I get the point you're making that this seems like an individually unfalsifiable proposition. Fair point. It would require massive amounts of data to show the arc of people's beliefs and I'm not certain it's a tractable problem.
That said, I already believe that many things I care about I only care about because they are issues that society (or rather members/organizations there within) dedicated time to considering. I think that discourse is inherently limited because attention span and time are limited and, as an extension, I believe that there are issues that most people/all people never think about but by metrics that we deem relative importance we'd find worth major consideration. I would give an example but you can understand the difficulty of describing something no one finds important that is important.
By extension of the above, I believe that organizations, through concerted effort, are able to crowd out the marketplace of ideas (either at societal level or at organization level) with issues that they deem less threatening to their interests, so long as they have hooks that draw attention. I don't think this idea is particularly unbelievable because we can see similar concepts outlined by even the government in the forms of documents suggesting how to disrupt organizations [1]. I think that this idea also dove tails quite clearly with the concept of propaganda and mass media influence like that discussed by Chomsky.
I would argue that there are many arguments that are valid (and sometimes valid from both sides) but at a societal level not productive. I think the American issue of abortion is a great example of this: would you agree that in 70 years of debating the issue, we as a society have made the implicit choice to not debate other issues? Not that we discuss nothing els, but certainly we'd have filled that time with some other issues if there had been a conclusive resolution on the issue. There is no resolution to the debate which is what makes it such an effective tool for politicians to rouse support, so why would they seek a longstanding resolution instead of this continue back and forth of the judiciary as members die and are added? I am happy to continue this conversation but I've rambled enough now and must work.
Not even if it's true?
I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
Is it, though? We've got here an article about a multibillion dollar company using its money and influence to peddle a view that's beneficial to them and trying very hard to make it look like it's not actually coming from them. This is absolutely not always the case. This is more than just run of the mill people being open to changing their minds then, is it?
>in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded
I think you've misread the post above, because at no point in that comment was it suggested that said belief should be disregarded.
Every multibillion dollar organization I'm familiar with has a PR team who's responsible for shaping news coverage in ways that benefit the company. We just don't normally think about it this way. Nobody looks at the coordinated release of reviews about a week before video game launches and says "aha, Nintendo has dishonestly manipulated the media once again".
Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. If you have all 3 of those traits, which are both from your discipline and genetic predisposition, the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for that geographic area in regards to the mix of political leanings.
I disagree it's about hard work, but about ego about how society deserves to value them. That correlates only really under the age of 35 before their first health scare when suddenly society owes something to them that they never previously wanted to feed a cent into.
At universities though, the libertarians had actually read The Road to Serfdom and could debate with you. Today’s libertarianism is google search deep, just another veneer over tha antipathies of our time.
Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.
People with terminal diseases also usually become religious. Perhaps atheists are faking it too.
> the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
Tomorrow an asteroid may, very unluckily, fall and strike me so as to kill me. It would not be due to my merits or lack thereof.
Yet if you want to get ahead, you should generally work hard and do the right things while being sufficiently savvy.
It is surprising to me since I'm not from US. Don't tech workers at Google have good health and life insurance for such cases?
I lean libertarian because I see all of the problems that come from federal level programs trapping us into a status quo that we are mostly powerless to change. You want to change the way that healthcare or education works...let's just say in your county of residence. It's virtually impossible, not because we lack smart people with better solutions but because the money for healthcare and education is already tied up.
Wealthy people can afford private schools or alternative approaches to healthcare if they want. The rest of the population is stuck with what they are given, whether they want it or not.
I don't know anyone who is happy with the state of public schools in the United States: teachers, students or parents. We're all mostly powerless to change it though.
It's not a lack of humility that creates these views, it's empathy for people who are stuck and want things to be better. I lean libertarian because I see the effects that are making it harder to improve all of our lives.
I simply want to reduce the barriers between a person having an idea of how to do things better and trying that out with other people who agree with them. If it works, it will be imitated and improved upon. If it doesn't, it will be discarded. This type of experimentation naturally leads to constant improvement.
People need freedom to make their own choices without having to ask for permission.
