The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
Though from a stoic perspective the only thing that can affect your self worth are your own actions, not external events which you have no control over.
If everybody thinks well of me, then I should probably think well of myself. If everyone thinks badly of me, then I'm probably not worth very much. So goes the logic.
So social media is tearing up peoples' self image, not just because of put-downs and deliberate trolling, but mostly because everyone is putting forward the best version of themself that they can, and we compare that, not to the version of ourselves that we put forward, but to the reality of ourselves, and we lose in comparison.
And that's the problem with self-worth-by-comparison. There's always someone against whom you lose, in some aspects. Richest man in the world? Yeah, but that other guy has a bigger yacht, and we use yachts as measuring sticks.
That's true of all of life, but social media amplifies it. We can see more people faster to compare ourselves to, and they can present a fake image more convincingly.
He did and we’re still reading them to this day.
I honestly cannot tell whether this is satire or if I just don’t want to be on this planet anymore.
For example, you wrote this comment. It is a well written comment. You likely have some belief roughly along the lines of "I write reasonably well". You have probably received feedback along those lines throughout life, and that reinforces that belief. This is perhaps mildly pleasing or at least seems correct.
Now suppose instead that whenever you wrote things people replied:
"Huh?"
"What? This makes no sense"
"Good god what led you to think that? That's so stupid!"
And so on. And you even reread some of your own writings that you thought were good and they seem to strike you as not good. The view that your writing is not good comes to strike you as correct. You aim to improve but continue to receive negative feedback. The view that you are genuinely not good at writing seems to be correct and you come to believe you cannot ever be good at writing.
That would be negative self worth. Does this example line up at all with any internal thought processed you have? Are you pleased by praise or hurt by criticism? Even to the level of thinking the judgements are correct or incorrect.
(To be clear you are good at writing)
A lot of people's minds are raised from a young age to make judgements and comparisons with others. Their minds are told that one must be useful to be valuable, and that simply _being_ isn't enough.
Over time those bad habits of the mind are so ingrained and automatic that we assume them to be part of "me". "My" thoughts, "my" ideas and so we don't question their assumptions or where they came from.
It takes conscious effort to be able to change those habits into something more positive, or to be able to center your mind to a point where those habits seen as just other thoughts and don't have the same "weight" behind them.
We're an ever changing process and being able to judge and adjust is a useful skill. It's just that doing that doesn't require all of the crap we put ourselves through due to unchecked assumptions.
Even diogenes the cynic who scorned society reproached himself when shown he was not meeting his own standard as well as he could. He lived simply and had but a cup to drink from. Then he saw a child drinking from a stream and smashed his cup in frustration at not having thought of the child's simpler approach.
Anyway my comment was aiming at illustration what high self worth or lack thereof may feel like, rather than what one should do.
To interact a little more with the substance. I don't think I understand what you're saying. You're clearly using the concept when you write
>I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything
That's what negative self-worth is. You seem to understand it fine. self-worth is your subjective assessment of how much you are worth. The self's assessment of the "worth" (whatever you choose to load into that term) of the self.
How do you know this is not true?
If your sense of obligation is seen as a value function for people, it follows that your self-worth is the value when you plug-in "self". Helping others and volunteering is indeed something that brings satisfaction and could help heal your sense of self-worth. If you value another person higher than yourself, by helping them you would establish a connection between their worth and your own. You potentially went from lacking any evidence of positive self-worth to having concrete first-hand evidence that you are worth something to someone.
years of therapy :-)
the opposite is also demonstrably false - there's people with huge self-esteem who are known for their complete disdain for others or their opinions.
I guess universally it may not be true, but I suspect for some it very well could be. Just depends on the value function you ascribe to (knowingly or unknowingly).
It should also be said that this topic is more complex than these simple models. I've heard it described that Narcissists essentially refute the evidence rather than allow it to poke a hole in their bubble of self-worth; All of that to say, there are many moving pieces beyond just how you value things that add up to your self-worth.
A simple mundane example would being going to the gym if you tell yourself you will.
A more complex example would be acting in accordance with the values you believe in or not. If you think people that kick dogs are terrible, but you yourself go around kicking dogs, this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance and low self worth. If you promise yourself to stop, but keep breaking that promise, you realize you cant be trusted, which also impacts self worth.
