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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.

We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.

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I think that's a little too cynical about culture in the past decades and also underestimating how much curated stuff is being shoved down our throats now. It's not really discovering, it's consuming what ever some ml model from one of the few big tech companies decides you should see.

I have become immunized to algorithmic content curation, I dont know exactly why that happened, but understanding how it works at a surface level I think helped. Im curious if thats a widespread phenomena or not, I suspect it is.

Or, you became aware of the most aggressive aspects of algorithmic curation, feel you are immune now, while not knowing the more subtle ways it has influenced your internalized thinking the past 5 years.

Yea, maybe. Though you can put me on youtube and ill scoll for maybe 15 secondsbefore leaving or searching for the specific content I want. Twitter, facebook, instagram, whatever it is I dont have the interest.

Since I'm way out of step with what most people think, I'm not too concerned about that.

I'm curious how you know what most people think?

Sort of like my dad, a professor of finance, who had a student remark to him "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"

I get similar responses. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on HN who understands how free markets work.

For example, most people would say that hard work leads to success. This is incorrect. It's creating value that leads to success. I very rarely hear the latter, in fact, pretty much never.

When I was a kid, I made some pocket money by mowing lawns. None of my customers ever asked me how I was going to do it, or how hard I worked at it. They did not give a damn. They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.

I can guarantee you that you're neither the only person, on HN or elsewhere, that "understands how free markets work" (if anyone can every truly fully understand a complex emergent system), nor are most people incapable of realising that hard work only pays off when you create value - it's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there.

So why am I the only one on HN pointing these things out, and legions of HNers telling me I'm wrong?

> t's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there

A lot of people are disappointed because hard work got them nowhere. It's because they weren't working on things that other people valued.

For example, the hardest job I ever had was working for the city maintaining the sidewalks. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. The job paid minimum wage, because the work had little value to it.

The jobs I've had since paid a lot more, and the work wasn't hard. It was just that the work was much more valuable.

> most people incapable of realising

I never said they were "incapable". I said they think differently.

> you're neither the only person

Of course there are other people that understand them. It's just that they are rare.

I'll give you some unsolicited advice: You come off as rather arrogant and I would suggest reflecting on it.

The idea that "legions of HNers" are telling you you're wrong sounds like confirmation bias. I basically see the same old discussion about free markets vs. market regulation every day on HN and it's not as if there was ever a clear-cut consensus. Maybe somewhat expectedly, radical positions such as "markets should be 100% unregulated" or, conversely, ones espousing something close to communism are comparatively rarer than ones in the middle (most people don't tend to have radical views), but that doesn't mean you can't see them often enough here (ok, maybe I haven't seen communist takes here that often, but definitely libertarian ones).

More importantly, even if everybody was disagreeing with you, it could be that they're right and you're wrong. Or that nobody is right or wrong because it's a matter of opinion. I haven't seen you take that option seriously, instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets

> You come off as rather arrogant

I know.

> instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets

When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.

> When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.

It may not be obvious, but buying and selling land and resources for personal gain is somewhat novel in the history of humanity.

Basing the entirety of society and law on the notion of a single person being able to own a piece of the earth, which they are allowed to deny others access to if they like, is unique to our particular time and culture.

One could say with a fair amount of certainty that a 'commune' aka a village or tribe is the basis of the vast majority of the human experience.

> When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.

You have completely failed to understand what I was trying to say, instead quoting something out of context.

I'm assuming the reason why you get so much pushback is not because of your unpopular opinions but because you don't know how to debate properly.

> They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.

That may have been true for you, but it won't be true for everyone. Sometimes we really do value the work that went into something and that will have an influence on what we pay for it. It's why people will pay for an orchestra instead of a laptop and some software. Its why people will pay extra for "handcrafted artisanal" items that could easily be pumped out by slaves in a factory overseas and sold for much much less. The large amount of effort involved is a big part of the charm for a lot of art forms.

Sometimes hard work can result in success. Some people produce a lot of value but never see success. Some people manage success without doing anything of value at all. Some fail upwards and gain success while actually producing negative value. If we could really reduce the formula for success down to a catchy soundbite there'd be a lot more successful people in the world.

> …most people would say that hard work leads to success.

I don’t think most people would agree with that these days. I know most of the people around me wouldn’t

Indeed, a lot of people in America believe that there is no path to success. It's a very popular notion on HN. Another thing I'm in a small minority of is pointing out that adults of sound mind and body in America are capable of success.

