also known as growing older ;-)
I'm probably more "idealistic" than I have ever been; it's just that I no longer have the silly "Let's just do this one simple thing" attitude. I've just found that getting places is always a lot more difficult than we think. Usually, it's people, and all their messy personal issues, that gum up the works.
The good news is, is that I am actually accomplishing more than I did, when I was younger. It's taking less energy, and is often more frustrating, but shit gets done. A big reason, is that I understand myself, and the people around me, a lot better than I used to. They are no longer "NPCs" in my Game of Life.
As to the article, I seriously feel for the author, but I am not exactly in their shoes. I don't have anything against them, but their crusade is not my crusade.
The one thing that is almost guaranteed to make our cause to go floop, is insisting that everyone else is either with us, or against us. This is especially annoying, when our cause is important to only a small minority of stakeholders.
For some reason, almost everyone in our life ends up in the "against" column, and many of them started as people that actually supported us, but weren't willing to go much farther than that. So now, they are actively working against us. The "woke craze" caused exactly this reaction.
As Dr. Phil might say, "So...how's that working out for you?"
Masterfully said, I'd love this to be the pull quote here.
- Ronald Reagan, 1972
I get that there are some 'purity test' type people out there, and they're annoying, but they're a small minority in most things.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
To demonstrate that you're in the "in group", it is not enough to simply support most of what they are into. You must take a potentially expensive position that demonstrates your absolute support. Such as supporting putting rapists in women's prisons if they've claimed to be women. Such positions then become a litmus test, and all who fail it are declared enemies.
No matter what the issue, no matter how fair their cause is, this tendency will wind up with extremism. And that torch everything extremism either results in victory or a backlash. Fair warning, usually it winds up with a backlash and overcorrection.
It happens constantly online. Leftist A will say something about respecting gender self-identification and then rightwinger B will manipulate the conversation so that the leftist is now trying to defend putting biological men in women's prisons [1]
It's incredibly disengenous and bad faith.
[1] regardless of your moral position on this issue, there's a fuckload of other awful things about american prisons that these type of people are rarely concerned about.
This isn't a gotcha either. When the horrific outcomes of males being transferred into women's prisons is brought up, it's typically being done to explain why gender self-id policy is so harmful to women.
Often, the person advocating for gender self-id hasn't spent any time considering this impact at all. The detriment to women and girls isn't even on their radar. So it's worth explaining.
It changes views, too. I've personally witnessed several people rapidly undoing their support for gender self-id when they see evidence of the deleterious consequences. Though more in real life than online.
Conversations like those are the reason why support for policy that prioritizes gender identity over sex is dropping like a stone.
In the sense that the vast majority of all feminists of any kind are on the left? Is there such a thing as a rightwing feminist? JK Rowling?
> This isn't a gotcha either. When the horrific outcomes of males being transferred into women's prisons is brought up, it's typically being done to explain why gender self-id policy is so harmful to women.
This is literally the point I was trying to make about these types of conversations. It's extremely tempting to argue with your blanket assertions of 'detriment to [other] women and girls', but now instead of talking about the person in the article's very real concern about being discriminated against while working or even being attacked while socializing, we're talking about some extreme hypothetical about women's prisons.
Also, it's weird how often people are completely silent about the treatment of female prisoners... until it's related to transgender issues. Or female athletes for that matter. If you were actually worried about it, there are probably bigger fish to fry.
There are some feminists who reject the left-right divide and don't place themselves anywhere on it, as a response to the male-dominated political system. It's not a very popular view but it exists.
JK Rowling isn't one of them, she has left-wing views and describes herself as such.
> instead of talking about the person in the article's very real concern about being discriminated against while working or even being attacked while socializing, we're talking about some extreme hypothetical about women's prisons.
Sadly it is not hypothetical.
If you believe that supporting gender self-id positively addresses the concerns of males like the blog author, then you should also be willing to consider the documented and evidenced harms to women and girls.
And certainly if you wish to understand why there is such significant opposition to policy that prioritizes gender identity over sex.
> Also, it's weird how often people are completely silent about the treatment of female prisoners... until it's related to transgender issues. Or female athletes for that matter. If you were actually worried about it, there are probably bigger fish to fry.
One might also wonder why policymakers haven't fried these bigger fish that would improve conditions for female prisoners and female athletes, and instead have chosen to introduce gender self-id policy which demonstrably harms women and girls while privileging males.
If you keep repeating this, maybe you'll convince some people who desperately want to believe it.
