I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.
I think this helps make it clear that any single goal can compromise overall health, even if along that dimension you're exceptional.
I think no matter what you do it will have a deterministic effect on your kid. If you're more responsive than deterministic they'll observe you for cues of who/what you have the most respect or adoration for and maybe seek to emulate it (or if they're rebellious, spite it). There's a fine line and moderation is important as with everything of course.
We sent them to various sports but my youngest found football via watching the World Cup, my eldest found swimming as we went surfing and he wanted to be better.
Their choices. We just facilitate.
I don't think providing them stimulus and opportunity is you finding it for them. Giving your child access to interesting people across various fields ensures they can learn about various intellectual pursuits. Treating them as a person with real ideas to consider ensures that they'll have the confidence to engage in the real-world as a peer. Giving them freedom and "down time" to explore their own ideas actually give them the time to find their own path.
Think of it as a vector, you can let them pick the direction, but you can ensure that they go far in that direction. They don't have to be a world-class mathematician, even being a well-respected local teacher is exceptional.
Personally I would have chosen this unflattering label for people who were pushed from birth into a particular career path and just followed along.
I understand the sentiment that chasing happiness without "purpose" or consideration to the world around you might make someone vain and hedonistic but I don't think that applies to being career driven. I do think a strong career drive (esp. external) will not make you happy, and may even be a source of discontentment.
I think the submitted article tried to make clear that just being a gifted child isn't sufficient to become a "genius", and favorable circumstances play a big role in turning giftedness into exceptional accomplishment.
Thus, wouldn't the same apply to happiness? Even if there were natural predilections toward happiness, circumstances can play a big role too in bringing the predilections to fruition.
Perhaps one needs to be "tutored" about how to become happy.
Some people would say that's very far.
Are these people more satisfied with their lives? Do they feel their life is meaningful and worthwhile?
Victor Frankl might argue that meaning and purpose are more important and entirely orthogonal to "success".
Those chasing happiness are usually unhappy https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/laurie-santos/
You're creating a false dichotomy. People can be both exceptional and happy. Parents do sometimes create unhappiness by trying to force their children to be exceptional at something the child isn't interested in, but you don't have to do that. You can let the child develop and follow their natural interests and support them without trying to force them to be something they're not.
Depends what number cab he got!
However, tutoring your child intensely is obviously important and will result in good outcomes
But assuming that's what parent was talking about (since that's the only thing they mentioned) - the market is sometimes wrong, for sure, but not as a general rule. If someone is earning a lot of money, they are giving some value that is worth it to the company that is paying them. More money = more value.
This doesn't always track with "contributions to society", because you can do things like e.g. stealing, which "gets you money" but doesn't contribute to society.
But consultancies as a general rule aren't stealing, they aren't as a general rule doing unethical things, etc. They are, for the most part, helping businesses. And that help is worth real money. This isn't theoretical either - if a consultant helps a business be more efficient in some process, that means real money to the company, which means real-world additional wealth is generated, which is a good thing.
The parent just made a quip because (I imagine) they think consultancies are a waste of money. And sometimes they are! But c'mon, I've known plenty of good, smart people working as consultants and I wouldn't want to jokingly quip that their job is meaningless. It's not worthy of a site like HN where we try to actually talk about things thoughtfully and critically.
In a capitalist society, these are basically competing entities seeking to maximise their own profits. This entails minimising expenses. That is, in capitalist society, businesses work to charge as much as possible, give back as little value as possible, and put as much pressure on their suppliers as possible to lower prices.
The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
I can make the theoretical argument all day, but really, we've lived in a world that has done this experiment for us. I look at capitalist countries, I look at communist countries, and I think it's pretty clear which ones are better to live in.
The majority of societies that have tried anything different were/are significantly worse for the average person. That seems like more than a little substantiation.