However if it is the very cycle itself that increases the effort necessary for breaking out of it, how tied to self-worth is it for different people? When one is the subject and the researcher or the judge, defendant, and prosecutor simultaneously - it can be much more challenging to locate the anchor to which self-worth is tied.
I feel a very strong ethical obligation to our children. I often worry about whether I've met that ethical obligation to them.
But when I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about our kids, and what I have done and failed to do – I'm not thinking about "self worth". I feel guilty about some things – whether I should or I shouldn't – but my mind doesn't associate those feelings with the phrase "self worth".
One thing that I have struggled with in relationships is that others need to feel validated, that their decisions are rational and that other people believe that they are rational. Stimulus from the outside to satisfy the inside.
What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve. I think this ties into self worth which seems to be related to people’s perception of their actions and the approval they see from others. If you do not need external validation then you are not concerned about peoples perception of you and therefore self worth is a foreign concept.
Although it's also tangential to the essay, which is about the mechanisation of self-image - not just sell-worth, but identity in general.
Which has always been socially imposed (even on those who are sure they're different). But now it can be directed algorithmically by a very small number of actors, who have the power to apply behaviour and value modification tools that can be individually tailored for everyone in a demographic - in ways which most people aren't even aware of.
"Low self-esteem" is just one the effects.
I had it from childhood to a much larger extent than any of my peers, even though it diminished as I grew older.
Part of it I think is blows to my self-confidence, part is that when you have casual light social connections (school, the in-person workplace, I now wfh) you get this sense of people pseudo-caring about you.
But once that wanes (age and wfh) and you have you put effort into getting even the smallest amount of care from others. Which, in turn requires vulnerability.
I think you are conflating a lack of need for validation and the ability to self-validate.
It’s not that you don’t need any validation, it’s that you have the ability to provide yourself with the validation you need.
Don’t take that for granted. It’s both something to be proud of and a reminder that you aren’t so different from others.
This almost made me laugh. I know where you're at. You got a long road ahead so get started! Tell your psychologist when these things pop in your head. Have a laugh, but then reflect on it or whatever.
Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder). There are many things, but it's not super important to define it, lest you let it define you.
You are right, except in my case I’m pretty sure it is more autistic than any of those - our children do X/Y/Z and professionals tell us “those are signs of autism” (one child diagnosed, the other not yet formally but the paediatrician is convinced she has it and on the waiting list for an assessment) and (for many but not all of them) I’m thinking “what do you mean that’s a sign of autism? I was like that when I was a kid too, some of them I am even still like that”
One is what I think of as the neurotypical way. They spend a lot of energy on social modeling, on fitting people into hierarchies of privilege. (E.g., "respecting your elders", older sibling vs younger, teachers vs students, the popular kids, and so many other things.) Then in the same way they're judging the worth of others, they fit themselves into the same primate status model.
I think that's what the psychologist is talking about. Personally, I find that way not super useful.
But another way is sort of reverse engineering. From how person X treats themself, what can we learn about how much they value their own self? Like you, I didn't have much of a concept of self-worth in the sense of "where do I place myself in the many hierarchies most people around me are constantly aware of." But a therapist eventually got me to see that I did not treat myself as worth the same as the people around me. Paying attention to that has improved my life a lot.
The big question for me is to what extent the latter thing is influenced by the former. For neurotypical people I gather the link is pretty strong. For me it's definitely a weaker link, but it's hard to tell the difference between "there is no link" and "I don't notice the link".
The reason I assume what the psychologist meant is that most of them are neurotypical, and neurotypical people are deeply invested in social primate dynamics. I understand that this is hard for neurotypical people to see, but you might read things like DeWaal's "Chimpanzee Politics" or Johnson's "Impro" [1]. Plus there's my personal experience, where psychologists are very inclined to talk about self-worth in the social sense. And I think that's fine; I'm sure it works well for their neurotypical patients.
