calibraxis

> This is a small preview of understanding how our emotions and brain chemistry affects our performance.

Interesting, what other sources can one look at, to go beyond this small preview?

People will find things to do, because we are human. But pointless work that goes nowhere is demotivating. http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

The question is, what's inspirational work? I think it's easy to come up with examples of inspiring work.

"an extreme individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming successful on one’s own merit."

It's ironic. Corporations are anything but individualist. They're collectives. Almost always top-down authoritarian structures that resemble fascism closer than most fascist governments. And full of bureaucracies that have nothing to do with making products, like marketing & finance depts.

And in this article, "education" is a euphemism synonymous with college. Not talking about self-learning. Some administration that gives people certificates.

"your firm has bought your time for that hour." Tech workers have unusual amounts of wageslave mentality.

> But even here on HN, with the high quality of debate

Maybe the debate here on other topics, from technical to political, is also of low quality? Just with the flavor of "quality", like carefully argued (but absurd) mini-essays? Much like politicians and the media which use carefully-manicured gravitas to give the flavor of truth without the nutrients?

Being irrational enough to destroy yourself isn't all that compartmentalized. It's not just about climate change, it's about economics and national ideology. Which certainly includes what we do all day in our jobs.

I like to say hyperindividualism, not individualism. Individualism and collectivism are naturally related: cooperation can bring out our individual potentials. From David Graeber's “The Democracy Project”, about Native Americans:

> Others (John Locke, for example, or many of the other English political philosophers so beloved by the Founding Fathers) became fascinated by the discovery of societies in North America that appeared to be simultaneously far more egalitarian, and far more individualistic, than anything Europeans had previously imagined possible.

In a European settler society like the US, people are still propagandized to believe the two are at odds: individual vs collective. But a moment's thought shows this to be ridiculous.

> What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments.

It's "startup news": computing for capitalism. We work on social media without knowing anything about sociology. We work on advertising, which is corporate propaganda. We have no vision of the future, unlike technologists in a sane world, so we build a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare where I'm literally filling out a form right now.

Anyway, politics is for billionaires.

Fortunately, capitalism is a fairly young system & requires a government to provide violence (police & military) to preserve it. Capitalists often ask government to step in and make capitalism viable long-term. That is, keep capitalists from destroying each other. And to keep the populace from trying alternatives. ("Revolution.")

Slavery was more stable: lasted millenia. We're in turbulent times, particularly since we're probably ending neoliberal capitalism: an unstable form of capitalism whose one advantage is to damage the imagination enough to stop seeing alternatives except a single bad one.

The left talks about the Israel lobby. Certainly would not talk about a "Jewish lobby." http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/01/the-israel-lobby/

Far more important than some "Jewish lobby" is the white lobby. Beyond influential, and very happy as of late.

> Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all.

No one said that. Just that racism is an oppression where whites are the top caste. Blacks can be racist against blacks too, for example internalized racism.

However, blacks being racist against whites is an odd statement, like homeless people being classist against the rich. Race is pseudoscientific classification of people to justify entire economic systems like slavery, and still lives on like awful backwards compatibility.

> Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy?

Companies like twitter are far more aggressive at fighting spam than physical threats. To the point where people simply reported abusers as spammers at one point. That's why no one bought them.

Oops. Maybe they should've been less arrogant to their embattled userbase; so-called "social justice warriors" turned out to be normal people just trying to help them make money. What happens social media companies refuse to learn things like sociology. http://www.businessinsider.com/disney-twitter-acquisition-tr...

Evidence that HN is a right-wing capitalist site (like both US political parties): in a discussion of threats to humanity, an apparently highly-rated comment talks about paying too much in taxes. And fears that solutions to global warming will "completely subvert our entire system of law making."

(Both of which are good things: not just markets, but the nation state system itself, are exactly what need disrupting. Those who drank the koolaid can't think past tight bounds even when future generations are at stake. Not everyone can escape to billionaire mansion compounds in New Zealand. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man... )

There's a lot of truth to this. There's something in the culture about excluding poor whites from being accepted as an oppressed class. (Literature should soon come out on this.) They're called names. This inconsistency is ruthlessly exploited by the right wing.

The Clinton future was bleak for the working class (not just whites), let's admit it. She ran as the least worst, expecting that'd be enough. While Trump's climate change denial alone is enough to make him more dangerous, and he will probably ruin the white working class way more, there's a reason Clinton lost.

[Edit: not that I agree with everything this person says. White and male supremacy are obviously huge elements. Poor black women are far less privileged than poor white men. But one should listen & understand.]

It will stimulate the economy to promote more jobs. "There are people whose labor is worth $8/hr but not $11/hr" is a non-sequitur because this fuzzy concept of "worth" varies in time & space. (For example, demand-push inflation will change the numbers.)

Our own cultures are mysterious to us. Why are we hurtling towards climate change? Why do we sacrifice countries full of people, like in Iraq? Why must we release toxins in water that lower people's IQs? Why do we need to cage so many humans?

