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Comment by pritambarhate | Hacker News Reader

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India.

* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".

Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.

* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.

Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.

So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy

[2] https://unacademy.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I

View on HN

"Gaming the system" is also a cultural thing in Greece. In fact, it's so expected that you are perceived to be either out of the loop or a fool for not going the extra mile. I broke friendships with people who claimed that "it's all subjective at the end of the day" whenever I was raising ethical/moral concerns.

Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm allowed to do it".

I'm Greek too (γειάα) but live in the UK. It's a cultural thing here, too. Just imagine everyone around you constantly trying to pinch every last penny off your purse, in any way they can think of.

Or, look at the way the Brexit campaign convinced half of the UK citizens to vote for Brexit with unsubstantiated claims like "350 million to the NHS" or "Millions of migrants from Turkey coming over" etc.

In general, I think both OP and you are making the same mistake: assuming that because we're citizens of once or currently very poor countries, we're doing something different than the more affluent countries, or are somehow backwards, more corrupt, etc.

Far as I can tell, rich countries are rich because they're better at this game of taking as much as they can from everyone they can anyway they can, than we are.

Just think of who is associated with "move fast and break stuff". Is it an Indian startup? A Greek startup?

I don't see it in the UK actually, and those are not good examples at all. When I go to visit the US, I get nickel-and-dimed a lot more. Compared to the US, there isn't much MLM or get-rich-quick here for example.

I go to McDonald's in UK and get charged money for ketchup.

McDonald's in the US, ketchup is free.

who's nickel and diming? US prices are lower across the board.

"Gaming the system" is really NOT a cultural thing here in the UK. Not in the same way as described by the OP. Your two examples are not in any way, shape or form examples of gaming the system.

Facebook is actually a good example of the opposite tactic. They leave a lot of money on the table because they don't need it and it could hurt their platform dominance.

Which part of the UK do you live in, I wonder. It it’s London (as I’d be willing to bet it is), I’m not sure you can generalise to the whole of the UK from that.

How much are you willing to bet? :|

Post modernism embraces this though, and it is rampant in the West post Kant/Nietzsche. When you create your own truth and morals, you are going to disagree with people about stuff like this :)

Do these people really create their own morals though or just live without them? I'm pretty much a nihilist, but spend a lot of time thinking about ethics and my own values because I know we need them for society to function.

Does it really embrace it, or does it explain why it's a thing?

I'd hardly call this embracing this thought.

The hundred dollars you get is nothing when you destroy the environment.

I'll see your destruction and I'll raise you externalization.

Yes, this behaviour is rampant throughout Western society, it's pretty much embraced by capitalism. It's still "who cares about $x, as long as I can get my $y". It doesn't really change the argument much if $x is open source and $y is a free t-shirt, or $x is the habitat of these creatures and $y is gallons of oil.

Don't really see how postmodernism fits in with this though.

Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.

Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.

If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism.

(Whether capitalism ever works out in-practice is another argument entirely. My theory is that given any long-enough amount of time, a small group of actors will amass hugely disproportional wealth, and then start gaming/breaking the system for everyone else, as seems to be human nature.)

It gets really tiring (especially in modern tech culture) to say "I'm a capitalist" and then have people dogpile on you, asking why you want to pillage the environment and steal all the wealth, etc etc.

And then you have to explain, "I want none of that. I just don't want anyone telling you how to live your life, and to have as many opportunities as you can create for yourself."

I say all of this as someone who grew up exceedingly poor, in trailer parks eating peanut butter and crackers, with no higher education.

There are shitty people everywhere. Because some humans are murderers, does not mean all humans are murderers. Become some people are twisted, unethical capitalists, does not mean all capitalists are twisted and unethical.

At some stage of hyper-capitalism, when you hit "oligarch" levels, you've stopped representing capitalistic ideals because you have created a less-free market than when you entered.

> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:

I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.

This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.

Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.

Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.

Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.

These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.

"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.

Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.

OR you can say "PART of Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part."

It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.

If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.

So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.

Well, you can't very well spark a fire that burns down a whole city and then turn around and say you can't blame the sparks because they're not really dangerous, it's only a conflagration that's really dangerous. Capitalism is the system that enables the kind of people you call twisted and unethical to do their twisted and unethical things and "amass hugely disproportional wealth". And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong? Did Adam Smith say that capital should be equally distributed, or something similar?

> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves.

Just wanted to mention that this is such a US cultural idea. It's really not nearly as strong elsewhere (maybe some exceptions, I don't know everywhere in the world).

> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong?

I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".

Or at least I like to hope.

Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.

But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."

If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.

And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.

I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.

This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.

Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.

Anything else is being nothing but a hypocrite.

> Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.

So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.

My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.

And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.

Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.

That's a poor reading of that Wikipedia page, it says pretty much the opposite of what you have written.

Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):

Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;

That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.

Either way, you can't blame America.

Please explain how the wikipedia page says the opposite of what I wrote.

Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:

- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.

- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.

- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.

- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.

The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.

I will absolutely agree that America's economic system is nothing close to resembling capitalism.

I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.

But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.

> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

Because, in their own words, that is what they're saying when discussing capitalism.

From a thread yesterday: "I owe nothing to a stranger".

> Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.

No, it's not.

Capitalism is one of many models of how the state can regulate commerce through the definition of the parameters and boundaries of property rights.

I think most of the replies to this are missing the point. Capitalism is the best we have come up with so far. There's less of a praise for capitalism but more of a fear from change. When systems like that shift to others, it can be very hard to predict which system it will shift to and if it'll be better. It's the fear that, yes if we do switch from capitalism to some other system, can we trust this new system will be better? Because it also has the potential to be ten times worse. People like to say capitalism is evil and it's causing all of these problems but what would a reasonable alternative be and what would be a reasonable way to obtain that alternative without making live much worse for everyone?

Maybe this will be interesting: https://youtu.be/8KQcm0Mi5To

I found it interesting at least :)

huh well i came into that very dubious, but that was actually quite interesting and i listened to every word. i will hand it to religion that they have had a fairly consistent answer to the post-modernism / relativism / post-truth-iness and its attendant ugliness in present times-- the same answer as before any of those things even existed, in fact. xD

I agree! Glad you enjoyed, have a great day

If you like this you should watch James Lindsay over at New Discourses. He just co-authored a book on this whole topic with Helen Pluckrose from Aero magazine.

I think you are conflating systemic corruption with culture. It's unfair to blame culture as the sole instigator of said corruption.

You can tell it's not cultural by the way Greeks abroad are not known for "gaming the system".

You mean people like Aristotelis Onassis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis

Aye, it's common knowledge in Greece that he came across his huge fortune by being a nice guy and never stepping over any lines, of law or ethics. True fact.

The dude was a legendary briber.

Generally he was thought to be trustworthy if you cut a deal -- no matter how corrupt and shady the deal was -- but absolutely willing to bribe, coerce, threaten, and completely willing ignore regulations and rules.

It's that argument of you let yourself get conned so it's your fault. Therefore it's ok to con people. Nigerian scammers also are in this camp.

The exactly same goes for Brazil. Am I seeing a pattern here, i.e. countries that are supposed to be great but really aren't?

I was backpacking Europe years ago and I met this Brazilian girl. We were discussing places that required a visa and she said she never bothered with them. I asked how that was possible.

She said that if anyone ever questioned her she just acted confused and found a way to sneak off. I was flabbergasted. She simply (and proudly) explained: "It's the Brazilian way of life!"

She's right. It even has a name, "jeitinho": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeitinho

Pattern is high trust societies vs low trust societies.

Yeah, personally I think this has a lot to do with post-colonialism.

I'm Irish, and there's a lot of this in our society. It was much more accepted in my parents generation, and appears to be reducing a little bit as we become a richer society.

I heard from an Irish colleague (I'm a Brazilian expat in Dublin) that this attitude, in particular towards taxes, changed after the independence from the UK.

So yes and no. My parents are pretty old (they had kids late) and they really don't like telling revenue (the taxman) anything, and would be inclined to overlook tax avoidance and whatnot. My wife's parents are of a similar age, and also similar on this.

Now, all of them were born a generation after independence, so it's definitely not just that.

However, when the government has historically not given a crap about you (as the British government did not), it leads to a disconnect from the society and institutions that increases the probability that you'll be OK with tax dodging and not have as much trust in the overall society (because historically, it didn't care about you).

So, I'd say that it's slowly changing because we're not a colony anymore, but it definitely didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke in 1921.

It has rather less to do with post-colonialism than it does with having a very unethical dominant church for hundreds of years, honestly.

