> That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act of kindness. I think, rather, it's the most rutheless form of grief there is.
I don't see how forgiveness is ruthless. It takes great compassion to accept people and situations as they are without harboring bitterness, resentment, or judgment. Forgiveness is also a form of self-love.
The non-attachment that comes with forgiveness isn't the same as being cold or moving on by leaving someone else behind. That's still looking at things from an egoic "I have been wronged" narrative. Forgiveness is about dropping that story entirely.
> I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt.
I think in general reconciliation is a good thing, but it's not a given. And even if you do reconcile with someone, you don't have to restore full trust and involvement with them. You can clear the air and never talk to them ever again, or just on a need-to basis, or whatever. It all depends.
In general, our society's difficulty with forgiveness and the like is just another facet of not liking to confront truth. We struggle with truth in this era because the truth is often painful and demands a lot of change out of us that we feel unable or unwilling to give. The Twitter apology is an answer to the question "How do we pay lip service to the truth without having to actually engage with it?"
Well, from the pov of the person being "detached", to be treated as an object is rutheless.
What we are saying, after all, is that the other is "a mere product" of nature; a symptom, not an agent.
This, I think, is the most "anti-Western" notion 'inside' forgiveness, and why it seems so counter-intutive.
The thing we do not want to give up is that people are agents who bare responsibility for their actions, that people are our objects of concern, that people are special.
When we forgive we, ineffect, dehumanise -- at least, for the moment of that forgiveness. We step outside of a world in which they matter. And that seems a more ruthless and radical gesture than just hating them.
Thomas Hobbes makes the following observation in leviathan, that is thoroughly depressing and at first perhaps paradoxical. A person who wronged you will only ever be able to hate you afterwards: either because of fear for your vengeance, or because of distaste for your forgiveness.
The positive action of forgiveness only applies to those who extend it; those who are forgiven are rendered impotent. it's somewhat of a manipulative act if it's not accompanied by magnanimity and reconciliation.
> So why not let them have a bit more salary then you?
One can agree that child-rearing and domestic work are productive activities while still disagreeing with your proposal to inflate salaries.
For instance, instead of what you're proposing, the state can treat these activities as an actual job and pay accordingly. This no longer conflates the issue by making other entities (private employers, tax code, etc) fill in the gaps on what society at large claims it values. Now, I'm not saying I endorse this solution, but rather that there's more to the discussion than how you're framing it.
I don't agree with your logic that childless adults are free riders, and you omit many of the upsides to raising kids that childless adults willingly forgo, or the fact that childless adults often play vital roles in their families and communities that regular parents often don't have the bandwidth for.
You also haven't really talked about the ecological impact of first-world nations having more kids and whether that's wise or sustainable. You act as if it's a priori a net good.
Last, I'd argue that one of the benefits to having a sufficiently advanced society is that people are granted more agency to live as they see fit.
These are thoughtful points and what I hear is agreement that child rearing (and I'd also add care for elderly parents and other activities) are beneficial and those that undertake should indeed be, for a lack of a better term, subsidized for that work. The disagreement is the source of that subsidy and that government should step in to fill the gap rather than the employer having to cover it. I'd be satisfied with that solution. I'd suggest health care should equally be covered by government and paid with taxes rather than the employer. The problem in the US is that there is a strong belief that government should not do any of these things. Since it has to come from somewhere, that leaves the only source of income of most people -- the employer to meet these needs.
The points about ecology and population are a whole other thing, interesting, but out of scope of the pay issue which is why I didn't mention them.
I didn't realize companies are charities now. A couple makes a private and typically self-serving decision to have children, therefore we ought to pay them more regardless of performance.
As if people won't continue to procreate unless their employer gives them more money.
The global population is increasing, so some form of civilization will carry on. The issue is that certain societies have lopsided demographics that will topple the fragile social structures they'd been relying on, a lot of that being the consequence of short-sided incentives like what you're suggesting.
I think there's a misconception that types are meant to tag things according to the programmer's mental taxonomy. They're not. Types should be based on significant distinctions in how your particular program treats and processes the data. For instance, you don't need an EmailAddress type because your program doesn't do anything special with the knowledge that this string is actually an email address. It just treats it like another string. It takes some judgment to determine this, but I consider that part of the learning curve in using types rather than an inherent tradeoff from the tool itself.
> Why would you instead keep your manager in the dark?
Because you're already providing enough value to justify your wage even with padded estimates and slacking off (otherwise your manager wouldn't have been happy to begin with). They just want to get more out of you via the expectation of "reasonable best effort".
In other words, your 50% effort was already good enough to provide the company the value it needed (was willing to pay for), but some managers feel entitled to 100% if you demonstrate that capacity to them. So just don't.
And the reality is that many places don't genuinely need people's best. What they actually need is "good enough", and that's already reflected in the wage via profitable business outcomes that role contributes to. Time and effort have nothing to do with it.
> If you continue to draw your salary while ceasing to provide reasonable best efforts, you are intentionally acting in bad faith and the employer has grounds for termination or at least reduction in pay.
I know you're mostly focused on OP's use of the word "honest", but I think that misses something.
The term "reasonable best effort" is biased in favor of the employer since companies recognize that mediocre performance (relative to the position) is the norm. They also recognize that people like OP exist, and are more than happy to take advantage of them since they aren't likely to aggressively negotiate for what they're actually worth (and actually get it), and that not everyone has the luxury of just switching jobs to not get overly exploited. It's also tricky because things change over time, and what once was fair or mutually beneficial may no longer be, and by then, it be can be tricky to transition out of that.
I do think OP needs to reflect upon why they stayed at this place if they've felt taken for granted for so long. At the same time, I understand the frustration and sense of futility that comes with feeling like you want to give your best, but that you're not in an environment conducive to that.
I also don't think honesty is so binary to where if OP scales back effort in order to transition out of this role, that they can no longer claim to be "honest". Nor does honesty necessarily imply putting oneself in a precarious position and quitting before they're able to do so, especially since I doubt OP's higher-ups have any expectation of being honest and transparent with them that their days are numbered regardless of performance.
edit: I didn't see OP's reply to other commenters and assumed good faith. Nonetheless, I stand by my comment even if it no longer applies to this particular situation
I think in a good faith situation, a scaling back while transitioning out is totally fair. That's a far cry different from intentionally trying to figure out how to do the bare minimum while also refusing to look elsewhere though. I think we are on the same page.
To me, "from first principles" implies a certain presentation style that's different than what this article employs. It feels like you take it to mean "start from the axioms and build up without any gaps or unanswered whys" which is fine, but it turns into a laundry-list of topics the reader needs to get through before seeing the payoff, which in a way is no different from any other math text. I was expecting a more reverse-engineering approach where the first principles are derived from analysis of the problem / application, and we proceed from there.
I think the issue here is that if mathematics is talking about anything at all, then the search for the first cause tells us what that thing is. This is a philosophical issue separate from the sociological activity of doing mathematics. The latter doesn't need an all-encompassing foundation to continue to do useful and interesting mathematics, so pragmatics shrug the issue off. On the other hand, even if mathematics is purely about "structure", then we should still be able to organize our knowledge in a way that provides a single foundation (even if that means showing that the different formulations are logically equivalent).
One suspects that if the search for "foundations" were made rigorous enough to analyze in any meaningful way, someone like Gödel would come along with some sort of impossibility theorem. In other words, if we were to really examine the idea that any particular foundation could be the best/most natural/simplest/whatever, we'd see that it is folly.
