The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson’s essays | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson’s essays

theparisreview.org

165 pointslxm112 comments

There's a difference between relying on others in general and relying on some specific entity or some particular way of doing things.

In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I value that choice and the freedom to change.

The distinction is important. If you rely on a single person or entity, they have some kind of claim to your success or failure. If you rely on people in general but nobody specifically, then your success or failure is attributable to you, and that's what "self-reliance" means to me.

I'm not suggesting that self-reliance is all-important or an unqualified good. But I don't think that it's a myth, either. You don't have to be abandoned in the jungle as a baby to be called self-reliant.

> In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I value that choice and the freedom to change.

You don't have as many choices as you think, many of the choices that you do have are meaningless, and many of the choices you can make are only possible because of the particular level of wealth, power, and social standing that you currently have.

If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only recourse is to cut off my nose to spite my face. (Opt out of credit entirely.)

If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a competitor, which has the exact same policies, that bring about the exact same outcomes as the one I'm currently with.

I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change, but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same.

Even when you have actual freedom to choose (Do you want to buy unorganic poor-person kale, or fully-woke, hand-raised, cruelty-and-gmo-free, organic kale?) - your choices are highly constrained by powers and circumstances you have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth and status.

Someone with cash in the bank, in-demand skills, useful connections, and no debt hanging over their head has the choice to tell an unreasonable boss to back off. Someone without that level of wealth, power, and status doesn't have a meaningful choice in this regard. (And, ironically, are more frequently in a situation where they have to make that non-choice.)

Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million.

That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that original 0.2%.

You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly.

EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya; about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.

What's your point?

That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY?

I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said.

But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.

The top-most comment said

> I value that choice and the freedom to change.

and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices.

I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.

> and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want."

I'm just going to quote myself.

_But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria_

This is like the people who argue that you shouldn't put in a solution that only makes the problem 20% better, that we should wait until it's a 100% solution.

You should probably just curl up in your basement and wait to die since you apparently can't interact with everyone in the world.

You’re doing the thing I talked about exactly! Our ability to chat with people in other parts of the world like we’re doing now is not at all what the original comment was talking about when they talked about reliance on others. Facebook and slack are not a substitute for community or family. That community needs to be strong because the fact that a small subset of all people have the ability to move to Nigeria isn’t at all evidence that we’ve got the freedom to just keep roaming about life until we find a group of people who just happen to provide everything we need.

In other words the fact that you CAN deploy capital and time to go to Nigeria hardly means we live in a world where you can shift the context of your life at will. Most people don’t even have a fraction of what it would require to do this.

What you're trying to argue is that poor people can't move to other countries, and that's just not reality.

That's a little bit much don't you think? Please do be kind, that is another human you are responding to.

I don't think it's too much at all, the persons argument boils down to "because you can't meet everyone, you don't really have free will to change who you interact with", and if they REALLY believe that, the world is hopeless and they may as well just stop trying.

The world has hope, but we are really constrained.

The correct advice is "make the best of what you have and are" and not pie in the sky "you can do anything".

And yes, it's because you cannot meet everyone or even afford to try every educational path to learn who they are and their language. Or sometimes even move out of country, and even when you do, the are costs.

Ultimately you have to run a cost benefit calculation and many benefits are big gambles in reality.

right, but this leads back to what I said before. Why not just lay down and die? It's like the ultimate form of analysis paralysis. What if there are better people to hang out with? What if I'm not meeting those better people because I'm wasting time enjoying the friends I met in college?

At some point you need to either accept it or change it, both of which you can do. My issue with the previous posts is the claim that you must necessarily become victim to this form of analysis paralysis because you can never truly choose to hang out with ANYONE. That 5 year old in the congo who died of malaria will always be a stranger to you.

It's just such a bad point.

This is very well said. We need to support every single person as much as possible because each choice is extremely costly and precious.

> If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only recourse is to... Opt out of credit entirely

Well you have more options than that. You can freeze your credit reports, put holds on your information, and push your political representatives to engage with the issue. No, you can't single-handedly fix the problem, but it is a correctable problem.

> If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a competitor, which has the exact same policies

You can also switch to a credit union which probably has very different policies, or use one of the very many online centric banks which have since popped up and are very customer focused.

> I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change, but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same.

At least anecdotally, moving from the DC area to Texas changed my life significantly for the better. It moved my friend group for people who were stuck to people who were pushing to accomplish things. It opened up a job market for me personally from a few firms to almost infinite choices. It reduced the cost of buying a house and made it so I could have that as an option.

> by powers and circumstances you have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth and status

You have a lot of control over your money. You can choose to spend it or not spend it, and you can choose how you spend it. You can give up your free time and make more of it, and you can use that free time to make more of it faster.

On your point about not being able to tell an unreasonable boss to back off without having money - that's simply not true. I've left a job while basically broke because I felt continuing to work with my employer was unethical. I picked up a lot of odd and un-fun jobs to make it work and it wasn't easy, but I had the choice and I exercised it.

Having a choice doesn't mean the choice is easy. It doesn't mean you get to keep your nice car or convenient apartment. Often times choices have consequences and that's OK - that doesn't mean it's not a choice.

Many people in the U.S. get by with limited banking and credit, so consumer businesses are used to dealing with them. Try letting go of the importance of some of the things you are worried about and it might not be as bad as you think. All those businesses that want your SSN will usually accept a deposit instead (yes, even the "big evil" companies that demand it, they will often relent quickly and accept a deposit instead). Get a prepaid phone (again, no SSN).

