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Comment by hereonout2 | Hacker News Reader

> knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.

I don't understand what you're weighing this against? A job that is literally saving lives maybe, or really leading in a field of science or technology?

Most of us don't have that though, even here on hacker news. Most of us are part of a larger effort that will progress just as well without us, our personal impact is marginal at best.

I've worked in tech for two decades for a company I deem "moral" and I feel I've had impact. But I could have fitted kitchens or made wedding cakes for that time and had just as positive an impact on the world and people I serve professionally. Hell, if I was a carpenter my work could probably outlast anything I've done in tech.

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This is a point too rarely made.

Most work that produces something people are willing to pay for does make the world a better place!

Not enormously so for the vast majority of us, but what one person out of 8 billion can do.

There's an aspect of longevity to our impact I love to contemplate.

For most of us, our tech work will be long forgotten and obsolete 20 years from now. At best it will have provided some small intangible advance - hopefully for the better.

But the people that built my house died before I was born, yet their work has a tangible ongoing impact to this day.

The people who built some European cathedrals lived over 800 years ago, yet that padstone laid by some nameless apprentice still holds an entire functional building in place.

I’m not sure I buy the premise as it reads as a Libertarian pipe dream. There are just too many examples of people willing to pay for something immoral or unethical to think that transactions can be broadly painted as a net good.

Capitalist transactions are a reflection of value systems and our own shortcomings/biases. To the extent that humans are flawed, many of those transactions are going to be ethically flawed as well.

The immediate transaction normally benefits both parties, or it wouldn't happen.

So as long as it doesn't hurt any third party, it does make the world better!

It's really that's simple!

Economies are incredibly complex. We should be also be concerned with long-term and second-order effects. Humans tend toward short term bias, meaning we’ll lose out on better long term outcomes. Forgive me, but I tend to give relatively little weight to overly simplified models that try to explain complex phenomena.

This is the typical model economists use to reason about utility. It has a good track record for explaining real world phenomenons.

Your model of "things are very complicated and you can never really know" is very common, but note that it doesn't even attempt to explain anything. This leaves adherents free to assume their gut feel as fact.

I’m saying you need a more nuanced model of the world. I only agree in the premise that "you can never really know" in that every model will have some uncertainty, but some models reflect reality better than others. People like simple mental models because people don't like uncertainty. It makes us feel good because everything makes sense in a simple model. But I would not agree that rational utility models work well in practice. Behavioral economics and psychology are rife with evidence that shows that rational “Homo Economicus” is a fiction used to make economists lives easier, not to make the models better reflect reality.

You are in agreement with the comment you're responding to.

Being generous, I’m maybe in agreement if the word “most” gets some clarification or nuance.

Fair enough. Easy to paint w broad strokes here.

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