassing. They don’t ACTUALLY care about bisexuality day, guys.
I think the real gulf of understanding is liberals thinking that corporations somehow *should* care about Bi Visibility Day and then getting outraged when the corporations "only" use it as window-dressing to sell bi- and/or visibility-themed merchandise.
I think it basically boils down to this, as someone on the center-left: you'd rather have corporations do it because it is in-line with actual corporate values, but given the choice between them doing it for cynical reasons versus not doing it at all, you'd rather have them doing it.
Personally I'd rather they stop doing it and stick to selling coffee or whatever. But "they are doing it, albeit for cynical reasons" is definitely a sign that your activism is succeeding.
Sorry, I was unclear. By "should", I mean "they think that the natural state of the world is that corporations share their values", not "they would like it to be the case that corporations share their values". The latter is a somewhat-reasonable goal, the former is a severe misunderstanding of the nature of the world.
And yet many of them act shocked when something happens which is an easy consequence of that fact. Perhaps you haven't noticed this, but Leora and I have.
it really causes a lot of unforced errors in political judgement, to be frank, by setting expectations too low...allowing folks to perpetually step over them.
I like the distinction between "stepping in at the vanguard of a controversial social dispute and enforcing widely agreed-upon social boundaries."
This sort of gets to the heart of what I see as the problem with "cancel culture." It's comes across as an effort to not just police the outer limits of agreed upon socially acceptable behavior, but try to win arguments by altering what is considered socially acceptable.
There is a strong push on the left to exclude the GOP, and even much of the center-left from polite society. This isn't just about banishing NAZIs, but excluding mainstream members of the GOP. The idea that a sitting SCOTUS judge shouldn't be able to publish a book is kinda nuts. As is the idea that anyone who deviates from the Lefts position on trans rights - an issue that remains very unsettled - should be banned from public forums.
While I don't want to say that this is the only reason, or even the main reason the Right is becoming/has become awful, I think it is a significant factor. Democracy only works if everyone feels like they get a fair shake (or if you can successfully repress those who don't) If the Right feels like they are not welcome to participate in polite society and the public discourse, they have no reason to think that their views are getting a fair shake in society and they no longer have reason to rely upon democracy or public institutions.. Moreover, the left does not have the power or will to actually repress the GOP.
I see your point about maybe it is a good thing for orgs, like the 1947 Dodgers, to be at the vanguard of a social issue, but I tend to think that neutral-ish speech platforms, such as Twitter or the publishing industry, as well as public institutions such as public schools and universities, really should not be, especiallybwhen they are all on the same side. I think that that really gives the impression that the other side is not being invited to participate in democracy, and that is corrosive to society.
I think the left’s clear drive to install norms administratively rather than persuade people and have them buy in has blown back on Democrats. People don’t know any way to stop a culture that they don’t want to be part of other than voting for DeSantis types.
I think its worth considering that society can be set up as a a discussion or a power struggle (or somewhere in between).
I oppose cancel culture because I think that society should lean toward the "discussion" end of this spectrum. I think that a discussion-based society is going to lead to a better society for a variety of reasons and on a variety of metrics. As a result, while I don't like left wing cancel culture, I definitely am not running off to vote for DeSantis.
However, a lot of people dislike cancel culture because it is an effort to remove their views from the public discourse and essentially win on those issues by default. If you are in this camp, voting for DeSantis is not all that unreasonable. You may be open to a discussion based society, but only if you get to be part of the discussion. If the other side is not going to allow you to participate in the discussion, why should you have any confidence that that discussion will result in an outcome that reflects your interests? At that point, either you have to give up your interests (something people aren't inclined to do) or use the power available to you to force your interests to win. Basically, if one side moves toward the "power struggle" model, it tends to push the other side in that direction as well.
And, for what its worth, I think that this goes in both directions. DeSantis' illiberalism pushes left-illiberalism. After all, if DeSantis is trying to use power to silence the left, why should the left be interested in having a discussion with him? I don't think it is a coincidence that left-illiberalism really flourished under Trump, and in the context of things like the GOP winning power with a minority of the vote and refusing to vote on Garland.
Absolutely. I think they’re probably worse, and I don’t want the government involved in that sort of thing. But the support for them is a reaction to something that is perceived as real (and undoubtedly is real in at least a few locations, which is all you need to incite a panic in the internet age).
Identity politics are wildly unpopular yet pervasive. It’s hard to remember a parallel. And above reproach/debate in much of our public square (which used to be *the* public square for the most part).
DeSantis types are fighting canceling with canceling in the places where they have power: mainly state governments. They don't have power in HR departments and Twitter outrage mobs
Maybe they don't, but there's no reason they can't. States have a fair amount of power to regulate workplaces.
Also, DeSantis types may already have some sway in HR departments because DeSantis has wielded blunt objects in the past. I'm guessing that Disney is going to be more careful with what it says and does. If they fire someone in FL for expressing views that are accepted by the right but not the left, there's a non-zero change they'll get punished by the Florida legislature.
To some degree each side is just weaponizing the tools of the other. Liberals are using conservative pro-employer laws and conservatives are using governmental programs against liberal causes.
I'm ideologically aligned with the left but know that both sides are fighting equally hard over power with whatever tools they have at their disposal.
You realize, don’t you, that DeSantis is very likely to win reelection as governor in a landslide? And likely to pull along a bunch of other Republican candidates for various state offices on his coattails?
The Right is too quick to call critique "cancellation," but at the same time there is a move on the Left to make it so that the Right doesn't have a venue to make its arguments. Look at Bennet getting fired for running Cotton's OpEd, or the efforts to get Penguin to drop Barret's book, or the fact that anything but the most milquetoast version of the Right's position on transgender issues can get you banned from Twitter.
You can't simultaneously say that the Right needs to just be more convincing while pressuring the neutral-ish platforms where they can make their argument to the general public to not deny the right a platform.
I'm not claiming that the Left has successfully excluded rightwing views from public discourse yet.
However, there is a clear effort to do so, and it has had enough success* that the Right aren't entirely crazy to think that the deck is getting stacked against them when it comes to persuasion.
*This success has admittedly waned a bit since Summer 2020.
Why are they obligated to convince you? Is this a two way street? Personally I am often skeptical of leftist ideas precisely because they don’t make any contact with conservative criticism.
"Plus, if they want to win elections, they need to convince people."
People already agree with them about many issues that the left wants to enforce (affirmative action, gender in sports, etc.), so there's not much need to convince more people. Furthermore, it looks like the right may in fact be convincing people:
"[in 2022] Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth. This is up from 56% one year ago and 54% in 2017." [1]
This left-wing viewpoint is already a minority viewpoint and is becoming more so. Sure sounds like the right needs to the hard work harder convincing people...
Taking the claim that "If the left wants their ideas to be taken seriously they need to actually do the hard work of convincing [people] that they’re correct." and switching "left" to "right" sounds clever, but it doesn't make sense because many of these "right-wing" ideas already have majority support whereas many of the "left-wing" ideas do not. It really is the burden of the left to convince people that affirmative action is good, gender is mutable, etc.
I agree with this. There are a number of issues where the Left is trying to use an "elite" consensus on a issue to close the Overton window on a substantial minority (or even majority) position, in order to win an argument without having to actually convince people. I don't think that that leads to a well-functioning society.
The complaint isn’t that some people on twitter don’t like them. That’s straw man nonsense. An actual complaint was that they could get banned by twitter, which is exactly what happened with the Babylon bee.
I'd seen the news item saying he'd promised *no* "free-for-all hellscape", but given that it's Elon Musk I was ready to believe that he'd made the opposite promise and had to walk it back.
I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic curation. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic filtering and ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other mainstream clients.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
This was kind of what we had in about 2010 when I worked on a third-party Twitter client. Twitter provided broad access to their API, and third parties built alternative clients on top of it. Since then (AIUI) Twitter have gradually made their API less open and usable, and maintaining a third-party client has become a Red Queen's race (and some popular clients have been in-housed and/or killed). Which is to say, I don't think Twitter wants to be a back-end platform, they want control of your eyeballs. But perhaps that will change now, who knows? It was pretty cool when Twitter worked as a general pub-sub backend protocol for short messages.
In Thompson's proposal, Twitter just charges for API usage and let's the organization providing the client figure out monetization. The third party clients can show ads (possibly using services provided by Twitter), they can charge a subscription fee, or they can pioneer a new monetization model.
For what it's worth, it shouldn't be very hard to require clients to include ads in their UX. I think the issues with splitting up the backend and client are that it feels like a pretty radical changes that's hard to compare with other strategy options and that it feels a bit like a solution in search of a problem. Twitter should be able to create a power user interface in house, and the other client types feel too niche and/or like potentially bad ideas (e.g., the partisan clients).
An API which allowed Twitter to require that you include ads would be a *lot* less open than the one I remember, which worked fine for "clients" which were text-only or even completely headless. Back in the day "delete all my tweets" was about five lines of shell script. Was that script a "client"? It certainly didn't display ads.
I was going to say I’m not knowledgeable enough personally but I feel Twitter made a very conscious choice NOT to go this direction. Presumably for business reasons. It’s not like they ended up with world beating ad revenue model so maybe it’s time to rethink? I’m not 100% on why they made the choices they did in the first place.
As I say, I think they want(ed) to own your eyeballs, and it's a lot easier to do that when people can only access your service through your approved client. If you own both client and server you get more control, more opportunities to serve ads, and more data to train your customer-engagement models. There might also be a public-choice analysis here: what Twitter does is the outcome of internal power struggles which we mostly don't see, not the best thing for the business as a whole. But with Twitter I always keep a lot of probability mass on "they don't know what the heck they're doing and just kinda make it up as they go along".
> This should be a feature of Twitter where you can either mass delete your tweets or else schedule tweets for automatic deletion.
Everything posted to the internet should be considered permanent due to trusted archive services and even screenshots. On the margin, deleting older tweets will make it harder for people to find; and that may be valuable to reducing controversy around what someone said in the past. Yet I think we should all act as if everything we add to the internet is permanent.
And famous people with a history of deleting tweets generally get auto archived. E.g., Michael Burry (investor of Big Short fame) auto deletes his tweets. So people created other Twitter accounts that simply mirror everything he posts to provide a permanent archive. E.g., https://twitter.com/BurryArchive
I agree with you, and I'm surprised that, to my knowledge, no one has done this to Matt's tweets, given all the annoying people out there that want to drag him for tweets that often weren't bad at all.
True, but "on the margin" is a big deal for most non- or marginally-famous people. Stories come up now and then of some not-particularly-famous who had a bad tweet N years ago and it got re-surfaced to their detriment. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. E.g. I'm glad that Alison Collins got dragged thru the mud for her old tweet [1]. But if she auto-deleted, I'm guessing that she could have dodged that controversy entirely (altho not all the other controversy she generated). Auto-deleting really could be effective for many people.
In journalism, there is a whole ethical framework around quoting people and when they are on the record and off the record. A deleted tweet that you dug up from an archive is off the record, and as a journalist you have to say "This person was caught saying X." If the tweet still exists and you can embed it in an article, you can do the more straightforward format of "According to this person, X." Twitter occupies an awkward middle ground between press release and haphazard remark that makes this line hard to draw.
"Nobody in the Republican Party... is in a rush to get Donald Trump back on Twitter because his account is embarrassing to the GOP."
Oh Matt Y., you sweet child of summer.