And I don't really need to wonder why. Because they obviously don't care except when they can invoke "won't somebody think of [the women]" as a convenient excuse to achieve political power.
It's exactly as dishonest and intellectually bankrupt as "advocating for the unborn".
I have helped some people understand the full impact of such policy, yes.
In my experience, it depends on whether the person I'm talking to has an interest in the wellbeing of women and girls, and is even slightly open to challenging their current understanding with new information.
> dishonest and intellectually bankrupt
Evidence-based and built upon feminist principles, actually.
As I clearly think, given what I said above, most of what trans people want is obviously fair and just. To go through life, being treated as their preferred gender, and not facing discrimination of various kinds for that choice.
But that isn't where we are. Instead we are in a world where Kamala Harris was, completely unforced, recorded talking about protecting trans rights in prisons back in 2019. Trump ran ads showing those clips with the tagline, "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you." And now Trump is President.
Is it being brought up now as a gotcha? Absolutely! But back when Kamala was running the first time for President, SHE brought up her support for the policy. Unforced. Because it was how to signal her support for that issue. And now we're all paying the price for how activist extremism creates backlash.
Like, I'm genuinely not trying to create a strawman, I'm just rephrasing literally what you said.
I'm reminded of MLK's quote about white moderates here...
That's exactly what you're doing with your own rhetoric, you know.
My "rhetoric" about the issue which Donald J. Trump spent something like 1/4 of his ad spend on. I didn't pick it to sound extreme. I picked it because it was very important to how politics will play out for the next 4 years.
If you don't like what Trump does now, you can thank Kamala's attempts to ingratiate herself to trans activists back in 2019.
How are you making that happen?
This is an honest question.
As I've gotten older, and developed a deeper understanding of the intractability of the world's problems, this change in perspective has cratered my motivation. It was one thing to give my all toward what seemed like it mattered, back when the scope for possible change still appeared to be great enough that one could imagine living in a better world: but knowing now that no matter what I do it's just going to be more of the same old bullshit, with maybe - at best, and this unlikely - one or another of the rougher edges on the great, awful machine of exploitation and suffering which powers our civilization slightly filed down, so that maybe a couple of people here and there don't get hurt quite as badly as they otherwise might have, while the core of the process continues crushing the life and beauty out of the world, unchanged... it's difficult to muster up any real energy to do anything about it. I still go through the motions, when it seems like I must, for conscience's sake; but I don't believe in it anymore. The source of my past effort is all gone.
I miss that past self, but I can't imagine how to believe that any possible accomplishment would actually matter anymore, enough to justify putting my back into it. What's your secret?
I can assure you that the work I do, makes a pretty big difference in some lives. We're not out to change the world. We're only trying to police our own area*.
Being older and more experienced, means that the work I do is much more effective, and much more economical (we don't have a lot of means). It also means that I work well with others, and am much better at team stuff.
*> “I was in the Air Force a while and they had what they call “policing the area.” And I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you and see what needs to be changed.”
-Willie Nelson
Not entirely dissimilar to the exploitation of eg college athletes.
Even in less obvious cases that don't involve old age, we often call something growth, when we should just say change. Sometimes we are all just more set our ways. Others, our "learning" is just abandoning principles so that we can follow random emotional fancies. Knowing when we are actually seeing the world more accurately, instead of being wrong in a different way, is quite challenging. We all want to think we are getting better, which is precisely whi we are blind to the ways in which we aren't. The convenient story often defeats what is actually true, but inconvenient.
I still like a lot of what Steve Jobs had to say at times. I do not pretend to know what he was like IRL or if I would even like him ... doesn't matter.
Truth be told folks who take those ideas and principles from others and not carry the weight of those folks as idols, might even do better with them.
By this late-game level, however, the city has descended into dystopia. Why? Well, a three-quarter century game of telephone. The ideals of the city's original founder, already imperfect, were further transmitted imperfectly to his successor and her charges, whose personal traumas further warped their interpretation of Columbia's intended values, and the actions taken in their name. That repentant successor, having lost control of the city's populace to a revolutionary fever, sends you back to the past just as Columbia's weapons begin to level New York City (a caricature of America destroying its real-life historical "center").
It's a metaphor, of course.
It's easy for the soul of an idea to get lost in translation. It's easy for principles of one era to be an ill fit for another. It's easy for the original ideas and principles to be fundamentally flawed in ways that no one could or was willing to admit to.