Consider the extent of human societies that have existed, what it is that we know of them and through what lens we know of them. What do we mean by the words "significantly worse"? Where does this idea of "worse" stem from? And let's not forget the average person. How do we measure what's good for this average person?
Sorry for the random remarks your comment caught my eye for some reason. The point here isn't for some bogus relativism but merely to state the obvious, that the human condition can be far more complicated than we give it credit.
All the reasons you say businesses suck are also the reasons why they work well. They need to react instantly to market pressures. If someone is making something no one wants they will crumble, if a new demand springs up businesses will instantly be created to meet it. I can't think of another system that is instantly responsive to a changing world and doesn't require much oversight.
Also, you say:
> More like an optimization for a small set of people.
As if that's a bad thing or a not-as-worth-it thing. But this is what a lot of software is. I personally work with schools, and one of the things I do is create tools to make teachers and school administrators more efficient and effective at their jobs. It's a fairly small subset of people that I'm helping, but I believe I make their lives a little bit better by providing them better tools that are time-saving.
Is what I'm creating less valuable than a line-cook? I don't think so.
I've often wondered why 'the market' doesn't understand that if garbage men disappeared, my city would look like a hellscape in a week. Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the market. I didn't understand this either until I (self-) studied a bit of economics.
The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
The answer to this led us eventually to the theory of supply and demand. Sure, without garbage workers, the city would be terrible. That's why we pay them. But the supply of garbage workers is apparently much larger than the supply of e.g. software engineers. If you have 100 people who can do one job, vs. person who can do the other job, that 1 person has a lot more leverage and you have to pay them more. Even if both jobs are equally important.
That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
> My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it. I think it's really true that one Einstein contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. One software engineer contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. And so on. It's mostly due to scale effects - one garbage worker can only do so much. One software engineer does a lot more because their work is easily duplicated and scaled and affects a lot more people.
> The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
Would people pay more for diamonds if they were dying of thirst? People pay more for diamonds vs. water only if the water problem is already handled. The economy is such a complex model of every interaction that I find it disingenuous to base the assumption that market rate == usefulness on pure theory.
> That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
In this particular circumstance, no. He's a lot harder to replace in terms of quality and knowledge than I am in my current team. We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
> It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play? If we'd be designing for the real world like we study physics in high school (no friction, perfect spheres...) there'd be a lot of difference between the theory and practice. I'm not sure why people suggest economy is otherwise.
> That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it.
Likewise. We can agree to disagree. But taking politics aside, I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
I agree, but I think this is also generally true. It really is true that a garbage worker is generally less valuable on a societal level than a software engineer (in terms of work output - they might be far more valuable for other things which are just as important!)
> We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
Look, that's true of a lot of software that gets written. There is a lot of waste. For sure if you look back and see that lots of code written was never used, that code in particular wasn't better for society than something more concrete.
But I look at it like with science. Lots of scientists are conducting research that won't ever pan out, doing experiments that end up going nowhere, etc. Was that value-less for society? I don't think so. If we could know ahead of time what would work and what wouldn't, then of course that wouldn't be valuable. But throwing out 100 bad ideas and ending up with a lightbulb is still worth it for society, and the markets react as such.
In your case - the reason VCs even have that money is because in the long run, given enough bets, they make money back, which for the most part translates into "they created enough value." Even if individual bets ended up not mattering.
> The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play?
Oh for sure there's a lot of distortions, both for good and ill. No argument there.
I just think that for the most part things are correct and adhere to the economic theory, and outliers are relatively rare. As opposed to
> I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
Ahah, funny but true. This btw is itself the result of regulations - if people were free to e.g. change countries as much as they wanted, fairly rapidly wage gaps like this would disappear, which would be good for the world IMO. At least economically speaking.
(Note again: I'm talking specifically about productive value to a society. Someone without a lot of money can still be enormously valuable in many other respects, e.g. a beloved family member.)
To say that money is a good proxy for value to society seems incredibly naive at best and downright disingenuous at worst.