We're the only horrifically-bent country in northern Europe

I'm sorry, what? Like I enjoy a bit of Irish-Catholic bashing as much as the next Irish person (probably more than most, given that I enjoy complaining about the Council of Nicea) but I don't really see how the pre-independence Catholic Church was unethical.

To be fair, though I'm not a fan of the authoritarianism, without the Catholic Church neither of my grand-parents or their parents would have had an education, and indeed the church was the centre of irish social life and community for a very long time.

Like, post-independence, the Church did a lot of dodgy things, but I really don't think you can blame the one organisation which actually provided some services for Irish catholics for our issues with authority.

And it's worth pointing out that much of the remaining corruption in Irish life is at the political level, rather than the bureaucratic level. As an example, you might bribe politicians to get planning permission for a large shopping centre, but you don't have to bribe the passport office for a renewal.

Can you give me some examples of Ireland being horrifically bent?

Edit: incidentally, thank you for Kildare Street!

Yep, Why Nations Fails talks about this a lot.

That could describe any country. Certainly Greece, India and Brazil wouldn't make it to the top of my list of countries I'd expect to see described that way.

Yes i think Nigeria should come first in terms of those behaviors

Which countries mentioned so far are popularly regarded as "great"?

According to a reliable source - hat logos - there is a country that might someday rejoin that elite group. ("MAGA" political hats: "Make America Great Again". There is so much to read into that in the political climate.

One more very Indian thing perhaps also is we like to gladly flog ourselves and jump at the chance of discrediting our people. We will start with "As an Indian" but end with "They" instead of "We"

I'm frankly kind of sick of the constant denigration and apologies being written slavishly to foreigners on behalf of all Indians by Indians. As an Indian, I accept there's a lot of cultural problems and crap in the country but to the degree that people will prostrate before the Western elite reminds me of our colonial days. Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world cause humans are just that shitty. In this particular case, the person making the video made it in Hindi so it very specifically created a spike from Indian users

I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride

> literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world

This is untrue. You won't find even a remotely similar tolerance for rule-breaking in Japan.

People are all the same in many ways but cultural differences are still vast.

yeah, man. I tried to convince my Japanese wife not to pay off her predatory student loans when she moved to the US, and it was like I was talking about burning down a building or something.

> I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride

I don’t see it as an Indian thing (or a Greece thing as someone else replied). It’s a failing of all of global humanity that anything you can get away with is “ok” to 10-49% of the world’s population (have no concrete source, but I “feel” it’s below 50%, but still a significant number). The US President got up on stage just this week and essentially answered the question “why did you pay so little taxes in 2016-2017?” with the response “because I could! Don’t like the tax laws? BLAME JOE!”, taking zero responsibility for his own actions.

It's something you'll see in pretty much every disfavored group: people will attempt to push themselves up by pushing the others down. They'll say "I'm not like other X", reinforcing the idea that X actually does whatever bad things you imagine they do, and deserves to be looked down on.

They usually don't even recognize that that's what they're implying. They merely want to set themselves up as worthwhile and ask not to be pre-judged. But collectively, you get "crab mentality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality).

The social motivations for saying sth should not be conflated with the truth of that thing. In my experience, usually people shitting on their own group tell the truth.

On another note, I find Western, affluent self-flagellation much more pervasive and deceptive.

I disagree. As an Indian, our pride is one of the biggest problems. Not achieving much but taking a lot of credit for it. We even take pride in Indians that leave for abroad and do exceptionally well - CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, MasterCard are not Indians in terms of their citizenship. They're of Indian ethnicity.

To the foreigners (especially Americans) - I cannot make this up. When I was in 6th standard, we had a teacher that said without flinching, or perhaps completely deluded that - 90% of NASA employees are Indians. We knew this is bullshit even when in the 90's when there was no internet.

Currently, we've got the Indian media tied up with taking pride in the fact that Kamala Harris is Indian.

It's frankly embarrassing how much undeserved pride we constantly seek.

Couldn't have said this better myself.

"For many Indians, self-flagellation is a sign of their intellectual arrival". This was a line I read long ago and it desribes the situation so well.

We do go the other extreme and take credit for what Indians do and "Ancient Indians" did.

>Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world cause humans are just that shitty.

Absolutely not true. It applies to low/high trust societies and is an cultural issue.

