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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

I know you're speaking with tongue-in-cheek but there's some unsettling truth to what you say.

People can be less involved in their community if they can just escape to like-minded havens on the internet rather than fixing the real issues going on around them (see al3x's post about fleeing to Portland for reference: http://al3x.net/).

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I went to a church on Christmas Eve last year for the carols and I found it invigorating and enlightening to talk to people who weren't 20-something grad students or professors. I worry that we're missing out on something by congregating in social and intellectual monocultures in which we are never challenged by someone that sees the world from a different viewpoint.

I think there is a lot that is lost by society's tendency to group similar people and people's natural tendency to seek out those who are similar to each other. When all the elderly people get put in retirement homes think of what is lost by those who could have benefited from the elderly person's years of experience and wisdom.

If you want to be a better entrepreneur, you are probably going to find an older entrepreneur who has some experience to teach you something, not one in your peers. Well, if you constantly surround yourself with those similar to you, how are you going to be challenged to grow as a person?

Books.

Edit: I am not trying to be snide, but you don’t actually have to talk to people to get an understanding of their viewpoint. Try reading some books from the far left and far right in the US and you will start to see how the other side thinks. Heck even tuning into Fox News, NPR, and the BBC in the same news cycle is useful.

The intersection of people with something worth saying and the people who write books is far from total.

That's true. But it's more meaningful from the societal level than the personal. As an individual looking for interesting or useful things you don't already know it's usually far more efficient to read a few books than to spend the same amount of time getting to know people outside your circle.

Now if you want to learn something that a large number of people don't already know then goes treasure hunting. But, suggesting people need to talk with a wide range of people to grow as a person is simply untrue.

The problem with your suggestion are all the things that you don't know you don't know.

>But, suggesting people need to talk with a wide range of people to grow as a person is simply untrue.

Learning how to get along with people that are not like you is a deeply transformative, and I think valuable, experience.

I thought that's what going home for the holidays was all about ;-)

Yes. I forgot about that. My family is a little odd, so I don't experience that.

jeez that conversation wouldve been so much cooler in real life.

The problem with using only books to try and understand what people who are disagree with you think is that they aren't interactive. While reading something you disagree with, you will probably find yourself thinking "Well, what about X", and if the book doesn't explicitly address that issue you will never know what they would respond. Even worse, people tend to assume that those who disagree with them don't have an answer to their objections, rather than that the book simply doesn't address them. If you are instead talking to a (reasonably knowledgeable) person, they will be able to at least give some sort of answer to your objections.

Perhaps we need Christianity for atheists.

As a long-time San Francisco resident I found it irksome that Alex was so quick to bemoan the lack of culture to consume without showing any possible interest in creating any.

In my opinion, San Francisco is a beautiful place for creators.

Well it's particularly odd because he claims he received a lot of feedback from other SFers who all see the same issues as he does and are equally fed up.

I say it's odd because the startup culture is be all about opportunism.

Is accountability/sane governance that intractable of a problem that people would rather move than meet the demand?

they can just escape to like-minded havens on the internet rather than fixing the real issues going on around them

For most people, the world just won't stay saved, so they begin to wonder, why keep going to the effort to save it?

I suppose the first step, then, would be to give people around you a real living example of what it means to "be the change you want to see in the world".

Good idea.

I have a job and bathe regularly. Yet I walk through the ghetto every day, and find that folks there are still unemployed and smelly. They're just not following my example like they should!

I was thinking more along the lines of starting your tech company in a city whose cup doesn't overflow with them and creating jobs locally rather than having all of the tech talent in america move to the bay area.

Moving some of the folks on the right side of the bell curve to a new city won't necessarily help out the folks on the left side. The Bay Area has lots of tech jobs AND unemployed and smelly people.

Memetic propagation is not instantaneous, grasshopper.

Perhaps. But I guess my point was that "be the change you want to see in the world" is easy, since all I want is for everybody to be like me!

I think looking for a bit more leverage than that might be a better first step. There's more opportunity to improve the world via technological changes than social changes, it seems to me; huge numbers of people and organizations put a lot of effort into social change for little or no result. Henry Ford probably had as much effect on the social fabric of the US as all the civil rights workers of the 20th century (though not necessarily in the same direction, and arguably not the effect he would have preferred to have).

I don't disagree at all, and if doing more of the above is a change you would like to see in the world then it's laudable that you're doing it (if you're doing it.) The phrase that moved me to post was "the world just won't stay saved". Of course the world won't stay saved, because we're all subject to entropy and, with apologies to Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart.

The world is a garden and it requires constant maintenance.

Sisyphus, from greek mythology, is a metaphor for this inescapable curse. Modern man would probably decide that it's much better for the rock to be at the bottom of the hill, as it were, but that strikes me as choosing to be a part of the problem.

Actually, the bit about the world not staying saved was a reference to the first little bit of The Incredibles. :) I think that fighting (metaphorical) entropy is worthwhile, though; I just prefer to find the most efficient means for the result, or at least a more efficient means than convincing folk to change their ways through rhetoric and example. I guess it's a bit ironic that I'm even writing this...

I'm slapping my forehead for not picking up on the reference.

I've actually been joking about starting a 'move to the internet' movement.

This is what startup hubs are all about.

My criteria for a place to live definitely include "there are fellow HN readers within a ten-mile radius".

I consider myself to be a citizen of the United States of Internet. Or perhaps that should be Disparate States of Internet, given what China, Iran, and Australia are doing to it.

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