Few have satisfactory explanations. (The most common ones don't stand up to basic scrutiny. Folk answers, ideological answers to explain away the ideology's problems, etc.)

Context: The Washington Post is from the militant nation which overthrew Iran's secular parliamentary democracy, and installed the brutal Shah: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat)

In any vaguely functioning ethical calculus, forcing every single person into a dress code is nothing compared to murdering hundreds of thousands of people right next door to Iran (Iraq).

No need to focus on what people in another country are doing. Focus on solving one's own barbarism. Leave others in peace to finally rebuild their stolen freedoms.

Yes, it's confusing to some in the US because Democrats are basically what "moderate Republicans" used to be in the 1980's. As even Obama pointed out. (http://www.salon.com/2016/05/17/noam_chomsky_the_democratic_...)

By world standards, not to mention many past US standards, the two presidential candidates (and the current president) are clearly right-wingers.

While magicial thinking is pretty universal, it's true that the US (where GiveDirectly comes from) has ridiculous amounts of it. For example, 42% believe "God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago." (http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...)

Even those who aren't climate change deniers still seem committed to running us off the cliff with climate change. Perhaps because they believe in an "invisible hand" of Providence.

The posted article is an example. They could've simply quoted what at least one Kenyan thought about it. Anyone operating within a culture which values rationality would've done so. But not these people.

Yes, that's what anthropologists often say. So you have quite some evidence backing you up... And many humans now are excited about exploring space, agitating over how few resources we allocate to it.

(That's another rant that many have; it's not like we suffer from too few resources. In fact, we overproduce many costly things. It's simply distribution that's fundamentally broken.)

DK = domain knowledge?

Good point. And the middle class damages itself with their lack of solidarity with the poor and minorities. Because the condition of the poor is the threat which keeps the middle class in line.

These "clandestine courses" certainly exist in rich nations, and are secretly held during lunch and in private homes. For example, to avoid bosses knowing.

Skilled human tutors, free from school/university bureaucracy, can get into your head and figure out effective ways to inspire learning. Leads to faster and surer learning, for those lucky enough to have it.

It's a political act to publicly declare something along the lines of, "I quit because of their politics."

Fortunately, people like me see such declarations — "Hmm, I'd better now reactivate my paid GitHub subscription, and stop pushing people to competitors. Their attitude is improving!"

Braced myself before reading this, but what a pleasant surprise!

> infinite number of closing parentheses

Nowadays, you can express it with finite parentheses using -> macros popularized by Clojure.

Corporations are organized internally as command economies, not markets. There are other social logics at play.

Yes, and they're right. People change genders or aren't part of any; there's gendered dress codes which societies enforce (or people beat you up, you can't get a job, etc); and so forth. Hell, Alan Turing was basically killed by the state for not adhering to gender norms.

With the concept of "gender," people refer to a huge social infrastructure. With "biological sex," they're trying to refer to something else.

Oh, also Joel Spolsky mentions it too: (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html)

(But it's not worthwhile for me to trawl through the managerial lit, so no doubt there's more examples.)

Don Reinertsen mentioned it. At least in a talk, and maybe in his book "The Principles of Product Development Flow".

That's only 1 example, but in my personal estimation he's one of the two most effective management theorists I know. Though I wish he were a better explainer. (The other of course is Shanley Kane.)

> You and I may not like it, but the vast majority of the population supports the views and policies of the AKP and Erdogan.

Erdogan succeeds in part because he attacks democracy. The whole reason Erdogan (with ISIS's help) attacks the Kurds is because "they" deprived Erdogan's party of a parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002. [1] [2] So his military attacks his own cities. [3]

(The Erdogan/ISIS connection is obvious. [4])

Erdogan's been threatening academics for a long time. For example, detaining them for a petition for peace, hacking/blocking it so people can't read it. [5]

Erdogan destroying his opposition isn't democratic.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey...

[2] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/29/turkey-launc...

[3] http://www.france24.com/en/20160714-turkey-unesco-heritage-s...

[4] http://time.com/3980085/these-5-stats-explain-turkeys-war-on...

[5] https://news.vice.com/article/turkey-detains-21-academics-fo...

US expats sometimes sound a bit like recovering cult members. (Probably generalizes to other countries, don't know.)

"Oh my god, did they make you 'pledge allegiance' to that fucking flag too!? [1] That was so fucked up! And over 4 in 10 of us believe the earth was created 10,000 years ago??? [2] We're gonna kill the Earth, aren't we?"

[1] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/pledge-of-allegiance-sta...

[2] http://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationists...

Say what's honest, and imagine that Californian ideologues [1] are no different from the "religious." [2] Then the downvotes are perfectly expected and normal. It's boo-ing.

Anyone who wants to verify this (and isn't close friends with executives) should speak with salespeople, maybe lead devs... rank-and-file devs tend to be poor sources since they're often like mushrooms, left in the dark. Even salespeople in fairly scrupulous companies often discuss the systematic lies. (Lies which should conform to some rules in order not bite the company in the ass later.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

[2] Particularly since markets are the dual to religion; a rupture that created egoism and altruism.