[1] particularly the section on status transactions, which are vital for authentic theater performances, but are rarely articulated because it's so natural to neurotypical people
While some types of non neurotypical people don't automatically spend their mental energy on such thoughts and analysis. That is maybe why 'self worth' feels a strange term to them. They simply are who they are and will not try to come across as this or that type of person (helping, smart, empathetic, strong character etc) . Neurotypical people hence find the way they come across weird.
To you, it seems the best way to achieve self-improvement is to maximize your value to others, i.e. by moving up the social hierarchy. But that doesn't imply that those who don't play the game have no worth, does it?
I think you are conflating a sense of happiness with a sense of worth. They are not necessarily the same.
For example I occasionally find myself in conflict with an acquaintance over a miscommunication. If after explaining the underlying conditions the other individual refuses to adjust their perception of me, I couldn't care less. That's their problem, not mine, even if they continue to spread their (possibly vile) misperceptions.
Now if I had sucked up to them perhaps, yes, I would have improved my life. But what I did not do was reduce my self-worth.
As long as I'm mentioning things that helped, I'll recommend this online alexithymia test: https://www.alexithymia.us/test-alexithymia
It looks at ability to perceive one's own feelings. Once I realized that I was relatively bad at it, it was such a relief. And in the years since I've gotten a lot better, because I knew I needed to work harder at it than the average person.
[1] If that rings a bell for anybody, I'd love to know!
People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.
People with a strong drive not attached to financial gain are often termed unambitious.
Your perceived worth really depends on values of society, so if you remove yourself from the equation, you only have no worth to others, not to yourself. Sequestered from others the sense of self has no meaning, so naturally you have no self-worth. Not because you are worthless, but because you have no self and place no importance on your perceived worth.
Or more strongly phrased, what's the point of self-worth if you can do everything you put your mind to?
I'd you can't but think you can, then that's a harmful psychological schism. Since no one person can achieve everything, self-worth is only meaningful in areas for which you lack competency
For example - and this deals not with self-worth but with stress - I'm pretty inflexible in my goals. When I can't meet my goals I tend to shut down. I'm often asked if I'm stressed, to which I can only respond, "Stress - what's that?". And yet clearly I've suffered a harmful schism between my perception of self and reality, as indicated by my lack of stress response.
My willingness to share their perception of me being ineffective was quite damaging to my self esteem. I never felt successful due to lack of acknowledgment of my achievements.
They asked me to leave the house about a year ago. Once I met new people and they saw me as successful and fun my self worth improved.
But just because you are detached from societal values doesn't imply you should be detached from people. I can't enumerate the intangibles I get by surrounding myself with others. I perform better, I have better ideas, I feel more alert. I've never been able to understand why as I never gain any objective aid. Does unexpected input promote flexible thinking? Am I inspired by differing worldviews to think outside the box. Or is it simple happiness? No idea.
- random stranger
I wish I had been kinder with my description of the less flexible. A better description I think is rigid and relates to others through dissatisfaction.
Utilitarianism is a moral concept. I think you just mean analytical.
That's because utilitarianism [1] is just one of the three major recognized moral systems -- virtue ethics [2] and deontology [3] being the other two.
In real life, we tend to balance the three. Anyone who adhered strictly to one while ignoring the other two would rightly be labeled a kind of amoral monster.
And utilitarianism is generally applied more at the governmental/societal level than at the individual level. At the society level, you want the greatest good for the greatest number. While at the individual level, you want to give a vastly greater good to your young children, and your spouse, rather than treating your children and strangers' children as equals, or your spouse and other adults.
Someone who, in their personal life, uses utilitarianism as their primary guide is going to rightly be called amoral and unemotional. They'd be a monster, truly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday? I wish I could say I was driven by rational assessments of my needs as a Homo Sapiens and my moral responsibilities therein, but I think I’d be lying to myself. Or, at least, it’s an eternal struggle to minimize the importance of self-worth.
"What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday?"
It's fun and it makes me happy. People in my life are smart people but they're just as flawed as I am, what they think of me also changes over time. Why would I build the foundation of my life and career on such shaky ground?
What motivates me? Certainly part of me likes it when people say I’ve done a good job. Again I don’t mentally link that feeling with a concept called “self-worth”. But often also I get motivated by the pleasure of the work in itself - when I really get hooked on a program, I find improving it is something I enjoy as an end-in-itself
I now understand self-worth in a new way. I had to realize that there was plenty of time to slow down and be deliberate. I had to get to point where I could take the time I needed to do a task.
