Hacker News Reader

Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com