Mark, please! You're a spam-your-friends-with-fake-news-and-baby-photos service at best. The world will go on long after Facebook ceases to exist. Please stop pretending that you're Mother Teresa here.
The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...
Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.
I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism.
Selling the BS is a fantastic smokescreen.
This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.
People who find success often become delusional megalomaniacs after achieving that success, when they see their success as evidence of their own greatness, not before. The idea that it's the megalomania (or a black turtleneck) that makes you successful, or even makes you brave enough to attempt the things that might make you successful, is an illusion.
A defining commonality of delusional megalomaniacs is their destructiveness and their danger to the people around them and themselves. Worse, they tend to attract followers who both amplify the reach of that destructiveness and who create an echo chamber that reflects back and amplifies the megalomania that attracted them, making the situation worse.
> That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems.
There's no evidence of this. Everything difficult was not solved by assholes, and Zuckerberg didn't solve anything difficult.
The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.
When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.
That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.
The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.
I very much agree with the first sentence.
But I don't know if I agree with the second. People who believe that something is meaningless, or hard to do, are at least not doing any damage, while saviors of the world have done plenty of damage. We humans seem to have an inherent bias for powerful persons, in that we tend to like them even if they're a terrible influence.
I think you mean "easier to get convince others to work 80-hour weeks for illusory stock options".
(i <3 u 'idlewords)
Just remember we're not just getting free lithium, aluminum and copper from another dimension to build all those cars, and when we're done with the cars, they're not just going to biodegrade back into forrests and coral reefs. Mining those minerals can have a pretty serious environmental impact.
There is some cognitive dissonance going here, we see a solution to climate change, but we don't want to observe the other side of the coin.
Yes, mining has an environmental impact, but 1 ton of aluminum used in a car does not necessarily mean 1 ton of aluminum was mined for it.
But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
And why would Lithium no longer be required? In some hypothetical future that doesn't exist? It's needed now, and that's all that's important. Moreover, its great performance in batteries is directly related to fundamental physics and the position of Li on the periodic table, and that's not going to change.
>But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
Let what get in the way of a great response? Your nonsensical predictions?
I.e., his solution to employment issues caused by automation is to merge with machines as opposed to addressing it on a social, political, economic, etc., level.
More and more I find this approach detrimental to society and likely to amplify all existing problems.
If you ask me, for a lot of these tech companies, this is a false dichotomy: they're outwardly preachy and inwardly cynical. How better to justify bad behaviour than to dress it up in grandiosity?
The grandiose self-vision is annoying PR, but at least some of the companies have a fair amount to back it up with. Facebook is just the next iteration of Microsoft in my opinion -- they took a huge early lead with a superior product in a new industry, but now they're kind of evil and they will ride their market share for many decades.
And even then, it was only because Friendster was crippled by scaling problems and MySpace was snowed under with self-promotion that Facebook even had a path out of the university populations to which they initially restricted themselves.
The funny part is that Mother Teresa wasn't a good person, but made a lot of money from her image of nicety. I think its the same way with these individuals who are trying to act 'noble'. The most noble thing you could do is bring consumer trust back and invest into people.
I would argue that a lot of problems that companies have, like when Tim Cook was going around giving presentations on why encryption is important, is solved by bringing consumer trust back by working in the best interest for everyone, and not just for money.
Four. Freaking. Decades.
It's not right to say, "Mother Teresa was not a good person because [minor thing I disagree about]."
Her views do not cancel 45 years of service. I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa. There would be fewer depressed, fewer lonely, fewer suicidal, fewer addicts, fewer outcasts.
The atheist Hitchens wrote several hit pieces on the religious Teresa due to her views on abortion, suffering, women's rights, and more. But the world is not made better by spilling rivers of ink about perceived imperfections in the laborers helping society's outcasts. The world is made better by the good things people do for others.
I'd rather live in a world with 1 imperfect laboring Mother Teresa than 1000 babbling do-nothings.
She raised billions of dollars and very little of it ended up helping the people she was supposed to be caring for.