I have no idea how others can find self worth but for me I describe it as being comfortable.
What's wrong with basing your worth on something like value provided professionally plus value provided personally, to myself and others?
Are we supposed to think that we are valuable (worth something) just because we exist?
Of course if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker or a burger flipper, and your labor is completely fungible and provides low monetary remuneration, then you would judge yourself as low(er) value in comparison. So determining your self-worth via other properties makes a lot more sense huh?
We can create value through more things than what we do for a job. It’s true!
Of course, having said all that, I am personally dismayed by the state of Christianity in our world. Institutional Christianity has done and continues to do tremendous harm in the world so I am sympathetic to your perspective. Indeed, I am most upset because I find the way that many nominally Christian institutions behave to be directly contrary to the their own sacred texts. The hypocrisy is almost unbearable. But I would encourage everyone reading this to withhold judgment of other's faith practices and/or self-identification until you understand where they are coming from rather than lumping them in with the worst exemplars of their nominal affiliates.
"You are a worthless sinner, a transient cloud of mortal dust, with a soul that is in danger of an eternity of torment. Unless you - you know - do what we tell you."
As marketing pitches go, it seems pretty straightforward.
That said, my personal feeling is that Christians (at least where I live) these days mostly focus on what to do right themselves (to be a self worthy God loved person) rather than saying what others are not doing right.
It was even more powerful in an era when the gods were vengeful in their retribution and/or capricious in their favor. I'm not saying I like it or agree with it, but it does really bring some form of comfort to people, which is why it spread so far and lasted for so long.
Most people assume there is such thing as a "self" and that it is okay, natural, and desirable to preference yourself when interacting with other people. Indeed, for most normies, there is only various people and their selves interacting. My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world, various roles that people happen to occupy, and here are my options for where I can slot into it, might as well choose the best one, but it never occurred to me that the other people in the system could be individually influenced or that you could preference your self over others. At least, until I interacted with others enough to realize that that was all they were doing.
Relatedly, most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda. As a result, the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance, as preferencing themselves and their worldview over everybody else. But to an aspie, there is no such thing as arrogance, because arrogance implies that one preferences their self-worth over others, and there is no such thing as "self" or "worth", and it is nonsensical to talk about self-importance.
Of course, this might be my lack of insight into the aspie mind. But self-interest is highly evolutionarily favourable, and is built into our brains from very early in our evolutionary history - from the first organisms that had brains.
Ayn Rand wrote a book The Virtue of Selfishness - of course, if she views selfishness as virtuous, she is going to claim that virtue for herself
Back to the realm of the more mainstream: a lot of people will admit they act selfishly sometimes - including me. I think you got to look after yourself, but you also should look out for other people - but if you go overboard on being selfless, you can start to be drained, and need to allow yourself a bit of selfishness to recharge.
I think what we really need is a healthy balance between selflessness and selfishness. And that’s the ideal I am for. But do I always get the balance right? I’m sure I don’t, sometimes I go a bit too far in one direction, other times a bit too far in the other.
I think what I’m saying here is pretty prosaic. Not everyone is going to agree, but heaps of people will.
And I'd like to present you with a different perspective.
You write that "My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world".
But it's important to realize that the "system of the world" you've developed is from your perspective exclusively. You are modeling everybody in your system, and you may be doing your best to be 100% objective and not push your own agenda.
However, your model is lacking because you can model your own "role" far better than anybody elses "role" -- you know your own preferences and desires with great accuracy, but not other people's. And you'll likely unconsciously assume that other people's preferences and desires as the same as yours, until proven otherwise.
You write "the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance". But what if it has nothing to do with broad sweeping systems, but the fact that your observations are extrapolating too much from your own preferences/desires that you are projecting onto others without realizing it?
So the perceived "arrogance" may not be what you describe as an inappropriate reaction that you are bringing an agenda to things. But may actually be an appropriate reaction to the fact that you're making too many assumptions in your "observations about broad sweeping systems" that the systems in your head are reality, when they are not.