You sound like a Soviet official in 1989, proclaiming that surely Comrade Gorbachev will crack down on this silly dissent in Poland any day now, and the Warsaw Pact will endure for a thousand years!
The world has changed. Yes, back in the innocent days of the early 2010s, Trump's tweets would have been embarrassing both to the GOP and to any decent person. Now? Yes, they're embarrassing and infuriating to the Tim Millers and Jonathan V. Lasts of the world, but those guys aren't even in the GOP anymore. The GOP elected officials and candidates have, to a (wo)man, bent over and kissed Trump's... ring, let's be polite about it, and they're tripping all over themselves to proclaim their fealty to him.
What happened to Congresswoman Cheney? Why was she pulverized in her primary? Did she suddenly change her mind on trans rights and gun control? No! She was defenestrated for publicly accusing the Orange God King of lying and trying to subvert our democracy. And you say that it's *Trump's tweets* that are embarrassing to the GOP?
Yes, in private some GOP politicians are probably embarrassed and disgusted with themselves for bending the knee before the Orange One, but they will never admit it publicly, because they can't afford to.
I think that Matt's position is that most members of the GOP simultaneously believe that Trump on twitter offends the marginal general election voter, and that publicly opposing Trump offends the marginal primary voter, and so they are happy when Trump is removed from twitter *without their having to publicly oppose him*, and they are happy to not push for his reinstatement because they can get away with that.
Matt has fun on Twitter. I used to have a certain amount of fun on Twitter, and miss a few of the good accounts and the occasional good joke.
On the whole though, it seems straightforwardly clear that a decent number of people have gotten badly ill from using Twitter. I hope Musk runs it into the ground. It’ll probably get replaced by something worse, but at least a few people will look away from their phones for a bit longer than usual and not look back.
I view Twitter like a vice - there's a legitimate libertarian concern that people have freedom to enjoy the vice (so don't mess with my scotch) - but we also have to look at the cumulative effect on all of society when a lot of people use the vice a lot.
It would be nice if Matt could enjoy a tweet and twitter wasn't used to coordinate our political or journalistic "discourse". (The scare quotes are doing a lot of work there.)
As someone that owns a company that writes reorg software...
... yes, many companies are overstaffed. Who created the system that hired these people? Not a single silicon valley engineer, product manager, or other person interviewed for the job hoping that they could be the 5th product manager of the LinkedIn help menu.
The problem was (and is) we judge people by the population of the org they control. Widely known: getting the VP promo means you need an org size of 75+ engineers. SVP? About 250. When interest rates are zero and budgets are infinite, nobody should be surprised this happens.
Of course, it is the rank and file who will "suffer". And by suffer, I mean take a job loss, find another company, and now that sanity is returning, have a more fulfilling job than somehow making enough work to spend 5 hours debating and poring over usage data to decide the order of menu items on the help menu. There are a lot of startups that could use the help, far more wealth will be created, and the industry will be better for it.
When we're not judging people by the size of their org, we are judging them by how much they are shipping (and not how much they ship per person), which also incentivizes growth.
I'm an engineer working in software, and while I wouldn't say that we are overstaffed, there is definitely widespread skills-mismatch/poorly-staffing.
Especially in the last few years as demand seemed to bloom and supply seemed to wither.
Companies resorted to scooping up anyone that had the credentials to fill these roles...and a significant % (and notably higher % than previous) of these people are of very minimal or negative net value. But they are (properly-credentialed) butts in seats, so HR and management consider it a win.
To the point that I think that my organization could drop ~25-30% of our engineering staff and still be about as productive.
I don't know if this is unique to my particular industry or widespread, though. I'm not at a FAANG or even the Bay Area, so we may be irrelevant.
In SWE this is a thing, but it's also true in Product, Program, and Design.
This can become obvious when you look at commits in any kind of nuanced way. No, don't count commits or LOC, but do look at a sample of the last 10 for all engineers on a given team, and you often get a situation where 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work.
Granted, you would be surprised how much of this is due to overzealous gatekeeping my more tenured engineers arguing over nonsense in pull request reviews (i.e. you used a for loop and not a reduce function? did you go to state school?). But it's hard to deny this reality when you look at the facts on the ground.
The cheat code of the best EMs is to create structured onboarding and keep an inventory of work that can scale up in complexity from easy to hard in order to acclimate new people to the team and get them into productive flow.
It helps if your more tenured engineers document the hard parts and actually do knowledge sharing.
I think we could probably lose as many as one in five, but only if we were allowed to catch our breath and cease active development for a quarter or so. Trimming fat and optimizing staffing and process/procedure is hard to work in on the edges when the ethos is customer wants X, gotta go fast, customer wants Y, gotta go fast, as long as it works, gotta go fast.
Gonna put in a plug here for "Bullshit Jobs" by Graeber. I have no idea if it's facts-based, but my life spent working for companies has given me plenty of anecdata to confirm it's thesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
When people look at the statistics, it seems that Graeber's main claims are in fact all false. He's describing an objectively value-laden concept of bullshit as meaningless work, but identifying it with a subjective account of when the worker feels that it's meaningless. He claims that bullshit work is increasing, is more pronounced in the anglosphere, and is more common in finance and less in service jobs, but when people have actually looked at surveys that seem to use his preferred measures, they find exactly the opposite of the trends that he describes. In the end, I think he's really re-identifying the Marxist concept of "alienation", which Marx identified in the assembly line worker who doesn't see the final product, but which has now arisen for knowledge workers in our increasingly bureaucratized society. But the worker not seeing the value in their work is not the same as their work not having value.
Hmm. I take your point. I gave up on "A History of Debt" because I didn't think you could reason outward from some random tribe to make generalizations about all of finance.
That said. Graeber's observations in Bullshit Jobs really resonated with me, and I see them play out in the business world ALL THE TIME. So maybe some academics have some survey data that contradicts Graeber's findings. That isn't going to change my mind. It calls to my mind MY's writing on how crime can be increasing while stats show it going down. Reasonable people can disagree. I, for one, can say that I see Graeber's main thrust confirmed in all of my work in the private and ESPECIALLY in the public sector, and in the work lives of my friends and acquaintances.
Reiterating my comment above- it is just so bizarre to me that HR would consider unproductive “butts in seats” to be a win. In the rest of the business world, HR’s job is to minimize payroll while maintaining the required output.
HR has almost zero control over this and most of the time is irrelevant to this conversation. Budget comes from finance, VP of Eng decides allocation of headcount, HR mostly makes sure you don't break laws.
In a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies, HR views themselves as there to protect the company from liability. So they are very worried about discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuits. This makes firing for performance reasons really hard because you have to have extensive documentation that the employee wasn't performing compared to their peers. And you have a lot of inexperienced managers because the company just grew really fast and pushed people into management with little training.
Also in Silicon Valley companies the HR team doesn't typically have any responsibility for the cost of R&D (basically the number of engineers). That's the VP of Engineerings problem to work out with the CFO.
HR typically has a whole recruiting arm that works closely with engineering to hire more engineers. And a more typical HR arm that works on things like compensation planning, manages the performance review process, helps manage promotions, and will consult with managers when there are performance and other issues with someone on their team. I've never seen them have much if anything to say about how many engineers there were.
I have a friend who works in pharmaceutical software, who estimates that he works about 10 hours a week in a nominally 40/week job. He makes a fairly modest salary (he has other priorities, and has made a specific decision to not take a high-workload job for more money), but even with the lower amount of time he works he produces more value than his peers, and the company is happy with his performance and contribution. His boss has a tacit understanding of the situation and knows that my friend can, if necessary, briefly do the job of two people when it's needed, and knows that the company would need to pay twice as much to get that overall productivity on a permanent basis. He isn't dishonestly representing that he does more work than he actually does, he simply doesn't mention that he is doing a competitive amount of work in less time than his peers require.
I know that there is this aversion to this kind of situation, as your comment expresses. But really, in this type of situation, where regardless of the actual amount of time you work, the company is happy with your long-term volume of productivity relative to your peers, and finds that it's getting its money's worth, what exactly is the problem? You sure it isn't just cheap moralizing?
Last few jobs have all included contracting, and some govt contracting, so getting butts-in-seats that are properly credentialed at least lets you charge for a while.
“an even blunter 2021 poll asks whether greater acceptance of transgender people has been good or bad for society. In that poll, “good” won with 38 percent, but 32 percent said it was bad with a hefty 29 percent saying it’s neither good nor bad.”
This implies that significantly less than 38% of the population buy the liberal position on gender dysphoria. I’m certainly in the 38% of Americans who think greater acceptance of the gender dysphoric is good. I’m for acceptance and tolerance, just as we should be accepting of people with bipolar disorder or speech impediments or mobility issues. This does not mean that a man can become a woman, or that I will pay verbal obeisance to that conceit. I can accept a person with bipolar disorder by being their friend, employer or colleague while thinking they should take drugs to reduce manic behaviors. Gender dysphoria is generally less disruptive than mania, so it might sometimes be better to lean into it than fight it. In any event, acceptance does imply that gender dysphoria is anything other than a fraught and unfortunate condition. I’m grateful that I’m happy being a man just like I’m grateful that I’m tall and physically healthy.
I don’t think there is a “leftist position on gender dysphoria”. Some people think that gender dysphoria is a real thing that needs to be significantly respected. Other people think that you should just accept people’s stated gender identity whether or not there really is a condition we might call “dysphoria”.
I read Abigail Shrier's 'Irreversible Damage' six months ago. My takeaway was there is some small percent of people with genuine gender dysphoria (Jan Morris's 'Conundrum' is excellent on this), but a current wave of teenagers, especially girls, wanting to be cool, and our medical establishment shouldn't be abetting life-changing medical interventions for them until they grow up and can make more mature decisions.
I don't think it's worth getting into a back-and-forth on trans issues in this forum, but I just want to say that if you don't want people to undergo life-changing medical interventions until they have the ability to make more mature decisions, that's precisely what puberty blockers are for - let people age before they decide what sort of puberty to undergo.
I agree with you it's not worth having a back-and-forth on the trans issue here, but Shrier's book claims puberty blockers for teens can have irreversible effects. No idea if this is true.
Yeah, I don't know whether it's true (it's quite plausible that it is!) but it seems just as plausible that undergoing puberty has irreversible effects. If one must make the choice at a young age of *which* irreversible effects to undergo, then it's disingenuous to say that they should wait until adulthood to make that choice. It seems akin to insisting on a waiting period before one is allowed to decide whether or not to get an abortion, and then extending that waiting period to 9 months.
The two groups you describe are both subgroups of the 38%. That's my point. My faction "gender dysphoria is a disorder that should receive reasonable accommodation" might be a minority of the 38%, but that hardly means every person who wants to move towards greater acceptance thinks that gender is a social construct or that puberty blockers should be used routinely.
> This does not mean ... that I will pay verbal obeisance to that conceit.
If someone tells me "Hey, I'd prefer if you called me Richard instead of Ricky" then I will do it because it doesn't cost me anything except the effort of trying to remember. I feel the same way about calling someone Rachel instead of Ricky, it's harmless and easy. It's interesting to me that for some people making that verbal switch feels unimportant and for others it's very meaningful. My first instinct was to try to convince you that names and pronouns are an easy thing to change, so just do it to be polite and accepting. The problem is that names and pronouns are clearly very meaningful to trans people, so it's kind of having it both ways on the issue. But I still think it's a useful frame of mind to turn down the temperature on the issue a little bit.