Slavishly? Eh? The comments also constantly remind how few talented people get lost in the haystack because of the noise. They are stating the reality.

> have some goddamn pride

We have seen how much damage pride has brought. If you still want to see

1) people without science knowledge claiming religious rituals have scientific reasons

2) people who don't know what linguistics is claiming Sanskrit is the first language

3) people without any knowledge of medicine heralding superiority of Ayurveda

Continue with your godamn pride.

> Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world

Oh come on. If we are able to mentally swap out cultures in the OP to see how ridiculous your claim is, then you are too. And we have to think you did.

Pride begets nationalism.

Do you think it could be a cultural artifact beaten into the Indian subcontinent by the British? Sort of a collective, areawide PTSD?

Tangentially, I personally wish people would stop using the "culture" excuse for a group's bad behavior. Culture doesn't develop in a vacuum. Certain cultural practices could potentially come from really problematic sources. Changing one's culture isn't an insult to anyone if you're changing it for the better. And in this case, even if Indian culture is to prostrate before those you see as your superior, I don't think that's an element of the culture that needs preserving.

I trust people who talk negatively about their own culture more than I trust people who talk positively. Every culture has lots of dumb stuff, and people who are willing to talk negatively about it strike me as more open-minded.

I can understand and relate to the point you raise. Constructive criticism and self retrospection is a key marker of any progressive society. The slight caveat is that each society is in a varying state at any given time. India has gone through a full circle from peak, to trough to hopefully a rising future. At this stage of the society, confidence is very fragile and mindset conflicted across the glorious to the defeated to the hopeful. This why you see the spectrum of emotions. As with personal image and attitude being sculpted for success, a nation's image and attitude need to be sculpted for success too.

This x 100. We have low confidence and apologies for Normal things which the whole world does

> If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.

The Ferengi from Star Trek come to mind when I read this.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi

The Rules of Acquisition are always a fun read:

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

In this case Rule 3 would probably apply:

> Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

I always used to wonder if the races in the star trek universe had any correlation with human ethnicities.

I wouldn't say ethnicities... The Ferengi serm to be a personified contrasting ideology against the "we don't need money anymore" of the Federation.

Not to say that people won't overlay their own prejudices over what's actually there, but i see just an explicit contrast of ideas about economies.

Less ethnicities than cultures and metaphors. Darmok notwithstanding.

The Klingons were originally intended to look Asiatic and resemble Mongols or Japanese samurai, with the Klingon Empire being essentially the Soviet Union In Space. And there is an uncomfortable elephant in the room that Klingons, a species mostly known for violence and bloodlust, are all (or almost all) black coded. While the implications are obviously unintentional, it's impossible not to draw parallels in the history in sci-fi and fantasy to the "swarthy, dark-skinned savage" archetype.

Speaking of which here[0] is a video on Klingons and the history of racial coding in Star Trek if anyone is interested.

The relationship between Cardassians and Bajorans is clearly a metaphor for post-war Germany, with the former being Nazis and the latter Jews. Romulans, obviously, are Space Romans.

The Borg clearly represent the dehumanizing effect of technology and collectivism, making them a perfect foil for the Federation with its techno-utopian ideals. I've heard but can't prove that the Borg were meant to be a parody of Japanese business culture. There are alien stand ins for racial prejudice from "Let That Be your Last Battlefield" and nonbinary gender persecution from "The Outcast," and the Trill species in general. In cases like these, the aliens are meant to serve as a mirror to some aspect of humanity.

And of course the Ferengi have already been discusssed here.

Although in one egregious case (TNG's "Code of Honor")[1] the "aliens" were literally just African caricatures in space. And of course TOS gives us planets with literal space Nazis, space Romans, space Cowboys, space Greek Gods, space whatever costumes they could scrounge from the Desilu lot that week.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqbSQWKV_T8

[1]https://trekmovie.com/2020/06/14/jonathan-frakes-and-denise-...

If you watch the first appearence of the Klingons they are obviously Mongol raiders. Later they are vikings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-...

General opinion for decades has been the Ferengi are specifically anti-Semitic stereotypes rather than generic Mediterranean-area stereotypes.

> In America, people ask 'Do the Ferengi represent Jews?' In England, they ask 'Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?' In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese[…] The Ferengi represent the outcast… it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.[19]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-...

Or you could view them as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.

As a Jew, I always just considered them space goblins...

So did I.

