Not all of us are raising families, but I think it highlights a bigger points. Work is not what builds societies (certain jobs do harm society I think, mostly by destroying it's moral virtues). People relationships are what build societies and build happiness.

And you're right - there are a lucky, select few who get jobs that can also influence society.

I'm not worried about that though (anymore - I was for a time though). With my job, I can provide and care for those around me (provide for my family and generally have positive, uplifting interactions with those around me).

I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am. From my perspective I have more than enough to do locally anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176036

The reason I ended up in tech is in part my fascination about tech, especially as applied to uplifting ourselves and solving our problems (yes, I watched way too much Star Trek: The Next Generation in my formative years). I never thought much about family - in fact, for the most of my life, I felt it's something of a side endeavour. I still feel it shouldn't be the sole focus of a person, though I definitely believe it's more important than I believed in the past.

Same for relationships. And small communities. I feel that maybe we overdid this globalization thing. Maybe global competition and centralization of various kinds of innovative work is more efficient, but it also doesn't seem healthy. Living in a city, there's no such thing as "local community" anymore. Not even neighbours.

> I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am.

Still, I'd like to feel like I'm actually doing my part beyond just participating in the economy as consumer. I have specialized skills, I'm not dumb. But I have hard time finding opportunities to do things I'd know could help meaningfully and effectively. There must be something. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

Your comment you linked to is golden. I'm favouriting it. Those are definitely words I'll try to remember from now on.

A few years ago I applied for a really interesting jobs within Telematics - one of my favorite areas. So I called them, got the CTO on the phone and he had almost no time for me. Then I wrote a mail with my formal application to them. It was appealing and they replied with some coding riddles. I guess I did well enough and was one of 2 or 3 people to get invited. Of course before the in-person interview I studied some Algorithms & Data Structures book. At the same time I did Scala programming although it wasn't expected to know that but people worked with it.

Anyway, during the interview they made me sweat for at least 3 hours. Every now and then also reminding me how good the other people working there are - the one guy having worked 8 years at a company writing DBMS in London. So yeah, after leaving the communication was difficult but the CTO said the people said they liked me and they would hire me despite my shortcomings - I would have to unlearn stuff. The offer was really bad, in fact even the most senior people got below average salary.

At the end I started working at a company that worked on a moonshoot project involving a CAD program in the browser. Even some mathematician who worked in Japan on Robotics was there. Salary was good enough but the people were borderline insane. I quit after 3 months and landed a below average paid job, but with a lot of nice people. I don't regret that. Work was mostly boring but the environment was nice.

Anyways, not living in the Bay Area, I guess things are they different again.

I still enjoy trying to match a user's expectations with the software I write. But, it's balanced by other aspects like coaching and being in a family.

Sure there is. I live in a condo with 20 other units, and it makes a great small neighborhood.

In reading your post, I had to stop and think for a bit.

I agree with you but want to give the thought that family can be one's top priority without looking for it fill every aspect of one's life.

no one is above great tragedy and loss.

If my family was taken from me unexpected, I don't I'd say that I wished for more time at the office, or working on personal hobbies. I do believe in balance, but the point I'm trying to make is that family can be the number one priority.

The mindset of "I can be happy because I have x" (in this case where x = family), is indeed dangerous. And while the mindset of "I have chosen to be happy, and my top priority is my family" will bring sadness and pain if they are suddenly taken, I feel like that pain and sadness will have been worth it. Well, it is for me. That for others it might not is understandable.

Please note as well that I'm not advocating self-deprecation or letting your family take advantage or you, or throwing yourself under the bus for an uncaring family - it's a group effort and there a lot of ways to appear to put your family first in a way that's detrimental to one's self.

For me when I think of dedication in family life, I think of the story, "the gift of the magi". Nothing of true importance was sacrificed, and yet the others needs were prioritized.

According to the book, the transition from being war criminals by day and family men by night, was possible through some rationalisation acrobatics or detachment from responsibility. As an example of detachment, the Nazi concentration camps didn't have an atypical ratio of psychopath to average joe. The predominant "average joes" would offload responsibility by telling themselves that this is not their decision, but that this is the _current policy of the organistation_, which is an interestingly complex statement, in the subconscious sense. It detaches the organisation participant from the organisation, and it detaches the organisation from their policy.

