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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, no, I get that. Student debt doesn't care how much you're making; if you're making anything, it belongs to a bank before it belongs to you. If that doesn't leave you enough to live on, the bank doesn't give a shit. And it was already hard to make a start without taking on decades of debt when I did it twenty years ago. It hasn't gotten easier in the interim.

I mean, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people, and here's pretty much where I give up trying. But in a time when more and more people are saying that all the old advice on how to build a good life in America has stopped working and they can find nothing left for them but to barely scrape by or just outright fail entirely, you should maybe consider the possibility that they are not wrong about that. You probably won't. But you should.

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I’m not arguing from a value judgment stance. I’m saying your anecdotal experience doesn’t jibe with reality that today’s youth is less materialistic or focus on consumerism.

BTW, I graduated 24 years ago from a state college and stayed at home. My total college cost was less than $10 grand.

Of course my living cost were subsidized. But how many students think they are too good to go to a local state school or go to a two year program locally and then transfer?

The same school I went to is now about $7K year including books. If you live in the state and graduate with at least a 3.0, that costs goes down by 80% automatically because you qualify for a state (lottery) sponsored scholarship.

Yes a better college can get you more connections. But if I could get noticed in the mid 90s by uploading my own freeware via ftp to the info-Mac archives, how hard would it be today?

I don't know anything about any of that; I never went to college, and made my start with what was effectively an apprenticeship and a hell of a lot of good fortune.

I don't know anything about what it's like to be young and trying to make a start today, either, because I haven't done it. Neither have you. So I don't really see much reason to weight your totally unsupported, entirely anecdotal just-so story, about how all the kids today want is to get rich in five minutes, more heavily than I weight the things people actually living in that situation say about what it's like. They at least have a firsthand perspective to speak from, which is more than what you do.

I don't know. Maybe spend less time on Reddit? Or consider that like, it's not the 90s any more and you need to market the hell out of yourself to get noticed from scratch at all? I mean, my first post-apprenticeship job I got 100% thanks to connections of the sort that a random kid at a random state or community school would never get the chance to make. Since then I've leaned on third-party recruiters which, again, how do you even do that if you aren't in a city big enough to have a real industry scene? And how do you afford to live in a city like that, these days, if you aren't already making tech money?

The ladder I climbed isn't there any more. I know you want to believe the ladder you climbed still is. But have you checked any time lately?

And your anecdotal experience comes from a local community. At least mine comes from people posting all over the US.

You bought up student loan debt.

My "anecdotal experience" comes from comparing the circumstances of my own youth with those of the young people I know today, and who tell me about the options they see for themselves, or more accurately the options they mostly don't. Most of them aren't local, and the sense I strongly get is that it's pretty much the same all over.

But, sure, tell me again about all the Reddit posts you read.

That’s kind of the definition of anecdotal....

...says the dude arguing from some Reddit posts he read. Claiming my arguments are invalid because they're anecdotal, in between making anecdotal arguments of your own, is a hell of a flex.

You might have better luck arguing that your anecdotes outweigh mine. That way, you at least wouldn't be making yourself look like a hypocrite.

Here is a post to refute another similar set of anecdata.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738242

I mean, if you'd rather point to the vaguely relevant and not really dispositive citations you gave to someone else's arguments than respond to anything I'm saying, then I guess we're done here? I'll admit I was hoping for better, but if you don't want to go to the trouble, then I suppose that's your lookout.

As oppose to your very well vetted citations?

Hey, you're the one claiming you aren't arguing anecdotally. I never said I wasn't, and I can't say I'm much concerned now with you trying to call me on not doing something I never pretended to be trying to do.

It's not that I mind an anecdotal discussion. Most people live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world, and that's very easy to lose track of when you try to reason out everything from first principles and raw data. For one thing, it's very easy to assume that a given number has weight independent of its sources or its context, as you seem to have done throughout this conversation. But of greater import is the ease with which one loses track of the fact that these matters, which we so easily discuss entirely in the abstract, determine the course of real people's real lives, and those lives are of greater import than any conclusions we might find comfortable to draw in an environment of security and comfort.

If you're not comfortable with an anecdotal discussion, that's fine too; as my rather longer comment in the other subthread demonstrates, I'm as willing to engage on that field as on this one - especially with an interlocutor who does such a poor job supporting his claims, having apparently chosen a few sources which even then only support his arguments if they're not examined in the slightest degree. But if you're going to claim that anecdotal commentary is a problem when I engage in it, I'd expect to see some behavior on your part other than yourself engaging in it, too.

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