There are certainly some wealthy individuals who "exploited society". But I don't think that's a majority (depending on how you define wealthy.) I also don't think most corporations are just dumping externalities on society and reaping benefits. The age of corporations is also at least partially the age with the best standards of living and the best life for most people, at least in terms of wealth.
Are you measuring most in terms of where the money goes or just the number of corporations? Because some of the biggest are quite literally causing climate change, poising the land, and getting people killed (if not killing them directly).
Of those that are left I'd still make the argument that they're destroying public health through marketing, but apparently "having ads shoved at you all day every day damages your mental health and that damages society as a whole" is somehow a controversial statement because marketing helps people make money.
The VCs get the money from their limited partners. As a rule the VCs don't have meaningful skin in the game. They invest other people's money and get paid a percentage of the money they invest. They don't reinvest their winnings either, that money goes back to the LPs!
Most VCs are also pretty bad at their jobs. They're totally undifferentiated, are not able to recognize great startups, and don't have much to offer to founders. You wouldn't expect an industry with those characteristics to do very well. VC investment is much riskier than investment in some boring 60/40 stock bond portfolio, so venture as an industry has a high hurdle to clear if they want to deliver superior risk adjusted returns.
How many venture bets in the past 15 years have produced companies that will become the next Google or Microsoft or Apple or Facebook? Zero. It's those winners that make the venture business work on paper, and when they don't show up for a decade the entire industry is in the red.
You can postulate that venture must be profitable because otherwise how could it possibly exist. But if nobody is investing their own money (not the VCs, not the LPs, not the startup founders) you're not going to get an efficient market.
I believe it is simply useful for many people to be able to state textbook economic orthodoxy as "a fact", even if it is almost trivially broken (as the supply and demand curve story is on many levels) or historically wrong (as the fable of money arising from barter). This lets people justify all weaknesses of the current economic system by simply saying "It may suck, but this is what it is, a law of nature. We can change it about as well as we can reverse gravity. Conform, and propose no change."
Might be me which is just cynic though.
And so does one Putin. Your point about scale is valid but the implied value judgement of choosing Einstein is not (whether you intended that or not, choosing Einstein ensures everyone will read it that way).
One software developer or engineer working for a big nasty corporation like Shell or Facebook does create more change in the world than one garbage collector, undoubtedly. But it's fully possible for the change they create to be entirely negative. An engineer who creates a faster rainforest cutting machine, for example, or a better method of catching fish that results in destruction of an ecosystem, or a developer who writes ever more sneaky ways to invade your privacy. More change does not equal more value.
cf the ur-example of Thomas Midgely Jr[1] who developed leaded gasoline (bad) and then went onto CFCs (bad).
Which of those modern civilizations do you believe are not capitalist? Are you counting trafficked slave labor today as an example?
That said, even if you simply view the slaves as property with no agency of their own, my original point was more that you can't compare the net worth of the slaves against the slave owners in terms of value created.
That said, I have no idea what your second sentence means.
Can you go into this a bit. In general sellers can acquire materials (oil say) by invading a country and mining it. If that seller then sells the oil acquired thus, I can't see how the buyers and sellers are not acting voluntarily? Is war/violence antithetical to Capitalism in some way that I'm not aware of?
But, enforcing ownership rights on property is surely part of regular capitalism?
Maybe it's because "the market" believes you would be a garbage man if there weren't enough garbage men, because the price of garbage men would exceed what you were willing to pay for it.
That one doesn't trouble me as much as this one:
> Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
Now is it so much easier to hire people to electrify a country than to hire nerds to make cool shit?
Maybe so... Some of these big tech companies have massive headcounts and rarely (if ever) make anything cool after the first thing that made them rich. How big is your cousins' team and how many electricians are there in your country?
But one day, everyone will want to be a programmer... what will happen then?
I saw this in Toronto 15 years ago! It was not pretty.