To come back to business v family, I think the old koan holds: separation isn't good. The rule of thumb in social situations is if detachment or separation is the easiest route, you're doing something wrong. Business is social action by necessity. So should we separate action from responsibility? What do we think of someone who is selfish and avoids responsibility?

Yes, your job as the "average Joe" is to be loyal to the organization. That statement doesn't sound surprising to me, and it took me a few seconds to realize why. I've heard it before. I grew up in a religion where there was an organization, and your job was to be loyal to God by being loyal to the Organization. Only by being on the outside now I see how this is a neat way to release responsibility. See also: "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.".

> The rule of thumb in social situations is if detachment or separation is the easiest route, you're doing something wrong. Business is social action by necessity. So should we separate action from responsibility?

It was easier back when you were naturally limited by geography to do business with people you also knew "after hours". These days, business and personal relationships are almost entirely non-overlapping. Hell, it's a common advice to avoid that overlap.

It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as a consequence some of us go into something science-y, but then we reach a certain stage in adulthood where we feel like we have a pretty good rough closed form solution to the problem, and now the journey all of a sudden seems empty and without purpose and we just keep going with the lives 16-year old selves planned out for us, with too much cost sunk to pivot. I almost suspect the end-state of science is not some sort of blissful state where we feel like we understand everything, but an utter dread and feeling of emptiness at no longer having a purpose.

For some time in my dream I was lost, not sure what my value was as a human being without my skills that I've spent decades refining.

Then I remembered that humans have inherent value, that I am not my work, and went to a park to meditate and teach karate. It made me think, in my dream, how even if a machine could teach karate better, I was not doing it for society -- I was doing it for myself.

Realizing that you are not your work, and are not defined by your work; that humans have inherent value and you have every right to simply be happy when the opportunity arises; that the Puritan virtues of work are an illusion, and that humans should follow their passion; that the illusion of the necessity of work often prevents people from ever discovering their passion in the first place.

It was probably my best dream, and I approach life quite differently now. I think when I feel like I have a closed form solution, it is much the same spirit as an AI that will solve your problems for you.

Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired.

Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual within it has blindsided me. So many interesting things happening, so many interesting things that need to be done still, and yet all you and I get to be are observers and consumers of whatever the system happens to spit out.

https://wiki.snowdrift.coop is probably the best introduction right now; the main site is in the process of being updated.

I agree. Maybe there is a word for that?

'Attachment to expectation'. See buddhism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienatio...

I don’t think “existential angst” fits. As the name implies, you get that just by existing and being trapped by the limitations of being a mortal human.

You’re talking about the specific meaninglessness of modern work. Marx suggests that capitalism affords us some real freedoms, but at the cost of our feeling of purpose and solidarity. And, Marxists would argue, this makes us easier to exploit.

Marx and his inheritors failed to produce systems that solved this problem, and maybe that indicates that the problem is deeper than just forms of ownership and control.

But as a problem description, I think he was onto something.

Koyaanisqatsi - life out of balance - see also the film

You guys talk about boxes. Well there are huge ones for the mind, carefully constructed to be believable for the masses. Too complicated to understand, they require you to put beliefs in people with credentials, who will repeat to you what they found in the books they were given, or the math they got shown.

If you want to understand your purpose here, you have to step outside of scientific thinking to start with, and that's a huge problem for almost everybody. You have to look at origins of the matrix we are living in, the illuminati, the Egyptians, book of the dead, the occult.

> ...also get away from [the people in] the box...

This may be the harder part. I consider some of the people in the box to be friends. But then again, if I think about it... maybe they're outside the box too, but we're on opposite faces, and so close to it that we are still looking at each other _through_ the box.

So here I am, with the map of the boundaries of the box finally taking shape. Now the question is, how do I exit the box? I'd like to walk around on the outside and check it out.

Also, is leaving this box even a good idea? What if everyone left the box at the same time? Would the world collapse then? (I can't help myself, I tend to be interested in the global view as well.)

It's a very nice idea.

It does have the potential to create localized unimpressedness though; the question is how powerful the temporarily-put-out groups would be, and whether the backlash would remove your power as well.

Money is power, laterally too.

In my mid twenties this was hard for me to grasp. I was working as an electronics design engineer for a company that made low-end industrial controls. We had a customer who had what seemed like the dream company to me: he made robots for animatronics and lab applications. One day I was talking to him about how exciting the work was and his answer surprised me: it used to be fun in the beginning but after doing it for a few years, it was just another job.

