Links for January

Peak Woke, Evolution of SciTech, Academic Troubles, Weird History, Fiction

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Now, onto some items of interest from around the web.

Peak Woke

A lot of people have been putting in their two cents on whether we’ve seen “peak woke.” For a pessimistic take, see Phillippe Lemoine’s “Is Wokeness On Its Way Out?” Of interest is his description of the bottom-up forces involved:

As more people who have been socialized into this ideology enter their workforce, they engage in staff activism and pressure the management to adopt their values, even at the expense of the organization’s mission. Management usually ends up yielding to the pressure, which may seem surprising because they’re supposed to be in charge, but when you think about it and have a realistic model of human psychology I don’t think it’s surprising at all. Nobody likes to be constantly vilified by people they’re close to such as friends or colleagues and most people are pretty low on disagreeableness, so in the end they just cave rather than be the asshole and have to deal with emotional blackmail and shrill mobs all the time. 

In my post on moral dependence, I noted that the involvement of authority in a conflict can result from both bottom-up and top-down pressure. Lemoine seems think the bottom-up pressures in modern society are greater than most give credit for. This is partly because, as Bradley Campbell and I have written before, social media gives access to a sea of potential partisans. From Lemoine:

There is also the fact that in many places, junior staff can now leverage social media to improve their standing inside the organization where they work, because it gives them some influence that is not strictly dependent on their position within that organization and they can whip up mobs on social media to influence the outcome of internal debates in their favor. 

Another interesting point:

In fact, not only do people rarely confront the mob, but they often end up talking themselves into embracing the mob’s ideology, because psychologically it’s much easier to tell yourself that you don’t speak up against a mob because you agree with it than to admit the truth, which is that you’re a coward. 

I’ve always questioned the logic of “conversion by the sword.” Does it even count if the convert is just saying he believes in Allah or Jesus to save his own skin? But I suppose the opposing argument is that even if the convert is lying today, people eventually come to believe their own lies. And if they don’t, their children do. What the Saxons who lost to Charlemagne and the Persians who lost to the Rashidun grudgingly accepted, their grandchildren actively embraced.

Evolution of Sci-Tech

Brian Potter at Construction Physics asks why we don’t yet have robot bricklayers. At first glance, it seems an ideal construction job for automation: Bricks are fairly uniform and they’re laid at even intervals in straight lines. After reviewing some attempts at robo-masons and their limitations, he considers why automated bricklaying is more challenging than it looks:

There seems to be a few factors at work. One is the fact that a brick or block isn’t simply set down on a solid surface, but is set on top of a thin layer of mortar, which is a mixture of water, sand, and cementitious material. Mortar has sort of complex physical properties - it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and its viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. This makes it difficult to apply in a purely mechanical, deterministic way (and also probably makes it difficult for masons to explain what they’re doing - watching them place it you can see lots of complex little motions, and the mortar behaving in sort of strange not-quite-liquid but not-quite-solid ways). And since mortar is a jobsite-mixed material, there will be variation in it’s properties from batch to batch.