- It strikes me that the culture war around trans people has become much hotter since even last year. Hard to know what a new poll would show. Further intensification of partisan differences or a weakening from one side?
- Silicon Valley is probably entering into a bit of a trough, much like after the dotcom bust. The years of explosive growth are over and they can't have too many people fooling around. Facebook are pissing away billions on nonsense.
- If Facebook and Twitter crumble to pieces through incompetence, it will be the feel good story of the year.
Even though I don’t love some things about social media, it would be a loss for America to have two American run social media sites take a nose dive while the Chinese owned Tik Tok and the European owned Only Fans take over.
It’s good for America to dominate the tech space and it’s bad if the tech space starts going in a different direction.
Sector dominance relies on continued strength across many different companies. It’s preferable to me for tech companies to be run by Americans rather than foreign authoritarians. Losing ground is a real concern, even if it’s a drop in the bucket. I’ll cheer for laundry that has to be washed at an American laundromat any day. It’s important where things get washed. That analogy went on too long.
The UK’s new direction (along with Sweden and Finland) on gender affirming care for kids is interesting. More honest research is needed but many professionals are now pushing back against the “American” model. Some EXPERTS are even questioning non-medical gender affirming care for kids. I had always thought well this isn’t really hurting anything.
Hopefully we can rise above politics to do what’s best for these kids. I am concerned that Dems position is that if we harm 5 confused non-trans kids (maybe gay) to help one actually gender dysphoric kid then that’s okay.
This is all well and good until we decompartmentalize it from the big elephant in the room which you've discussed elsewhere:
Musk has massive personal exposure in China--and indeed, in other authoritarian regimes. One of his biggest funders is Saudi.
He will take all of that into account when overhauling the fourth-largest media company in the world. Anonymous dissidents the world over will feel the impact.
It seems useless to discuss this situation as if it's just another example of a new boss with new ideas to improve a product. Musk is a geopolitical actor--and as we've seen lately, a narcissist with a deep grudge against the US media writ large, yourself included.
He will be seen by history as such, and we will all look silly for treating his Twitter takeover like just another business story.
I find the overstaffing SV thesis very interesting and I’m sure it’s only like 50-75% trying to avoid giving out a bunch of stock options.
One very very interesting element of it, to me, is product improvement. Twitter has always seemed to make very few changes. If it were a similarly staffed video game I would expect many many changes all the time—not just improvements but simply bc the audience craves novelty. This is not the prevailing view of the socials, which rise and fall on acquiring some pretty marginal tech users like famous actors or sports stars. It’s important to be able to onboard some folks like this and make them ‘power users’ even if they actually would feel overwhelmed by a product worthy of power use. Especially one that is rapidly iterating.
The problem may be solvable, different version of the platform or something else creative—hiding features away so they can be found and accessed but don’t present themselves as an overwhelming array of knobs, dials, and levers.
But certainly there seems to me a tension between tech company staffing and a general sense that their products need to be quite simple and changes need to be subtle and infrequent. And it’s interesting to me that Twitter seems to be on the verge of testing both theories at once even though they kind of point in different directions. For me, it’s sort of either get rid of the extra people and view your product as a mature thing to squeeze remaining value out of or rapidly innovate with a large staff of developers.
I don’t use Snapchat, but from friends who do, I hear that they are constantly adding and changing features in a way that it’s really impossible to know what you can do today.
That's interesting to hear. Snapchat is probably my most used social media app. They do probably add and change things more than other apps but I've never felt like I didn't know what I was going to be able to do on a day to day basis.
I think the LONG history of anonymously sources stories about how hacked together the Twitter product is and how only a few people know how to fix it is often shared as a cautionary tail meant to make Musk (guy wanting to fix it) look back and make reader sympathetic to poor employees tasked with “dealing with” such a crappy software product.
But i think the opposite is actually true, all it makes me wonder is how so many people got such big paychecks for so long from Dorsey and Agerwal (former CTO, then CEO) and whether complacency about some of even the most basic programming tasks have set in as givens with the Twitter staff, and whether a sympathetic media has basically let them get away with it....
Good point. Say what you will about Google and their capricious product canceling, but I appreciate they’re a lot less precious than they used to be about making changes. I remember ages ago when they had to add some section to their front page (like a help button), and they publicly agonized about the best way to keep the front page with only having 17 words or something. I think they eventually made a goofy change like “I’m feeling lucky” to “feeling lucky.” So precious!
"Twitter has always seemed to make very few changes."
Right???
I don't have access to their code, so what follows is total arm-chair quarterbacking, worth what you paid, but it seems they have to either (1) not want to make changes or (2) have a tech stack that's really a hotmess or (3) have an unproductive engineering organization.
I like Matt's idea of archiving tweets, except for the part where they'd be removed from public view. As several others have already pointed out in parallel, deleting tweets are bad because everything on the internet is capable of being archived, and it's really frustrating when you're trying to figure out what's going on, or trying to read a really good conversation of the past when one of the participants has deleted a bunch of tweets. The archiving should allow for tweets to not be replied to/RTed/QTed, and any linking to them should not show up in the author's timeline, but they shouldn't be gone for good.
I also think Twitter needs a retract button, where any people who feel they screwed up on a tweet can flag it to prominently display a message that the authors no longer stand by the tweets they made. This would end a lot of the silly drama of people pointing out "Didn't you say this bad or inaccurate thing?", and the authors can instead let the "This tweet has been retracted by the author" message do the work for them.
And related to this, Twitter really needs to get cracking on that clarification button, so people don't have to be chained to a bad typo or very slight mistake when their tweets go viral.
> I’m not exactly sure why this happened, but roughly a year ago there was a substantial vibe shift in Silicon Valley which holds that most large technology companies are massively overstaffed.
Many, if not most, tech companies are extremely reluctant to fire engineers for performance reasons until they run into a cash flow issue and have to do layoffs. You’ll find this general consensus across tech forums (e.g., Hackers News). I believe this is the case for a multitude of reasons.
First, engineers are among the most expensive employees to hire and onboard. A lot of resources go into recruiting, including numerous interviews with existing engineers and managers. And many candidates get rejected or reject the company. This adds up to a lot of time and money (guessing high 5 figures) just to hire one engineer.
Further, it can take months for an engineer to get up to speed at an established company due to all of the proprietary tech and knowledge. And engineers grow in value for years as they pick up more tribal knowledge of the firm’s codebase and systems.
Second, engineers on the same team become non-fungible due to working on different projects. We certainly try to minimize this by rotating people on to different projects so that they can gain more tribal knowledge. Yet every team member becomes the canonical expert on different systems since they simply have worked on different projects.
Third, there rarely is any short term value to firing a low performing engineer. Yes, some of us are an actual net negative by worsening the codebase quality or breaking things that require other people’s help to fix. Yet that is rare. More likely is a “quiet quitter” that makes some minimal, yet positive contribution. You’ll find numerous self-reporting on Hacker News of engineers only working 10 hours a week at FAANG firms.
Fourth, engineers have short tenures, commonly jumping to another firm in two years. It’s an open secret that an internal promotion at almost all tech companies is harder than simply getting hired at that higher level at a comparable firm. There’s a lot of debate among engineers about whether that is due to a failure of internal promotion processes or a failure of the hiring processes. And of course the most ambitious and highest performers are jumping firms more frequently.
So in summary, engineers are expensive to hire, possess valuable differential tribal knowledge, are almost always a positive contribution to the team, and constantly leaving anyways. So there’s just no reason to manage out low performers unless the firm runs into cash flow issues.
This matches my own experience reasonably well also, though one thing I would add is that it also burdens a team to onboard a new hire, especially a junior engineer. Would my life be easier if my team added another skilled engineer who understood the system? Yes. But to get to that point, it would be at minimum several months of making my life harder, potentially more, even if they were a great employee.
I endorse this comment, but I think it's also really impossible to understand FAANG hiring practices without understanding hiring as a competitive tool.
FAANG and similar companies spent a decade plus aggressively hiring everyone under the sun and aggressively pushing up engineer comp. Did that make their engineering teams quantum levels better? No, probably not. Marginal improvements. But it did put a lot of pressure on their up-and-coming competitors. The days of being able to find a talented engineer who's willing to take a kind of disappointing salary plus some equity that could be a lot of money but is more likely to be worth zero are pretty far in the past, when Google will give that same engineer a non-disappointing salary plus equity that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year *today*, and a solid bonus on top of that. And during this decade-long period, the FAANG companies were enjoying big revenue growth with fat margins, so that's an environment that favors competition. It's easy to get off the ground in an expanding, attractive market (capital is easy to buy, growth is easy to sustain, and unit economics are easy to make favorable). So it makes sense for the incumbents to spend some of their own attractive economics to put pressure on their competitors.
I actually think what you're describing can be applied to lots of white-collar jobs. Replace "engineer" with "underwriter" or "insurance adjuster" or just "analyst" and I think a lot of the same analysis applies. Reality is in a lot of "white collar" jobs, getting up to speed on all aspects of your position can take 6-12 months. Knowing who to email for different situations. Learning where various documents can be found. Literally, just memorizing the names of the people who you need to interact with (and learning tendencies and personalities).
To a certain degree these aspects also apply to a lot of "blue collar" jobs. If you have been a server for 5 years and you move to a new restaurant. It will take you time to get to know the various quirks about how a restaurant operates, typical type of customers, knowing the cooks names etc. But I think I feel pretty confident in saying "getting up to speed" in most "blue collar" jobs is going to a lot less time than in a lot of "white collar" jobs on the whole. We can have a separate discussion as to which jobs are more stressful (physical vs. mental stress, the stress of being lower paid vs. stress of high demanding clients. etc.). My money is on "blue collar" jobs being much more stressful on the whole than "white collar" jobs. But the job security on the "white collar" side I think has a lot to do with the how long it takes to get up to speed at the job question.
Not saying that any of this is wrong, though perhaps it’s not universal. But Elon explicitly said that the issue is that the ratio of managers to engineers is too high, which seems plausible to me. I’ve worked at organizations where the ratio of people working on the product to people who get to have opinions on the product is like 1:5.
"Team lead" is the language in our org. Somebody who's still doing line-level work, but also onboarding new hires, assigning tasks to direct reports/removing obstacles that are hindering success, and reviewing team work product.
I wonder if this is regional. I'm retired now, but I was an engineering VP at a large networking company on the east coast and we regularly purged the bottom 10-15 percent of engineers even in the best of times.
We'd call it a layoff or reduction in force (RIF), but in reality it was performance based. In fact, if in a given cycle, only 5% of the engineers on a team weren't performing, their manager could ask to have their target number of cuts reduced and the request would often be granted.
Is this not a thing anymore?
Stack ranking is highly disfavored because the incentives make Goodhart’s Law very aggressive.
Every major company that has used it also ended up a tire fire as a result. Most infamously, GE, its progenitor, became a tower of fraud as people scrambled to make the cut.
Stack ranking is also terrible for morale. My personal take on it is that it's a good idea about once every five to ten years -- there can be significant value to a large org in cutting the genuine deadwood to make room for new and more productive headcount, but if you're doing it every year (as MSFT was for a long time) you not only risk turning it into a Goodharting charade but also find yourself in a position where you're almost guaranteed to be cutting muscle along with fat because it was only a year ago that you ostensibly tried to attrit out everyone at the bottom of the stack - which just makes the morale problems even worse!