I work with wireless sensors now. Yes, it's technically interesting, but it's pretty boring.

Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.

I worked with an software developer at my last job who was incredible. He seemed to have a strong interest for the technology, no matter what technology that was. At the time, it was iOS, and he was an absolute master of iOS. I was constantly impressed by his attention to detail and emphasis on quality, well written, technically challenging code.

I've loosely followed him since, and he seems to be absolutely crushing it wherever he goes. He's spanned many different roles and seems to do enjoy taking on new challenges in the form of different programming languages / platforms.

When I think back to him, I remember someone who seemed to just love programming. In a way, he was like a Robot. It doesn't appear to matter much to him what he's working on, or if it's "fulfilling" in the ethical sense.... He just enjoys the process of coding, and being damn good at it.

Question - is his management crushing it as well or are they crushing him? Is he good at standing up for himself and not letting management crush him?

I think a lot of enthusiastic and brilliant people get destroyed by their managers exploiting them. So the individual goes from crushing it to getting crushed. Management really has to enable that kind of person to succeed.

Yes. This. He was very, very good at standing his ground and asserting that his time and effort was being spent well.

Multiple times I witnessed management clashing with him over something. Usually he felt like more time and effort needed to go into a certain part of code. Rather than just "get it done" he took pride in his work and wanted it done RIGHT.

In general he was so good / fast that he could get it done "RIGHT" within management's expectations. But occasionally he would take on a big chunk of work, and management would try and shut him down. 9/10 they failed, he would do the work, and a damn good job of it.

A good manager would realize that his quality of work was top notch but that he was at times difficult to get along with. He was a perfectionist who held those around him to the same standards, and that often clashed with the business needs and even sometimes other teammates. A business generally isn't concerned with the product being perfect, they're more concerned with it getting to market on time.

So my suggestion to any manager that has an employee like this: Value him for what he is. Put him on MISSION CRITICAL tasks, where you need a rock solid implementation. Let him work for 2 weeks without interruption.

For other tasks that are perhaps not as "critical", throw other team mates at them.

Also, not everybody has the personality or energy to constantly stand up for themselves. A lot of people will eventually crumble or leave. Don't make it so the only way the employee can do their best (e.g. what rubicon33 describes) is if they put their foot down and scream.

100% agree. I'm a Data Scientist and I'm supposed to have one of the most exciting and sexiest jobs in tech. But after many years of doing this I've come to realize that working with good customers and seeing them happy is much more rewarding than playing with the latest machine learning thing. New tech is just the thing that makes it easier to tackle a customer use case.

There's a strong relationship between the quality of the people I'm working for and my sense of the work being interesting. If the people I'm working for are unrealistic a-holes no amount of technical novelty can make up for that.

At one of my previous jobs, "my customers" were the managers of some company who asked managers of the company I worked in to deliver some software that will be sold as a part of a software package, to be used by someone downstream. I don't know who ended up using my work and how, because we were isolated by several abstraction layers from that. I did care about the happiness of those people, little I knew about them. But I couldn't care less about the happiness of our customers - a company I didn't hold in high regard, with managers not being particularly helpful. I suppose I did get some small sense of satisfaction when their managers told my managers that the work is good. But that was it.

So, are we talking about happiness of customers, or happiness of people actually using the product? Those are very often different groups. Or, in other words, are we talking about finding happiness in generalized servitude, or making people's lives better?

I've also worked in situations you've described. My only interaction with the end user is through layers of middle management. I found that environment to be extremely demotivating and certainly no direct sense of satisfaction. One of the small benefits of being a Data Scientist right now is that a lot of managers don't really understand what it is I do so I get some interaction with the end-user from a requirements and solution validation standpoint. But I suspect in a few years Data Scientists will become invisible cogs (like everybody else) in the Enterprise IT machine.

I don't think you can get that kind of satisfaction in B2B software as a developer (only a salesperson/exec).

Two kinds of "work": work that gives you money, and work that gives you value. They are not necessarily the same one.

Most people have to work for money. The best we can do is to gather more "money" (or resources). So that you can dedicate more of your time to generate, as you said, "interesting outcomes".

I recommend the book "Your Money or Your Life" by Vicki Robin. I learnt a lot relevant ideas from it.

