ugochukwu

Lina, you don't know the honest truth. In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that. In civilization, we have POMs. Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that. "This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role. Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up. Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans. And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough. If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention. It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical. SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable. Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation. Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI. This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies. Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw. She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels. No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers. It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team. It was a flex. "Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real." The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly. It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities. What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up. When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.

I didn't go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult. One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers". This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something. Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. These women didn't want to be wives. They wanted to be pets. What's a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves. You get a cat because you want to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he's smart, he'll adapt to you somewhat, but he doesn't have responsibilities other than "be a cat". If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don't have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on. These girls didn't want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but only some of the time. Only when they felt like it. The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job. These young millenial women didn't realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that's what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to. Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted. And as I've said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child. Since our ancestors, in a moment of foolishness and weakness, allowed women to vote, it is no longer legal to dole out the corrective spankings a great many of them both need and read pornographic novels about. Therefore, the corrective measure, for any man who finds himself with a pet instead of a wife, is to withdraw from any husbandly duties and start actively searching for alternatives. This can either result in a correction of the behavior, or the end of a relationship that offers no value. Either is acceptable. This may strike some of you as dishonorable, but there is no honor in keeping a broken pact, or in serving those who despise you. Men must have the pride and self-worth to say "I will be honored and respected, or I will depart to a place where I can be, even if I must be alone there." Men must honor and respect themselves.