Theoretically, yes, there are lots of problems with banks and credit agencies. But in practice, they don't often interfere with your life if you use them sparingly.

However, when they do interfere they're a real pain in the rear.

(Second hand: including invalid vindication, account lockouts, wage garnishment.)

I think a good way to put it would be if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well and they have control over you.

Instead, rely on many people, that way any single person's damage is fairly well mitigated.

In fact, I had a company find this out about me the hard way late last year. They were harmed much more than I was, in fact.

> if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well

Strict adherence to this rule would have prevented nearly every successful startup and romantic relationship.

Better advice would be to increase your resilience in the face of disappointment, betrayal, failure, and accident. All are guaranteed to happen no matter how carefully you try to protect yourself.

The whole problem is that there are circumstances which you cannot absorb. So, each trust of that level is a gamble.

Startups and (chemically driven) romance are gambles, the difference is stakes.

So do not gamble that which you cannot lose.

OK, gotta quote David Chaum from "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms", published in 1981:[0]

> This paper presents a solution to the traffic analysis problem that is based on public key cryptography. Baran has solved the traffic analysis problem for networks, but requires each participant to trust a common authority. In contrast, systems based on the solution advanced here can be compromised only by subversion or conspiracy of all of a set of authorities.

0) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/chaum...

Sounds like the author is having an existential crisis moment. I recall reading Sartre's Nausea and there was a scene where the protagonist is riding a bus. He focuses on a bolt in the seat or some other trivial object and is overwhelmed by the idea that someone put that bolt there. IIRC, this is at a point in the story where the protagonist is having a bit of a mental break. That is, it is emblematic of the exact kind of malaise the author of this piece is experiencing (or was experiencing when they contemplated their privilege at Thanksgiving dinner).

In my experience, this kind of thinking leads to nowhere other than the nausea mental state described by Sartre's novel. It isn't my fault the modern world is structured around me any more than it is my fault that the Earth is perfectly suited for the kind of life that exists on it. I bear exactly the same responsibility and blame for both of those circumstances.

A better line of thought is the boring old chestnut of encouraging compassion for the suffering of others.

I generally agree but would like to add the old notion that being unhappy in a bad situation is normal. Feeling upset at a violent status quo even though you're not the direct target of that violence is normal and evidence of empathy, which is good. Ultimately we need to come to terms with the objective reality that not all problems can be solved individually: some require collective action and solidarity.

Is it? This seems like something distinctly modern, and enabled first by the mass media and now by hyperpresent images and video on our phones.

Modern = past 1800 or so, with newspapers and the printing press and widespread literacy.

I’m trying to think of past examples and religious ones are the main ones I can come up with.

To be clear, I’m taking you to refer to an abstract violent status quo, where the violence is present but not tangible. (Unlike past status quos where you might readily see brute physical force directly rather than in video)

It's just visibility. People have empathized with unfortunates (called as such and not blamed for their problems) locally a long time ago too, some were unhappy there are a lot of poor and other wretches. It is what has driven some of the accomplishments we take for granted nowadays.

The relative lack of visibility of people with those problems is rather increasing the lack of empathy. What you do not know you cannot empathize with properly.

I’ve been trying to watch all of the Oscar nominated movies before the academy awards. I’m down to the documentaries now, so I’m watching the documentary “American Factory” about a Chinese company that bought and refurbished an old GM plant in Ohio that had closed down. The camera crew followed around the Chinese workers and the American workers. The difference you see, over and over, is that the Chinese workers have this underlying belief that they are nothing by themselves and that they owe everything - their success, their focus, and even their lives - to the company and, by extension, the government/society. This results in factory workers who work 12-hour shifts, 28 days a month, forbidden to joke around with one another, and still praise their good fortune to be there. If you look back over the history of the Chinese cultural revolution, it started with this mantra: “you accomplished nothing. Society accomplished it and you were there.”

>If you look back over the history of the Chinese cultural revolution, it started with this mantra: “you accomplished nothing. Society accomplished it and you were there.”

It started with "let's purge our enemies," but the Chinese state has pushed the success of the society over the individual for millennia now.

It seems like there might be happy medium between the idea that your accomplishments are insignificant and the idea that you're a Ayn Rand action figure.

Maybe most citizens of 1st world nation states are beneficiaries of an incredible network of mutual support we call society and stand on the shoulders of many who came before... and yet deserve some recognition and reward for individual effort.

A lot of our "accomplishments" are indeed meaningless even when averaged into a society.

A few are important, such as healthcare.

The ultimate drivers are politics and high technology (research) to which the common person has no access. (Even academia is limited.) The top half percent does.

Being recognized for being average sounds like a participation award or paraolympics. It's insulting to those who are not and are pushing state of the art.

Let's face it, the worth of an average life is low because it is really readily replaceable and not in short supply. Some number of average folk is necessary to run economy that the actually important few can push everyone forward - which they sadly lately do not do often, instead exploiting their privileged position.

Instead of building laboratories and schools we build factories to produce literal garbage and waste the environment... Shops to sell the aforementioned garbage so that someone can profit. Create circular service jobs so that more people can afford services, and especially get rich off it, not create opportunities for advancement and betterment. Etc.

Selfishness is everywhere.

I believe Sartre had magic mushrooms before writing that, and weird things kept happening for a while after, like many months.

I'll admit I'm biased in that I'm the opposite of what I think the author's stance is but even after reading it I'm not entirely sure what their point is.

In my mind self-reliance, is growing and having strength unto one's self but giving freely of that strength to others to build relationships.

I feel like the author is speaking to an author audience, though, so maybe that's why the article is obtuse to me.