> adults of sound mind and body in America are capable of success.

You are in a minority because of those caveats. 'Sound mind and body' and 'success' are vague enough to lend themselves to many interpretations and act as an escape hatch you can jump out of when someone points out any one of numerous exceptions to that statement.

You and I both know what these conventionally mean, and the overwhelming bulk of American adults are of sound mind and body, and you know that, too.

I don't know what it means; that's the whole point. I want a specific definition. I'll start with a question: Is a pregnant woman of 'able body'? Is a person who speaks english as a second language 'of sound mind'? Is a person who grew up in a place with very poor schools and who had to drop in high school to take care of their aged mother 'of sound mind and body'? Expound on the reasons please.

Sorry, I'm not interested in semantic arguments.

Have you considered that your 'different' ways of thinking may be flawed if they can't stand up to a little bit of dissection?

> It's creating value that leads to success.

No. You need to also be in a position to capitalize on it. There also has to be no value add involved. You can profit from destroying value ...

You see, you think very differently from me, and your opinion on this is mainstream.

I’m pretty skeptical that it’s possible to be immune to algorithmic content curation. It seems more than a little bit like the people who say “hey, mainstream media is all biased, but that’s not a problem for me because I’ve found the sources that are actually true”. How do you choose which content to watch and how does that process exclude algorithmic curation?

I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing content that is served up by algorithm but by finding the content that the algorithm omits. I find I then have to listen for what are truth statements, for verifiable truth statements, and sift out the emotional language. In fact, the more emotional the tone, the more intention I attribute to the engineering of it being shown to me. This has resulted in me looking at and reading what I think is garbage sometimes, but I typically find some nugget of truth in it that helps me reason about why someone would think that way. Kind of erases the left versus right thing in politics.

How do you know when you found that truth nugget?

Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?

How do you know it was excluded?

What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?

> What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?

I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).

Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.

(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)

It's the social media era equivalent to "advertising doesn't work on me, I can see right through these stupid commercials."

When I used to be on reddit there was this idea that algorithmic content curation didn't apply to us because of the upvote system. There often seems to be a similar implication (by way of omission) when these discussions come up on HN. I'm not familiar with the workings of the HN feed, I only migrated here last summer, but the reddit feed is absolutely subject to gaming and algorithmic shenanigans.

The comparison would be thinking our government is completely free from corruption and undue influence because we all have the right to vote.

I've read many books by activists, and by serious historians. After a while, you notice that the style of writing is different. The activist writers use noticeably more emotional language, draw sweeping conclusions based on flimsy evidence, have fewer cites, and no counterexamples are ever mentioned.

For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.

Do you think that is because the producers had some kind of agenda, or were they pandering to modern sentiments on those figures, or were they illustrating their own biases, or something else?

Probably all of the above, but that's just speculation. What's pretty certain is the relentless one-sided approach was no accident.

One thing I try to do is increase the amount of content I view because I explicitly requested it instead of what was being suggested to me. "Pull" instead of "Push". I don't ever log into youtube. I also have their related/recommended videos disabled, and I never see their homepage/trending stuff. They'll still put whatever random stuff they want you see in search results (usually pretty far down at least) and ultimately an algorithm determines what kinds of videos are included in any set of search results, but I do think it helps both to avoid being fed most of what they're pushing on people and (to some extent) limit the amount of time spent just mindlessly viewing youtube.

Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.

Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.

The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.

For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.

> I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.

I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.

I have people I like watching, and find other stuff I like through that persons own recommendations.

If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.

Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.

I wish I was immunized to it. By avoiding it for years I have basically 0 immunity. Hand me a phone with stock YouTube on some short and 5 minutes later I've scrolled through people dancing, some cats, shitty DIY tips, crazy sport moments, someone talking about how traveling is great etc. Luckily I'm easily distracted so any little thing is enough to snap me back to reality and have me questioning my life on why I just scrolled and watched that garbage.

It's really scary how effective it is on me. I completely understand how it's designed to work and what it's trying to do and yet it's extremely effective.

> we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.

That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.

The bonds between people are diminishing while the bonds between people and the institutions / technology is strengthening. The normal course of technological progress. This will and is already leading to widespread unhappiness and mental illness, as bonding with others is a biological need.

Concomitant is the erosion of spirituality and its replacement with other forms of tribalism. Atheists now donate to politicians at incredible rates—more than any other group.

The older I get, the more I realize that I didnt so much have a problem with the 'gatekeeping' as the 'gatekeepers'

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