Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down | Hacker News Reader

Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down

artofmanliness.com

55 points0x54MUR4134 comments

Interesting. The framework from the article mentions three independent axes (active/passive, internal/external, positive/negative) but doesn't explore all combinations of them. It seems like there are other clear actions that can be driven by those other combinations:

Active Positive External -- Leave (as per the article)

Passive Positive External -- (?)

Active Negative External -- Betray (trying to harm the organization by interacting with external entities or authorities)

Passive Negative External -- (?)

Active Positive Internal -- Voice (as per the article)

Passive Positive Internal -- Loyalty (as per the article)

Active Negative Internal -- Sabotage (trying to harm the organization via internal actions and interactions)

Passive Negative Internal -- Neglect (as per the article)

I'm not really sure how Passive Negative External or Passive Positive External would manifest. For negative, failure to protect against or warn about hostile external action? For Passive Positive External something like whistleblowing seems to mostly fit, but seems more active than passive.

Yeah, I think your approach could be applied. I simply read the 4 options as "leave" with three variations of "stay" based on how much additional effort is added. Once you leave, you are out of the system and cannot be active or passive. If you stay, you can complain/try to fix (more effort), stay the course (same effort), or do less or work against with neglect (less effort).

I like this way of looking at it also, thanks!

Passive Positive External -- Fanboy (speak warmly of the organization but without trying to take part in it) Passive Negative External -- Badmouth (try to warn other people about the organization, but don't act directly against the organization)

“the people most sensitive to a decrease in quality are typically those with the most resources, skills, and talents that could be used to effectuate improvement. The people who are the least sensitive to quality usually have fewer resources, skills, and talents. When the people who have resources leave, it results in a “brain drain.” With fewer well-resourced members, the quality of the group further declines; it thus has even more trouble attracting new members (especially well-resourced ones); as a result, even more people leave. Things go from bad to worse, and the group or organization enters a death spiral that can be difficult or impossible to recover from.”

I wonder about this in the context of immigration reform.

If the US were to only allow those most capable of fixing their own state/country to flee to the US, is this a moral policy when we have the knowledge that it extends the harm of a bad system in need of reform?

Those left behind are the most poor and incapable of helping themselves.

Those who leave are not capable of fixing their state, because that requires power, and those with power rarely leave.

Is that so? The London property market isn't propped up by poor Russians.

100% of Russia's richest man stays in Russia, but that doesn't mean that 100% of the most resourceful 10% stay there. Look at this, for example:

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/fn...

I feel confident that the richest third of Russians bought almost all of those, and the poorest Russians few or none, so it's those without power who don't leave, because they can't. Lack of money/lawyers/resources diminishes your ability to arrange a residence permit in a foreign country.

Those richest thirds of Russians are still under Putin's thumb.

To some degree. The poorest third are under his thumb to a larger degree, don't you agree? The difference is best described as power.

The power gained by their wealth is enough to make leaving the country easy, but not enough to "save" it, by any stretch.

The modestly powerful can only effect modest improvements. Often local rather than national. If you think modest improvement is zero, then you are unquestionably right, they can't "save" it.

"Moral" is the wrong word when you consider:

  -a big reason people immigrate to the US is because the US destabilized their home country in the first place
  -America systematically ensures the poor are incapable of improving their condition

Many Americans would be happy to vote to stop destabilizing countries across the ocean, given the choice.

Even if this is true, as we know, the American government is explicitly set up to not give citizens this kind of choice, so offering this as an argument is disingenuous.

As a counterpoint though, consider that neocons keep getting elected to Washington every other year.

>Counterpoint: neocons keep getting elected to Washington every other year.

Because the choice given to a voter is this:

Vote for a democrat, who destabilizes foreign countries as a matter of course, and puts their energy into rewriting a health care bill. Vote for a neocon, who destabilizes foreign countries as a matter of course, and puts their energy into keeping gas prices and taxes a little bit lower. Vote for Trump, who actually attempts to stop destabilizing foreign countries, and gets impeached and called a terrorist by everyone who suddenly thinks NATO and aggressive foreign policy is the most important thing in the world.

An actually democratic decision would be giving citizens a plebiscite, "Do you want to stop foreign intervention in X country: yes or no." It would be quite a long list, but the results of that vote would be nice to see.

I just listened to a podcast [0] this morning that mentioned the fact that the many of the same people denouncing "Team America World Police" two decades ago have flip-flopped on that attitude regarding current events in Eastern Europe. I guess this is sort of intended to go along with c_crank's reply there.

[0] https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/4567762/the-ben-he...

Any comparison between the middle east and Ukraine is entirely disingenuous, because they aren't even remotely comparable. Ukraine is most comparable to when a coalition of western states freed Kuwait from Saddam.

Sending money to Ukraine is more comparable with sending money to President Jinping or President Maduro.

In what way?

And most of those many will flip on a dime. Invading Iraq had something like 70% public support and Afghanistan was even higher. Of course, you can't find most of those people now.

Because they're mostly flip-floppers based on their political ideologies.

Or… because they have different information now than they had then… which is a completely rational and even desirable state of affairs.

They had all the information they needed then. Those chose wrong, they'll be mostly wrong now. Any ideological bent today is just as much a normie venture as it was then.

Excellent username

> If the US were to only allow those most capable of fixing their own state/country to flee to the US, is this a moral policy when we have the knowledge that it extends the harm of a bad system in need of reform?

