Hacker News Reader

Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

> I think your question assumes a level of planning that simply didn't really exist. It wasn't so much about me having any particular expectations of what would happen when I made the original kernel sources available: a lot of the impetus for releasing it was simply a kind of "hey, look at what I've done".

I love that. Just a couple of guys randomly working together on something that at the time sounded like a toy.

> In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place". No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons.

And there's the cynicism we all know and love.

View on HN

I'm not sure I would call that cynicism... It reminds me of Larry Wall's three great traits of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris [1]. They're both using the negative form of a personality trait for literary effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_progra...

Are you saying selfishness is a negative personality trait?

It is. It is only our arrogant individualistic capitalist ideology which pretends otherwise. Cooperation, mutual aid, these are principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial. Biologists and anthropologists understand this. But economists think so highly of themselves that they see no need to study history or modern psychology, so they come up with equations they think describe reality, then ignore evidence which contradicts their models. The result is predictable. You get ecological catastrophe, a breakdown of social trust, and the breakdown of society itself. But oh how we lived like kings before the music stopped! Or maybe living like cancer is more appropriate, sucking up resources, growing rapidly, and fucking up system-wide dynamics. There's a reason why selfishness has historically been viewed as a negative trait, and it's instructive that a society as sick as ours lives by the mantra, "greed is good!".

Cooperation, mutual aid, these are principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial.

Those things are not incompatible with selfishness. If I'm pursuing my own self-interest, I might quite rightly choose to cooperate with my peers for mutual benefit.

Conversely, if I don't pursue my own self-interest, what exactly is the point of living at all? It's not like intelligent life serves any objective purpose or end, other than that which we individuals imbue it with.

You're right, and I attempted to clarify my thinking in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4107492

We just seem to use a shitty definition of selfishness these days.

We just seem to use a shitty definition of selfishness these days.

That's English for you, where every word seems to be overloaded with about a dozen different meanings...

The problem is, selfishness (in the negative sense) and what I would call selfishness are actually related in a sense, which makes it easy for people to slip in and out of using either meaning in conversation, and everybody winds up arguing for no reason.

I am not sure you can make the claim that cooperation and mutual aid are "principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial", nor would you find a large body of either biologists or anthropologists rushing in to support said claim.

Life on earth has gone roughly four billion years relying largely on predation, competition and survival of the fittest. I think you will find symbiosis and mutualism to be in the vast minority when quantitatively evaluating "things that work in nature".

I'm not saying that means cooperation and mutual aid are "bad". I just find it interesting when people impose their personal morals on nature.

I probably overreached in that comment. Competition and cooperation are both important, I just think that we've come to irrationally overvalue selfish tendencies, while forgetting the cooperative basis of social behaviors that have made our species so successful.

There is, as I understand it, strong support for the ideas of "Reciprocal altruism" and "kin altruism," from the evolutionary psychologists / evolutionary biologists. Game theory research[1] by Robert Axelrod[2][4] has shed some light on the nature of altruism, cooperation and competition, as has the work of Robert Trivers[3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axelrod

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation

I don't see it as cynical. Open source works when the community is able to foster a sense of economic interdependence and people get out and give in. This interdependence is perhaps a more important good than the software freedom itself, although I don't think you can get there without the software freedom (BSD licenses are no worse at this than the GPL v2 license).

If we are all better off by contributing to eachother's well being, we will do it over and over, and we will all benefit economically and even in a sense spiritually, in the sense that such a community nourishes the spirit in a way that other models don't.

Adam Smith: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Yes, but he was talking from the context of division of labor. He also believed free markets would bring prosperity only if you have equality. And on division of labor in the same book he says that division of labor 'will make a human as stupid as a creature can be'.

He predicted Javascript AND php ?

Just from examining a match factory

That is a true and good observation. Much depends on those kinds of people and those kinds of motivations.

But there are also the priests and doctors, from whom we reasonably do not expect to hear "this is all about my interest, what's in it for me?" And likewise there are many enterprises where people are doing them for reasons which do not relate to turning a profit, a category which a great deal of valuable open source development falls into.

Sure, but he doesn't say that self interest is or should be the only interest, only that markets and economic activity work best when self interest and the interests of society align.

Adam Smith wasn't a free market fundamentalist in this respect, much as the fundies would like to make out. He was very much in favour of regulation.

I like this:

"..The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [businessmen and traders], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention."

SOPA and ACTA anyone?

And he was also an all-around pretty shitty economist, and those who claim he invented economics ex nihilo are delusional. He pretty much stole all the correct parts from other economists and added some falsehoods. His diamond-water paradox for example is retarded, and a step back from previous (mostly French) economists, since it's based on the Labor Theory of Value, which later spawned Communism. When I hear people praise Adam Smith I just want to NOPE out of the room.

The "selfish motivations" may be non-financial. Priests and doctors may be motivated by helping others.

Being motivated by helping others is not a selfish motivation...

It can be. If you believe that you cannot be truly secure in your freedom and well-being unless everyone around you is also secure in theirs, then helping people could be seen as "selfish". The problem is that we use the term selfish to mean whatever dickheaded move looks like it will net us some short term benefit. Without the ability to see all the indirect consequences of these selfish actions, we don't notice that the aggregation of them actually diminishes our overall well-being. Socialism, it could be argued, is based on selfishness as well, but paired with a recognition of our limited foresight and an attendant tendency to err on the side of mutual support rather than ruthless competition.

there's the cynicism that makes America work, and why socialism sucks

So why does France work?

By the way, is it really true that France works (or that America works)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com