Cash Cows
ageofinvention.xyz
ageofinvention.xyz
“a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed, in the same way as Bakewell, Collins, &c., by this very same process, only carried on more methodically, did greatly modify, even during their own lifetimes, the forms and qualities of their cattle.”
If you breed two entrepreneurs, are you more likely to get another entrepreneur?
These days elite universities, Tinder, Twitter, and the general Internet are pushing out the tails of humanity further. Expect more outliers as time marches on.
If universal basic income is adopted, expect more negative outliers, as the barriers to entry to human reproduction plummets, and the lure to collect the child’s paycheck proves hard to resist.
My take is for the most part of the grind of these types of professions is more relatable and schedules are easier to align, but it probably also aligns on social cache/prestige to some degree.
Although at that point, do we even need the people?
As for entrepreneurship, I don't think there's a gene that encodes that :). Although heredity isn't only genetic.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.021...
Amazing that a single lifetime was able to yield measurable results.
Also reminded of the fox domestication program[0] where they were able to go from wild foxes to a dog-like domesticated breed within a decade.
>Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails (Fig. 2). Their stress hormone levels by generation 15 were about half the stress hormone (glucocorticoid) levels of wild foxes. Over generations, their adrenal gland became smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels also increased, producing “happier” animals. Over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs)
[0] https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
It's not particularly difficult to select for specific traits when you consider inbreeding (which Bakewell did) and linebreeding (same idea, but avoiding excessive coefficient of inbreeding). Arguably, changing the muscle distribution on a domestic cow given a plethora of similar domestic breeds with different muscle distribution is easier than shrinking the adrenal gland in a wild fox given only wild stock.
Not to diminish in any way Bakewell's accomplishments. He revolutionized the field of animal husbandry.
Late edit to add an example: our (big, light brown, horned) Jersey milk cow came into heat and the (smaller, oreo-colored: almost black, white band around the belly, almost black; no horns) Belted Galloway bull jumped the fence, siring a heifer with small horns, a redder black, a splotchy band, and significantly greater size. Her offspring (against a bull from the same herd, possibly her sire) are medium-dark brown with a red tinge and a splotch of white, have no horns, and are still larger. Their offspring are very dark, solid brown with obvious red in sunlight, are still larger than the non-Jersey lines, and have, in every example, excellent conformation. All this in the last 7 years. The most recent generation will calf next year. Imagine what we could do with a targeted selection program!
What’s challenging is I guess you can’t know a priori much about the actual genetics at play so at a certain point it becomes hard to know what’s simply phenotypic variance independent of genetics and what’s actually genes - it could take quite a while to be certain you’ve “converged”. Or for something more subjective/without an obvious strong genetic link, it could take a while to rule out the possibility of breeding for the trait at all.
Like for humans, I’m highly confident you could do some basic process over 10 generations to breed some ridiculously tall people. But it helps we know it has huge variance, is highly heritable, is easy to measure, and is polygenic. Probably a lot harder to try to breed “nice” people or people with thick skin. The fact dog breeders can do things like that is much more impressive IMO.
As much as I resonate with this sentiment personally, I've recently been reading the works of Byung-Chul Han, specifically "The Burnout Society", which has made me really think about how this mentality can be pretty insidious.
EDIT: not that I think this detracts from the thesis of the article itself, I just find it interesting how the author of tfa bolstered their thesis with this right away.
My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole. I don’t find it constructive. It seems like another flavor of doomerism. Capitalism is not evil— it’s incredibly ingenious and productive. We all live much better for it.
The other point is while capitalism has numerous advantages and benefits, I do think it may miss some uncosted externalities (Modern western societies have a tremendous impact on the planet which is hidden from market pressures as exploits different resources). Other examples are the cigarette companies hiding evidence about lung cancer and oil companies hiding research into climate change. If you purely select for profit and no other criteria, it can tend to nasty effects for others
When, by contrast, I'm working (perhaps against my recommendation) on something (perhaps useless) assigned to me (perhaps sub-optimally) for the (perhaps hypothetical) benefit of (perhaps faceless) others, where my motivation is entirely negative - do this, or maybe lose my job - well... Then I feel burnt out before I even start.
But figuring out how to incentivize people to self-determine their way into doing 100% of the things an organization needs to do is a real trick! Some work that still needs to be done just isn't great.
The typical approach is to use a combination of money and "skin in the game" (ownership) to cover those cases. And I think that's essentially the right approach, but this simply won't work for everyone.
And the thing is that it's super tough to separate out less fulfilling work into a distinct job role that can be more highly compensated and done by people who find that more motivating.
I think the best I've seen it work is for managers, who people already expect to be more financially compensated, to fill in these kinds of cracks. If there's something their team needs to do that just isn't getting done without them directing one of their reports to do it, can they do it themselves instead? (And maybe while they're doing it, they can be thinking about whether there is a way someone could build a tool to make it trivial to do the next time it comes up, and then they can probably get their team more excited about building that tool.)
Implied, but not directly stated: managers should be technically-capable. I also agree, but how do we incentivize that, against all of the headwinds of our industry?
Not just HN. There is a significant correlation between social media use and job burnout
Under it, a dollar is a dollar, regardless of whether earning it improved the world, left it about the same, or made it worse. Unless you make your dollars have colour[1], it falls into the traps described above.