> In my mind self-reliance, is growing and having strength unto one's self but giving freely of that strength to others to build relationships.

I think that the point is that "strength unto one's self" exists within a myriad of external supports. That strength exists because of the the physical and mental tools built and maintained by a multitude of other individuals.

This is not saying that there isn't variance in levels of dependence external, but that true independence is not possible. To acknowledge only the gifts you give, and not the gifts you receive and have received is to miss out on some of the beauty of life.

Those who grow in strength are able to do so by receiving the support of others. It's a causal relationship.

The myth is that we arrive at strength through overcoming the need for support, having grown our metaphorical muscles through force of will. Many have it as a goal, in fact. They think that the measure of strength is the ability to function without external help of some kind and to indulge in the fantasy that it is their unique individual application of their mindset that is the source of that strength.

This illusion is actually quite easy to penetrate by looking at our biology. Our body grows and heals to the degree it perceives it has external support. There's a built-in biological feedback system that requires these external inputs for our bodies to function to the peak of our abilities. At it most extreme it can be seen in babies. If they are deprived of touch and attention, their brain development stunts, they don't grow as healthy. It has a lasting effect through life. People think that reliance only is required at these more vulnerable phases of life, but not, say, as we become adults. But that's a fairy tale, our physiology continues to respond positively to cues of support, growing in strength when in receipt of support through all stages of life, On the other hand it declines in the face of lack of support. The effects are large and predictable, we are social creatures and our physiology is setup that way, we don't have a choice over it. The concept of self-reliance tries to tell a story that defies and in a sense denigrates our basic nature.

Rather than questing for self-reliance to indulge in the fantasy of independence, it is far more empowering, to me at least, to live in the knowledge that as individuals we have the ability to make others stronger.

Do you have study- or experiment- backed evidence for the claim that we physiologically respond positively to cues of support of others as adults? I figure it's true, I've just never seen any data on it. Some latent part of your lizard brain probably changes when your tribe respects you vs. when you are ostracized.

Broadly though I think the concept of self-reliance does not do anything to contradict the pro-social behavior you advocate. Those who are self-reliant and capable of independence are, all else equal, those who are most capable of helping others. Most who practice self-reliance do not do so to go off the grid, but rather to learn their own limits and capabilities. The process of learning a skill from scratch and inventing from blank slate is creative in ways that are unique, freeing from social pressures and socially imposed constraints.

There is an enormous pile of scientific evidence indicating this directly and indirectly. For direct examples you can for example look at studies involving touch. A hug, for example, can lead to a multitude of beneficial physiological responses in part because you get a release of oxytocin, which itself is a sign that our physiology is wired for 'coregulation'. Touch receptors are one of the ways that our body picks up on these kinds of cues. For a broader theoretical basis for this idea that cues of support are pivotal to ongoing health and wellness in adults, there is a groundbreaking theory called Polyvagal Theory which is well worth looking into.

We also have a vast number of examples of negative evidence in the literature (because scientists tend to hunt for what makes things go wrong). For example it is very well established that social isolation leads to worse health outcomes. The basic principle at work is that humans require coregulation to maintain physical and mental health and it doesn't matter what phase of life you are in, those feedback systems are operational from start to finish. Because humans in particular are social creatures, we have physiology that is designed to pick up on social cues, because it is through group participation and social bonds that our species obtains better chances of reproduction and survival. If we have poor social bonds and lack of social support/connection, the body picks up on that. You will get feelings of loneliness for example, which in a way is hoping you to drive you back to seek out a social group to belong to, as it increases your chances of survival. That's your body saying it is reliant on others.

Social disconnect is also a influencing what our immune system and the profile of our autonomic nervous system functioning is up to. If the body does not get cues that is safe - and for mammals like us that means perceiving social connection and social support - it is going to favour stressful physiology which over time deteriorates our health. Note that giving support (rather than receiving it) is also a cue to our body that we are in a social group that is positively affecting our survival and reproductive chances. But, note that to get these cues you are still relying on others to get that positive feedback loop working for your physiology. There are a lot of studies showing this dynamic as well, doing community work and altruism boosts all kinds of markers of mental and physical health, giving a massage reduces stress and promotes oxytocin release in the giver as well etc.

The bottom line is that our physiology makes us coregulators, rather than self-regulators and that is such a key distinction that is frequently missed.

> Those who are self-reliant and capable of independence are, all else equal, those who are most capable of helping others.

The people that in practice help the most are the most skilled and able coregulators. To become the strongest, or as I like to think of it, the most resourceful person, you don't get there by self-reliance, you get there by being an effective coregulator. To get close to maximum impact, strength and health you have to strong connections with others - you can't get there on your own, others are required because our physiology recruits the outside world as a means of regulating its own state.

And lastly, one of the perks of having a secure feeling about your social connections and sense of support, is that it opens up an ability to explore more freely and roam more widely. Many of the multi-million dollar making basketball stars in America who've come from poor backgrounds share the same story, while growing up they had at least one person and more commonly a whole group that supported their path to the NBA - it was their support that made their success possible. It's not uncommon to hear how their childhood peers kept them away from bad people because this person had a shot at something special. In just about every success story, whether it's a rags-to-riches scenario or the story of how a group of athletes largely from middle-upper class assembled one of the best teams in basketball history (GSW) you can trace back the critical role of enduring social support.

