Hacker News Reader

Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

> If you stay at Google, make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life. If I'd've stayed, I could have comfortably raised some kids with my wife by now - but that's still on the todo list.

Uh oh. Unseen Risk Fallacy

Just because you don't experience risk, doesn't mean it does not exist. The company just hides risk from you, but it's still there, culminating without feedback.

As raising a child is a 19+ year project and the OP has already a few years of not stellar performance and risk - if not dealt with - grows exponentially (risk factors attrackt more risk factors).

So the stay in place is actually a very risky proposition. One huge bet, without much feedback.

As the OP is Young and doesn't have kids or other major spendings a much safer strategy would be to try different gigs. With his resume then (Google, lots of other gigs) he can prop. return to a low maintenance job at a big company at one point anyway.

View on HN

Speaking of fallacies, how about the one where parenthood increases your risk of underperformance 'exponentially', or is in any way a 'risk factor'. Check your bias. Parenthood is as likely to make you better at your job.

And how about the strawman? GP didn’t argue that parenthood may make OP lose his job, but that he already is in a position where he might lose his job due to underperforming previously. And if that happens, he’s unquestionably better off without kids.

Is he really in any risk of losing his job? I do not see how either your or OP came to conclusion.

I have met people who were under impression they were performing poorly, but actually they were doing great work. They just were disinterested in the job, which is a different issue.

The point is OP won't know if he it at risk, and yes Imposter Syndrome exists, so it's true that we don't know whether he really is at risk or not. But having kids still raises the stakes a lot.

> Parenthood is as likely to make you better at your job.

Have you got any evidence to back that up?

I’m explicitly not making any claims about the affect of parenthood on performance in saying that in the absence of any evidence, it is as likely to make you better as it is worse. The burden of proof lies with the GP, who sees it as a risk.

I highlighted the claim that you did make and asked you to respond to that.

My point is that I didn’t make a claim, I refuted GP’s by saying that either outcome is equally likely as there’s no proven link between parenthood and performance. If GP wants to claim there’s a negative causal link, the burden of proof lies with them.

You didn't refute GP, you refuted a strawman. And snidely.

> Uh oh. Unseen Risk Fallacy

a bit off topic, but couldn't identifying fallacies in arguments be automated? how much better would the discussion be if comments were labeled with likelihood of fallacy?

Given that this thread is the only instance of the phrase "Unseen Risk Fallacy", I'm not too sure that it will work as well as you'd hope. Fallacies are subtle and even in the best of cases only point out holes in someone's argumentation, which doesn't tell you much about the conclusion.

If anything automatic labelling of fallacies just risks running foul of the fallacy fallacy.

This would be a tall order for any NLP algo. I would hazard a guess and say no, not yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com