That's always been my issue with cutting the bottom 10% automatically at the end of each year. At the end of the day, there are only so many employees who are truly bad at their jobs. At a big enough firm, the performance of your employees is extremely likely to follow a "bell curve" like so many other phenomena involving large groups of people. Meaning, it seems likely to me that you can probably identify the very worst performing employees pretty quickly if you do it once. But if you're doing this exercise only 12 months later, it seems very likely you're getting to the point where you're deciding between a whole lot of employees who are likely performing at or around the same "average" level. Meaning deciding upon who is kept and who is fired is likely being done on some pretty arbitrary grounds. Which just creates some pretty terrible incentives to "game the system" as you say.
I’d say it’s definitely arbitrary.
Once you start fine-slicing you’re heading further into luck and structural questions, like whether someone works on something easily evaluated (or whose evaluations are easy, like just showing up a lot).
I’d forgotten about morale. Eventually you also get a sorting effect where you’re tilting ever more toward people with the over-confidence to believe they’ll always make the cut. That’s not a great result if your firm isn’t struggling with risk-aversion.
My experience with this was that as long as we got the number of cuts right, the result was usually an increase in morale. The key is that after it's done, the engineers left behind should feel like it was justified and even necessary. You can't have too many close calls or even sad story cases or I agree it can hurt morale and also create weird team dynamics.
OTOH, leaving team leaders to deal with marginal workers on their own, those not quite bad enough to terminate for cause but still very troublesome, can cause all manor of morale issues and strange team dynamics.
I think the issue may be just a difference in hiring philosophy. This approach makes sense if you also open yourself up to a higher risk of false positives and then the cuts are generally needed, and you gain the advantage of a less stressful hiring process and more ability to take risk on borderline candidates. Coupled together this is a sensible system.
Yes, I’ve heard about practices like stack ranking at firms like MSFT back in the day, but I get the impression that this is less common now. Contemporary tech is just too incentivized around growth over margins; until recently it has been growth at all costs.
One could argue that the rigorous barriers to internal promotion partially address the issue. We simply have way more info about current employees relative to potential hires. If someone is barely performing at their current level then their manager can at least withhold promotion. Whereas on the hiring side we all gotta make our best guess and aren’t incentivized to correct mistakes.
As an aside, I have gotten to work with an old school tech team when the startup that I was at got reverse acquired by a firm founded in the 60s. (I.e., parent company moved assets and teams to us and then sold everything else—including the parent company’s name—to another firm.) That team had what I’d consider a culture of costs and benefits rather than growth at all costs. They had been through layoffs and recognized the value in managing out low performers to control their costs.
In merging into the eng org, the OGs adopted its tech culture for compatability, although they could certainly joke about some of the absurdities. Yet I imagine they all still have their hard-learned lessons, and it’s not surprising that their top manager eventually became the VP of engineering a few years post-merge. I imagine that eng org is now particularly well positioned as we exit the current tech boom and cost/benefit trade offs matter again.
Not much of a thing, partially because of what Matt Hagy said, but also because MSFT and others figured out with yearly bloodletting, many people were (rightly) solving for the equilibrium. If they were ranked above their peers, they kept their jobs, so there were plenty of instances of sabotage and other Lord of the Flies type stuff.
I can't speak to Matt's situation, but my engineering team isn't big enough to do that. We're at roughly a 6:1 "flatness" from level to level. Firing the bottom 10% of my team every year would be... loud, bloody, and illegal.
I think this is all spot on. Just to add a few more things from my experience.
During the scale stage of startups, especially with the really big funding rounds we've seen over the past few years, there is a lot of pressure to hire really quickly. The hiring is often done without much of a plan or coherent organization design behind it. So you get teams of tons of engineers with very little direction and managers who are over stretched because they just hired too many people without building the organization or leadership necessary to provide direction.
And the famous quote from the Mythical Man Month: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" seems to be true in practice. As others have mentioned, onboarding new people slows down the existing team. It also adds communication overhead, and as the engineering organization grows, complexity increases, and it often increases faster than the inherent complexity of the product due to the disorganization caused by hiring so fast.
You can end up in a kind of mythical man month spiral, where you've added a bunch of new engineers but aren't utilizing them effectively, actually making your product harder to develop. This creates more pressure to hire more, but you're getting diminishing, if not negative returns for each engineer you add due to the increased training and coordination overhead, and poorly organized work adding complexity.
And letting under-performers go is hard. HR teams tend to be fairly risk averse in my experience. Even though California is an at-will state, HR can be very worried about wrongful termination. So you need to have quite extensive documentation of the performance issues. This can be really hard in the context where you're already overly stretching your managers with too fast and poorly thought out hiring.
So it's often a really challenging process to let an under-performer go. The main case where it does happen is when they have a seriously negative impact on team moral due to being very hard to work with or abusive to others. Or they actively break things due to incompetence.
While this is definitely true for startups, I wonder about the degree to which this is true of Twitter --- it hasn't been in startup mode for at least a decade, and hasn't been growing headcount _that_ rapidly either. (Then again, looking at their rate of product change and the size of the company, I've also often wondered exactly what it is all their employees do, so ... *shrug*)
I get it, but this logic is very odd to me. I work for an old-school industrial company that’s quite sclerotic but always trying to get with the times. But the idea that more headcount=growth=good is strange and backwards to me. If business is good, and we have more work to do, we have to hire more people- usually reluctantly. But the demand comes first- specific projects that don’t have enough people to accomplish them. Though when we work on govt-funded projects, things can get upside down and we staff up to match a budget then scope the work from there. Is the problem that these tech companies are over-valuated, and have more money than they know what to productively do with?
Makes some sense- still seems like you'd develop a slate of product ideas with the top-notch talent you already have, then go hire programmers to execute on those ideas?
I’m still confused though- are programmers hired with no clear idea what specific project/deliverables they’ll be working on?
As someone in big tech, who is in a non-engineering function, this rings extremely true. Our labor strategies are absolutely designed around maximizing talent retention in the engineering space. But maximizing retention in a core function with highly contested talent bleeds into bloat in less core functions, as the primary focus is on retention, not efficiency.
I think the bigger issue with Twitter specifically (speaking as an outsider with no inside knowledge of Twitter's system) is that their basic product just....isn't all that conceptually complex. At the core, it's sharing 140-280 characters with a push/pull subscription mechanism. It's not rocket science.
In one sense, even as I say that I'm sure it's gross oversimplification: the infrastructure and data frameworks have probably grown to be incredibly large by now just due to the data volume being processed -- and, in turn, everything customer-facing has to be coded in a way that plays nicely with whatever Twitter's complex backend looks like -- but it's the kind of thing where you can imagine building your own proto-Twitter with like two dudes in a garage with some javascript and a SQL server. I think you run into the problem that no matter how cute you get with it, the infrastructure engineering team is probably indispensable, and the algorithmic "what tweets you see" team likewise seems damned important to value-add and to entice spending, but at the end of the day you could get away with a shoestring set of front-end devs just because of how simple the basic product is.
TL;DR: as an outsider, it's easy to imagine that Twitter does have a lot of important engineering jobs, but the basic simplicity of the product suggests that there's a pretty low ceiling on the amount of value that a lot of engineering jobs really *can* add, and that in turn makes it easy to imagine a world in which Twitter has too much headcount relative to their basic proposition of "a blog or chat platform except with fewer characters allowed."
You might be overlooking some areas of complexity. There's a lot of software complexity not involving tweets. First, the basic product of Twitter is not tweets; it's ads. That's what Twitter is selling. So there has to be a complex system of ad management. Second, compliance: there are various legal regimes all over the world whose regulations have to be complied with.
That said, it's not like Twitter does everything in house. They use AWS and GCP [1] for a lot of their heavy lifting. I'm sure they handle some compliance (e.g. making sure EU data is stored in the right locations).
[1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/twitter/twitter-gets-deeper-google-cloud
Great thread and lots of stuff I agree with here. I also wanted to mention a widely held suspicion in Tech that big tech companies also like to overhire just to take potential start up founders (and potential future competitors) off the market, and to raise costs of start ups that do get started. Just another reason why what looks like 'over hiring' may be done for rational, strategic reasons.
I think, you’re talking about FAANG, the main driver is that it’s impossible for them to hire if they don’t commit to hiring quotas.
They rapidly get to a place where no candidate is good enough unless they’re too good to be working in the position you’re hiring for.
I think there is a fundamental difference between left-wing and right-wing speech norms.
Left-wing norms are about the sentiment; what a ban on "misgendering" amounts to is a ban on expressing the position that trans women are men; it doesn't matter what language that you use to express that sentiment, you are not allowed to say it.
Right-wing norms are about specific words. The question right-wing people ask, often, is "what words can I use?". Their mental model is that you can say that a trans woman is a man, but you can't use (list of slurs) to say so.
To pick an issue where the badness of the sentiment is less controversial:
Right-wing norms on race are that you can say that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people (they mostly think that this is incorrect as to fact, but it's acceptable to say it), but you can't call them by a slur.
Left-wing norms are that the sentiment that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people is, in itself, outside of the norms.
I should add that this is consistent: if an atheist says "there is no God", then right-wingers do not take offence (they disagree, often vehemently, but they don't take offence); if they use what is intended as disparaging language, like talking about "invisible sky fairies", then right-wingers do take offence at that.
You'll often hear right-wing people asking what words they can use to say what they want to say - and they rarely hear the truthful answer, which is that there are no words through which it is acceptable to the left to express that sentiment.
You can hear this culture clash all the time: right-wingers objecting to people using George Carlin's seven words; left-wingers happily using all of them and objecting to The Bell Curve, which never once uses a racial slur, but expresses a view of black people that is utterly abhorrent to the left-wing mindset.
The only word I can think of where left-wing people object to the word itself rather than the sentiment is the N-word. I'm aware that there is some discussion about two versions of this word, but as a speaker of a non-rhotic dialect, I can't actually hear the difference. Other slurs you can usually quote directly or talk about (the use/mention distinction).
I don't think that this is right at all. Left wing humanities types seem to have a very strong belief in the power of words and language, which Yglesias went into in his piece about whether the Ancient Greeks could see the color blue.
The whole Latinx hubbub is based on this. The insistence on man and woman referring only to identity and biology is a part of that as well.
Isn’t LatinX consistent with what Richard is saying. Inherent in its use is a sentiment. Basically everyone who uses LatinX is expressing a sentiment that language rooted in gender is wrong because gender is so nuanced.
BTW - I am not defending the sentiment, just observing. Many people use language to send signals about who they are. Use of LatinX says “I’m a good liberal”.
This is similar to putting your pronouns in your signature block. It’s a tactic used by liberals in the culture wars. I do find it interesting how many clearly leftist people don’t put pronouns in their signature block. I would love to interview a bunch of people and see why some do and some don’t.
I'm liberal, not leftist, but I don't do anything with my pronouns because I just don't think that has a future. People are going to continue to rely on the highly accurate ways we already have of guessing gender.
That's not even clear with the term. Using LatinX is also consistent with not wanting to always default "male" and be more inclusive - whether there are 2 genders or not.
(This is separate from whether it's a good term since it also doesn't work in Spanish at all - but all the first uses I heard of it I thought were just to not say Latino when you also meant Latina)
I've also heard it astutely pointed out that the whole thing is even more farcical when it comes to the U.S. because English naturally lacks grammatical gender -- you could just say the word "Latin" as an adjective and Bam! Problem solved, right? How is "Latinx" somehow *less* contrived than a gender-neutral construction everyone is already familiar with and that actually forms the basis for the terms Latino/Latina/Latinx in the first place?