> I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa.
Don't worry, there are people like Benny Hinn, like Peter Popov, like Creflow Dollar who are out there taking mountains of money from people in the name of faith to spend on their gold-plated jets.
Mother Theresa did more damage to the world than you can possibly imagine. If instead of celebrating misery she worked to mitigate, instead of being staunchly opposed to birth control she had encouraged family planning, if instead of using the sick and dying as a fund-raising tool instead of helping them get back on their own feet to lift themselves up the world would be a better place.
Mother Theresa clearly didn't give a shit about women's rights.
> The world is made better by the good things people do for others.
Especially if those good things help others pay it forward. She kept her flock just sick and miserable enough they didn't escape. She's like someone with Munchausen syndrome by proxy in a monstrous scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome_by_proxy
Where's the evidence for that? I read Hitchens' utterly biased hit piece on her, I didn't see real evidence, just accusations and editorializing.
> "She raised billions of dollars and very little of it ended up helping the people she was supposed to be caring for."
Be specific. She raised billions, but very little helped the people? Give us numbers, and show us original sources. Hitchens' hit pieces didn't contain these. (As I recall, even Hitchens acknowledged that Mother Teresa didn't live luxuriously herself.)
>> There are plenty of others like Benny Hinn...
Hinn, Popov and others shysters aren't caring for the sick, feeding the hungry. Red herring.
Actually, the piece he wrote was about how she would deny medicine to those who needed it, and reused needles between patients, along with putting down 'modern' equipment and anything non-religious. All while she received millions in funding she did not invest into her 'homes'. The 'houses' poor people went to where she said she would take care of them, were actually houses of death for them, even if it was treatable.
45 years of service means nothing, if your 45 years of service includes purposefully making people suffer and denying them of care they need, while making money for yourself and trying to look like a saint.
Also related:
https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Heresy-Rescuing-Social-Technolog...
Google, FB, etc. are a bit pretentious. You are world saving because you can afford it - you run companies with huge margins that rake in billions of dollars per QUARTER.
Let's keep it in perspective - you do it because you can, you're not successful because you do it.
It's the same reason you see Hollywood actors being outspoken political activists. Because if they stay out of politics, they're "only" insignificant entertainers.
It's the same reason you see comedians and TV shows getting political. Saturday Night Live (SNL) is just a show for laughs. But if it takes a political stance, suddenly the writers/producers/actors can feel good about making a positive change. (Whether it's actually positive is beside the point; it only matters they think it's positive.)
And so, Facebook is doing something to enact positive change. (For various definitions of positive.)
Facebook is only different in that it has enough money and influence to actually change things in the world. Whereas comedians, actors, TV shows can only offer political opinions and try to influence people, Facebook can actually change things thanks to its financial status and its staggeringly user base.
Where are the actions to back up the argument? Internet.org? India would like to kick internet.org in the nutsack. Giving money to charity? Where are the results from that investment?
Without any evidence, Mark Zuckerberg is just another king of spin. Aren't there enough cockroaches in the world already? Not saying Mark is one, but I'd like to see someone else point to the good FB is doing in the world and hear nothing at all from its CEO.
While this manifesto was a little over-the-top, and probably amplifies globalism as a cure-all, he does appear sincere in his desire to do good. Time will tell.
Sure, there are a ton of negative externalities of that such as fake news spam. But it also puts them in a unique position to tailor their site to encourage the behaviors and enforce the values they want. I think the focus on local communities is an important example. Obviously local communities can create groups now, but there is a lot that can be done to encourage those kinds of communities and groups and discover existing ones.
"The joy of reading" is coming under great fire.
In fact I am beginning to realize that I no longer enjoy reading from a phone. Never before in my reading experience did I get so worked up until now
Your comment not just includes fake news or junk reading but simply anything written in an opinion fashion.
This manifesto is an example of why reading has gone sour.
Humorously, Teresa caused a lot of pain and suffering all the while self-righteously convincing herself and others that she was doing god's work.
More similarities than one may think.