There is a lot of wisdom in this post. I think there are some people who have a knack for recognizing talent, value, whatever you want to call it, and protect and/or share their own social capital to encourage (boost?) what they see and remove impediments to it flourishing. It's not a guarantee, but it might be a signal. If the baseline is a 1 in 5000 shot at the NBA, there still may be 10 of those deep boosters among the 5000 who do the same things, but come up short. Yet 10 kids reduced their odds from 1 in 5000 to 1 in 10.

But one can reason from first principles, and find many more instances in one's life where reliance on others is unnecessary. It doesn't need to be an absolute.

I don't think it is possible to arrive to an explanation for why self-reliance is sought from your premise. The closest point I can think of is an analogy with the cell membrane; the fact of the existence of an indivisible individual... But to go from there to why someone would hone some skill not necessary for survival takes a change of perspective.

If you have eaten a good meal and you have some fat reserves you can spend a long time without having to ingest food (barring some minerals that you need every day), but that doesn't mean your body has become independent of its need for nutrition. You can do things that make it so you can last longer without food, but ultimately, the idea of independence from nutrition is ostensibly silly. Distorted views of self-reliance, in this analogy, is like believing that you can go without nutrition because you've become strong enough to do it.

I'm familiar with the philosophy of thermodynamics and don't object. However, there are many instances we sentient beings encounter where perception and reality blur. We don't have access to objective truth, so it is noble to willfully alter one's own subjective reality. A common example in the personal narrative of a human being is forgiving the people of one's past who subjected us to the difficulties which made us who we are. Here one may choose independence of one's own previous perception of what one thought was a fact, and no longer have one's future actions dictated by it.

Freedom is not an absolute.

The strength we need is not biological. We need the strength to pursue our individual roles in life. All the collective strengthening in the world cannot tell you which way to swim or do your life for you.

George Lucas got into film from cultural anthropology when it was near impossible to get a career in it. He then made a soap opera in space which you needed his background in anthropology to get what he was doing. The collective was against it or didn't understand. The film nearly didn't get made.

The NBA stars that make it have individual advantages that put them ahead of the pack. Wayne Gretzky was ahead of the game to the point where the collective had little to provide in direction or competition.

Independence is fundamental and countries have wars over it. Codependency is a psychological disorder that ruins lives. Strengthening people who are aiming at ruin breaks the virtuous loop, no matter how much collective support. It is a myth to think collective support is an easy task. Real support requires as much time, effort and skill as the individual puts into achievement. A married pair of doctors in the same field would know enough about each other and the task to support each other.

Falling into taking or giving the signalling cues of the collective and eating/massaging perks is a quick way to lose yourself. Meet each other's needs, yes. Collective strength as a replacement for the individual? No.

You've put unnecessary tension between the collective/society and individuality and individual achievement as if they are at odds here. Lucas didn't need the whole of the collective to believe in his vision from the start, he just needed some measure of support in his life coming from another person or people. This is especially true for someone making films, as that involves hundreds of people combining their individual talents to a project. (ps he's donated 6 Billion into helping people get good education, a support system for people to help get success)

Superstar athletes get to shine with their superior talents only because they had some measure of support in their life to encourage their career and open up the possibilities. This is especially true for countless NBA athletes, many of them having come from poor backgrounds. You won't find a single NBA star who doesn't acknowledge that their success was made possible through the sacrifices of others in their life. Their childhood peers who kept them away from gangs, a parent who drove them to games, a mentor who kept reinforcing their belief in their talent. Not to mention the infrastructure that was laid before them by the pioneers before they were even born.

The individual and collective is at odds. By fundamental design like the manager focusing for corporate profits over paying the employees a higher wage. By nature like the expression of one's own character in the face of collective difference. And arbitrarily too, between people who do not like each other or two lovers breaking the rules.

An NBA star sacrifices teamwork with others to focus on his career. His community gave to him in a way that he did not return. His amateur league teammates taught him things he didn't return. His professional teammates are ultimately left behind as he ascends up the hierarchy. He didn't focus on teamwork, he focused on getting as good at the game as he could and that put him in selection, on the advertisements, on the money.

The collective can kill the individual very easily. Falling into the collective trap of an empire builder frequently has the outcome of individual growth being limited for the sake of the team, the union, the standard. The mindless waves of reputation based attacks can take down in the individual regardless of fact or fiction.

Harmonious teams end in wars. You organize all the king's men into a tribe and see what happens when a tribe's Juliet marries the other tribe's Romeo. You pick your conflict, between individuals or collectives. The tension doesn't go away, it just gets shifted forward in the circle of life.

You have a mistaken idea that community is about repaying.

We're not in a just world, the community is supposed to be about bettering everyone, but of course there are traps like sports or people who ignore it.

The honest rule is to pay back more as your ability to increases.

The teacher does not have to be directly paid back by his students, it is enough that some of them will produce a generalized return, trickling down and around.

However, we're all too local for that to really work. Hence witness flight from cheap or rural areas to cities, draining resources.

None of this requires conflict. It just requires pure indifference. Teams can cooperate too.

The authors point is trying to make, I think, is that a particular form of "self reliance"; that espoused by Emerson (and with far less nuance by Rand) doesn't actually exist, and pretending it does is a disservice.

Roughly speaking, I think they would say that the only way you could achieve the state you speak of ('having strength unto one's self but giving freely of ...') is through a complicated web of relationships making you anything but self reliant.

Put in a more trite way, and as an example, in America freedom comes in part from having enough money to pay for health insurance and medical bills.

Which is to say that it's not really self-reliance. It's buying into a system and relying on the indirect support of many others (who buy into the insurance) in a way that frees up your time/worries enough for you do the things you want to do.

The point being that your perceived freedom exists because something/someone else enabled it, and that's freedom earned by relying on someone else.

