Comment by aureate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aureate | Hacker News Reader

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I shouldn't be surprised how prevalent this viewpoint is, given the entrenched anti-intellectualism these days in the US and across the world, but it's disturbing to see it so widespread on HN of all places.

You are of course free to wield this new technology any way you choose (to the extent its owners and your wallet allow you to, for now at least), and if you can enrich yourself by doing so power to you. I won't attempt to dissuade you from your apparent hatred of those who have spent their lives trying to expand the boundaries of human understanding. I'll just state my equally emotion-driven opposing view: It always was and always will be about the understanding. "Results" and "progress" without sufficient thought are the reason our enormous modern wealth is accompanied by so much human misery.

I don't relish the prospect of living in your predicted world of multiplying technology untempered by human thought, if that's what happens to emerge. I don't think it will be a good place for anyone but a handful of the very richest. Good luck adding yourself to their number.

That same scientific community that gave us such wonders as thermonuclear bombs and agent orange? Please. I understand we need science, but we don’t need “intellectualism” and the various self-appointed guardians of whatever that is.

Once you have experienced first hand the level of disdain the so called intellectuels have towards the regular joe it is hard to feel any sympathy for them. If I can be replaced with cheap foreign labour you too should just deal with it. You are not entitled to your well paying oil drilling job, you know, you should just move on and take another job or two and some nightly backbreaking gigs here and there if math doesn't feed your family any more. Surely you don't want to be lazier than immigrants and can adjust to their frugal standards of living...

Exceptional mathematicians are not going to be jobless, just like master level craftsmen still do kinda well. Tough luck if your abilities are subpar to achieve excellence though, that is just the rat race to the bottom we have created and finally the so called intellectuels are also getting to fully taste it themselves. Realizing you were never that special and your job can be either fully automated away or reduced to a wage that barely pays the bills is a hard pill to swallow. But progress is inevitable as they have been saying.

I will keep studying math purely for fun.

I struggle to identify with the apparent glee you feel at berating the person you imagine yourself talking to. I guess we all have our own idiosyncratic forms of fantasy, but this one doesn't seem very healthy.

I think you are generalizing tad bit too much. There is certainly some subset of intellectuals that is detached from normal people and are riding the high of their academic position. At the same time, in my experience, you will find a lot of compassionate and understanding academics, certainly way more of them than in business.

And there was quite a bit of work put in to make people less compassionate, for example by feeding them the dubious musings of Ayn Rand.

Don’t bother, they don’t see it. It’s sickening.

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