Ouch, this resonated. I've been walking this path with you.

Sometimes I make my own food. Or grow it. Or pickle it. It would be more "efficient" to buy such food in many cases. But if it gives me pleasure, I trade my time to do it.

My opinion: the point of life is not to acquire so much money that you can avoid doing any difficult things and wrap yourself in a cocoon of comfort. The point of life is to find your own good life and live it. That will entail some difficulties (at a minimum the difficulty of seeking your own definition of the good life, which is hard!). You may find that in your work (lucky you!) or you may have to work to support yourself and find this good life in other areas.

When I wrote my edit to the comment, I didn't expect much reaction to my confused ranting. I was surprised to discover it resonates so strongly with people here. I guess I'm nowhere near alone in thinking those thoughts, and going through this process.

This is the lens through which von Neumann and Morgenstern saw all of human behavior, and their "rational" economics has been hugely influential in public policy. I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational -- many things in life can't be measured in dollars, not even dollars! (E.g. you can't compare a dollar today with a dollar ten years from now. Regardless of your discounting strategy, that money is going to mean something different to you in ten years.)

Your position is a great example of this phenomenon -- there's not really any amount of money that can compensate for a lack of inspiration at work. You might be willing to give up on interesting work for enough dollars, and the rational economist would say that this is the measure of how valuable interesting work is. But there's a long history of studies, notably by Kahneman and Tversky among many others, showing that framing human motivation this way leads to all sorts of paradoxes.

So yes, we have a strong tendency to measure everything with money -- this outlook is deeply embedded in our economic and political systems -- and it makes people miserable because it's a terrible way to account for human happiness.

Agreed. For the most part, going to church is not economically rational. For the most part, having children is not economically rational. For the most part, being monogamous to one's spouse is not economically rational. For the most part, patriotism to one's country is not economically rational.

In a slightly different sense, going to space, or colonizing Mars, would all be economically irrational.

I'm wary of a definition of "rational" that tends take all of the things that humans hold dear, and declares much of it "irrational".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.

I don't think they are rewarded on the grand scheme of things. Software has always showed a winner-takes-all structure and most software disappear. Take for example the game industry. 15 years ago, you would have talk to anybody, they would have told you the market is mature and they are making money on making movie-based games. Today, most players (publishers, studios, etc) of that era have disappeared (Im too lazy to get the long list of publishers that are gone).

Also innovation can act in a subtle way. Take the iphone for example. People are more productive because of it. That means that hospital, universities, research labs, non-profits, etc, all are doing better jobs which means we cure more disease, teach, help and study better, etc. because of the iphone.

But yeah, if you dont work in innovation, then you work for the current "government", the current group-thinked direction made by some smart "politicians" (by "politician" I mean that guy who lick asses all day long, who goes always in the direction that's well accepted and who use words to seduce people and get what he wants). It's either innovate (rare) or maintain.

Maybe our civilisation has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money.

There is a passage in the movie "1492: Conquest of Paradise" by Ridley Scott that I love:

"Look outside, what do you see?" ask Colombus to some royal acolyte

"I see towers, I see palaces, I see steeples, I see civilisation. And I see spires that reach to the sky!" answer the politician contrasting with the wild america of that time.

"All of them created by people like me" say Colombus

I handicapped myself by going into CS instead of graduating some hard engineering degree (or biology). See also matte_black's comment elsewhere in this discussion. Programming alone is a tool in search of problems to solve, and the interesting problems are elsewhere.

Isn't this what humans like to strive for? Making an impact, being remembered after death, thus living forever. That's one of the things a family (with kids) helps you get over, you know, the whole "living on through your kids" thing. If they don't end up as homeless drug addicts, it probably kinda works.

I've taken a job at a university two years ago. Pay is much lower than before. Haven't felt anywhere close to overworked or burnt out ever since, even though I've stayed until late at night occasionally when we fucked something up by deploying without any proper testing again, because hey, it's such a tiny change. I'm not doing frontier science or anything, we're just working on a custom netbooted Linux distro that also runs windows vms via qemu-kvm, for teaching environments. A lot of what we do could be dismissed as NiH-syndrome or creating solutions to problems that have already been solved by big companies, but as long as someone is paying for it I'm good with this job. Because there pop up a lot of problems or requirements that are just interesting to solve by yourself, actually not just for fun but for actual use cases. Nothing game changing for humanity, not for millions of people, but for some. And I will interact with them directly, and sometimes they tell you that they like the system you helped develop. That, and the fact that you're not in competition with your coworkers or another team or anything really makes for a great work atmosphere that I'm currently really enjoying. I don't know how long I can/want to stay, but for now I can say it greatly improved my overall happiness.

