You are a good person if | Hacker News Reader

You are a good person if

geohot.github.io

35 pointsgalfarragem12 comments

> But at the end of your life, total it all up. You should have produced more than you consumed. That’s what it means to be a good person.

Summing up one's life in terms of "production" and "consumption" is such a broken way of looking at things.

I will be kind to people. I will be patient with them. I will try to help them. I'll try to make the world a better place in all the little ways I can. How much or how little I "produce" has no bearing on whether my life will be weighed as good or bad.

And since we're quoting incredible TV shows...

"The success or failure of your deeds does not add up to the sum of your life. Your spirit cannot be weighed. Judge yourself by the intentions of your actions, and by the strength with which you faced the challenges that have stood in your way. The Universe is vast and we are so small. There is really only one thing we can ever truly control... whether we are good or evil." - Oma Desala, Stargate SG-1

I’ve never seen anything more eloquent on good or evil than Dungeons and Dragons. Putting others before yourself is good. Putting yourself before others is evil. And everyone lives somewhere on that sliding scale.

There is a reason religions tend to agree on 1) the worth of your life is not your own to judge and 2) what makes humans moral is they have free will - good or evil is found in the places you can control, even and maybe especially when it's hard.

Because otherwise you make morality a game and people are distracted from the deeds by the point system (The Good Place is another good TV show that has a funny satire of this).

> I will be kind to people.

If you look at it as "producing goodwill" (an intangible asset) it still fits his axiom.

I considered that, but I think it's a stretch to think that's what they meant - they were clearly referring to actual tangible assets and labor. To be sure there is some merit in what he's saying, but I take great issue with the framing; it seems to me to almost be contradictory to outline the issues with society brought on by, what he calls, the "unproductive elites", while simultaneously framing the success of one's life in a consumerist way.

Yes, and we should factor in a $ amount per child you’ve had, also subtract a $ amount per time you yell at said child. Also how much should a compliment given to a stranger be worth? Should the value be different if it’s in sincere?

The important point is that it’s the net sum at the end that qualifies if you are a good person! If you help out 1000 people and have 12 kids, but also you contribute to a racially motivated genocide, you’re still a good person as long as the net $ sum at the end is positive. /s

Absolutely everything about the idea seems wrong. Both the idea that it’s all about accounting and the idea that you can ascribe a definite value to actions that should sum to some moral statement.

So what "axiom" do you propose instead?

In February 2022 the fed funds rate was 0.08. In October 2022 it was up to 3.0. From November 2022 to January 2023 Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce laid off tens of thousands of people. They were no more or less productive then the day before they were laid off. At this time hiring basically stopped for everybody, and wages did not keep up with inflation. So this affected all SWE'S on some level. Nothing happened to their productivity, the system just changed.

Some say some of these people never should have been hired to begin with and they weren't being productive, but that was just another anomaly of the system.

Some defend the system and so-called market at every turn, with workers racing around to be productive at its whims, but it kind of becomes like Calvinists trying to satisfy a fickle god to ensure their salvation.

The unproductive, parasitic heirs at the top use the unproductive business cycle crises endemic to their system to discipline workers - jacking up unemployment and freezing wages.

I look at the new Acela trains in the US, currently slower than the old ones, the power problems and RFK Jr's new health mandates, and I compare them to China's five year plans, high speed rails, solar and wind rollout and capacity, and wonder where the US will be in a few decades, or even one decade.

Wow, I think I might just have a fundamentally and axiomatically different worldview from this guy. American society is oriented almost entirely towards productivity, to the detriment of all else. The owner class has made it their personal mission to squeeze the population for all the productivity they can. It required government intervention to end, for example, slavery and child labor. Billionaires, especially the "productive" ones, are actively hollowing out the country for their benefit. I think it is astronomically rare, if not impossible, to acquire One Billion dollars without unethical behavior.

I cannot comprehend the connection between productivity and democracy that he tries to draw here. So there is some nebulous productivity score, and if you have a negative number, then democracy is over? Nobody can vote? What happens? And being a good person is stapled exclusively to productivity? The only value a person brings to the world is whether they've been "net positive"? This is a remarkably narrowminded conception of personal virtue, discounting relationships, classical virtues, etc., and instead crunching it all down to whether you're in the black or the red when the accountant calls.

"The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you." is a genuinely bonkers thing to think. Cahoots? Are they communicating methods to steal your hard earned "productivity" from you, or what? The "unproductive poor" are a downstream effect of a society where productivity is tied to whether or not you can stay alive.

Additionally, (but not centrally) this whole piece has a call-to-action tone to it, implying that, now the author has weighed in, everyone has to get a grip and start acting right. "Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, sales, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay." Alright everyone, I'm putting my foot down! Annoying, but not a core problem.

The strange thing is that I agree with the end goal. Yes, there is a rent-seeking/email-job class of society that adds no value. Yes, manual/physical labor should be treated better. Yes, productivity is largely desirable, and society would benefit overall if we produced more. But he gets to these conclusions in such a strange and stilted way. Overall, I really dislike this blog post.

I never really found a reason to like George Hotz but all of his recent posts are bangers.

hotz truthers are an oppressed minority

Always have been. It’ll still take a bit of time for the HN crowd to simmer down the anti-hotz vitriol long enough to process what he’s actually saying.

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