I forgot where I read it, but I believe Roddenberry modeled the Ferengi after New England traders in the 1800's.

This is stated directly in the episode that introduced them.

This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior culture of open source, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.

If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating it.

(For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.)

> his "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.

While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,

Which is gaming the system, if you ask me.

Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.

Overfitting? Sure. But gaming the system? I disagree. Hell, I've heard of companies giving candidates the book to help them prepare for the interview. It's not ideal but this is what the system expects.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game"

Can still hate them for playing the game, if that involves disdain for ethical principles one actually believes in

FAANG will usually send you a few slides on what algorithms and data structures to prepare.

I just started interviewing with FB and got prep slides, two courses on educative.io, a 27 page document on the origins and purpose of the role, two 45 minute intro calls, and two 45 minute prep calls so far, and a recommendation to study up on a bunch of problems on leetcode in addition. I don't know how the rest of FAANG compares but Facebook drops a mountain of prep material for candidates.

Learning for test is gaming the system? Seriously?

Depending on the extent, of course it is.

Imagine I'm taking Calculus 2 and I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold" or I can get the final exam a few months ahead of time and simply memorize the symbols I need to write into the exam booklet. The latter is self-evidently gaming the system.

When primary school teachers teach directly towards the assessment exam, they are only incidentally teaching the subject and are primarily (IMO) gaming the system as well.

But the latter is not going on here. They are not memorizing the symbols.

> I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold"

What does cold means? Learning calculus without solving exercises? Or without solving variety of exercises? Intentionally ignoring last years tests and not trying them?

If your learning materials match what the test is supposed to test, you will solve a lot of exercises while learning from them. And the test itself would contain combinations and variations from these.

When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

A test is a proxy for actual performance working on some useful task. The nature of useful work is usually that it can't be represented by two hours of multiple choice questions, whiteboarding, or anecdotes about "a time you disagreed with someone"; therefore, most tests will differ from the work. Learning to pass the test is easier than learning to do the work, but if you do that the test ceases to measure your work performance.

Yes it is, while the tests are obviously imperfect, the intent is to be a proxy for a wider set of skills and knowledge to be tested.

I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere

Sure, but you always have to ask, to what degree?

If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.

It's pretty well correlated to wealth inequality. The more wealthy cheaters there are, the more the masses are pro-cheating for themselves.

But to that intensity, ingrained-ness? That's not how it is in the UK[0] - to anywhere near that degree I mean.

edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with

well check out italy, you can substitute italian with indians and keep the entire paragraph almost word for word.

I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.

Would this apply more to southern Italy more than north?

> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...

* https://archive.is/SYP7l

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_It...

The criticalness is a general Italian phenomenon. The one thing that unites Italians, north and south, is the perception that Italy is stupid and corrupt.

I was also thinking about Italy, especially with how popular people like Berlusconi always were precisely because they were never playing by the rules... but it's possible that it's still a difference in degree. I don't know if Italians would go to such extreme lenghts just for a t-shirt. I don't really know Indian culture though, so I can't judge.

How about Finland? That's not the general attitude here.

well am not well versed about everyone history, but a cursory search says it maintained special status granting cultural and political independence for quite a while and rebelled within a decade of the russification project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland

That's a ridiculous generalization

I didn't see lots of Italians creating a PR just to get a T-Shirt

The populations of Italy and India aren't even remotely similar.

India dwarfs the entirety of Europe, never mind Italy, by population size.

you need to start thinking percentages and not counts. also, and in percentage, knowledge of what a github even is in Italy is far lower; IT is still seen as the nerd kids choice and not as a professional career.

I would compare population numbers and percentages. India has 1B people. Uk is less than 10% of that.

This is one of the reasons Indians cheating on the OSCP is such an issue. I don't know if they realize that destroys the value of the cert for everyone... cool you got the cert but now its worthless.

Before seeing the video I posted my theory here [0] on where the spam was originating from and it seems this pretty much completes the explanation I gave that it's a classic case of academic spam [1].

That type of spam, especially on GitHub (so by folks trying to get into IT) really only reinforces the stereotype that 95% of Indian IT students can't code [3] [4].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645000

[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/what-is-b...

[3] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...