I don't know. Everyone has kids. Having kids is technically making an impact, but I think that when most people say they want to make an impact, or to accomplish something great, or to change the world, they don't mean by doing something that almost everyone else does.

I guess that's what the "help getting over it" part was referring to. In your teens/early twenties you dream of changing the world, and after reality sank in, you do the next best thing and go for kids because you shape them and so live on through them, mission accomplished, impact has been made. Humans are great at bullshitting themselves. (Not trying to sound harsh or implying kids are worthless or anything, but it really seems to be a fallback plan for a lot of people)

No, it's hoping that you plus your kid(s) will have more impact than you alone. Or that your kid will magnify your impact just by existing (which there is some evidence for if your chosen venue of impact is electoral politics, at least.)

That's one mental model but it doesn't fit exactly with reality and there are others. See the Love & Money graph here for example. Not quite sure how that fits in with the job hunting. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/does-mo...

Not sure what you mean by "social" problems specifically, but when you alleviate a problem for a group of people, they pay you, and that's what a business is.

I realized recently what a useful abstraction money is, because when money came about we didn't have the ability to create a massive blockchain keeping track of who did favors for who, and when. So it's a reasonable proxy for reputation and social credits.

- Make it so that people in your community have access to clean water. Surprisingly, it's a problem even in the most advanced countries.

- Contribute to something in healthcare that reduces costs, improves availability, or makes more people survive a procedure, an illness, etc.

- Make firefighting safer, or more efficient. Make it less needed in the first place.

- Make the air clearer. Make the energy cheaper. Make the roads better and safer. Etc.

- (Meta) make the market less ennui-generating.

I found that "what pays" is not a good proxy, because often what pays best is solving problems for a group of people, which also generate further problems for other groups of people. Usually, the benefits for the first group are purely financial.

To use a simple example - advertising. There's lots of people who would pay you for your work in this space, because your work will earn them more money. What your work will do downstream, however, is most likely one of those:

- It'll create more work for someone else to cancel the effects of your work; a lot of advertising is playing a zero-sum game, i.e. simply wasting natural resources and human time. (Conversely, often your work is only needed to cancel out the effect of someone else's efforts.)

- It'll disturb the market, promoting a worse solution over a better solution, leading customers to make wrong choices, and thus lose some amount of money and/or happiness.

- It'll add to the noise we all have to endure, also slowly eroding happiness.

Occasionally, you might end up promoting the right thing to the right crowd for the right reasons, but I doubt that happens very often ;).

Conversely to all of that, I feel that solving what I see as "social problems" pays less, if at all, again making "what pays" a bad proxy towards finding ways to address those problems.

It's a somewhat serious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek question. But if you need to clean your room, maybe you should do that first. Instead of having grandiose visions of improving things at large scale, prove to yourself you can improve things at a local scale and keep them that way.

If that sort of thinking is interesting, there's a whole book of it in https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/ Though I'll say I got out of the existential and nihilistic mindsets differently, I don't feel like I have to wrestle with meaningness like I used to, before I ever heard of the author, I've just read good-sounding things from people who have read that book or have otherwise gotten themselves invested in the author's doings.

I suspect you've read this before but if not, point 5 might resonate with you: http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006... If you fit the mold and can't change your mindset then you'll forever be unhappy unless you manage to get one of those "interesting" jobs.

For some reason, I still think they have value and that their problems are worth solving, regardless of what the market thinks of them.

Also, getting paid by the government to do something is decisively a non-market solution, given that the government gets its money through taxes.

Panera Bread gross revenue $2.8B, McDonalds gross revenue $22.8B

Nordstrom gross revenue $14.4B, Walmart gross revenue $500.3B

Payday loan revenue in the rich burbs roughly-zero, Payday loan revenue nation wide mysteriously between $6B and $46B depending on data source

Now can you get a cool and trendy very high social status hipster job to brag about on social media in the coolest office with only the best "personality fit" coworkers helping poor people, oh heck no you'd be savaged here if you admitted to working for McD, but the market of poor people products, at least in some areas of business, is about ten times as large as rich people products.