"Running with it" can be dangerous. (Ask us how well Cold War politicking has worked out for us post-9/11.)
I think, at all turns, you must be asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and if it's actually effective. If it's actually good. I don't know that Jobs ever predicted that the bicycle for the mind would be beholden to OTA updates or have a commensurate attack surface exposure, but we have to deal with that reality, regardless.
The one time I remember something different was around 2003 when he was asked at an all hands meeting, a question that came down to “how do we work with all this chaos, war, blaming ethnic and religious minorities”, etc. The person that asked it was almost in tears. Jobs response was to look seriously non-plussed and he answered “if you can’t do anything else, vote for the democrats” and then moved on to the next question. He may have had deeper opinions- but they were not part of his public discourse when he was ceo.
Unfortunately, that's not true. He is also a well-read and influential essayist. He wields power and influence through his words as well as his money.
But frustration can over simplify issues for all of us, at some point.
And power dulls sensitivity to those with less of it.
This is why I respect authors that publish a consistent level of quality more than those who hit and miss as if they were throwing darts at a map. And the stuff I have read from Paul Graham is definitly not in the former category.
I don't feel he is intellectually honest, either with himself (bad) or with his readers (worse). But if the past decade of the Internet has shown anything, it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.
I have a pet theory that volume is required for quality, but would love to be wrong so that I can feel less bad about how much I publish!
Mow on the other side you have musicians who have two releases a year and every other of them has a track on it that is really cool.
I am not saying the latter is wrong, I just say the former has more of my respect, because you know that even the rejected stuff of the first band is probably stellar.
Keeping a thought to oneself that isn't fully fleshed out is a virtue.
I’m going to use this. Well stated.
Let's all just take a moment to remember that today is inauguration day.
A counter here would be well written essays offering the humanist perspective.
I don't think PG is particularly well read in the area of "wokeness" anyway since he has fallen for the traditional conservative trap of redefinition.
Upvoted because I couldn't describe better how I feel if I tried. There were so many of these tech leaders who I looked at with such awe, and a lot of it was because they did have a set of skills that I didn't and that I really envied (namely an incredible perseverance, amount of energy, and ability to thrive under pressure, while I was often the reverse). So it's hard to overstate how disappointed I am with people (and really, myself for idolizing them) whom I used to look at with such admiration, who now I often look at with something that varies between dissatisfaction and disgust.
But I realized 2 important things: the same qualities that allowed these leaders to get ahead also figures in to why I don't like them now. That is, if you care too much about other people and what they think, it will be paralyzing in the tech/startup world - you do have to "break some eggs" when you're doing big things or trying to make changes. At the same time, this empathy deficit is a fundamental reason I think of a lot of these guys and gals (it's usually guys but not always, e.g. Carly Fiorina) as high school-level douchebags now. Second, it's allowed me to have a higher, more compassionate vision of myself. I used to feel bad that I wasn't as "successful" as I wanted to be, and while I do have some regrets, I'd much rather be someone who cares deeply about my friends and family and really wants to do some good in the world, as opposed to someone I see as just trying to vacuum up power and money under the false guise of "changing the world".
The very powerful just affirmed a reversal of "wokeness" this may become performative just as much as their acceptance of the "other" became performative by their admirers and corporate copycats. This will result in tangible harm to people. I think OP did a great job in explaining this.
Ha well that a particular bad joke.
Most are not so egregious.
The downgrading of exceptional individuals like PG to mediocrities is no healthier than placing them on pedestals.
Recognizing that we're all just people is certainly healthier than placing people on pedestals.
At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.
> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]
It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
I would like to see our modern robber barons and philanthropists (and society in general) put some effort into creating a usable digital library system; we actually have things like Google Books, which scanned many university collections, but it will likely remain unusable as an actual digital library unless some sort of copyright reform can be enacted.
robber Barons also destroyed nature and communities. only in their old age they tried to be remembered by universities and libraries.
only question is if musk and Zuckerberg will build their 2080 ouvres still in the USA or elsewhere. remember most Barrons made their fortunes living in the North East and ended up on the West. the world is more global today. the Musk University might as well end up in Shenzhen.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/billionaires-are-building-lu...
how much of this "the 19th century Robber barons at least did one thing right" idea is all down to Andrew Carnegie, I sometimes wonder.
You mean the ones that turned around and produced the current market fundamentalist and elite-run culture we have today?
What a coincidence.