As Aaron Sorkin had Leo McGarry say once, “The left’s come full circle, hasn’t it?” We started saying Latino rather than Latin or Hispanic so we would be using the terms the community uses for itself. Now we use an unpronounceable bastardized term instead of those handy gender-neutral English terms we abandoned.
I disagree. It is clear the use of some words send messages about who you are. When one chooses to use LatinX as opposed to Hispanic or Latina it sends a message. Homeless vs unhoused, undocumented vs illegal immigrant. These words express a sentiment that goes beyond their basic definition.
But most words don’t politically message your values. For example, Apple or tree, or nose, etc.
Humanities types of all political persuasions tend to believe in the power of language , but not in a simplistic , strong Sapir-Whorf version you seem to imply. On the contrary, some humanities scholars (linguists) have pretty conclusively refuted the strong versions of that theory.
I think that's a fair point, but not quite a contradiction. It's not like anyone is saying that "Latino" or "Latina" should be banned or are slurs.
I don’t buy the “left wing” “right wing” attributions here, but would observe that the kind of attitude *you* call “left wing” here is totally antithetical to free speech and indeed amounts to classifying a whole bunch of thoughtcrimes. We must be allowed to express and debate every idea , and I think freedom loving people of all stripes agree on this fundamental principle.
The people calling to censor that satirical piece - whether right or wrong there - are *not* doing so because it expresses the idea that gender is sex determined but because it is “punching down satire” I.e. it is intentionally *ridiculing* a marginalized group. Most of them would not oppose an earnest discussion of the topic and some of them would love to try to enlighten you about the differences between sex and gender.
Well put. "Punching down" is one of key dimensions. It incents being a victim, and thus, allow one to express outrage, and garner sympathy, while avoiding engaging on the points of difference. A NYT piece on Sati was an excellent example. The resulting problem is that everyone wants to be a victim - evangelicals included.
Isn't all satire ridicule?
It’s not all ridicule of marginalized groups.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily endorsing the “no ridiculing marginalized groups” line, just pointing out that it is radically different from the one Richard Gadsden proposed as the guiding logic for “left “ attitudes on speech.
I think there are two things happening here 1) simply being rude/impolite/inflammatory and 2) right belief. I think most people agree that you should attempt to avoid the first. Being hurtful for it's on sake is stupid and cruel. Right belief is actual philosophical differences about the truth, natural law and appropriate rights.
The problem with pronouns is that it pushes people outside of their held beliefs in order to avoid being rude. I have no issue using a neutral pronoun to avoid being rude and but we may have fundamental issues on the nature and flexibility of gender. I'm not going to give ground on my position to appease you, especially if I think that appeasement is individually and socially harmful.
I think the secular left gets similarly uncomfortable with religious norms: removing your hat in a church being a simple example. Some folks on the right will get upset about casual use of OMG and similar mock religious expressions, especially by clearly unreligious people. I can understand the frustration with abiding by reverence you find harmful or vacuous.
Basically, language matters and while you can avoid being directly rude, you can't completely talk around deep ideological divides.
Except we may try to find a middle ground. I think most of us naturally shift our language register and vocabulary based on context. Many won’t swear in front of children, or their grandparents, for instance. Similarly I can see a certain space for avoiding certain religoysly offensive terminology *while* engaging with a religious person sensitive to that . Calling someone the pronoun they request, just like the name they request , sounds to me like common courtesy. It doesn’t concede objective realities, it’s simply giving the courtesy of the premise that a person knows their own identity best unless there is a strong reason to call it into question (it’s not too different from misgendering a cisgender person who might present ambiguously- that happens too and you would course correct there immediately with apologies not argue ask for proof! )
This is all different however from arguing in generalities or the abstract. When talking about absent individual we have a grey area i suppose (eg I feel there is a strong case to refer to Ezra milller by as a “he” since it’s relevant to his purported pattern of aggression towards women and his request to be given non binary pronouns might help obscure the fact- but that’s an extreme outlier case)
I think I'd disagree with the statement that people know their own identity best. Your identity is primarily communal and relational, not individual self perception.
I do not perceive myself as rude and judgemental, but many people do. They're probably right, but that doesn't at it's core change how I perceive myself when responding to people. What's the truth? The actions as perceived by the community are more real.
You cannot perceive or wish yourself into changing your essential or social reality. That's the crux.
“Identity” is doing some work,there. “Am i a nice guy” is one identity question. Indeed one the individual is not best to answer. What’s my name? What’s my birthdate ? What’s my gender? All questions that in polite society we would, under most circumstances, assume (or at least pretend to assume) the individual knows best. I reiterate that this norm has *always* been the case. If an ambiguously presenting individual would correct you as to their gender 50 years ago (eg on the phone) you’d immediately apologize not doubt them.
If someone's proclaimed identity is not in line with obvious evidence, this is not accepted by society. If I claim I'm 12 to order off the kids menu, I should be challenged. More interesting, religion is very much a part of someone's identity, but you claiming to be part of a denomination does not make that fact; it's the community which accepts and identifies you. Same logic applies to political affiliation. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's no chicken. I can't claim to be Black and should be ridiculed if I do. Even if I feel deeply attached and empathetic to Black culture, I'm still not Black.
Is gender different than age, party/religion, race or disability? Not really other than the use of gendered pronouns and the deeper social and physiological differences between men and women related to procreation, child rearing and physical defense. The case for not self identifying gender is stronger than race or age.
How old you are is a matter of objective fact so in that respect it is certainly different from gender.
Your religious example is also not apposite. Members of a religious community might choose not to count someone as part of that community, but in *polite society,* not in the context of that community, it would be considered rude to question it. If someone at a party says they're Jewish and you start trying to determine if they're *really* Jewish—"Do you keep kosher?"—that would be considered inappropriate.
Race is a more interesting question, certainly.
“People should be referred to by the pronouns they prefer…”
Sure: “Ms.” instead of “Miss.”
That's an honorific rather than a pronoun?
Yeah, true. I shouldn’t do this from work.
I kind of agree, but I get there differently. Left-wing people tend to think more systematically, at a community level, and are more skeptical of traditional mores. They are inclined to calculate right/wrong from secular first principles based on potential harm caused to others, especially groups they deem to be especially vulnerable. Because they’re often too smart for their own good, they dream up all kinds of potential harms to come up with and enforce new rules. Right-wingers are more individualistic and traditional. They prefer clear rules that have stood the test of time, that can be followed at an individual level without much hemming and hawing or reflecting on potential harms.
Might be easier to describe it as "the right is currently much harder to offend". Or "only the left is offended by ideas (and this is a recent development)" It's not they are very offended by the specific offensive words you picked out, it's just that they agree with the left AND the broader public that there is such a thing as impolite, offensive, unnecessary and inflammatory speech.
Probably worth noting that many on the right were genuinely offended by, say, Colin Kapernick's kneeling for the anthem, or "ACAB." They might have "banned" it if they had the power to (and certainly pushed the NFL to ban the kneeling to some extent.)
I think Matt is closer to the mark that it’s just a gap in how offensive different people find it to call someone who was assigned male gender at birth ‘a man’. There are certainly magic ‘more polite’ words some people try to use to express that some individual was assigned a particular gender at birth if that is what one wishes to express.
It looks to me like a large muddle actually, with a lot of cross pressures, disagreement on what the ‘asks’ are, and desire for broad standards of politeness. I myself have often noted people who ‘don’t feel the need to be polite’ about something actually be polite about it in practice. Many times. They often mean that they reserve the right to be impolite about it. That there are particular social groups where they are going to be impolite about it. Or they think that if they are impolite even though they actually don’t try to be, it’s fully justified! But the passion does come from the deep conflict you are pointing to.
I doubt there are many older people who would be “flabbergasted” with transgenderism. They would merely be confused about why anyone takes it seriously.
I suspect 80% don’t have strong views one way or the other and have only a vague sense of what a trans woman is.
I wonder how many young single progressive men would loudly profess the "TWAW" orthodoxy but, if faced with the opportunity, refuse to personally date one.
Based on the number articles I've seen from Slate and other left-leaning outlets over the last several years explaining how bigoted cisgendered individuals are if they categorically refuse to date transgendered individuals, I'm guessing it's high, but I can't say that I've seen polling data.
That is, predictably, the Slateiest thing I've ever seen.
This is one of the better things I've read recently about politics and language. Well done.
This is also why I am glad Matt has dived into substack. He's a great and prolific even when I disagree with him, which is frequently. He attracts a ton of smart readers who make points such as this one.
Consider slavery. Both right and left wingers think it is unacceptable to defend slavery, no matter the language you use. So the core distinction is not the one you made, language. It is the ideas themselves.
Conservatives tend to hold on to old ways, that's why they are called conservatives! Progressives like progress. Conservatives will hold on to old conceptions of sex or race or whatever longer, and that means expressing those old ideas remains acceptable longer. Progressives go the other way, that things we once accepted are not longer acceptable is central. That is how they define progress!
Values are the fight, always. Progressives, being more open to changing their values, will be the first to arrive at the conclusion that previously widely held-ideas are no longer acceptable to defend in civil discourse. Language used is a consequence of the primary dynamic, is is not primary.
“Progressives, being more open to changing their values, will be the first to arrive at the conclusion that previously widely held-ideas are no longer acceptable to defend in civil discourse”
The problem is that progressives are often wrong about this.
Hey, no one is perfect. Progressives prematurely try to declare ideas unacceptable and conservatives are slow to discard discredited ideas because tradition.
I think this give and take is unavoidable and society needs functioning progressive and conservative parties to check and balance each other.
So I agree with you that progressives are often wrong but I would generalize the problem: People are often wrong, conservatives and progressives alike. We need people of good will on both sides to limit the damage.
This is not both-sidesism. Right now we only have a functioning progressive party. The putatively conservative party has succumbed to fanaticism, is addicted to propaganda, and is, as Biden put it, semi-fascist. Responsible conservatives in their lust for power have abdicated their duty to marginalize the fanatics and nihilists.
I more or less agree with your comment. But - and this is not both-sideism - I can’t recall left routinely marginalizing the worst on their team.
Have you really never heard the attacks on "tankies"? I think that is absolutely the left routinely marginalizing the worst on their team. Stalinists and Maoists get marginalized hard.
I think a large part of the problem here is that the most extreme on the left are so thoroughly marginalized that many on the right don't even hear about their existence and think that the extreme left are people like Sanders or "The Groups" as MattY puts it.
Like: look how marginal Sirota and Grey (Sanders staffers) ended up when they made it clear that they were to the left of Sanders - Bernie is a very savvy politician who takes the exact left edge of the Overton Window.
Even things like Defund the Police (which was the compromise position of the hard left; the original was Abolish the Police) is being pushed to the margins by the mainstream left.
Once upon a time, I participated in once of the early internet-based, member-moderated discussion forum communities. A running joke developed that was too often deployed as a response to a comment criticizing a right-of-center position: "Have *you* denounced Stalin?!!"
I suspect that a lot of people would disagree with you if you defended slavery (without using slurs) rather than saying it's something you should be kicked off of social media for saying.
There's a huge difference between ideas you disagree with and ideas whose expression you want to punish people for making, and that was the distinction I was trying to make.