Many libertarians are above average in intelligence, in part because it's a less mainstream viewpoint, but I don't think it follows that intelligent people tend to be libertarian. I could be wrong about that, but I've met enough intelligent people whom are the opposite of libertarian that if there is any relationship between intelligence and libertarianism that it's probably small.
> Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them.
It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that you're wrong if that's a result of your experience. On the contrary, I've found that those who are competent, as you say, and have their heads down in hard work a lot, are as liable to viewing the world as being anti-meritocratic. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say whether the world is strictly meritocratic or anti-meritocratic, I think there's more of a relationship between having such black and white viewpoints and having one's head down in work for so many hours that little time is left to read about different facts and opinions.
My best example is a good friend of mine who is also above average intelligence, but works in a field outside of tech where he is, in contrast to me, much more of a slave to the office, hence he spends a great deal of time staring at one subject and not interacting much with information outside his field of view. His perspectives are often very black and white, and he would view the world as being entirely anti-meritocratic. Being an openly communist type, I could make some educated guesses about why that is, but I'll leave my opinion on that vague for now. When we have discussions about any number of things, including meritocracy, it's pretty obvious to me that he holds these black and white opinions because he's rather oblivious to the various counterarguments and experiences of others outside of his narrow field of study. Yet he is at least 120 IQ.
I just realized I indirectly insulted your view on meritocracy. I'm not really here to debate that, and your conclusion may be entirely valid. (and I would say not completely unjustified)
Yes, it's one anecdotal example, but that's a repeated observation of mine. Besides, pigeon holing people into single categories is a flaw of its own.
In that case, so is this very conversation, the fact that we're both on this website, and even the fact that we are both interested in tech.
If it's simply a roll of the dice, then nearly all aspects to existence are pointless, there's no point in trying to think for oneself, etc. Perhaps this is what you truly intend to convey, but until you explicitly state this, this is an incoherent perspective.
Having conversations on a website is a choice. Interest in tech is probably a blend of luck and choice (hard to be interested in something you're never exposed to, and hard to sustain interest in an environment where people consistently discourage it; people ending up in those situations are the "roll of the dice" the author is referring to).
In short, justifying a lack of empathy with "they made their choices" underestimates the amount people do not choose their circumstances in life.
I'm not saying everything is pointless at all. I've earned every one of the few pennies I have the hard way, believe me. I have a non-stop work history going back to when I was 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe to buy my own video games and toys. My efforts mattered. These experiences and my self-discipline built my character and who I am today.
There's some luck involved though. Whether it's your genetic makeup, how you were or were not groomed by your family, and simple right place, right time. To dismiss everyone as "failures in the meritocracy" is short sighted.
For example: John Carmack is a very successful programmer. I'd bet there's many here just as hard working, and as intelligent. He did the right thing, when he was at the right place, at the right time. That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
> That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
I am astounded by HN's hatred for the extraordinary every day I remain on this putrid hellhole of a site.
Notice how all of those variables are outside the individual's control. I never chose to be born in the shithole that is Greece that was ravaged by the debt crisis, yet it affected me as an individual significantly. Sure I may have had the ability to fight my way through, but I know many who didn't. Furthermore, Bill Gates and Bill Joy never chose to be born into the year they were born just as computers were taking off, they just did. And they used their smarts to make billions.
The sad truth still remains that the strongest predictor of an individual's success is their economic and family background. No one has proven otherwise.
Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?
I'm not the GP but you're being obtuse and counterproductive. The idea that no one does anything completely on their own is not particularly revelatory or insightful. It comes off as dismissive more than anything else.
That's the thing- I'm 50/50 on this issue. I believe there's inherent advantages that people have, and it's also about discipline and will.
Some people will never grasp opportunity when it comes knocking. That's why many that do grasp (and are lucky to have) opportunity are often pretty upset when others try to dismiss their success. I get that. It's true too. Both can be true at the same time, some are fortunate by no effort of their own, and some are unambitious. It's a Venn diagram of conditions.
But in 2022, everyone wants to be the victim. I don't believe in victimhood as a lifestyle. I firmly believe that "no one has more control over your life, than you".