Lobsters: Power Relations

Honest feedback time! I think that this document is written in such a way that practically no one will read it. It is long, rambling, sprinkled with absurd quotes whose point is unclear, and immediately starts with elaborate digressions including sheaves (in topology or category theory). I started to read a few pages to know if I wanted to try to read the whole thing, and the answers I got are "no, I don't want to risk reading more of this and finding that it was a complete waste of time", also "wow, the author is really bad at helping the readers understand if they want to read the thing", and also "maybe this is crackpot writing". (There is a particular sort of crackpot writing by people who are in fact technically very on-point, they do know non-trivial mathematics (or philosophy, or computer science, etc.) and use them correctly, but they have completely lost touch with how many technical details their audience can tolerate and which of them are or are not relevant to the point at hand.)

After the first weird quote there are three lines that summarize the point of the document. This is good! But then, I need an introduction, whose purpose is to convince me that I want to read the rest. The introduction should convey why the topic being discussed is important/interesting, and summarize the main notions developed in the document. If I liked the introduction I will be enthusiastic about following the rest. If I don't like the introduction I will run away.

For the rest of the document I would recommend re-reading each paragraph to ask yourself whether they are necessary to the point being made or not. The document is very long, so if the answer is not a clear "yes", just cut the paragraph out.

I think that this document is written in such a way that practically no one will read it. It is long, rambling, sprinkled with absurd quotes whose point is unclear, and immediately starts with elaborate digressions

I don't like to comment on posts without first having done at least a cursory reading if not a deep reading… but I skimmed this post briefly and came to the comments to try to judge from the ensuing discussion whether this was going to be worth the time.

Honest feedback time!

I don't want to pile-on, but I had recognised the submitter's username, and surmised that matching URL meant self-submission. I recognised the submitter's username, because I have considered them a uniquely high-quality and high-frequency contributor to discussions here. I hope the author will appreciate that negative feedback can come from those who really appreciate them and really want them to succeed.

immediately starts with elaborate digressions including sheaves

From my quick skim, I'm not sure that the mathematical discussion really goes much of anywhere. It is not clear what using the mathematical terminology category adds over using this term to just mean some “group of stuff.”

I am not personally opposed to unnecessary rigour—I know for certain that many of the things easily veer into tedium—but I recognise that the rigour needs to be in support of a point, and I suspect applying mathematical rigour and mathematical formulation without subsequent use of these tools to draw inferences or conclusions is ultimately just a fairly superficial stylistic choice.

For example, I don't really even like it when a writer claims that two concerns are “orthogonal”—how does invoking theory from linear algebra help us understand the point more effectively than more standard terminology, like “completely unrelated”? As I vaguely remember, in a space of certain dimensionality, a equally-sized selection of non-zero orthogonal vectors are guaranteed to span that space, which is a very powerful idea from which we can draw analogous or conclusions—that from the right set of “completely unrelated” small things, we can derive the entire space of things—but I've never seen anyone use the word “orthogonal” in this way to respond to another comment, then derive an orthonormal basis from which to methodically continue the conversation.

So it just… doesn't really seem to add much.

maybe this is crackpot writing

I think the assertion that there are distinct types of (distinctly capitalised) community contributors—e.g., Influencer, Celebrity, Clown, &c.—is often a mark of such writing. It's also a mark of a certain kind of very reductive thinking, which also contributed to my lack of desire to do a close reading of this post, even knowing that the author is a very thoughtful contributor.

Honestly, for a post of this form, I'd be more interested to read a proof that these roles do indeed exist in these clearly distinct forms (and perhaps why they are an obvious or inevitable evolution of their circumstances.)

As it stands from my skim of the article, I think the author takes us down a very narrow but mostly uncorroborated path. Therefore, I would, in fact, not suggest reformulating this article into smaller, tighter sections that could be posted independently. Were that done, I most likely would have read more of the overall text, but I would likely not have considered it deeply, and would likely have less negative feedback as a result of not really caring that much one way or the other…

I'll shy away from making concrete suggestions, but I wonder if the difficulties we are sharing may not be a consequence of the weakness of the argument being made…

The mathematical interlude also feels like it's weak on its own terms: If responsibilities form a category, what is the composition of unlike responsibilities? If Alice owes Bob $20, and Bob has to do the dishes tonight for the apartment he shares with Charlie, what responsibility does Alice have to Charlie?

Similarly, the point about maintaining the barrel of the metaphorical gun is a good one, but tying it to locality seems unnecessary; if we lived in the classical Newtonian universe of 18th century physics, that would not materially change the nature of responsibilities.

To summarize, when we treat power and responsibility as components of the same sort of system and equip it with transitivity whenever possible, the evolution of that system over time has natural explanations for why power and responsibility either remain delegated or are eventually revoked.

In less fancy terms, this is just "if A delegates responsibility to B, either A will revoke it or they won't". You don't need category theory to prove that.

Also: I skimmed the rest and I am not fond of the style, with offensive jargon and silly equations:

Normal Group Member
+ Capabilities
+ Group
= Normal Fuckwad

Meh. But this is a secondary problem at this point, the main issue is that the document has no clear structure and is unable to convey why one would want to read it. Maybe I am not in the intended audience, but probably some other people are, and they need help to notice it instead of being immediately turned away by apparently-pointless rambling.

Always thought exercising power over someone meant making someone do things they didn’t want to do voluntarily.

To have the power of life and death is to have the responsibility for choosing between life and death; to have the power of where to go for lunch is to have the responsibility of choosing where to go for lunch.

It’s definitely possible to have power without responsibility. I think this essay might be off topic because my comment is definitely off topic.

As always, this was written with no chatbot assistance. I did use vim's spellchecker. Based on preliminary feedback, I suppose that my advice is to chew slowly and be unafraid to use a search engine.

@Irene: Sorry for taking a half-year (half-decade, really) to get around to this. I could have posted this mostly-finished in April, but I failed to make it a priority. I hope that there are many interesting tidbits in here, even if the overall thesis doesn't resonate with y'all.

For any community I share this essay with, I think it's useful to examine the power structure of that community as an example. Lobsters is an Autocracy which respects a limited amount of petitioning but denies Democracy in order to foil Influencers and Sock Puppets. Lobsters isn't a Cult; from my perspective, the typical sour-grapes quitter of Lobsters is a frustrated Influencer, rather than somebody genuinely burnt out from emotional labor. That said, there is value, and thus a draw for attackers, to Lobsters as a watering hole, as a town square, and as a better-moderated alternative to Hacker News; the main structure protecting Lobsters is the invitation tree, which has an excellent record of detecting and cutting off Sybils before they can grow too big.