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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

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.

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