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Comment by stygianguest | Hacker News Reader

Worse is the evolution of job requirements. I believe them to be the driving force behind this madness. No good can come of it, only lies and deceit. While I'm sure there are many true over-achievers at Harvard, I wonder how much of all this is polish rather than true greatness. Remember that Nietzsche's Uebermench has no scruples.

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This is a gross misreading of Nietzsche's conception of the ubermensch. The ubermensch is someone who doesn't _need_ scruples. He operates beyond conventional morality because the sharpness of his judgement and the greatness of his philosophical insights far exceeds the value of the slave morality embodied by everyday law, and morals.

But from the perspective of normal people, or "slaves" as Nietzsche would call us, he's just an overachieving asshole with no moral scruples.

Going to Harvard doesn't make you uber anyway, it just makes you "best slave". A real ubermensch would likely see that it's not in her interest to spend 100% of her time pleasing others.

>he's just an overachieving asshole with no moral scruples.

real unbermensch would have so little interests to and so little in common with the normal people what you'd be happy if s/he would spent a second of his time on the interacting with normal people (even being asshole toward them)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludens_%28Noon_Universe%29

The speciation inside the human species continues. We've had several successive species of humans so far and there is no reason for the process to stop. Human evolution has been speeding up, and i hope to see signs of new humans in my lifetime (statistically i have about 40 years left). Ivy Leaguers mating to Ivy Leaguers only is a one way to go, though i'd bet more on the changes coming from human-machine integration and biomedical advancements as brain related changes seems to be the primary driver of human evolution.

Eugenicists are out of date. The reason successful people have successful kids is due to enriched environments and increased opportunity.

The field of psychology can't even agree on a definition of intelligence anymore, and certainly IQ is not genetically determined. The environment is the biggest influence on IQ.

Harvard kids fucking Harvard kids doesn't create genetic supermen. It just creates an inbred aristocracy like has always been the case. Hemophilia is the true achievement of eugenics.

The wise know, and always have known, that it is education and drive that makes a person. Genes play little role in success.

Drive moreso than education. My Grandfather has a 5th grade education, worked the trades his entire life, repaired heavy equipment in his spare time, raised seven (7!!!) children and his net worth is somewhere in the millions. Drive.

He probably self-educated though. Which is really the only kind of education there is.

>Eugenicists are out of date.

just a statement of fashion.

>The field of psychology can't even agree on a definition of intelligence anymore, and certainly IQ is not genetically determined. The environment is the biggest influence on IQ.

The fallacy of nurture vs. nature as if one can be a substitute for another. Their respective roles are well known and each of them is a factor and not any of them is "the biggest influence" vs. the other. And about importance of the biological factors - i'd recommend reading on Einstein's brain, which was smaller, yet more densely packed and with higher ratio of energy supplying cells.

>Harvard kids fucking Harvard kids doesn't create genetic supermen. It just creates an inbred aristocracy like has always been the case. Hemophilia is the true achievement of eugenics.

Tell that to those several thousands who took over the world from other human species without much interbreeding with them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern...

Why are you citing fiction in the support of your argument?

any argument about ubermensch is a fiction until we get to meet one. Without facts, a fiction/theory/speculation can be judged only on how logical it is and on the quality of underlying assumptions. The one i referred to does very well describing the alternative speciation scenario inside the human species when new species doesn't cause extinction of the old human species (the extinction has been a typical scenario so far)

Science-fiction is optimized for interesting story-telling, not for predicting the future.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...

only future will tell what was the most optimized way to predict it. You seem to dislike references to sci-fi in discussing the future, yet you link to the sci-fi yourself, and not just sci-fi, you link to the high brow discussion (i.e. specifically optimized for non-interesting story-telling) of how sci-fi may be predicting future incorrectly - without acknowledging that such a discussion in itself implies some modeling process of future (to compare other models against) and thus sci-fi in nature. At first i thought this link was some parody/joke :)

Nietzsche isn't calling you a slave. He's saying that your morality is a slave morality. Meaning your moral system was invented by people who were, in fact, at the time, slaves.

How anyone feels about that is up to them. He mostly just wanted to point it out.

What's wrong with job requirements?

Also, often "requirements" aren't truly "required". They're just trying to give a sketch of the person they're looking for. So if an ad requires "7 years of Javascript experience" but you have less, you aren't necessarily excluded from applying, as long as you have a comparable level of expertise.

It's a problem when the ad requires three years of Javascript, two years of embedded C, two years of C++, two years of Python, two years of Ruby, and five years of HTML and CSS, and yet is only offering college-leaver pay.

I remember during the dot com implosion, for six months straight section 115 was entirely absent from the local classifieds. The numbers jumped from 110 (clerical) to 120 (accounting). As you might guess, 115 was the catch-all for anything computer related.

During the same time frame I saw a job post looking for all of the following: 8 years of unix systems administration experience, 5 years of MS Server, Exchange, 6 years of network administration, 5 years of perl, 6 of VB, bash scripting, and 8 years of experience as a DBA. The advertised wage for the titan that qualified for the position? $10.50 an hour.

Well, you aren't excluded from applying as far as the people actually hiring for the job are concerned.

But sometimes you've gotta be prepared to BS the HR creature in order to make it past them and actually talk to someone human - it's not too uncommon for these folks to view listed job requirements as a hard filter that all applicants need to pass in order to be considered, especially when dealing with bigger companies.

And the fact that perfectly qualified applicants are often forced to embellish experience to make it past these initial screens is a very bad thing, it means that a certain level of dishonesty is almost required as part of a standard job hunt (i.e. one that doesn't lean on connections or direct relationships with people at companies, which is always a better way to go). This is part of why it ends up being so hard to distinguish legit programmers from terrible ones by their CVs: the crappy ones know they have to make up a ton of crap to get any interviews at all, whereas the legit ones know that if they can just get through the door and interview they'll get an offer, so they don't bother embellishing, and all the CVs end up looking about the same.

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