Patrick McKenzie

Now, the meta discussion is like, don't LARP it having rigor.

Actually have rigor.

But what would that look like in this context?

What would you have done differently?

Ultimately happy with the decision I made.

Although, as presented, it's the wrong decision.

I'm happy about it for other factors about life.

Working in Japan as a young engineer, there are some very rough parts about that.

But on a meta level...

maybe this is an early opportunity to trust institutions less than trust like systemically viable reasoning patterns more like okay the wall street journal has asserted uh assuming i'm remembering this article right and i'm pretty sure i am because it was a reflection point in life for me the wall street journal has asserted that no future americans will get hired at software companies assume this is true what happens in the american software industry and uh

Maybe I did not have enough knowledge to like confidently predict that at the moment, but I can confidently predict some things now.

Like software companies are going to start to break as older engineers age out of the engineering population and they have no one coming up to replace them, et cetera.

Like the industry institutionally must hire people every year and hiring freezes are necessarily temporary as a result of that.

That's as close to the law of physics as one can have.

So if you are telling me something which says the law of physics has been suspended and will be in the future, I don't agree to that.

How would I learn the law of physics?

I did not know anyone in software engineering at the time, which is partly why I was getting my advice from this from the Wall Street Journal.

But if I had been slightly more agentic about it,

I was at a research university in the United States.

But the fundamental thesis was that for journalism is that the total size of the pie is decreasing in journalism due to structural factors.