When I have conversations with really smart people who come across as arrogant, it's not usually because they are being overly objective. It's because while their logic and deductions may be 100% correct, it's their starting assumptions that are wrong, which usually assume that other people have the same preferences/desires as themselves. But sometimes it's really hard to understand just how different people can be.
Honestly, I'd say literature and fictional works generally come the closest to that. Sitting down with a novel written by someone from a vastly different background from yours is kind of the closest you can get to seeing the world through someone else's eyes.
Obviously not spy thrillers and the like, but novels that are more about real life.
Another really interesting resource is some of the podcasts that do ~hour-long interviews with famous people and really dig into their childhood, motivations, etc. Dax Shephard is particularly good at this. Discovering how vastly different people's backgrounds are, the big choices they made in life, and the unexpected factors that contributed to those choices.
I have generally heard this as "All models are wrong, but some are useful" which is attributed to the statistician George E. P. Box.
I have a theory (not claiming to have invented it, just something I often think about) that most people have a strong tendency to assume that other people think the same way they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic
In order to access our hyper modern comfort you’re only asked to contribute something frivolous like clocking in at a record store or writing something that will entertain some people as they enjoy their morning tea. That we increasingly measure contribution, although terrifying in many ways, is also a more just way to compensate contributions. This article seems to yearn for a more political system that would allow her to indulge her creative passion at her whimsy without accountability to the reality of if anyone wants those outputs. A very self serving system indeed.
But again what great fortune to be alive today in a wealthy western political zone. To be able to entertain this fantasy.
In particular the Industrial Revolution but he himself sees an ideal world basically void of technology. That the revolution should strive to destabilize industrial society enough to force its collapse.
I think he has many interesting observations that are really worth exploring. He also predicted a lot of things more or less. But end of the day life is what you make of it. You don’t really have to participate in modern society. And people have always had existential problems and a desire to find meaning, even if they had less time to ponder it (and possibly be antagonized by it) because they were tending a field, etc. They probably had a long time to think about it as an infection slowly ate its way through their body causing immeasurable pain over days or weeks.
The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.
Almost all of our historic writings wrestling with the higher levels of the pyramid came from social elites, and now vast swaths of humanity are able (or forced) to wrestle with these tough questions.
Many people seem to be avoidant and running from these tough questions to their own detriment, but culture takes time to adjust.
I think your points about levels of self fulfillment and satisfaction are strong evidence that the destination state of Brave New World is unstable equilibrium at best. Most people being miserable from their own existential angst is not long sustainable in an environment where the cognitive tools to overcome it exist and are available.
I think culture will adapt because I think there is a lot of selection pressure favoring being well adapted. People will look at those with fulfillment and satisfaction and emulate them. Thats what I try to do. Right now just happens be a tough time for a lot of people to identify that because we are in a period of transition.
I think people will have a much better sense of which one of us is correct 5 generations from now.
I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades.
E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1]
As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed."
> Depends on what you mean by good.
This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?)
Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it.
Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.)
All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after.
[1] core transformation process https://www.coretransformation.org/
(how embarrassing)
People want to first get fat and happy and for many that’s good enough. All the self actualization stuff comes far later.
Never mind that Goethe was the eldest of 7 children with only one sibling not dead as a child. Then going on to have have 5 children of his own. 4 that also happened to die as young children.
Modern people are so clueless we literally take the lack of dead children completely granted.
The type of person who writes this cultural word salad slop I suspect has an IQ of 100, thinks it is 140 and can't figure out what is wrong with the modern world that they are not above average in their output.
It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.
This kind of meme nonsense belongs to reddit, not here
You can switch your job as desired. Kids can’t switch their school.
You can not have a job (economic consequences aside). You can’t not be in school.
They didn’t choose to be there and if they hate it, the main way out is waiting.
You can OBVIOUSLY it be in school. No country on earth forces kids to join any school (let alone to attend it).
Most people didn’t choose to be at their jobs and hate it, the main way out is waiting for retirement.
It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.
I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.
The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.
Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.
You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.
That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.
you answered it yourself.
What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?
