Out to Get You | Hacker News Reader

Out to Get You

thezvi.wordpress.com

119 pointsapsec11234 comments

Oooh, I really enjoyed this. The style, while some other commenters had issues with it, was enjoyable to me.

"Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You."

"They seek resources at your expense."

You aren't being paranoid. There are systems out there that are designed to maximize your loss and minimize your gain. This is the way of pirate capitalism, where you aren't concerned about LTV, just about short term value.

Great list of techniques for dealing with this situation, which seems to come up more and more often. Would have loved more examples, but the ones the author mentioned were excellent.

I liked this read. I heavily subscribe to the "only suckers pay full price" philosophy. Everyone is out to get you, and they profit by relying on most people's trusting, docile, harmony-seeking nature. Your cable bill is $0.01 more than last month? Call up and fight it--threaten to drop your subscription. Medical bill you don't understand or credit card charge you don't remember? Call them up and dispute it. Speeding ticket? Fight it in court. Find a small scratch on a piece of furniture you just bought? Threaten to dump it back in the store's lobby unless you get a discount. And never, ever buy a new car! Negotiate everything, even your groceries. You work too hard for your money in order to just give "them" what they want without a fight.

- Proud cheapskate

>You work too hard for your money in order to just give "them" what they want without a fight.

So you're happy to give them a fight for your money, but not for your time?

Consider who the real sucker is in the situation where you find yourself harassing a cashier to reduce the price of your eggs.

Think about how much you value your time and how doing that will affect your happiness.

Exactly. Some people enjoy this and that's great. Others are so blinded by the need to not Get Got that they end up working for pennies an hour on some tasks.

So you are the one I see arguing with the poor teenage cashier that the milk is $.50 too expensive?

That is definitely, definitely not what the author was suggesting.

But is it worth it? Read it again...

Poshmark is filled with products that were barely barely used because people forgot to return - companies have a generous return policy and they still don't return. Clearly, people don't appreciate the value in chasing after a few tens of dollars of money - even when that adds up and makes a difference.

While I understand that this is stressful, there's a bare minimum that some people can do that can save them a good chunk of money every month.

Oh man, it seems like every bill is $0.01 to $0.03 out, but whenever I chase it up I end up in a rabbit hole of documentation and administration

Authored by Zvi Mowshowitz, Magic PT Hall of famer. I was surprised to see intersection here of two of my interests.

tl;dr for those who read the definitions but don't want to Get Got.

* Understand the difference between the value of something and the cost of the thing.

* Understand opportunity cost (and sunk cost).

Get Got when when value is high and opportunity cost is low.

Get compact when value is high but opportunity cost is non trivial.

Get Gone when value is low and opportunity cost is high.

Get ready when cost as well as sunk cost is high.

This comment made me realize why I never remember summaries of self help books.

Using examples makes it easier to relate and remember, whereas summaries require an additional step of mapping an ongoing situation to a stored summary in your head, and this is very hard to do in realtime.

Upvoting for the excellent philosophical points; in spite of being mentally exhausting to read...

Actionable, seemingly trivial advice that might be the foundation of better habits:

"A buffet creates overeating. Filling up one plate (or one early to explore, then one to exploit) ends better."

"one early to explore, then one to exploit"

> When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.

That's exactly how I feel when I'm in US. That'd be X dollars. Plus state tax. Cover not included. And 15% tips. Sorry, no change.

How you people can tolerate this, I don't know.

What's the experience called when a word is said so many times it feels like it starts to lose meaning?

Get Got Got Get Got Got Got Get Got Get Got

Got

Worth It

"Semantic satiation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

Perhaps one day we'll have AI and collaborative filtering to warn us in such circumstances.

(At the risk of stating the obvious.)

It is likely we will soon have multiple AI's Out To Get You. We're pretty close to it, but I would assume current algorithms are not "AI".

> We're pretty close to it, but I would assume current algorithms are not "AI".

Seems like it depends on your definition of "AI". We've got computer programs reading our communication, watching our browsing, and piecing together which patterns are likely to be the same person in different locations.

Then they use that information, both alone and in aggregation with other peoples' info, and finding ads for things that the individual might be interested in.

I understand at least some of the algorithms behind this, and have at least a fuzzy concept of most of the rest. It certainly crosses over into the category of what I'd call "AI". But that's the problem with the definition of Artificial Intelligence: It seems like the most-used definition is roughly "The collection of intelligent-seeming behaviors that we haven't figured out algorithms for yet".

There is also a lot more profit to be made in AIs Out To Get You than AIs acting in your self interest. Machines are turning out very capable of exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche, as the article talked about.

The ones Wanting to get you will also have all of that.

Sometimes you can retroactively undo being Gotten by just not paying.

While there is good thought behind this article, I found it unnecessarily difficult to read. For instance:

> "Get Compact when you find a rule you can follow that makes it Worth It to Get Got."

Now, he defined "Get Compact" earlier, and "Get Got", but why is "Worth It" capitalised? I am not sure if it is a typo or if it is also referring to some abstraction made elsewhere in the piece or in another piece by TheZvi. The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

There are many more examples of the kind of grammar that makes you read a sentence twice, or second guess yourself, etc. Ultimately, I think this sloppy writing elevates the author's system of writing over helping the reader understand quickly.

Is there a reason to be particularly forgiving? Is English not a first language or is there something else Hacker News knows that I don't?

> why is "Worth It" capitalised?

To make it clear that it has to be really, really Worth It. Not just sort of "worth it", or "probably worth it", etc., etc. You have to be really, really sure that it's Worth It.

> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

I think what the author is doing is defining technical terms--those are the Capitalized Things. They are to be treated as having a particular meaning in the context of the article, which the author doesn't spell out but which can be built up from context. They're technical terms because they either don't have a well-defined meaning in ordinary usage (like Get Got) or have a meaning in ordinary usage that might not be emphatic enough (like Worth It). The point is to get you to think very carefully about what those terms really mean. Which is part of thinking carefully about the underlying issue the article describes.

> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

I think this has a lot to do with Zvi being a member of the competitive magic community. Magic players tend to speak in dense, abstract, reductionist overstatements at all times.

I have much love for the community, but its nerd-jock culture is grating at times.

I liked the style. I found it notably easy to understand. Maybe it follows the structures of my internal thought patterns or something. The sentences are all unusually simple.

It sounds like the article wasn't Worth It and you Got Got

But since it was free, it was Worth It...

It wasn’t free in terms of the time cost.

If you value your time, then maybe it was Worth It, and maybe not.

Yes, it takes a bit more cognitive processing to follow, but I feel that the idea of the piece couldn't have been expressed much more clearly, given that the subject is so abstract.

The level of abstraction reminds me of Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_. Now _that's_ a tough read (though it should tickle the fancy of any HN'ers not already familiar.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Baudrillard,Jean/sim...

I agree completely. I love the idea of the article and the concept he's trying to get across, but it's extremely difficult to read.

I did upvote it still because I think it makes some interesting points, but the execution definitely could have been much better.

This reminds me: don’t ever do business with SurePayroll.

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