It’s also a hell of a lot easier to take advantage of them, given they generally lack the education or resources to protect themselves from predatory businesses. I struggle to think of McDonald’s as “helping” poor people. It’s putting food in their mouths, yes, but if McDonald’s were more concerned with the health and financial wellbeing of their customers as opposed to exploiting psychology to get as many people to impulse buy as much junk food as possible it would be an incredibly different company.

The goal of a company is not “help” its customers, the goal of a company is to exploit any and every untapped source of wealth. If it can do that by hurting someone who doesn’t know better, it is going to.

Payday loans may "solve a problem" but they do it in a predatory and exploitative way.

But, I'm not trying to comment on either of those, just that you can create utility for a poor person and still have a viable business. If it relies on government for funding, because society has decided it's worth funding that sort of work, so what? We have an entire defense industry in the US based on that idea. Most of our education is too. Other countries have their entire healthcare systems based on that idea. You can decide you don't want to be paid directly by taxed money, but that's on you, not on the viability of such a model.

My point is, you have to compare them entirely. At least Gates seems to have moved into the "good" quadrant later in life.

With the explosion of NGsequencing there's no shortage of data or data-magician positions, and there's many challenges with social impact

That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?

Why does this noise bother you? Besides, keep in mind that the grant-chasing doesn't happen because of greed, it happens because people want to continue doing science and that's the only way to maintain an active lab.

I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.

I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"

The noise bothers me for two reasons. One, because grant-chasing to keep the lights on means you end up having to prioritize busy work over important problems, which wastes lives of researchers and slows the scientific endeavour. Two, because high noise makes it more difficult to find interesting/important results of other people's research.

Maybe I'm just wishing for unachievable perfection in this space.

> I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.

That I agree with, and I definitely complain more about the private market than scientific research because of that :).

> I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"

True, I feel the same.

I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?

I see in this thread lots of people who have their security level established and are now looking to fill their social level. I feel inverted on the subject and let's just say Maslow's order matters.

* top-tier peer-reviewed conference.

* paper abstract and introduction.

If I am not convinced that the problem is interesting by introduciton, I will skip it.

I mean if you're a programmer and want a job fighting cancer, maybe pick up some ML skills and find a way into that industry. But short of getting your PhD in medicine or a law degree fighting injustice, we're all just a different sort of coal miner providing the things society needs to keep chugging along. And there's no shame in simply being a productive member of society. As far as societies go, we're better than all that have come before.

Yes. The most rewarding thing one can do is to figure out a way to change that.

It's sad that our brightest minds don't want to understand this, and that they'd rather think about how to make people click ads.

The reality of the situation is that, if I'm not so drained from the mind-numbing soul-crushing CRUD work that I feel like doing more when I get home, I'm sure as hell not going to work on anything remotely related to my employer's line of work. I get quite enough of that at work. I'm going to work on problems that matter to me, and that seems to be stuff that really doesn't matter to my employer.

Boring problems are quite manageable when they are also important and meaningful. The general lack of purpose most of us find in our jobs (apart from 'earning money') is the real problem.

For instance, patient outcomes from a feature you built in an electronic medical record get published in major newspapers.

Now that sounds meaningful. Email me if you agree.

It's a good idea. There should be an easy way for a small team to capture the value that their open source project creates. There are a variety of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon that are doing something similar. CodeMill and Bountysource are paying developers directly for adding features.

Maybe a software repository site, where users must watch a 30 second commercial, before they can download the software. Then a percentage of the profits made from selling that commercial is shared with the programmer.

Sounds like sourceforge, but I don't know how that site is monetized, or if they share the revenues with the project creators.

Another recommendation is to have a look at 80000hours.org which is a great resource for finding the best work opportunities out there! I think they even provide some coaching :)

One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.

Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift. And that trying to force it to will leave with neither -- you will need to find your meaning in something else.

The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth: making coffee for the rich is "valuable", meeting the basic needs of the poor is not "valuable." This makes the market notion of "value" very different from just about any other notion of value in the world. If you muddy the distinction, or let someone else muddy the distinction, markets become almost tautologically awesome, because the market notion of "value" is something that markets are very good at optimizing.

