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Comment by dqpb | Hacker News Reader

> But God is different. Because he has an infinite mind, he does not need to aggregate above the level of an individual. As I thought about this, I realized that the way God would measure my life is different than how we measure each other’s. Instead of aggregating all my accomplishments, comparing them with the accomplishments of my friends and colleagues, and then giving me a grade, he would simply want to know how I helped other people. It will not be about my degrees, books, or awards, but about the lives I was able to assist along the way.

This author sounds like a deeply confused person.

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If the concept of God offends you, replace it with "truth" or with "any entity / program / algorithm that can accurately measure the contributions I make".

When we acclaim someone we're praising them because of their contributions. Because our minds are finite, we use heuristics / proxies to measure those contributions. And those heuristics can be arbitrarily poor.

To put it in words you might like better, I think what he's saying here is that if he were going to write an algorithm that measures his success, he would have it measure how much he helped each person. Because the supercomputer running the algorithm is better at details than we are, it could bypass the often-misleading heuristics / proxies and measure his contributions directly.

When we're looking at our own lives, we have more detail available than when we look at others lives. So why not try to skip the proxies and optimize on the core concept?

Eh, I think focusing on helping others over prestige and external acclaim is a healthy way to approach the world, no matter how you come to that conclusion.

I disagree. Read their words carefully and it appears they never gave up the old mentality. They just changed how they define achievement.

I’m not saying not to help others - just that I think their mentality is still a reflection of the desire to achieve

I think that is the point. Moving ones personal definition of achievement from superficial to meaningful. There is a innate desire to do something useful(achieve); and you can't get rid of that. What you can do is decide what you focus your desire and actions towards.

This is such a vague argument it's basically meaningless. Prestige for what? Helping who, in what way?

And yes, it is important how you come to conclusions. Being right for the wrong reason means your still wrong, and it will catch up with you eventually.

I grew up Mormon, and Clayton Christensen was always regarded as one of the examples of "look, Mormon doing things in the real world!" next to Steve Young, Mitt Romney, the Osmonds, and others.

As a Mormon my view was that god comes before self. God, really, comes before everything. I think that is still the case with most Mormons.

Why would you say that?

Even as someone who is not religious I think he makes quite an interesting argument for the metric used by many to measure success.

Seriously? Read it again. His argument is: Your profession would be meaningless to an all-powerful god.

And? It's a great argument; I'd hate to live in a world where my value to an all-powerful god was based on how much revenue I brought to a company by increasing ad-clicks.

To argue any other perspective would be repulsive.

Maybe instead of claiming someone is deeply confused, make an actual point.

Your profession IS meaningless to an all-powerful good.

Maybe you are the one who us confused. Why would a being powerful enough to create the heavens and earth give one shit about your job?

Why? I think it's a beautiful thing to try and focus on helping other people.

I love helping people. I love it more than achieving technical accomplishments. I love it because I can do things that cost me very little, but which provide the other person quite a lot of value. It's like magically introducing new value into the world, and creates/strengthens a bond and relationship with another person. And having that friendship makes me happy.

I don't do it because a mythical all-powerful (but personified) creature, who I have never had contact with will judge me more favorably. That kind of thinking is just insane.

He is approaching this from the standpoint of someone who, presumably, _has_ had contact with that being, God, and who views Him as his literal spiritual father.

From that standpoint it is easier to understand what he is saying. Just as with my father (sleeping downstairs), he taught me to help other people and to be kind to others. I saw him doing it and realized how happy it made him, it made me want to be like him, so over the years I tried hard. I failed a lot, but over time I became a kinder, more thoughtful, more intelligent person.

The more kind I am, the more I serve, the more I understand _why_ it is so wonderful to help other people and why it is worth it whether it costs me little or whether I have to sacrifice a lot.

I view God in a similar light; I know he is more intelligent than I am, he knows things I don't, I can sense what kind of a being he is and I want to be more like _that_. I don't understand all the reasons, but I sense that he loves his children, just as my father downstairs loves me and my siblings. I trust that what God wants for me is right even when I would feel like I would rather do something else, so I persevere and I learn how wonderful it is and I remind myself of how much I want to be better. God is an example, both of what to do, and how wonderful it is to do it. That works not only in serving others, but in the details of how to do it and some nuances that I probably wouldn't come up with on my own.

I care about what God cares about because I love him. Presumably that is the same for Clayton Christensen.

Hopefully that helps explain the thinking a bit better.

I'm an atheist and my default reaction to any talk of knowing what God wants normally makes me bristle. I also believe that intentions matter and in this case they are good.

Here's a wonderful short piece by Andy Weir (who wrote The Martian) that I am in love with and resonates with the very bit that you disliked. It's worth 2 minutes of your time:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Thank you for saving me my time.

For 25+ years, he got a lot of fame and fortune from some sophomoric, simplistic observations.

His thinking is so simplistic that he fails to see how simplistic it is.

Then on "confused", well, he is simplistic and, in particular, concludes that the world is as simplistic as his observations, concludes that the universe and God are nearly that simplistic, so is willing to believe his stuff about God.

E.g., his description of the roles of data are absurdly simplistic. Look, Clayton guy, you have not even started even to scratch the surface of the nature, role, power, value, importance of data.

Also Clayton, your view of innovation is too simplistic and fails to cover all the more important cases of innovation funded since 1940 by the US DoD, NSF, NIH, NASA, DoE, and more and the work of, say, Viterbi at QUALCOMM, and the rest of the STEM fields.

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