_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)
In one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, he talks about the emotional impact of looking at one's portfolio performance. If you do it rarely, like quarterly or annually, it'll generally be a positive experience. If you do it day by day, you'll have quite a lot of negative experiences. Because we're wired for loss aversion, we'll weight those negative experiences more highly. The same facts, presented differently, have very different impacts.
If I'm doing my own thing, like the author was with roller skating, my basis for comparison is me. There will be ups and downs, but more of the former, because we can't help but learn. But as you say, the bigger group I rank myself against, the more those experiences will be negative. I also think the bigger groups discourage camaraderie, because the declining chance of future interaction means smaller rewards for collaboration and support.
>> When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours [...] One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating [...] Soon after, I stopped skating.
Seems like the author struggled with comparison before the internet, like the grandfather comment said.
Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".
One thing importantly different about our age is context collapse. With communication costs and marginal costs near zero, a global service is easier and cheaper to build than local ones with equivalent coverage. It's as if we've taken every ecosystem in the world and dumped it onto the San Francisco peninsula to fight it out to discover "the truth" about what plants and animals are "best".
What's different about those small locales and villages is that each one of them naturally had its own values. Skills and tastes co-evolved. Schools of thought were born and elaborated. Communication and movement between locales gave useful exchange and inspiration, but generally weren't enough to swamp variation.
In the pre-web era, the question of, say, whether Irish music was better than Spanish music would be seen as kind of a dumb question to take any more seriously than for an entertaining argument. But having put everything in Meta's global blender and reduced it to counting updoots, the ever-present metrics purport to provide "the truth" to questions like that.
They don't, of course. But they do place a much larger burden on us to recognize that not everything that goes up and to the right is an unalloyed good.
Does that mean the internet and digital advances are bad? No, it just means we were unprepared for them in a very meaningful way.
I don't see how digital technology diminishes that in relative comparison.
When compared with a pool of 40 million, that doesn't seem like much to be proud of.
Things are complicated today. Doing what's always been done is not enough, you need to do better. Having a job is not enough, we no longer view jobs as purpose.
Especially in tiny peasant villages in pretty much every country, except maybe Switzerland and some Polynesian islands.
You dont even have to go that far into the past, you can simply talk to anyone who lived prior to the internet.
pick something like skateboarding. The best skateboarder in 100 kids could shock and impress peers with tricks they had never seen.
Pick a given subject, the best expert someone would be exposed to was very limited.
Happily married right now. Feel free to email me to exchange some career advice for dating advice.
You made dating easy by fully revolving your life around it for some period? That sounds very interesting - mind sharing the bullet points with everyone?
Cold approaching respectfully is a small course on its own, especially since I deviate from standard advice because I test what works for me. TL;DR: approach respectfully (safe and it’s nice) yet playfully or curiously (fun and not boring).
Online dating: enhance your pictures with AI as if it is the best picture of you ever taken. Test this with a few throwaway dates by telling them that your pictures were edited. Bonus points if they aren’t deterred by it (it means they can take candor). If they are, well it was a throwaway date anyway. Have throwaway dates in general. These are dates with women you genuinely like but you test certain things. All the things you test should have a screening effect (aka if they like it, it means they match you better), that’s how you make testing things ethical. Also, use an autoswiper and don’t get caught doing it.
What helps: meditation, social courage (better than confidence as my confidence is quite low but my courage is crazy high), studying charisma (as it pertains to your personality).
That’s a very short tl;dr. I am probably missing things. Feel free to email to chat about it. I desperately need career advice for in the EU.
Or when changing eating habits in general like eating less meat or consuming less dairy.
It’s not entirely about changing the industry, a part of it is just integrity.
How many of us will not be our authentic selves in a comment because of fear of how others might react? I know that I have done this.
I don't owe the world my true self
If you're considering HN from a forum perspective, the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason). Reddit is the same. You rack up 'karma' so that you can afford to take some downvotes for speaking your mind.
Now, the other dynamic is that some people here expect to see and work with other HN folks in the real world. THAT is more chilling, and I don't think one could be one's 'authentic self' in that instance unless you're already a 'name' who doesn't need to give a rip about others' opinions.
That's not really correct; downvotes on HN hide your comment and it eventually becomes dead (it can also become dead if super-users flag it); then it will only be visible for users who are logged in and have explicitly opt-in in seeing dead comments.