There's a lot of privilege talking about what is and is not valuable, but its worth pointing out that its only a very recent, probably very temporary, phenomena that coffee is all about rich people massively overpaying in public as an act of conspicuous consumption at Starbucks, for some decades previous McDonalds and other fast food sellers made more total money selling coffee than hipster coffee shops.

There are some market bifurcation events going on, as relates to income inequality only increasing over time. For example the number of independent bicycle shops has been dropping for decades while average revenue and profit increase... thats because the market for $2000 adult bikes is extremely high social status but also very small, leading to the inaccurate observation that "there's no money selling bikes to poor people". However, sales and revenue for poor people bikes at department stores, walmart, etc, are really pretty good, its just that you can't buy a poor person bike at a cool trendy rich hipster independent bicycle store, only from extremely uncool mass retailers. There are absolute tons and boatloads of money in selling bicycles to poor people; the money is inaccessible to the "cool kids" is the only problem.

Food deserts are a similar thing; the point of talking about food deserts is to point out the individual noticing them is a really cool person.

Perhaps a HN car analogy where nothing could be cooler on social media and more valuable than bragging about selling Tesla cars to very rich people, but you won't make even a tiny fraction as much total revenue as the incredibly uncool act of selling commuter SUVs to suburbanites.

Being cool and trendy on twitter is important, but you can make many times as much money by being very uncool. To some extent the whole meta overall topic is conspicuous consumption at its finest, along the lines of I'm rich enough and privileged enough to pretend deeply uncool (as defined on social media) market opportunities literally don't exist.

Hayek understood that what we think about prices and what we think about ethics are distinct things. He didn't see rightness as flowing from markets. He saw it as a discovery process for allocations of resources.

> One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.

I have no clue either. But it feels to me as if we're turning humanity into a single superorganism, with each one of us being just a cell, except all those cells have brains capable of wishing they'd play on the same level as the superorganism.

Related: I've never had a libertarian bent. I'm known to argue for coordination over individual freedoms. I frequently wondered, just what is it that makes many people say that we're in chains, and (here in the West) we have so little freedoms left. I think I finally realized where this could be coming from.

I've been spending some time recently going, in my head, through a list of activities I'd find exciting. I quickly discovered that most of them are either impossible or illegal, especially when living in a city. Someone (I think pg) wrote that as we entered the industrialized age, we had to invent the whole fake, hollow thing called "exercise" to replace what we've lost in the change of lifestyles. I'm starting to see it as more general pattern - we're losing many more things we could do, and replacing them with structured activities available on the market. They're similar, but also feel fake to me.

> Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift.

That sounds about right (I suppose I should start reading the foundational texts of economic thought at some point). I do not deny that the scheme I described, in which your only role in society is to pick something profitable to do, doesn't work. It generally does (with all coordination problem caveats of the market in mind). But the meaningful work, the virtuous work, the uplifting work, seems to be distributed scarcely and randomly throughout the market space. Much like in the past, you got to be a king or a peasant depending on the lottery of birth, nowadays you can be involved in civilization-changing work, or forever toil on the margin, depending on random chance. Is there even a place for fining meaning in contributing to society? Is there any agency left as to how to contribute? Are we supposed to seek either of it?

I have no answers here. Only a topic I'm trying to think my way through, hoping to find some meaning on the other end.

I wish you luck.

I'll be sure to let HN know if I ever come to any lasting conclusion.

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Fun_Theory_Sequence

What has always tied Marxism in knots has been the tension between waiting for the inexorable laws of history on the one hand (and sometimes trying to give them a hurry up) versus on the other hand agitating for reforms. The former see the latter as delaying the revolution. The latter see the former as something between dreamers and jerks.

I think that history, having been somewhat lawless after all, makes the reformers look better.

The thesis of capitalism is that acting only in self interest is good for the collective, i.e. your own capital is all, i.e. we can abstract everything away with money.

I think you're completely right about the problems with above dogma and hope that you don't stop looking for a way to do something you find meaningful.

Step 2. Push for creating more and more social infrastructure. So if people want to, they can choose to not be part of the box

I do that a lot on HN. I've been considering blogging on this topic, but I feel I suck at writing, and people may not want to listen to confused ramblings of a random programmer -.-

> Step 2. Push for creating more and more social infrastructure. So if people want to, they can choose to not be part of the box

I'm a noob at that. Need help.