If someone was arguing that slavery was what those n-words deserve for being n-words, then sure, everyone would object.
But if someone was arguing that, say, slavery was a more efficient economic system than free labour and, while it clearly was worse for the slaves, it was better for society as a whole, and that the problem with antebellum slavery wasn't the slavery, it was that the slavery was racially based, and slavery would be fine if it was in proportion to the races [and I feel the need at this point to point out that this is very much not my view; slavery is evil] then I think you'd get exactly the left/right or progressive/conservative difference I described on whether the publisher of the book making this argument should have published it.
You can't discuss an idea without stating it. If you want to convince people that trans women are women, you need to discuss with them, and they need to be able to state that they believe it isn't so.
However, when people use known slurs, they're mostly just being deliberately antagonistic/provocative and NOT open for discussion.
If someone thinks children shouldn't be exposed to the idea that kids sometimes have two dads, I can talk about that with them. If they call me a f***** what's the point in discussion?
I mean, sure you can write something really offensive about me without using that word but in general, the kind of people who would do that would probably just use the word too.
Not really? The extreme example is someone trying to save my soul and tell me that being gay means I'm going to burn in hell. I think they're misguided, but charitably they're trying to help? After I came out(25 years ago) I had a friend try to be supportive but also tell me that he kinda felt being gay was wrong. I obviously didn't agree with him but he wasn't trying to be mean(I knew him well enough to know he wasn't trying to be mean - he was pretty devout)
Plenty of people thought being gay was wrong and came around on it - and now my marriage enjoys majority support. (Since he was just a college friend I have no idea how my friend feels now but I can easily believe he'd be more supportive now)
If someone says "f**" then they're being deliberately offensive.
Yes and no.
I agree with the idea of a euphemism treadmill that deciding we should say "people experiencing homelessness" instead of "homeless people" will eventually revert to the mean.
_However_ - please note that even "homeless people" isn't intended to give offense. Maybe not even "illegal aliens"
But if someone used "bum" or "wetback" you'd be pretty sure they were intending to be offensive, no?
Someone using the f-word is intending to be offensive - they've picked the term for offense.
Someone saying they think being gay is wrong might or might _not_ intend to be offensive - and I think intent matters - I can have a discussion.
So no, I wouldn't say it's the "meaning" behind the word that is offensive, I would say it is the "intent" behind the use of the word that is offensive.
* Side note: I really hate that word. I've specifically avoided typing it out, as has the commenter("Just some guy") below me. I believe in the use/mention distinction but that doesn't mention I wouldn't appreciate fewer mentions.
No. Because choosing the word was an intentional choice meant to start a fight. It’s like the difference between saying, “I disagree with your position,” and yelling, “go to hell, mother f’er!” Both of them get you to functionally the same place in terms of communicating disagreement, but the affect is radically difficult, and affect (the feelings wrapped around the meaning) is half or more of in-person human communication. (Affect is also why you can communicate in situations without language, like with pre-verbal babies.)
F***** is a word with specific affect. Someone who uses it has probably chosen that word not just for its meaning, but for a set of attached emotions that are potentially dangerous (anger, disgust, mockery, etc.).
"Turn away from homosexuality" also implies that there is something wrong with being homosexual.
“left-of-center people…need to get used to the honestly quite banal idea that many successful and capable businesspeople have right-wing political views.”
Failing to understand this has made a lot of liberals total marks for corporations faking progressive values. It’s embarrassing. They don’t ACTUALLY care about bisexuality day, guys.
....do you think that liberals actually think that they do?
Because I run in liberal circles, and it's pretty much an open, running joke that these companies are pandering for financial reasons.
I think the real gulf of understanding is liberals thinking that corporations somehow *should* care about Bi Visibility Day and then getting outraged when the corporations "only" use it as window-dressing to sell bi- and/or visibility-themed merchandise.
I think it basically boils down to this, as someone on the center-left: you'd rather have corporations do it because it is in-line with actual corporate values, but given the choice between them doing it for cynical reasons versus not doing it at all, you'd rather have them doing it.
Personally I'd rather they stop doing it and stick to selling coffee or whatever. But "they are doing it, albeit for cynical reasons" is definitely a sign that your activism is succeeding.
And this ties in to Richard Gadsden's comment at https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musk-needs-to-make-twitter-better/comment/10138975 - if your theory of change is that you can stamp out disfavoured concepts by policing disfavoured language, then you're going to be shocked when compelled speech doesn't reflect a real change of heart.
Sorry, I was unclear. By "should", I mean "they think that the natural state of the world is that corporations share their values", not "they would like it to be the case that corporations share their values". The latter is a somewhat-reasonable goal, the former is a severe misunderstanding of the nature of the world.
And yet many of them act shocked when something happens which is an easy consequence of that fact. Perhaps you haven't noticed this, but Leora and I have.
it really causes a lot of unforced errors in political judgement, to be frank, by setting expectations too low...allowing folks to perpetually step over them.
I like the distinction between "stepping in at the vanguard of a controversial social dispute and enforcing widely agreed-upon social boundaries."
This sort of gets to the heart of what I see as the problem with "cancel culture." It's comes across as an effort to not just police the outer limits of agreed upon socially acceptable behavior, but try to win arguments by altering what is considered socially acceptable.
There is a strong push on the left to exclude the GOP, and even much of the center-left from polite society. This isn't just about banishing NAZIs, but excluding mainstream members of the GOP. The idea that a sitting SCOTUS judge shouldn't be able to publish a book is kinda nuts. As is the idea that anyone who deviates from the Lefts position on trans rights - an issue that remains very unsettled - should be banned from public forums.
While I don't want to say that this is the only reason, or even the main reason the Right is becoming/has become awful, I think it is a significant factor. Democracy only works if everyone feels like they get a fair shake (or if you can successfully repress those who don't) If the Right feels like they are not welcome to participate in polite society and the public discourse, they have no reason to think that their views are getting a fair shake in society and they no longer have reason to rely upon democracy or public institutions.. Moreover, the left does not have the power or will to actually repress the GOP.
I see your point about maybe it is a good thing for orgs, like the 1947 Dodgers, to be at the vanguard of a social issue, but I tend to think that neutral-ish speech platforms, such as Twitter or the publishing industry, as well as public institutions such as public schools and universities, really should not be, especiallybwhen they are all on the same side. I think that that really gives the impression that the other side is not being invited to participate in democracy, and that is corrosive to society.
I think the left’s clear drive to install norms administratively rather than persuade people and have them buy in has blown back on Democrats. People don’t know any way to stop a culture that they don’t want to be part of other than voting for DeSantis types.
But aren’t DeSantis types just as strongly involved in cancel culture as anyone on the left? They just cancel different people.
I think its worth considering that society can be set up as a a discussion or a power struggle (or somewhere in between).
I oppose cancel culture because I think that society should lean toward the "discussion" end of this spectrum. I think that a discussion-based society is going to lead to a better society for a variety of reasons and on a variety of metrics. As a result, while I don't like left wing cancel culture, I definitely am not running off to vote for DeSantis.
However, a lot of people dislike cancel culture because it is an effort to remove their views from the public discourse and essentially win on those issues by default. If you are in this camp, voting for DeSantis is not all that unreasonable. You may be open to a discussion based society, but only if you get to be part of the discussion. If the other side is not going to allow you to participate in the discussion, why should you have any confidence that that discussion will result in an outcome that reflects your interests? At that point, either you have to give up your interests (something people aren't inclined to do) or use the power available to you to force your interests to win. Basically, if one side moves toward the "power struggle" model, it tends to push the other side in that direction as well.
And, for what its worth, I think that this goes in both directions. DeSantis' illiberalism pushes left-illiberalism. After all, if DeSantis is trying to use power to silence the left, why should the left be interested in having a discussion with him? I don't think it is a coincidence that left-illiberalism really flourished under Trump, and in the context of things like the GOP winning power with a minority of the vote and refusing to vote on Garland.
Absolutely. I think they’re probably worse, and I don’t want the government involved in that sort of thing. But the support for them is a reaction to something that is perceived as real (and undoubtedly is real in at least a few locations, which is all you need to incite a panic in the internet age).
Identity politics are wildly unpopular yet pervasive. It’s hard to remember a parallel. And above reproach/debate in much of our public square (which used to be *the* public square for the most part).
DeSantis types are fighting canceling with canceling in the places where they have power: mainly state governments. They don't have power in HR departments and Twitter outrage mobs
They absolutely do have power in Twitter outrage mobs. Well, maybe not Twitter - maybe it's e-mail outrage mobs. My colleague Tommy Curry got forced the leave the country by one of those mobs: https://dailynous.com/2017/07/27/targeting-philosopher-tommy-j-curry/
"They don't have power in HR departments"
Maybe they don't, but there's no reason they can't. States have a fair amount of power to regulate workplaces.
Also, DeSantis types may already have some sway in HR departments because DeSantis has wielded blunt objects in the past. I'm guessing that Disney is going to be more careful with what it says and does. If they fire someone in FL for expressing views that are accepted by the right but not the left, there's a non-zero change they'll get punished by the Florida legislature.
To some degree each side is just weaponizing the tools of the other. Liberals are using conservative pro-employer laws and conservatives are using governmental programs against liberal causes.
I'm ideologically aligned with the left but know that both sides are fighting equally hard over power with whatever tools they have at their disposal.
Yes, but this is Slow Boring, and we only punch left here in the comments.
You realize, don’t you, that DeSantis is very likely to win reelection as governor in a landslide? And likely to pull along a bunch of other Republican candidates for various state offices on his coattails?
You asked what “DeSantis types” are doing to convince people. Is DeSantis not a DeSantis type?
The Right is too quick to call critique "cancellation," but at the same time there is a move on the Left to make it so that the Right doesn't have a venue to make its arguments. Look at Bennet getting fired for running Cotton's OpEd, or the efforts to get Penguin to drop Barret's book, or the fact that anything but the most milquetoast version of the Right's position on transgender issues can get you banned from Twitter.
You can't simultaneously say that the Right needs to just be more convincing while pressuring the neutral-ish platforms where they can make their argument to the general public to not deny the right a platform.
I'm not claiming that the Left has successfully excluded rightwing views from public discourse yet.
However, there is a clear effort to do so, and it has had enough success* that the Right aren't entirely crazy to think that the deck is getting stacked against them when it comes to persuasion.
*This success has admittedly waned a bit since Summer 2020.
Why are they obligated to convince you? Is this a two way street? Personally I am often skeptical of leftist ideas precisely because they don’t make any contact with conservative criticism.
"Plus, if they want to win elections, they need to convince people."
People already agree with them about many issues that the left wants to enforce (affirmative action, gender in sports, etc.), so there's not much need to convince more people. Furthermore, it looks like the right may in fact be convincing people:
"[in 2022] Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth. This is up from 56% one year ago and 54% in 2017." [1]
This left-wing viewpoint is already a minority viewpoint and is becoming more so. Sure sounds like the right needs to the hard work harder convincing people...
Taking the claim that "If the left wants their ideas to be taken seriously they need to actually do the hard work of convincing [people] that they’re correct." and switching "left" to "right" sounds clever, but it doesn't make sense because many of these "right-wing" ideas already have majority support whereas many of the "left-wing" ideas do not. It really is the burden of the left to convince people that affirmative action is good, gender is mutable, etc.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
I agree with this. There are a number of issues where the Left is trying to use an "elite" consensus on a issue to close the Overton window on a substantial minority (or even majority) position, in order to win an argument without having to actually convince people. I don't think that that leads to a well-functioning society.
