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Comment by Kvakes | Hacker News Reader

It's a personal essay about how not all—probably most—technology is destined to liberate us.

Well, when all is said in done, people like to own things and other people. The form will differ, sure, but the concept stays.

How do you explain the saying 'sharing is caring'? If you're correct and people inherently enjoy the exploitation of others, how could such a saying spontaneously develop and resonate with rather large groups?

And how did the feasts of large religions develop? Things like iftar, where you communally share lots of food with both people you know and strangers, including the impoverished and disadvantaged? There ought to be quite a bit of violence involved to make such practices palatable if you're correct about this.

Because that saying originated as a US bourgeois thing, people willing to liberate themselves from really caring for the other (much poorer) people living just besides them in exchange for writing some code. Just look at the streets of San Francisco, for example, not much sharing there.

And before someone mentioning that people like Torvalds and such other open-source luminaries are not technically Americans, they’re Americans in spirit, and by this point they’ve already got either US citizenship or a US green card, not to mention the hefty comps coming via US tech colossuses (either directly or indirectly).

As the original article mentions, the secret to all this tech non-sense is to log out and experience life, while always remembering that Uncle Ted was right.

> As the original article mentions, the secret to all this tech non-sense is to log out and experience life, while always remembering that Uncle Ted was right.

That you evoke Uncle Ted shows that this is a half-measure at best.

There is a great book called The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) that talks about how cultures like that existed, and we (the Western civilization) decimated them.

Graeber's Debt has similar themes in some places too.

Don't look at what people say, look at what they do. People like feeling virtuous, but rarely act that way unless they stand to gain from it.

My experience is that if people are in an environment where helping others is socially encouraged rather than punished, most people want to help even strangers providing no benefit to themselves other than the healthy little dopamine hit. There's exceptions of course, but not enough to actually cause a problem.

Unfortunately I find there's a lot of social pressure (at least in the US) telling people that if they help others they're a rube and a mark, or worse, so help isn't normalized.

>My experience is that if people are in an environment where helping others is socially encouraged rather than punished, most people want to help even strangers providing no benefit to themselves other than the healthy little dopamine hit. There's exceptions of course, but not enough to actually cause a problem.

What they stand to gain in that situation is good standing in their peer group which is a personal gain. It's basically personal public relations management.

How often do people truly do something good without standing anything to gain? That is the true measure of innate human tendency to doing good. I'm sure there is some of that, but very little.

If I do something good because it makes me feel good, is that a selfish action or is it feedback from my 'innate human tendency'?

We are social creatures. Seeing our social group benefit is a hardwired desire, and it makes us feel good. Being recognized as a valuable member of the group also feels good, and double-dipping on the dopamine hit is what motivates people towards contributing.

Why does some states in the US punish generosity towards e.g. unhoused people if that's the case?

It's common for modern states to act violently to suppress empathy and generosity, and it's common to use the school system for the same purpose.

I wouldn't say we "like" to do it, but in a certain sense it's an existential necessity to do so.

Disagree: the DiSC personality assessment codifies dominance as a key motivator of behavior. As much as I think the DiSC assessment is just business horoscopes, I still see canonizing dominance as a response to a real impulse, along with a way to easily sell decision makers on the fact that they are, in fact, just wired differently from all those other people below them.

Now that is an acronym I haven’t seen in decades, is it still a thing?

Yup. There's probably an infinite appetite for business horoscopes that tell people what they want to hear. Just have to dress it up with a veneer of authority.

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