Fortunately, all capitalist societies, to some extent, assign their dollars colour, through the process called 'regulation'. Unfortunately, the process through which it is produced is called politics, for which we have no good solutions for, and a slew of bad ones.
When coupled with the realization that "now" is more valuable than "later", you can put a price on now (interest). This leads to the finance industry, and using a small sum as leverage to borrow and invest a larger sum. Capital has value, because you can trade some capital now for more capital in the future.
While I agree rent seeking exists, it's hard to imagine the world without lending and commerce. Capitalism is the natural result of private property.
Many transactions that happen in a capitalist society are very much not transactions between peers. And those can absolutely be, and often are zero-sum, or negative-sum.
From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.
Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends, sick leave, overtime pay, company scrip, employer responsibility for worker safety, fair employment, the right to free association, the right to work without harassment... Capitalism didn't produce any of those things - it is incapable of producing them - but has fought tooth and nail, sometimes with batons and bullets against them.
Power imbalances continue to exist, the purpose of all these work-arounds to them is mitigating the harm that someone with power can inflict on someone without.
Both Sweden and USA are Capitalist but have very different views. You're critiquing an economic system as not self-fixing the flaws without proposing an alternative you would expect to do so.
I agree capitalism has flaws, but feel history has shown the flaws to be manageable.
Well regulated capitalism is the least worst of all. Even Adam Smith himself didn't imagine "the invisible hand" as some silver bullet.
Unbridled capitalism, much as the US has had since the 70s, is just the transitional period leading to feudalism.
Everyone can get burned out under the right (wrong) conditions but I think the mismatch between personality and entrepreneurial ambitions is a bigger problem than we like to acknowledge. There are a lot of people out there who want to be entrepreneurs but when it comes down to it they either don’t want to do the work required or they aren’t the type of person who can handle it.
Of course something can both energize and eventually cause burnout.
Perhaps moderation by scope and one's ability and agency is an answer? Scope: never being happy with anything seems miserable; but being unhappy with one thing is maybe good. Ability: demanding performance beyond your abilities seems discouraging, but realistic subgoals that you can make progress on is encouraging (of course, for the unknown, we can't know if it's possible or not). Agency: insisting on the actually impossible is frustrating; but again, acting within your agency is self-affirming.
i.e. just match difficulty to ability - accounting for the fact that we can know neither.
PS "successful" entrepreneurs is a small subset. Those who win a grueling competition are often, though not always, happy about it.
(For example, it is common for people take offense when some member of their group proposes an improvement.)
This contradiction was recently resolved for me by Suzuki Roshi’s statement: “You are perfect the way you are. And you could use some improvement.”
(Note: That’s a rough paraphrase. I recommend reading Suzuki Roshi’s compiled teachings – they’re very good.)
Does anyone have recommendations for those kinds of books?
Darwin himself liked it (as they advertise with the book) "The best of all natural history journals which have ever been published."—Charles Darwin
You can still get a fantastically flavorful pork chop anywhere in Japan, for example, where they didn't adopt the low-fat pig breeds. Chicken is far juicier as well. It's still just as industrialized, though.
Meat in the wild is generally gamier, which isn't what most people usually mean when they say more flavorful -- gamy flavors can be off-puttingly strong to a lot of people. I personally love those flavors occasionally, but not as an everyday thing. (Sometimes the "flavor" doesn't leave your breath/body for hours/days, it's so strong.)
I think it might be ‘gamey’?
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd...
Other forms of industrial agriculture, sure, meat, not so much.
It's time to stop thinking like you’re in a wasteland because it’s the very way to make it so.
Downside: they can get stuck on their backs and die https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guEyxTpevFo
To me it seems strange how concentrated these efforts are in some communities while seemingly silent in others. Cannabis farmers and pepper farmers nerd out about it a lot. I think dog breeders do although I suspect the existence of “institutions” like AKC and dog shows channels their efforts into ossification of existing breeds. I’m sure plenty of regular livestock breeders are trying but you don’t hear about it and they don’t seem to have done anything truly crazy in a while (that I’m aware of) to the extent Pepper/Cannabis breeders have.
Just to demonstrate what’s possible: Belyayev was able to make huge progress domesticating foxes in just 26 years [0]. Dachshunds [1] didn’t look anything like their current forms until the late 19th century (I think a lot of dog breeds saw huge changes around this time but not certain). Cannabis breeding didn’t even really start until the 1960s and we have an absolutely massive assortment of strains, not just differing in subjective “flavor” and “effects” but with quantifiable massive differences in concentration, overall volume of flower produced, and flowering behavior. Because people didn’t understand what it was, some say that the domestication of yeast [2] didn’t even start until the 16th century.
All that said it baffles me why more people aren’t trying to domesticate bears, otters, lemurs, raccoons, etc. Maybe not bears, but the rest could probably be domesticated in a human lifespan and (not bears) without many expenses year-on-year. I’ve always said I’d try this if I came into the means to do so at a young enough age. Even for medium-scale farmers of your regular-old cow, having some kind of special breed or phenotype seems like a great way to move up-market with a differentiated, unique product.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachshund
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160908130552.h...