Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

You can distill it down to: don't be a piece of shit, think carefully about how what you're building is used, talk to real humans and listen to them, and stop driving your product development process mimetically. Instead, solve real problems that real people have (not people in SF; I'm talking deep reality like a 60 y/o woman who had to get a job at a bible belt grocery store just to make ends meet but really wants to help you find the powdered peanut butter for your recipe but can't use the app the store gave her to find things).

This doesn't happen because there's a "lack of humanities in tech." It's because there's a lack of care and concern for others in tech. Most are motivated by the usual stuff: status and wealth. No amount of prescription in the form of humanities can fix that or will. You don't learn how to take care of real people by burying yourself in study. And you can't negotiate with sociopaths [1].

You just have to actually be a decent person. You can't game it. Thats part of tech's problem: it's always trying to solve problems from angles that the majority of people can't see, don't share, or can't even afford access to.

[1] https://youtu.be/nVp0Dvh1XQM?is=Tn76Ed3AlIv4nqjt (first part in the car)

Another thing to remember is that the "common people" example you gave aren't much better. Bible belt would be a good example, statistically a lot of them for instance hate gays. People are fucking assholes, people with more money just have more means to execute it.

Herein lies the problem: assuming that all people in a location/area are like that. Black and white thinking is the antithesis to a humanistic approach. Even worse is thinking your perspective is the "best" one and that whatever decisions you make are, of course, best for everyone.

We'd do a lot better if we accepted that everybody is different and homogeneity and the drive to force it on others is a disease of the mind. Yeah, there are plenty of assholes, but consider why: because someone taught that person as they were growing up (either directly or indirectly) that being an asshole protects you. I'm frequently an asshole because I got picked on when I was younger. But guess what? For the right situations, it works. For others a more gentle touch is fitting. That's the dynamic to encode into tech: leveraging a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic systems to create adaptable systems that relish in a mess as opposed to fall apart because they're too rigidly shaped to accommodate the most and only favor the perspective of the few. That's how you get inhumane systems: they're designed and maintained by people living completely different lives from the people they're building for.

I just feel people project unnatural evil to billionaires. Interacting with "everyday common" people leaves me with a no better view. I have had to repeatedly lower my opinion of humanity. If anything I think billionaires are better in many ways. Whatever the reasons be, the big ai labs are doing high end math and science problems for free even though there is no need to. Or if people think billionaires don't pay enough to society, what percentage of their own money have they donated? If you are a person with a house in San Francisco or New York, you are actually "elite" and you should ask yourself how much you have contributed to others if you think billionaires don't.

Hating gays doesn't protect me from anything. Anyone who hates gays is simply an unvarnished asshole. People in the bible belt generally are shitty sorts. Which is why I hate this unnecessary vilification of billionaires when there is much more scuminess right among "everyday people".

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