Only in this case, why should we think the market value is the only thing to care about? Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
As I said somewhere else, water is far more valuable than diamonds. But selling water doesn't earn you nearly as much.
That's not a sign of the "market value" being different than "everyday value". That's a sign that water is plentiful, so however much you want and need water, me selling you water is not really helping you - you can just go get water yourself.
> Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
Of course. And it's sometimes wrong. We have lots of rules and regulations that try to make the market more in line with other things we care about.
But you do have to provide an alternative. And I know of no better mechanism than markets to, in general, give a price to something. Almost everything else is flawed and/or biased in some way.
And btw, parent comment wasn't providing a nice justification for why the pay of consultants is flawed - it was just quipping that they are clearly not worth the money. Which is offensive to me, I dislike just writing off a whole profession. That's why I asked for clarification!
About consultants (the MBB/B4 kind), all I can really say is that they tend to confess on their own that they don't provide much value. Everyone I know in the profession seems to say so. They find it utterly baffling that 23 year olds can be rented out at about 6x their salary to do presentations to managers with decades of experience. They often tell you that they are simply rubber stamping some internal decision with some nice slides, and that the slides have no real insights.
There doesn't have to be a contradiction either, it may well be that these guys are scarce like diamonds, but also like diamonds, they aren't really valuable in another sense.
The market has really bad metrics when it comes to contributions. One can see it very well with entertainment for example. What do people like MrBeast exactly do other than simply specialise in creating viral videos and therefore wasting the time of millions on individuals?
People like MrBeast! That's why he's successful. What is he actually doing? Creating entertainment for people. It might not be your cup of tea, but there's no inherent difference between what he's doing and what Shakespeare did. One generation ago people lamented reality tv, before that tv in general, there was a time that books were considered bad, etc.
This is exactly why a market mechanism is good! Because I don't want your views, or mine, to be what decides whether something is "worth it". You and I have different tastes, and we have different tastes to millions of other people, we shouldn't get to decide what they find valuable - they should.
What's the principled difference except that you like one and don't like the other? Or that society considers one "valuable" and the other less so?
Do I think MrBeast is doing anything as deep and rich as Shakespeare? No, I don't. But I don't think I get to make that choice for other people. I love reading fantasy novels and think they are often every bit as deep as Shakespeare, sometimes more so. Many people in the world look down on that and think they're not as valuable as "real literature". Luckily, I get to decide what's good and what isn't, what's valuable and what isn't.
this is just obvious wrong allocation of resources in the market.
Maybe the world would be better off if I (or you) were a dictator and could impose our views on everyone else. But I don't really trust anyone to do that, so a market mechanism is better than anything else. And whether we like it or not, more people find watching MrBeast or Michael Jordan "worthwhile" than other things that we care about more.
(If I were a dictator, I'd put most of our resources on advancing scientific discoveries, with an emphasis on figuring out how to make humans immortal, and a huge part of our resources would go to figuring out AI safety, then to AI. That is the correct way to allocate resources in this point in time, IMO. How many people would like to live in such a world?)
That is not how the conventional free market is supposed to work. I'm happy to give that the market wants weird things, but the basic thing that's missing here is a feedback loop: you go and eat at a restaurant, you like the meal, you come back because your guess about the subjective value of the meal to you was correct.
The market for addictive experiences breaks this loop. You snort some drugs, and you feel you need to break into people's houses to get money to buy more. Ask any recovered drug addict whether they think it's actually worth it, and they will tell you of course not but the addiction is so compelling. People in this situation are robbed of their freedom, the essential ingredient in a free market.
Now I don't know a heck of a lot about Mr Beast, but a lot of internet influencers do the same thing as candy salesmen. It's bad for you to eat loads of candy, you don't want to be fat and get diabetes, but in the moment you make the wrong decision. Influencers do the same, it's a cheap thrill designed to make you forget you're in control of yourself.