> Those left behind are the most poor and incapable of helping themselves.

That's pretty much the reality now. Look no further than Russia: there are millions of Russians in the US and Europe in all sorts of science and engineering positions in universities, JPL and NASA, and the aerospace & defense industries working on the same sort of stuff that is deciding the war today. The brain drain has been a very real issue since the iron curtain fell.

But let me stop you right there: that's dangerously close to paternalism and denying the people who would be allowed to come to the United States their self determination based on some ham-fisted attempt at geopolitical fairness is not only immoral but will only end in tears. Humans simply aren't capable of social engineering at that scale without huge unintended consequences and reams of collateral damage.

The United States has already tried nation building in this century in Afghanistan (where the Taliban rule, a return to the status quo pre-9/11) and Iraq (which was an unmitigated disaster). If the US focused more on improving itself instead of building other nations then I think the world would be a better place.

I'm not saying isolationism, and foreign aid is good, but let other countries fix their problems (potentially with aid from us, but not direct military intervention) because if the shoe were on the other foot, they'd not lift a finger to assist us (except for maybe Cuba).

If the US had actually been serious about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq, they could have done it. Instead it looked more like an extractive neo colonial project.

The US has no moral obligation to prevent the best and brightest from coming here.

You can always over-analyze everything to death, but at the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the leadership in that organization/country to fix the problem. If they don't, or can't, no one else is going to take responsibility for it.

Power corrupts. If a government is broken, it's the people's responsibility to replace that government with one that works. Whatever that takes.

Since this can be costly, the sane approach is to nip a governments' broken-ness in the bud ("voice" in the article's parlance) before things get bad enough that you can't do so any more.

Democratic countries tend to not attack other nations. The US is an odd one in this respect, which imho reflects the state of US' democracy. Sadly the US people aren't fixing it.

This is a very insightful article -- some of it seems so obvious but in that wonderful way when something is obvious _in hindsight_, ie is written with clarity and insight.

A better title would be "Exit, Voice, Loyalty, or Neglect". The article focuses very little on burning things down.

This is a really good starting point for discussion, I like it a lot. It doesn't quite capture all the nuances -- and I think Loyalty and Voice need some refinement.

My observation is that people often use their voice when they are invested and want a situation to work. You've worked at Acme Corp for seven years, most of the time it's been good. You like your job and co-workers, but growth and management changes have taken a toll. So you start speaking up trying to make things better. That is loyalty. Loyalty isn't passive acceptance or blind hope that things will get better if someone else makes changes.

What this calls "loyalty" I'd call apathy, inertia, or lack of agency. "Things were good once, they will be again, so I can just wait it out."

And neglect isn't the same thing as "burn it down," IME. I've seen both. Maybe it needs a section on sabotage...

But, again, this is a great starting point for discussion. Might share this with some folks who don't frequent HN...

Your definition of loyalty sounds like it's more loyalty to yourself/your own values or an idealized/rose-tinted view of the company from the past rather than loyalty to what the company is at the present time, which is always a moving target of course.

I interpreted their notion of loyalty as like a sort of trust that things will work out in the end, "maybe this is just a rough patch", etc.

Re: neglect, I think there's a more subtle gradient there. Lets say your company decided to implement a dumbass policy X, and you rail against it, but since it's highly popular it's like you're pissing against the wind. So you kind of resign yourself to it's inevitability and make a long bet that it's going to fail. This is in the hopes of a brighter future where it has already failed and been replaced with something better. You might even make decisions during this time that set you up to be better positioned for when it does eventually fail. This is a kind of negative semi-passivity, but it's only negative in the sense that you're betting against something that you think is a bad idea and you're trying to improve your position within that potential better future after the bad thing is gone.

That's not strictly the same thing as sabotage which would require malicious actions on your part to undermine the effort. You don't even need to hope that it fails, you can just make impartial/rational decisions to prepare for it's eventual downfall without being heavily emotionally invested in that same downfall. And on top of that, you could rationalize all of that as setting the company up for future success after it gets through this rough patch, so it's not all about self-interest.

E: There's a famous chess saying that comes to mind, "never interrupt your opponent while they are making a mistake". Not sure about it's applicability here, but it feels like a similar kind of mindset.

I think loyalty in this case would be better described as tolerance.

I hate Cox Cable. Seriously, I fucking hate them with all the vitriol I can muster. Even just last week I called bitching about the fact that I'm paying $170/month for an internet connection that hasn't stayed up for more than an hour over the past 3 weeks (I'm paying for extra bandwidth to be able to backup data).

But I've been with them since the 90's because there are no viable alternatives and every time I call AT&T they refuse to tell me which areas they serve fiber in. years ago I was once told by an agent that they have an agreement with Cox that they confirm or deny given a specific address but they cannot tell callers which area they have fiber in.

So I tolerate them because the alternative is clearly worse.

That's not loyalty, that's lockin. I'd absolutely drop them in a heartbeat if the alternative was reasonable close in performance.

Tolerance is a good way to look at it. +1

Clickbait title. Nothing in this (pretty vapid) article refers to 'burning it all down'; according to the article, a person leaves, complains, stays quiet and hopes for the best, or stays quiet and distances themselves from 'it'. The piece is just an overly-wordy, high-level summary. It was bad enough that I ran it through a ChatGPT detector and the worst bits (affluent parents section) got picked up as AI-written.

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