Though technically universities are more than just their endowments, business schools, engineering schools, sports teams, etc. They often have pretty good libraries, for example. Many universities also provide a variety of educational and course materials for free over the internet. Some train physicians and operate hospitals. And many universities have at least some minimal diversity of opinion on politics and policies.
The idea that elite universities produce elite university graduates is probably not controversial, and many of them were founded with the idea of producing "leaders", which they have arguably done.
Isn’t it?
{elite universities} produce {elite university} graduates
is of course tautological
but this
elite universities produce university graduates who are elite (meaning better than others)
is debatable.
Most people who say "elite universities produce elite university graduates" mean the second and then don't provide any especially great arguments for the opinion.
The state schools of the US aren’t worse than Stanford or Harvard, you pay extra to hang out with people who can also afford to pay extra.
The college education system in the US is second only to the healthcare system in terms of “how fucked this system truly is” metric.
Would you agree/disagree with: “Elite run culture is a side effect of wealth concentration, and the removal of options for money to collect or be generated in the middle of the pyramid.”
Other than the ability to search the worlds knowledge at our fingertips, having a 1990s supercomputer in our pocket, being able to video call most people in the developed world, having fairly cheap usable computers for most people in the developed world, having high speed internet available around the world, being able to discuss things online with people all over the world, being able to play incredible computer games and having the cost of launching something in space reduced by a factor of about ten have have we got out of having a few hundred billionaires ?
Just think though, some of them might disagree with some our of politics.
It's like Carnegie setting up 2500 libraries but charging access to them and becoming an even greater billionaire in the process
There is a list of defunct spaceflight companies :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_spaceflight_c...
Here is a very small list of just a few of the defunct internet companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_online_compan...
It's also worth considering how many millionaires were made by the companies that the billionaires started.
internet companies become defunct because some other company puts them out of business - if we had never had Facebook we would still have had a way to keep in touch online
> It's also worth considering how many millionaires were made by the companies that the billionaires started.
who cares? the world doesn't need more millionaires or billionaires
The consumer surplus of all these things is the bigger thing.
And getting to that is really not easy.
Externalities are so easily ignored if they don't happen in SF (and even the ones that do. For instance, take a look at the pricing out of affordable housing for all the cooks, dish washers, janitors etc who cater to that highly paid workforce but now have to commute hours each way).
Just because San Francisco is disastrously run despite staggering riches and has horribly magnified problems does not mean it's the fault of people who started companies in San Jose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
That's larger than the GDP of all but two countries in the world.
That is not starving.
On top of that, tech CEOs and highly paid tech workers pay a lot of tax. Far more than they cost the country.
I doubt DOGE will recommend cuts to SpaceX funding.
I need to remind you that Mush has invented nothing nor is he an engineer. His vast personal wealth is extracted, and at least part of it's vastness is due to corruption. Mush's personal views expressed on his own-media-trumpet Xitter, have hampered more technological innovation than he has ever enabled or paid for.
BTW what's SpaceX carbon footprint like? This 'man' also just paid for a slice of the US presidency that just pulled the US out of a global treaty to attempt to address human-caused climate crises that are unfolding in front of our face on a daily basis as predicted. Mush has done net harm to Earth, not good.
SpaceX has received $15 billion in government contracts.
I don't think either company would exist without government support.
innovation is risky and rewards accordingly.
Ycombinator app-startups are low-hanging-fruit with marginal innovation and marginal risk => it ain't hardware, and it's just webservices and a few React devs...
SpaceX and DARPA and ARPA = our tax dollars.
Is it really ‘hard’ to make tech firms profitable, or is it more a function of survival?
Many of the companies which enter are bought out, or acqui-hired, adding to the leaders. Tech often rewards those who survive long enough to consolidate.
And finally, enshittification is a way to make MORE money, but it’s not hard.
maybe it's medium difficulty? There must be some enshittification that makes significantly less money, up to shutting down companies.
Extracting money out of people, because you can price it better, and competition isn't going to stop you, means theres a race to the bottom.
This is on top of being vastly profitable already.
So its not hard, its just following a script.
Consumer goods are delivered by businesses. Delivering new, high tech ones is hard.
Zoom!? WebRTC! Proprietary XYZ? Standards!
Computer games are pan-et-circenses, IMO, but I also don't recall any billionaires having created any.
Your John Galt story is trite and untruthful.
This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people of the same size, and I can't imagine how anybody who works in tech can not know of the specific good things they have done or be so confused about the bad to believe they are outweighed.