This is a case where I think both sides are true. One can be both self-reliant and reliant on others, and it turns out that's pretty much reality. One cannot rely on someone who is not self-reliant, nor can one be self-reliant without others' help.

I think "I, Pencil" would blow Odell's mind.

This reminds me of a lesson I learned in an intro to Economics class : everyone's lot in life is a combination of luck, effort, and ability. Those whose view of the world from a left-of-center perspective (those who downplay self-reliance) really just think luck far outweighs the other two. Someone right-of-center thinks that effort is the most important. Most right-of-center people I know don't discredit the impact of other people on their lives. They just live as if effort and self-reliance can help them overcome bad luck.

I figure a lot of folks are angry at the broad generalization you've stated, but I can corroborate it a bit with statistics. Conscientiousness broadly correlates with affiliation with right-wing parties. This personality trait would trend towards admiration for self-reliance (by my figuring).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

I've linked 1 study above but there are many more studies with the same conclusion. I also think that your generalization makes obvious sense, even without having to rely on statistics.

If by right of center you mean Republicans and not say Chinese or Japanese, who also fit the bill.

(All of which are just as conservative. Chinese believe in circumstance, Japanese believe in maximum effort in current circumstance with a few key choices, Republicans believe any decision is mostly on the individual.)

It's never an absolute, but there is a big difference between living as if effort is a major thing that matters and believing it is the only thing that matters or more important than the other two.

Former can get you to push harder, latter brings nothing good - it is a problem because it brings pathologies especially blame, false hope and exploitation.

Ultimately there are only a few impactful things most of us can control. Therefore these things are important.

These are key decisions and it is rather hard to change them. The unfortunate fact is that we get to make them too early when we're inexperienced and some are still dumb. And you get few or no retries. (High school, college, these impact where you live, with whom, your late life social circles, even health.)

Whether you become bitter because of this is up to you.

"And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder."

This seems to be the thesis of the whole piece, but ignoring the role of free will is self-defeating. Recognizing that people can make decisions, and encouraging them to make good decisions, is ultimately what leads to better outcomes. Telling people that they have no free will doesn't lead anywhere useful, even if it's true.

You can still acknowledge that improving opportunities for everyone is a good thing without dismissing the importance of good decisions.

I might agree more with the author if many of the problems in the modern world weren't as trivial as they are.

How many times are respondents here passive aggressive because a poster clearly didn't read an article?

How many of the posters who argue either side about Damore's bibliography come armed with their own annotated bibliographies on the subject?

How many comments here start by apologizing for what the poster knows is an inadequate sample size of one... followed by an opinionated anecdote that cannot be verified because HN only requires a handle and a password (and HN disallows talk about how inadequate this is for functional social media)?

If self-reliance is the tale that must be told to get respondents to do any meaningful work at all, its practical value far outweighs any questions about truth value.

If you're reading this and are now amp'd up to actually go to the woodshed, please help reverse engineer the touchpad for the Pinebook Pro because it's not working very well for me atm[1].

1: https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater Most of the work done seems to be on the keyboard. There are some i2c captures of the touchpad in /firmware plus some labeling of the hardware. I thought at first that it might just be a problem of not polling often enough, but after some more use it seems like the noise filter might be too greedy.

I view self-reliance a bit differently. I see it as taking the initiative to solve one's problems, and accepting the consequences of one's decisions.

It's the opposing viewpoint to being a victim.

For example, I recently had a root canal. The dentist told me it was not my fault. But I know it was, and I accept the consequences of my choices, despite being unhappy about it. Maybe I can choose better and avoid getting another one.

- There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion

- To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

and most poignant of all :

- Your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is.

I remember the exact moment of my life when I read "Self reliance for the first time, I'll never forget that moment.

Jenny Odell's essay was well-written.

No further comment here on the nurture vs. nature debate, except to mention for those interested in learning more about recent research into volition and agency (i.e. what is commonly referred to as "free will"), Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind is a good place to start.

Remember though that this book covers recent experimental work in psychology, so the usual disclaimers apply.

I really tried to read this, but it was so bad I wonder if it was generated by a script. The whole thing was pointless minutiae. Surely the author was getting paid by the word.

Perhaps getting paid by the word is too extreme, but I also felt the same way. Enough so to finally have me create an account to leave a comment similar to what you have just said.

It's par for the course for this kind of outlet. "Literary" magazines like Paris Review and the New Yorker are almost always like this, flowery and baroque and overwrought, signifying nothing.

Well... they're the literary version of "it's the journey, not the destination". They're for people who have more time than they have things to fill it, so something that takes time to go on a journey are perfect for them.

If you have more to read than you have time, it drives you crazy. "Just make your point, already!" I suspect that many of us here are not part of their target audience.

I agree these "literary" things can be hard to read, but try treating the words as a stream of consciousness designed to evoke a feeling rather than say a usual newspaper article to say something concrete.

I regard literary works as an art form to be experienced much the same as you'd experience a painting in a gallery, and I think thats how they are meant to be interpreted.

Like picking a random phrase from the article "including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental" - murmorous flocks evokes a large number of birds making a noise, the art is in the use of words to evoke a feeling and a picture. I think its designed to be read more slowly and thought about a lot more than you would a usual article - an experience to be savoured with a fine wine on a Sunday afternoon, rather than something to read on the way to work on the train.

This is going to sound terrible to some but as someone who believes strongly in self-reliance, I get a little giddy when I see anti-self-reliance commentary get promoted in the media. It's the same feeling when I see advocates pushing shorter work weeks, more time off, more lax leave policies, and so on.

