Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasudasu | Hacker News Reader

Free markets tend to become positive feedback loops for those with skills or access to capital. Calling this feedback loop "unfair and corrupt" really does not necessarily follow from this fact alone. At the very least, it is not the best choice of words.

View on HN

One of my favorite professors in college was my economics professor, who forbade us from using the word “fair” during lecture seminars. Even referred to it as the “F-word”. The idea was that “fairness” is subjective and ill-defined.

Could be relevant: https://evonomics.com/more-evidence-that-learning-economics-...

“In a study of over 28,000 students in Switzerland, 62% of economics students gave money at least once to help students in need, compared with 69% of non-economics students. These differences were already present before the students took a single economics course: students with lower giving rates were drawn to economics. As freshmen, before their first lectures, 71% of the students who chose economics contributed, compared with 75% of non-economists.”

That’s...not a significant finding by any means.

Secondly, I would take these psychological studies with truckloads of salt. In what is possibly the most damning indictment of the social sciences: they have among the lowest replication rate of any of the sciences, and even after retraction (due to replication failure), the vast majority of positive citations continue after retraction, specifically in the social sciences: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

You had a bunch of founders just last year being ousted and nothing more than snakeoil salesmen, and you still believe this? There is a freaking post about some company that got 170M in investment where the founder was committing fraud ffs

And that represents a minuscule fraction of founders. The vast majority are just trying to build a company.

This is like watching the nightly news and coming to the conclusion that it’s really likely that you’ll be murdered if you go outside. It’s a common and understandable conclusion from watching the news, but it’s also totally wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com