Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

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The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint.

I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.

That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society.

All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade.

I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.

I tend to look at it this way: hard work improves the probability of financial success, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. So yes, people benefit on average from hard work, but because of the uncertainty of the situation you can't take the contrapositive and say that poor people are lazy.

That's interesting. That view, of the essential unfairness of the system, had the opposite effect on me: it motivated me lots. Just not to buy into the American dream stuff.

It motivated me to understand my own values, and learn more about the system, and figure out what I wanted to do to try and change the system for the people who'd never luck out and get a desk job, the people in coffee shops, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like.

Guess we can take different things from the same thing.

You're right if you assume that people don't work as hard when they're pessimistic. People (like me) who work harder when they are pessimistic, however, certainly benefitted from the liberal view.

So your position is that we should just all believe outright falsehoods if it's "useful?"

To be ever so slightly pedantic: regardless of whether we should, we do. We're afflicted with a slew of cognitive biases.

I don't really see that as relevant to this particular discussion.

Of course? If you want to recover 'not believing outright falsehoods' from that, just assign a very high value to 'truth' in your utility function.

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