Why do I like these things if I disagree with them? Because it's convincing people they shouldn't have to work as hard as me! Which is making me so, so valuable to companies. My compensation is shooting up like a rocket. And I'm no workaholic either. I put in a solid 50 or so hours a week and take vacations and occasional personal days. I still ask for help when I need it. Yet, I'm becoming more and more of a rarity in the modern workforce.

This is going to get me downvoted, but I thought it was valuable to share my perspective. I suspect others are the same as me and are secretly cheering for people to buy into the notion that they aren't personally responsible for their success. We'll pick up the slack. ;)

Most work is likely useless or counterproductive.

That’s kind of like saying “every employer is paying trillions in compensation and healthcare benefits for work that conveys no benefit.” It takes staggering hubris.

> every employer is paying trillions

Um, that's not how division works.

In seriousness, the argument isn't that employers are stupid, but that has some local value (and inertia) but far less global value because the nature of the economic distributed system.

Kinda like how micro services are often a terrible idea yet in some examples of that each service is justified given the others.

I believe this is a new talking point on cable news, probably going to receive a negative canned reply

People obviously have to take responsibility for themselves in order to be successful, but this kind of article is a valuable corrective to the notion that individuals are solely responsible for their successes and failures. This seems self-evident to me on reflection; we are all products of the families and societies in which we grew up.

> This seems self-evident to me on reflection; we are all products of the families and societies in which we grew up.

And luck. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-... (If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.)

Not just chance. You have to see the opportunities AND work to take advantage of them. Worries the work, they wouldn't happen.

You can still see the opportunity, attempt to succeed, and fail, through no fault of your own. And conversely, you can do everything wrong and still succeed. There's a reason we have the term "failing upwards", or businesses that succeed not because of their actions, but in spite of them.

Chance is a substantial (but not the only) component to success.

The idea is about increasing expected value.

I give you a machine, once per year say, and put it at the entrance to your home. It's broken. If you fix it, it will, with 5% probability, give you a ton of money. In the other 95% of cases you get nothing, it disappears, wait for next year.

Is chance a major component? Of course. But not tinkering with that machine is lower EV than tinkering with it.

If you stay in bed all day, ignore the machine and do something else instead, you're not going to get anything, ever. It will never spontaneously open by chance.

You post below that "you can do everything wrong and still succeed". No, you actually can't. If you're picturing a startup founder that makes a lot of seemingly silly decisions - well, they still made the (high risk) decision to start that company.

If you lay in bed all day, or work your corner shop job forever, then you are not increasing your EV.

I work in a field that is very heavily based on probability; I literally bet for a living. Luck is a considerable component, but if you want to tell me skill is irrelevant, then I'd like to show you what happens if I just tweak this parameter here...

The point is that the variance in actual value based on chance is larger than the variance in the actual value based on skill/talent/intelligence/effort.

This is not saying that there is no effect of skill/talent/intelligence/effort, but that the effect size is smaller than commonly thought and smaller than the variance due to luck.

That's only the case if you make nonsensical comparisons.

I wasn't born to an upper middle class family and I didn't get a ten million dollar trust fund. I don't have the correct muscle fibers to be an Olympian, etc. That's happened, it's done. That comparison is completely pointless and irrelevant for me.

From the perspective of decision making, what matters is the difference in expected value of different decisions that I make now, from T=0, not some time in the past that I can't affect.

(FWIW, 'skill/talent/intelligence/effort' are also part of that initial distribution).

The idea that success is primarily random makes no sense at all, because there are certainly paths that an individual can take that will not under any circumstances result in outsized success.

There are paths that an individual can take that will by definition result in failure, like if I went out and drove my car into a wall at 100mph.

> From the perspective of decision making, what matters is the difference in expected value of different decisions that I make now, from T=0, not some time in the past that I can't affect.

That still depends on the type of decision and context.

If you are talking about "should I play video game or should I study" that is a type of decision where valuing individual effort is absolutely beneficial.

If you are talking about making a decision based on evaluating other people/companies based on their life outcomes, then awareness of the role of luck is absolutely beneficial. You need to look beyond the results and also evaluate the decision making and luck that went into obtaining those results.

It's not an either or sort of thing. When we over-estimate the role of decision making in producing outcomes, we end up with a worse model of the world that will lead to worse decision making.

> It's not an either or sort of thing. When we over-estimate the role of decision making in producing outcomes, we end up with a worse model of the world that will lead to worse decision making.

Thanks for making my point better than I.

Pushing the idea of talent into a finite computer simulation like stats in an RPG can't replicate real life. The talent humans have doesn't neatly summarize as a one or a zero or a biological quantity. Pulling on the right conceptual thread in life simply isn't chance. It's a responsibility that can't be delegated to going with the flow or randomness.

Rich people skew right-leaning. We can imagine many reasons for this, but I'll break it into two groups:

1. The same moral leanings that are identified with right-leaning parties are moral leanings, that when applied to your own life, can help make you more wealthy.

2. Having these moral leanings have no impact on your future success.

Considering that in absolute numbers the rich are more charitable and pay more taxes than the poor, and if you believe that the majority of the rich are strong value-creators (implying that they are generative, and are contributing positively to the economy rather than playing a zero-sum game), then for any portion of factor #1 above that is true, there is a moral argument to be made that adopting right-leaning values leads to a better world for both yourself, and for society as a whole.

All of this is speculative and stated in broad generalizations, but it's an argument that I've worked into my mind as a Pascal's wager of sorts and that I've found very convincing.