[4] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

Well Said pritam. I am also from India and i see many of my friends run away for free thing. eg: Till September 30 They used google meet for their online classes and now they are searching for another free alternate. It is very sad to see this culture of spamming and gaming. Infact this is one reason why many Saas Companies dont prefer India as a matured market as they will use the free system and wont ever upgrade to a paid plan.

I live in a post-soviet country and the ~50 years of soviet planned-economy, arbitrary laws and constant shortages combined with an illegitimate regime (as any foreign power that is ruling by force on your turf is by definition) meant that people got a pretty deep ingrained attitude of "gaming the system" even tho there's almost 30 years of self rule. It is slowly fading away and being replaced by the capitalist "growth hacking" which I'm not sure is a lot different.

Can agree. Gaming the system was the norm in Russia. E.g. you couldn't buy or sell apartments. If you wanted one, you had to "move in" with someone and the other person would then "move out" later. Payment was handled under the radar.

Hearing the stories from my parents, just getting furniture for a new apartment was already hard, since sometimes it just was not available.

This mentality now still lives on in a lot of us.

> It is slowly fading away and being replaced by the capitalist "growth hacking" which I'm not sure is a lot different.

There's definitely a blurry line there. I'm not completely clear what "growth hacking" means, but I definitely think SEO crosses a line (basically hacking google's algorithm to mislead them and their customers). Even worse would be things like paying for fake traffic to drive up ad revenue. People generally understand there is a line between legitimate business and scamming people, even when greed/desperation drives them to bend the rules somewhat and rationalize it.

To quote myself: “I’ve yet to see something called a “growth hack” that wasn’t unethical.”

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16829121#16829957

Estonia?

Yes in fact, but I can imagine it’s mostly same elsewhere too.

I only ask because I'm looking at moving to Estonia in a couple years!

I can attest to this. In fact, in India, it's considered very stupid and laughable by a very large number of people to buy digital books and music, because they are available for "free" on pirate websites. Read that again: I'm not just saying that people pirate stuff, instead, I'm saying they consider it unimaginable and stupid to spend money because it's available for "free." Ethics never enter the picture, I promise you.

Also, it's considered acceptable and clever to order clothes, use them at an event, and return as "defective." Quaint concepts like morality are not even considered relevant.

Usually it will have to do with purchasing power parity.

The low pricing in one country doesn't translate to low pricing in another country, especially with digital goods.

Things are changing though now. Many streaming services are doing well in India as prices are appropriate and people are educated on the value of the goods.

It is also related to strong laws/enforcing of laws as well, which is also improving in my opinion.

All of which are not necessarily unique to India.

Okay, so let's say some people can't afford to buy digital goods. How does that, by itself, explain a general belief that the few who do that are stupid because they "don't realize" that they are available for "free"?

Now, you or I might say that they aren't really available for free (they're stolen/pirated), but any thoughts of that kind just don't appear in many people (amoral, not immoral).

I have to say, I love this.

Yes, things get fouled up from time to time but this is really the same as the old hacker ethos. It is the mindset that led to Woz building a computer from scratch, the internet being an open system and the concept of open source thriving.

You could have explained it without using negative connotations like gaming the system. Student crowd in US also games the system. Humble bundles and exploiting regional pricing of Steam are few examples.

It might be a post-colonial cultural artifact. Speaking as an Irish person, we have a similar regard for bending rules, which is only beginning to show signs of change recently.

Now all they have to do is convince the middle class that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and India will start to become the US.

Pathological behavior being part of a culture isn't an excuse for it. If everyone acted this way open source couldn't exist.

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

> 4. Naughtiness

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

Everyone breaking a rule will say that they're doing this. They'll claim they're just bending the rules. Even when they're engaged in massive law breaking behaviour they'll claim that those laws don't really matter and that the ends justify the means.

Hacktoberfest highlights the problem with this paragraph of Graham's. Hundreds of thousand of people being "naughty", hacking the system, cause problems for other people.

I know your comment is in good faith because the core of what you're saying is correct, and I'm certainly not accusing you of anything... Instead of 'part of the culture' though I would phrase it as 'correlated with the culture' to avoid accidentally giving supremacists ammunition.

The point being, you have to rise above your circumstances. Just because everyone you grew up with is doing something gravely immoral doesn't make it correct. No culture should exude pathological behavior as a trait.

Your attempt at couching your comment in disclaimers is hilarious. You don't just give supremacists ammunition, you make everyone laugh at the absurdity.

"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.

Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?

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