Josh Barro has called it a "stolen base".
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/against-stolen-base-politics
The complaint isn’t that some people on twitter don’t like them. That’s straw man nonsense. An actual complaint was that they could get banned by twitter, which is exactly what happened with the Babylon bee.
Strictly speaking, the Right is relying less on winning elections these days.
I think Matt left out a "not" in the second paragraph, which caused me to laugh out loud in very inappropriate circumstances
I'd seen the news item saying he'd promised *no* "free-for-all hellscape", but given that it's Elon Musk I was ready to believe that he'd made the opposite promise and had to walk it back.
I actually thought that Musk promised a free for all hellscape. A libertarian with a love of irony might do that.
Oh I totally took that typo literally until I saw these comments.
I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic curation. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic filtering and ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other mainstream clients.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2022/back-to-the-future-of-twitter/
This was kind of what we had in about 2010 when I worked on a third-party Twitter client. Twitter provided broad access to their API, and third parties built alternative clients on top of it. Since then (AIUI) Twitter have gradually made their API less open and usable, and maintaining a third-party client has become a Red Queen's race (and some popular clients have been in-housed and/or killed). Which is to say, I don't think Twitter wants to be a back-end platform, they want control of your eyeballs. But perhaps that will change now, who knows? It was pretty cool when Twitter worked as a general pub-sub backend protocol for short messages.
This. There is no world where Twitter gives up the ability to control the UX and put ads in where it wants them.
In Thompson's proposal, Twitter just charges for API usage and let's the organization providing the client figure out monetization. The third party clients can show ads (possibly using services provided by Twitter), they can charge a subscription fee, or they can pioneer a new monetization model.
For what it's worth, it shouldn't be very hard to require clients to include ads in their UX. I think the issues with splitting up the backend and client are that it feels like a pretty radical changes that's hard to compare with other strategy options and that it feels a bit like a solution in search of a problem. Twitter should be able to create a power user interface in house, and the other client types feel too niche and/or like potentially bad ideas (e.g., the partisan clients).
An API which allowed Twitter to require that you include ads would be a *lot* less open than the one I remember, which worked fine for "clients" which were text-only or even completely headless. Back in the day "delete all my tweets" was about five lines of shell script. Was that script a "client"? It certainly didn't display ads.
I was going to say I’m not knowledgeable enough personally but I feel Twitter made a very conscious choice NOT to go this direction. Presumably for business reasons. It’s not like they ended up with world beating ad revenue model so maybe it’s time to rethink? I’m not 100% on why they made the choices they did in the first place.
As I say, I think they want(ed) to own your eyeballs, and it's a lot easier to do that when people can only access your service through your approved client. If you own both client and server you get more control, more opportunities to serve ads, and more data to train your customer-engagement models. There might also be a public-choice analysis here: what Twitter does is the outcome of internal power struggles which we mostly don't see, not the best thing for the business as a whole. But with Twitter I always keep a lot of probability mass on "they don't know what the heck they're doing and just kinda make it up as they go along".
> This should be a feature of Twitter where you can either mass delete your tweets or else schedule tweets for automatic deletion.
Everything posted to the internet should be considered permanent due to trusted archive services and even screenshots. On the margin, deleting older tweets will make it harder for people to find; and that may be valuable to reducing controversy around what someone said in the past. Yet I think we should all act as if everything we add to the internet is permanent.
And famous people with a history of deleting tweets generally get auto archived. E.g., Michael Burry (investor of Big Short fame) auto deletes his tweets. So people created other Twitter accounts that simply mirror everything he posts to provide a permanent archive. E.g., https://twitter.com/BurryArchive
I agree with you, and I'm surprised that, to my knowledge, no one has done this to Matt's tweets, given all the annoying people out there that want to drag him for tweets that often weren't bad at all.
True, but "on the margin" is a big deal for most non- or marginally-famous people. Stories come up now and then of some not-particularly-famous who had a bad tweet N years ago and it got re-surfaced to their detriment. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. E.g. I'm glad that Alison Collins got dragged thru the mud for her old tweet [1]. But if she auto-deleted, I'm guessing that she could have dodged that controversy entirely (altho not all the other controversy she generated). Auto-deleting really could be effective for many people.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-school-boards-san-francisco-0f13b0a16562f4e30bdc575a84285a6b
In journalism, there is a whole ethical framework around quoting people and when they are on the record and off the record. A deleted tweet that you dug up from an archive is off the record, and as a journalist you have to say "This person was caught saying X." If the tweet still exists and you can embed it in an article, you can do the more straightforward format of "According to this person, X." Twitter occupies an awkward middle ground between press release and haphazard remark that makes this line hard to draw.
"Nobody in the Republican Party... is in a rush to get Donald Trump back on Twitter because his account is embarrassing to the GOP."
Oh Matt Y., you sweet child of summer.
You sound like a Soviet official in 1989, proclaiming that surely Comrade Gorbachev will crack down on this silly dissent in Poland any day now, and the Warsaw Pact will endure for a thousand years!
The world has changed. Yes, back in the innocent days of the early 2010s, Trump's tweets would have been embarrassing both to the GOP and to any decent person. Now? Yes, they're embarrassing and infuriating to the Tim Millers and Jonathan V. Lasts of the world, but those guys aren't even in the GOP anymore. The GOP elected officials and candidates have, to a (wo)man, bent over and kissed Trump's... ring, let's be polite about it, and they're tripping all over themselves to proclaim their fealty to him.
What happened to Congresswoman Cheney? Why was she pulverized in her primary? Did she suddenly change her mind on trans rights and gun control? No! She was defenestrated for publicly accusing the Orange God King of lying and trying to subvert our democracy. And you say that it's *Trump's tweets* that are embarrassing to the GOP?
Yes, in private some GOP politicians are probably embarrassed and disgusted with themselves for bending the knee before the Orange One, but they will never admit it publicly, because they can't afford to.
I think that Matt's position is that most members of the GOP simultaneously believe that Trump on twitter offends the marginal general election voter, and that publicly opposing Trump offends the marginal primary voter, and so they are happy when Trump is removed from twitter *without their having to publicly oppose him*, and they are happy to not push for his reinstatement because they can get away with that.
Matt has fun on Twitter. I used to have a certain amount of fun on Twitter, and miss a few of the good accounts and the occasional good joke.
On the whole though, it seems straightforwardly clear that a decent number of people have gotten badly ill from using Twitter. I hope Musk runs it into the ground. It’ll probably get replaced by something worse, but at least a few people will look away from their phones for a bit longer than usual and not look back.
I view Twitter like a vice - there's a legitimate libertarian concern that people have freedom to enjoy the vice (so don't mess with my scotch) - but we also have to look at the cumulative effect on all of society when a lot of people use the vice a lot.
It would be nice if Matt could enjoy a tweet and twitter wasn't used to coordinate our political or journalistic "discourse". (The scare quotes are doing a lot of work there.)
Believe me, I love booze, but if I carried it around in my pocket and took a swig every 45 seconds all day that would be bad.
As someone that owns a company that writes reorg software...
... yes, many companies are overstaffed. Who created the system that hired these people? Not a single silicon valley engineer, product manager, or other person interviewed for the job hoping that they could be the 5th product manager of the LinkedIn help menu.
The problem was (and is) we judge people by the population of the org they control. Widely known: getting the VP promo means you need an org size of 75+ engineers. SVP? About 250. When interest rates are zero and budgets are infinite, nobody should be surprised this happens.
Of course, it is the rank and file who will "suffer". And by suffer, I mean take a job loss, find another company, and now that sanity is returning, have a more fulfilling job than somehow making enough work to spend 5 hours debating and poring over usage data to decide the order of menu items on the help menu. There are a lot of startups that could use the help, far more wealth will be created, and the industry will be better for it.
When we're not judging people by the size of their org, we are judging them by how much they are shipping (and not how much they ship per person), which also incentivizes growth.
I'm an engineer working in software, and while I wouldn't say that we are overstaffed, there is definitely widespread skills-mismatch/poorly-staffing.
Especially in the last few years as demand seemed to bloom and supply seemed to wither.
Companies resorted to scooping up anyone that had the credentials to fill these roles...and a significant % (and notably higher % than previous) of these people are of very minimal or negative net value. But they are (properly-credentialed) butts in seats, so HR and management consider it a win.
To the point that I think that my organization could drop ~25-30% of our engineering staff and still be about as productive.
I don't know if this is unique to my particular industry or widespread, though. I'm not at a FAANG or even the Bay Area, so we may be irrelevant.
In SWE this is a thing, but it's also true in Product, Program, and Design.
This can become obvious when you look at commits in any kind of nuanced way. No, don't count commits or LOC, but do look at a sample of the last 10 for all engineers on a given team, and you often get a situation where 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work.
Granted, you would be surprised how much of this is due to overzealous gatekeeping my more tenured engineers arguing over nonsense in pull request reviews (i.e. you used a for loop and not a reduce function? did you go to state school?). But it's hard to deny this reality when you look at the facts on the ground.
It is an issue here (and I think it is widespread) where there is a very limited or poor quality training pipeline internally.
And there is no incentive to improve it, because engineers jump jobs so frequently that the company doesn't gain enough of a ROI on it.
The internal promotion/retention and better training regimen have to go hand in hand, or we will just keep this endless (and inefficient?) churn.
The cheat code of the best EMs is to create structured onboarding and keep an inventory of work that can scale up in complexity from easy to hard in order to acclimate new people to the team and get them into productive flow.
It helps if your more tenured engineers document the hard parts and actually do knowledge sharing.
Pair Programming FTW
I think we could probably lose as many as one in five, but only if we were allowed to catch our breath and cease active development for a quarter or so. Trimming fat and optimizing staffing and process/procedure is hard to work in on the edges when the ethos is customer wants X, gotta go fast, customer wants Y, gotta go fast, as long as it works, gotta go fast.
Gonna put in a plug here for "Bullshit Jobs" by Graeber. I have no idea if it's facts-based, but my life spent working for companies has given me plenty of anecdata to confirm it's thesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
When people look at the statistics, it seems that Graeber's main claims are in fact all false. He's describing an objectively value-laden concept of bullshit as meaningless work, but identifying it with a subjective account of when the worker feels that it's meaningless. He claims that bullshit work is increasing, is more pronounced in the anglosphere, and is more common in finance and less in service jobs, but when people have actually looked at surveys that seem to use his preferred measures, they find exactly the opposite of the trends that he describes. In the end, I think he's really re-identifying the Marxist concept of "alienation", which Marx identified in the assembly line worker who doesn't see the final product, but which has now arisen for knowledge workers in our increasingly bureaucratized society. But the worker not seeing the value in their work is not the same as their work not having value.
Here's a paper that does the statistics:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
Hmm. I take your point. I gave up on "A History of Debt" because I didn't think you could reason outward from some random tribe to make generalizations about all of finance.
That said. Graeber's observations in Bullshit Jobs really resonated with me, and I see them play out in the business world ALL THE TIME. So maybe some academics have some survey data that contradicts Graeber's findings. That isn't going to change my mind. It calls to my mind MY's writing on how crime can be increasing while stats show it going down. Reasonable people can disagree. I, for one, can say that I see Graeber's main thrust confirmed in all of my work in the private and ESPECIALLY in the public sector, and in the work lives of my friends and acquaintances.