I think you make an interesting point.

However, I think there are some other considerations that should be factored in:

- The good that left wing policies would have done if they had been implemented.

- Situations where the economy is a zero sum game (e.g. desirable housing).

- The possibility that the good that comes from the rich is not evenly distributed. (In this case I mean distribution different between different segments of the non-rich. I don't mean distribution between the rich and everyone else.)

It seems to me that the logic that you present could act as a sort of social contract that basically say "in exchange for implementing right wing policies that make conservatives rich, you will benefit from their charity, taxes, and economic growth". In that case, I could see the increasing unrest and polarization in America being due to a growing segment of the population feeling that the contract has been broken.

It could also be that right-wing policies protect the interest of the rich and provides the ideology that this is fair and just. So if your are rich, right-leaning morals will make you richer and make you feel better about it.

But if you are not rich, it will do the opposite.

Ha. I have the opposite response!

I also believe strongly in self reliance and the power of the individual to affect their environment.

To me though, that makes the seemingly increased focus as of late immensely frustrating, because to me, it's seeking to take away agency from people.

Exactly the _worst_ thing you can do to someone who's in a bad situation is tell them that they're just helpless and that's how it's gonna be.

Feeling like you have no control over your life situation is not an ingredient that will produce a healthy mind. There's a fine line between having an awareness of your limits and fighting for what's right, and running around blaming all of your problems on others.

The article seemed to be more about appreciating the networks that have allowed the author to be successful (in her case especially the authors she has discovered in her neighborhood bookstore). I don't think anyone is telling people in bad situations that they shouldn't bother trying to help themselves; rather, we are suggesting that no successful person becomes successful alone.

Right, but that's completely self evident and thus pointless to discuss.

I'm typing to you from a screen that I couldn't produce alone, that's ignoring the 50 billion other objects in my life that depend directly or indirectly on the activities of others. An entire article isn't needed in order to make that viewpoint clear.

I address this in a post above - it's a strange cartoonish stereotype that there are people out there who think that they are completely 'self-made'. Those that advance it in public as a genuine belief are either mentally ill, or deliberately playing a character.

It's a matter of moderation. Yes, working hard and smart is great. But don't give yourself too much credit. There are people who helped you along the way, and you should recognize when you're in a position to give others a boost too when they need it. That's more productive and kind than putting yourself at the center of the universe.

Agreed. I appreciate the help of others and am considered by most to be a generous giver of help myself. I think the idea that self-reliant people don't care about others or don't genuinely appreciate giving & receiving help is cartoonish hyperbole akin to the cigar-smoking rich man bulldozing the youth community center to build a shopping mall. Like, okay, maybe that exists somewhere in real life, but it's usually an exaggeration under-achievers use to self-soothe.

> "[...] I think the idea that self-reliant people don't care about others or don't genuinely appreciate giving & receiving help is cartoonish hyperbole [...]"

Note this isn't what other people are saying. They are saying self-reliant people are not entirely self-reliant. It's not a matter of appreciation, it's a matter of understanding we're the products of society, family, luck, and the efforts of others, as well as our own merit -- i.e. we're not entirely self-reliant. The same critique can be made of the overestimated notion of "meritocracy".

Yes, but as saas_sam says, no-one actually believes they are truly completely self reliant in that cartoonish way.

When people speak of being self-reliant, they obviously don't literally mean that they were spawned from some sort of spontaneous reaction, that they farm their own cotton, sew their own shirts, invent their own scientific disciplines and produce semiconductors in their garage in the clean room they built from scratch.

They're referring more to building their own path in life and going out and getting what they want rather than waiting for it to be handed to them.

It's similar to how you or I might say we "need" something, when really it's qualified, because almost all use of language is.

Agreed about the use of language, and I wasn't being literal either. Nobody believes the cartoonish notion described by saas_sam. What they actually believe is that people who think they are self-reliant conveniently forget or downplay the other factors, i.e. they are not as self-reliant as they like to believe.

do your thing!

i think having a variety of humans with different priorities and interests is absolutely a good thing. i think it’s amazing that you enjoy putting in that time at work and it’s amazing that others prefer to spend a bit more of theirs on family or other projects.

as a person who advocates for shorter work weeks (as long as we place a higher emphasis on _occasional_ crunch times) i totally understand both sides.

i do think the article makes some great points though–it borders on delusion how a subset of people convince themselves they “did it alone.”

For a variety of reasons, I learned early in life that I couldn't really count on anyone, and I had to learn/do everything for myself. Not sure I'd choose that for someone else, but it has indeed been an extremely useful work skill. In pretty much every job I've ever had, I've ended up being the final go-to person for the hardest problems. Especially with respect to computers, there's essentially no problem I can't solve/mitigate/triage at this point in my career.

That said, this skill doesn't seem to be very useful for getting hired. Maybe I'm not marketing myself correctly. Once I'm in, though, I'm generally gold after a few months. Once had a manager burst into tears when I gave notice.

It does feel like this is rarer these days. In my current org of about 5000 people, I'm not aware of a single tech person on par with me in this respect. That might sound like a boast, but it's very much a lament.

I struggle with this too. I think it's people applying the "jack of all trades, master of none" saying too far or too literally. To be a truly successful (backend, frontend, web, mobile, crypto, etc...) developer, it is a requirement to have firm grasp of nearly all technologies, methodologies, and practices at play in the ecosystem.

Not that this is exactly a massive disadvantage for you, but I routinely see guys such as yourself, not being exploited as such, but essentially never having their compensation match their productivity.