Shakespeare is the opposite. You're supposed to be thinking about human nature, but you don't get your dose of satisfaction without quite the mental strain. You can't overdose on Shakespeare; you'll fall asleep first. People can and have overdosed on silly internet videos, staying up until 3am.
I imagine that if you gave the choice to a person to watch what you described or to read Shakespeare then the vast majority would choose to watch the eggs.
OP specifically mentioned Mckinsey consultants, i.e. "advice givers" and PPT generators who mainly exist to provide cover for higher ups. I'm inclined to agree with them.
It’s merely an illustrative example to stoke the broader question of “are people who are more highly paid actually more useful to society?”
The CEO of TurboTax makes the US worse by leading a company that lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can remain an expensive middle man. A line cook is doing infinitely more good for the world.
Yeah the chasm is much bigger than that.
We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.
There’s a lot that goes into you being able to “do nothing” / be present / mindful / enjoy the moment.
Many exceptional people sacrificed their happiness to build the world that you can enjoy. And if you want that to continue, many more will have to do the same.
On the other hand, many exceptional people sacrificed your happiness to build the world they they can enjoy.
A way of being that constantly re-emphasizes that way of being. Super-linear growth that doesn't stall out or crumble when external motivation is absent.
If everyone a person cared about was taken away, I can’t convince myself that they’ll still have the motivation to perform the same way they did before
It seems to have emerged that way to drive evolution / progress.
In order for happiness to be sustained, you need economic / technological / societal growth. Who do you think is capable of producing that? Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?
There is a certain level of talent x struggle needed to get to the next frontier.
If everyone decided to not suffer in pursuit of excellence and simply work on iterating on what we have, the rate of growth needed to sustain our happiness will never come.
This is the basic problem of what is our purpose. There's no definite answer. What if it's better to optimize towards having no unhappy people rather than average happiness?
As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.
/mylife off
What are you left with when you are raised on one specific value system and reality proves you’re not going to excel in that system?
We need to teach our children to have a variety of value systems, and that, of all of those, their academic or professional performance is not the priority.
Have fall back in place, that's also where rich and supportive parents come : blow money on different endeavors without sacrifying school. Study end goals for what the kid wants to do, how to achieve these outcomes, what are the best paths, support the kids etc etc.
If we speak about sport at a professional level, an injury can kill a career, but still, if the "kid" is at a professional level, he has other means to be still successful in any cases, being resilient is also a skill.
(a) A lot of encouragemeent to explore things, and the benefit of family members in the sciences
(b) My family teaching me a healthy attitude of not caring what others think too much
I was never pushed. I was always told just to do whatever I wanted....so I think those two elements are crucial, since I grew up never caring whether I "succeeded" or "failed".
Tons of money alone is not a guarantee of happiness, there's a cutoff of income beyond which happiness maxes out. Getting seriously ill can of course induce depressive traits, however I've just seen a documentary about using psychedelics for cancer patients and it did improve their lives significantly, although not curing cancer itself.
If you were miserable before winning the lottery, the money probably won't change that. If you have a bright outcome on life before getting cancer, you're more likely to cope and stay happy.
1) Wanting to be ultra-wealthy is arguably a vice rather than a virtue. A form of gluttony. It doesn't make you a better person.
2) Hardly anyone is prepared for the massive, sudden change in lifestyle brought by winning the lottery. Not to mention that everyone you ever knew, and also people you never knew, suddenly want a piece of you and your newfound money.
We talk a lot about big lottery winners, because it's fun to imagine, but it would honestly be better for most people to win $10K or $100K rather than winning $10M or $100M. You can improve their lives without radically changing their lives, which can be a curse rather than a blessing.
Unless you already have a very specific idea of what you would do with lottery winnings, e.g., start a business or foundation that required $X million in capital, a newfound giant pile of unanticipated money doesn't necessarily do you good. Money needs a purpose.