I think Graeber has identified a real phenomenon but is just wrong when he claims to get at the trends and causes.
Reiterating my comment above- it is just so bizarre to me that HR would consider unproductive “butts in seats” to be a win. In the rest of the business world, HR’s job is to minimize payroll while maintaining the required output.
HR has almost zero control over this and most of the time is irrelevant to this conversation. Budget comes from finance, VP of Eng decides allocation of headcount, HR mostly makes sure you don't break laws.
In a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies, HR views themselves as there to protect the company from liability. So they are very worried about discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuits. This makes firing for performance reasons really hard because you have to have extensive documentation that the employee wasn't performing compared to their peers. And you have a lot of inexperienced managers because the company just grew really fast and pushed people into management with little training.
Also in Silicon Valley companies the HR team doesn't typically have any responsibility for the cost of R&D (basically the number of engineers). That's the VP of Engineerings problem to work out with the CFO.
HR typically has a whole recruiting arm that works closely with engineering to hire more engineers. And a more typical HR arm that works on things like compensation planning, manages the performance review process, helps manage promotions, and will consult with managers when there are performance and other issues with someone on their team. I've never seen them have much if anything to say about how many engineers there were.
I wonder if things are similar at Microsoft, or if the company's age lends itself to a more sustainable approach to staffing.
I have a lot of friends who used to work at Microsoft in the 00s and most of them said they did hardly any work and kept getting promoted.
One strong engineer told me he played World of Warcraft for roughly 40 hours a week, at work. His performance reviews were always good.
😱🤯
I have a friend who works in pharmaceutical software, who estimates that he works about 10 hours a week in a nominally 40/week job. He makes a fairly modest salary (he has other priorities, and has made a specific decision to not take a high-workload job for more money), but even with the lower amount of time he works he produces more value than his peers, and the company is happy with his performance and contribution. His boss has a tacit understanding of the situation and knows that my friend can, if necessary, briefly do the job of two people when it's needed, and knows that the company would need to pay twice as much to get that overall productivity on a permanent basis. He isn't dishonestly representing that he does more work than he actually does, he simply doesn't mention that he is doing a competitive amount of work in less time than his peers require.
I know that there is this aversion to this kind of situation, as your comment expresses. But really, in this type of situation, where regardless of the actual amount of time you work, the company is happy with your long-term volume of productivity relative to your peers, and finds that it's getting its money's worth, what exactly is the problem? You sure it isn't just cheap moralizing?
Last few jobs have all included contracting, and some govt contracting, so getting butts-in-seats that are properly credentialed at least lets you charge for a while.
Maybe not a common enough setup to matter.
“an even blunter 2021 poll asks whether greater acceptance of transgender people has been good or bad for society. In that poll, “good” won with 38 percent, but 32 percent said it was bad with a hefty 29 percent saying it’s neither good nor bad.”
This implies that significantly less than 38% of the population buy the liberal position on gender dysphoria. I’m certainly in the 38% of Americans who think greater acceptance of the gender dysphoric is good. I’m for acceptance and tolerance, just as we should be accepting of people with bipolar disorder or speech impediments or mobility issues. This does not mean that a man can become a woman, or that I will pay verbal obeisance to that conceit. I can accept a person with bipolar disorder by being their friend, employer or colleague while thinking they should take drugs to reduce manic behaviors. Gender dysphoria is generally less disruptive than mania, so it might sometimes be better to lean into it than fight it. In any event, acceptance does imply that gender dysphoria is anything other than a fraught and unfortunate condition. I’m grateful that I’m happy being a man just like I’m grateful that I’m tall and physically healthy.
I don’t think there is a “leftist position on gender dysphoria”. Some people think that gender dysphoria is a real thing that needs to be significantly respected. Other people think that you should just accept people’s stated gender identity whether or not there really is a condition we might call “dysphoria”.
I read Abigail Shrier's 'Irreversible Damage' six months ago. My takeaway was there is some small percent of people with genuine gender dysphoria (Jan Morris's 'Conundrum' is excellent on this), but a current wave of teenagers, especially girls, wanting to be cool, and our medical establishment shouldn't be abetting life-changing medical interventions for them until they grow up and can make more mature decisions.
I don't think it's worth getting into a back-and-forth on trans issues in this forum, but I just want to say that if you don't want people to undergo life-changing medical interventions until they have the ability to make more mature decisions, that's precisely what puberty blockers are for - let people age before they decide what sort of puberty to undergo.
I agree with you it's not worth having a back-and-forth on the trans issue here, but Shrier's book claims puberty blockers for teens can have irreversible effects. No idea if this is true.
Yeah, I don't know whether it's true (it's quite plausible that it is!) but it seems just as plausible that undergoing puberty has irreversible effects. If one must make the choice at a young age of *which* irreversible effects to undergo, then it's disingenuous to say that they should wait until adulthood to make that choice. It seems akin to insisting on a waiting period before one is allowed to decide whether or not to get an abortion, and then extending that waiting period to 9 months.
The two groups you describe are both subgroups of the 38%. That's my point. My faction "gender dysphoria is a disorder that should receive reasonable accommodation" might be a minority of the 38%, but that hardly means every person who wants to move towards greater acceptance thinks that gender is a social construct or that puberty blockers should be used routinely.
> This does not mean ... that I will pay verbal obeisance to that conceit.
If someone tells me "Hey, I'd prefer if you called me Richard instead of Ricky" then I will do it because it doesn't cost me anything except the effort of trying to remember. I feel the same way about calling someone Rachel instead of Ricky, it's harmless and easy. It's interesting to me that for some people making that verbal switch feels unimportant and for others it's very meaningful. My first instinct was to try to convince you that names and pronouns are an easy thing to change, so just do it to be polite and accepting. The problem is that names and pronouns are clearly very meaningful to trans people, so it's kind of having it both ways on the issue. But I still think it's a useful frame of mind to turn down the temperature on the issue a little bit.
- It strikes me that the culture war around trans people has become much hotter since even last year. Hard to know what a new poll would show. Further intensification of partisan differences or a weakening from one side?
- Silicon Valley is probably entering into a bit of a trough, much like after the dotcom bust. The years of explosive growth are over and they can't have too many people fooling around. Facebook are pissing away billions on nonsense.
- If Facebook and Twitter crumble to pieces through incompetence, it will be the feel good story of the year.
Even though I don’t love some things about social media, it would be a loss for America to have two American run social media sites take a nose dive while the Chinese owned Tik Tok and the European owned Only Fans take over.
It’s good for America to dominate the tech space and it’s bad if the tech space starts going in a different direction.
‘Merica!
Sector dominance relies on continued strength across many different companies. It’s preferable to me for tech companies to be run by Americans rather than foreign authoritarians. Losing ground is a real concern, even if it’s a drop in the bucket. I’ll cheer for laundry that has to be washed at an American laundromat any day. It’s important where things get washed. That analogy went on too long.
The UK’s new direction (along with Sweden and Finland) on gender affirming care for kids is interesting. More honest research is needed but many professionals are now pushing back against the “American” model. Some EXPERTS are even questioning non-medical gender affirming care for kids. I had always thought well this isn’t really hurting anything.
Hopefully we can rise above politics to do what’s best for these kids. I am concerned that Dems position is that if we harm 5 confused non-trans kids (maybe gay) to help one actually gender dysphoric kid then that’s okay.
This is all well and good until we decompartmentalize it from the big elephant in the room which you've discussed elsewhere:
Musk has massive personal exposure in China--and indeed, in other authoritarian regimes. One of his biggest funders is Saudi.
He will take all of that into account when overhauling the fourth-largest media company in the world. Anonymous dissidents the world over will feel the impact.
It seems useless to discuss this situation as if it's just another example of a new boss with new ideas to improve a product. Musk is a geopolitical actor--and as we've seen lately, a narcissist with a deep grudge against the US media writ large, yourself included.
He will be seen by history as such, and we will all look silly for treating his Twitter takeover like just another business story.
+10000
I find the overstaffing SV thesis very interesting and I’m sure it’s only like 50-75% trying to avoid giving out a bunch of stock options.
One very very interesting element of it, to me, is product improvement. Twitter has always seemed to make very few changes. If it were a similarly staffed video game I would expect many many changes all the time—not just improvements but simply bc the audience craves novelty. This is not the prevailing view of the socials, which rise and fall on acquiring some pretty marginal tech users like famous actors or sports stars. It’s important to be able to onboard some folks like this and make them ‘power users’ even if they actually would feel overwhelmed by a product worthy of power use. Especially one that is rapidly iterating.
The problem may be solvable, different version of the platform or something else creative—hiding features away so they can be found and accessed but don’t present themselves as an overwhelming array of knobs, dials, and levers.
But certainly there seems to me a tension between tech company staffing and a general sense that their products need to be quite simple and changes need to be subtle and infrequent. And it’s interesting to me that Twitter seems to be on the verge of testing both theories at once even though they kind of point in different directions. For me, it’s sort of either get rid of the extra people and view your product as a mature thing to squeeze remaining value out of or rapidly innovate with a large staff of developers.
I don’t use Snapchat, but from friends who do, I hear that they are constantly adding and changing features in a way that it’s really impossible to know what you can do today.
That's interesting to hear. Snapchat is probably my most used social media app. They do probably add and change things more than other apps but I've never felt like I didn't know what I was going to be able to do on a day to day basis.
I think the LONG history of anonymously sources stories about how hacked together the Twitter product is and how only a few people know how to fix it is often shared as a cautionary tail meant to make Musk (guy wanting to fix it) look back and make reader sympathetic to poor employees tasked with “dealing with” such a crappy software product.
But i think the opposite is actually true, all it makes me wonder is how so many people got such big paychecks for so long from Dorsey and Agerwal (former CTO, then CEO) and whether complacency about some of even the most basic programming tasks have set in as givens with the Twitter staff, and whether a sympathetic media has basically let them get away with it....
Good point. Say what you will about Google and their capricious product canceling, but I appreciate they’re a lot less precious than they used to be about making changes. I remember ages ago when they had to add some section to their front page (like a help button), and they publicly agonized about the best way to keep the front page with only having 17 words or something. I think they eventually made a goofy change like “I’m feeling lucky” to “feeling lucky.” So precious!
"Twitter has always seemed to make very few changes."
Right???
I don't have access to their code, so what follows is total arm-chair quarterbacking, worth what you paid, but it seems they have to either (1) not want to make changes or (2) have a tech stack that's really a hotmess or (3) have an unproductive engineering organization.
The feature development rate is just so slow.
I like Matt's idea of archiving tweets, except for the part where they'd be removed from public view. As several others have already pointed out in parallel, deleting tweets are bad because everything on the internet is capable of being archived, and it's really frustrating when you're trying to figure out what's going on, or trying to read a really good conversation of the past when one of the participants has deleted a bunch of tweets. The archiving should allow for tweets to not be replied to/RTed/QTed, and any linking to them should not show up in the author's timeline, but they shouldn't be gone for good.
I also think Twitter needs a retract button, where any people who feel they screwed up on a tweet can flag it to prominently display a message that the authors no longer stand by the tweets they made. This would end a lot of the silly drama of people pointing out "Didn't you say this bad or inaccurate thing?", and the authors can instead let the "This tweet has been retracted by the author" message do the work for them.
And related to this, Twitter really needs to get cracking on that clarification button, so people don't have to be chained to a bad typo or very slight mistake when their tweets go viral.