I believe the original poster in that they could be much more productive than their coworkers. However, in my experience, that has only a loose correlation with wealth, and playing the game right / nepotism take precedence for real earning.

Working hard, working long, maximizing productivity, and maximizing value are all separate things. They do not necessarily correlate positively across the whole scale let alone perfectly at the peaks.

You should be optimizing for value. If you optimize for one of the other three you're making a sucker tradeoff by definition. You will have to work some hours with some effort to generate some productivity to maximize value for yourself, but anything past that more value is going to your employer than the opportunity cost for you of your time.

This is tautological but it's worth saying because your language fits the pattern of someone who chases productivity as a proxy for personal value. Or in other words you value the possessions money can buy more than the experiences you could have with free time. The tell for workaholism isn't always 80 hours a week or some numerical threshold, it's also that you look down on people who value free time more than you do. That's an indicator that you aren't adjusting your own values, that you've delegated that function to the companies you're so happy to please--which always optimize to extract from you rather than maximize value in your own life.

And I'm no workaholic either. I put in a solid 50 or so hours a week

Sounds pretty workaholic to me. I guess everyone thinks of themself as the norm.

your success is the mostly the result of a massive amount of luck and privilege you've received. just imagine that you had an accident that reduced your brain capacity by 20%... you could then have worked three times harder but sadly not achieved the same success. While your hard work is an element of your success, it is not at all the foundation of it. It's more akin to a chef putting the correct seasoning on a fully prepared dish. It's definitely needed, but it's not the basis.

That seems like a pointless argument.

Sure, I'm successful because I wasn't run over by car when I was 12.

Yeah, you are.

So when you're talking to someone who lost a beautiful person in their life because someone else decided they were fine driving after a night out of drinking, you can realize how arbitrary and random life really is.

Sorry for your loss.

Being alive is a pre-requisite for success, but doesn't make it guaranteed.

The fact there is no guarantee makes it inherently luck based.

it seems like you missed the argument entirely.

hard work means nothing if you are not fortunate enough to have the foundation with which to work upon. the person with 20% less brain capacity can do way more work than you, and not get anywhere, which proves that there is no linear relationship between hard work and success. something else has to be present for "hard work" to lead towards success. There are some people working much harder than you at their job at McDonalds, and they will not be as successful as you.

Your hard work did not create your success, your circumstances did most of the work in making the conditions right, just like human evolution would not have happened if there weren't a perfectly conditioned Earth present that took billions of years to create.

Your hard work was just one of many prerequisites for your success to occur (and of course, many people don't need to work very hard at all to be successful, due to their circumstances as well), and additionally, your capacity, desire, and stamina for such hard work are also things that you were lucky enough to have.

Your hard work did not create your success

Yes, but without hard work, your unlikely to be successful.

I don’t disagree that both play a role, but some people like to claim success is 100% luck, which I definitely disagree with.

A person with 20% less brain capacity would be aiming at a different form of success, with different tools. Dragging his place down to lower situations doesn't change the life changing potential of properly applied hard work.

We are not victims of our circumstances.

We aren't victims. But we are rather hemmed in by circumstances and budget with the exception of top 0.5%.

Feel like working 8h today? No? Too bad.

Need rest for mental reasons? Sorry you're out of holidays.

Want to work on rocket science? Unfortunately no positions are open and the longer you're out, the less likely you will get in. That if you even studied the right things.

Or maybe you feel like being a fireman but failing the physicals?

Perhaps a doctor? But you need those 6 years of education plus actual knowledge. And this have to weather those years. If you're not rich, you get to work some trash job in the meantime hoping it won't affect you or the studies. Etc.

And do not even get me started on social network you cannot begin to choose unless you have copious free time.

everyone is hemmed in by their circumstances. Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer, and all his billions could do nothing to prevent his death. We are all in the same boat, it's just some of us don't really see it.

He turned down treatment early on that he later regretted. It's true he would die eventually anyway. Life and death can be used to describe anything that lives including the individual.

he did! but did Steve Jobs singlehandedly invent that treatment? nope! So even then, his reliance on existing constructs that were not created by him-"self" is quite obvious.

And the person(s) who made those treatments sacrificed collective opportunities to do so. We are all individuals, talking to crowds is best done by talking to individuals in the crowd. Dare I go too far.... The collective can't exist until we give up portion of our mind to others that themselves are individuals. The link doesn't exist outside our individual imagination.

How can you be both a strong believer in self reliance and also want to spend more of your time working for someone else?

This comment has nothing to do with the article. You responded to half of a headline.

You find pleasure in the idea that your relative value is increasing due to the value of others decreasing? This sounds psychopathic. It is one thing to take comfort in the belief that you can control your own destiny, but to believe your control is diluted by the control of others is delusional and short sighted.

Its the same reasoning I support marijuana legalization. More people sitting at home high on their parents couch is less competition for me

I know plenty of very, very well off pot users. I also know several very, very unsuccessful pot users. I'm tempted to believe that the "high on their parent's couch" types would be otherwise on their parent's couch, irrespective of access to pot.

I think the argument is that relative value to an employer translates to absolute value to the employee.

The rewards of effort, ambition, and talent are absolutely diluted by that of others.

Yes, essays like this give people like you and me a short term advantage. But these anti-work-ethic pieces also poison the minds of the next generation and justify political agitation on the part of the suckers who believe this stuff and squandered their time instead of contributing. There will always be a market for soft words that tell us that our vices are actually virtues.

Pick up some game theory, too! Your strategy works great when you're the only one who follows it. But if everyone follows your strategy, everyone gets screwed.

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