So no, you can't use your karma to go against the hive mind on HN, your comment will just be flagged and hidden completely.
Respectfully, I know nobody here and you all mean nothing to my life, which is much broader than what I post here, so what do your judgements matter to me? What do these points actually mean that I should choose not to be myself because of them? The answer, to both, is nothing.
I tend to get grumpy when an expected one happens, there are many unwritten rules on HN.
I tend to defend against imagined arguments with my statements, and against corner cases far, FAR too much. Getting those imagined arguments wrong doesn't help either.
I do notice that things that are inconvenient but true tend to take a hit, then rise back over time, so that's a good thing.
Does this really happen? Or maybe just in the USA?
Why would I, as a customer, care about server's follower count? Is it somehow correlated with their performance?
But a similar thing has been part of the service industry for a long time - attractive and charismatic people will often get the best shifts, even if they're not necessarily the hardest working or best at the other aspects of the job. I suspect if such a thing around the followers is happening now, it's just the a new manifestation of the same underlying cause.
It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example.
It's absolute brain rot.
chicken/egg of course, but the question people – especially technologists – should be asking is: is that really helping society progress? I would argue, like this article does, that it isn't and is indeed harming society by atomizing and attempting to quantify behavior in the name of 'choice' which of course is a non-sequitur. The commercial engines should be in service of humanity and enrichment, not the other way around. A brilliant writer isn't a social media maven, nor should they be.
I don't think that's accurate. It might be useless from the perspective of the system, but hugely advantageous from the perspective of the individual. When a co-worker hacks the metrics and gets the promotion, that might be bad for the company but it is great for them, and perhaps bad for you.
The same is true for sales, search engines, and social interactions.
I agree with your first point that the proxies are not true reflections, but don't see where this is peace of mind when someone loses out because of them. If anything, I think it would Foster anger that the system is rigged, basically the opposite of Peace of mind
(A) i don't visit sites that have "Followers"
which i can probably afford to do because:
(B) unlike writing or waitservice, where one's market is huge numbers of people who each are only willing to pay a little, my skills interest few, but those few are willing to pay a lot.
So I agree they get some reward from the writing. (Like all writers do, and like we can all do just as well with a journal.) But the part I just quoted is clearly part of the reward function, and just as clearly the total reward increases with others seeing it. Which on HN is controlled by upvotes.
If I were to say something like "life depends on water", the connotation is that water is a necessary condition. You wouldn't use depends if the dependency is situational e.g. "life depends on shoes". Shoes might be the difference between life and death in some situations, but irrelevant in others.
That is to say, if a factor is a poor predictor of the outcome, but perhaps correlated, depends seems misleading.
Even in your sense of the term, I think I was correct to say that HN "depends so heavily on the upvote". It's a fundamental constituent of how this place works.
But I'd also argue that even in the person I'm replying to later in the chain, it's a reasonable thing to say "describing a reward function that depends on the upvote" with your sense as well. If a person just wants to write, they can write in their journal or type in the reply box and then just close the tab. I do that sometimes here. If they actually click reply, then it's pretty clear their expected value for that involves somebody seeing the text. And the amount of that visibility is strongly determined by the upvote.
We share this privilege. My wife doesn't, though, and she and I have fundamentally different interactions with social media.
For her, it's a necessary evil to some extent - the nature of her profession demands that she's tuned into hot trends. That's a visible connection between her profession and her social media relationships. The invisible connections are much harder to identify, and you bring up an interesting point. I can't conceive of a company looking up your instagram account just to see how many followers you have, but maybe that's a thing. I wouldn't know.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
working, object and sale have nothing to do with art even if these terms are the endpoint of looking at the world for so many people.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
>There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
If your perception of yourself is firmly attached to the collective projections imposed by governments, ideology, religion, or any form of group thinking, you are cooked.
In times like this, one must find the connection with nature and take action. Get out from the cities. Search places with enough water and option of growing your food locally. Be prepared for this activity to be outlawed under the Global Climate Emergency act, which the UN is ready to activate under the command of elite families and their servants in governments, military, and science institutions.
In essence, when your money is truly worth nothing and your life is driven by debt, you are a slave for life.