By what metric?
That's completely absurd, but let's see the data on that.
Is that a way of saying 'I don't actually have any data or numbers backing my absurd claims'?
Your claim was that tech billionaires contributed more towards the good of society than any other group.
You provided a list of metrics that are in no way exclusively attributable to tech billionaires, and no actual data/number on how and how much these are attributable to tech billionaires.
Your analogy is completely unrelated too.
It's more like if you said 'whales are the best animal' and then gave me a bunch of random metrics about the state of the world.
What are you talking about?
I also love how all of your analogies/examples immediately switched from amazing societal improvements to measurements of physical object characteristics. Truly amusing stuff.
Let's take one of the metrics you suggested - 'number of lives saved' - go ahead and tell me how tech billionaires have saved more lives than any other group.
Or maybe just admit that you're talking out of your ass.
Yes the billionaire I listed have saved more lives than 99.999% of humans. They do this by paying for specific individuals to be treated for specific fatal diseases, and by funding research that has led to cures and preventative vaccines that have already saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people
You also don't seem to understand that if a team of scientists discovered a cure - that doesn't automatically get 100% attributed to whatever billionaire funded the building the scientists were working in at the time.
Also big difference between saying 'X did this good thing' and 'X did more good than everyone else combined'.
And the onus is on you here - you made the absurd claims - now either back them up or walk them back :)
I'd take Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, and Marie Curie over Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Benzos.
But even in this case, I could make a pretty strong case that Salk was less important for the eradication of Polio than Gates, and that Curie will likely be less important in the long run than Zuckerberg on healthcare and biosciences, and a weaker but reasonable case that Borlaug will be less impactful on human survivability with increasing population than Musk.
In the meanwhile, the technocrat administration we just got is putting the anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr up as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The progress we have made on eliminating Polio is at risk directly because of actions taken by this crop of billionaires. That is more on Musk and Zuckerberg than Gates, but these people cannot be trusted to use the power and influence they have for anything other than self-enrichment.
Trump bad, has nothing to do with Gates or Zuck. If you blame them for trying to prevent Trump from doing bad things, you should look into what they will benefit from and how they spend their money
Well, that depends if RFKjr and his lunatics get control of the HHS[0][1]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/rfk-jr-aaron...
[1] https://www.protectourcare.org/experts-say-deadly-samoan-mea...
how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.
Did he generate them purely from his genius and benevolence?
And yes, mostly genius and not benevolence.
Is the value of everything in the world higher or lower than it was 1000 years ago? If it's higher, how did it go up?
While you're at it, consider what portion of MS success is directly attributable to Bill Gates and not the many thousands of other people involved in the company and code it literally copied from open source projects. Not to mention the extreme anti-competitveness of MS and their aggressiveness in suing and shutting down other companies, and other negative externalities they generated.
Thing is Larry Ellison doesn't write blog posts acting like he's a philosopher. Some tech CEOs really position themselves as arbiters of culture and it just feels more and more like trying to transfer their tech/business positioning into a cultural one. I do not like it!
They’re all a bunch of aspiring lawnmowers, some of them just try to ride whatever the latest wave of popular opinion is to cynically accumulate some social currency.
^^ I am totally behind this proposition even though its a 2nd effect allusion
You want to look at a person and identify what they are very good at -- and then study what they know, say and do specifically in that area, maybe take it on faith a bit that they know something you don't in those spheres. You can safely ignore everything else from them.
So let's look at some people, with Mark Zuckerberg for instance, I would say here's a guy who seems to have some good instincts for doing aggressive and invasive viral marketing, and he also seemed to be a pretty prolific PHP hacker in his early days. I don't need much else from him.
With PG, high level Lisp hacker, good systems thinker, good at getting businesses going (if I'm being cynical I'd say in environments where there's not much competition, but a guy like PG might wisely argue finding those is part of the skill). I want to absorb everything I can from him on programming language design, startup thinking and then I want to move on.
With Donald Trump, here's a guy who is literally the best in the world at parlaying negative social media attention into power. And being fueled by rage at Sith Lord levels at an age when most people have thrown in the towel and are just waiting to die. Again, all I really need to hear from him is how he does that stuff, then it's best I just ignore the rest.
PG is not a hero. He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people, many of whom benefitted greatly (as did Paul himself). I'm not saying any of that as a negative! Just that we have a habit of attributing superhuman characteristics to folks (Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind) and ending up disappointed.
I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I once did.