Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

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I get the impression that these people are fighting for the right to have more decent lives and better schools. If so, organized cheating is a cost of the unequal system they live under.

Reminds me of Basho's chief architect (the Riak company), who advised at Ricon's closing keynote that you should lie and misrepresent yourself to anyplace doing interesting things, as he did at Apple (where he got to write a distributed filesystem), Akamai, etc.

Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective. Does anyone honestly think Steve Jobs was averse to sociopathic behavior, or went unrewarded for it? We live in institutions which reward such sheer winning over obeying rules. (Regardless whether those rules are important or terrible.) The people who make the rules themselves are subject to such pressures. The mass of cheaters here on HN simply are too wise to speak up and admit it.

I say that as someone who never cheated on a school test or homework. I don't begrudge those who did, because the mainstream educational systems are disgusting. I have no fear that a cheater will make my worklife hard, because that's what interviews are for. I'm more concerned about play-by-the-rules people who've stuck to conventional wisdom all their lives, and defer to bosses.

Basho's Chief Architect here. I was talking about self-taught programmers and companies irrational bias towards people with CS degrees.

I didn't say "lie and misrepresent", I said "BS and charm". It was a rephrasing of an earlier tweet of mine:

https://twitter.com/argv0/statuses/222618738250350592

My main point was that all this stuff can be learned without a degree, but should always be learned, and that these jobs mainly require skills not taught in school; that charm goes a long way, etc.

Your parsing of what I said is unfortunate and your characterization of what I was espousing ('sociopathic', 'cheaters') is wrong.

EDIT: Try to interpret what I said in a positive way.

I was talking about personal intellectual growth, not obtaining things you don't deserve via lies.

I was talking only about bootstrapping yourself into a career you want - of course you must then master whatever it is you have set out to do or will be found out and fired.

If you want a job and know you can learn it, then obtain that job however you can and prove yourself.

In my personal value system I value the one who is able to beat a system through a clever hack much higher than the one who follows just the instructions to the point how somebody else planned it out.

After all in you world of non-cheating companies you would have to be strictly agains the business practices of companies such as Uber or Airbnb. After all they were certainly breaking the rules when they first started out and are still facing some serious legal battles.

I believe that everyone has the personal responsibility to challenge the rules, to question them, to demand answers why they are there and whom do they benefit. If the answers are unsatisfying it comes down to the personal evaluation: Is it better to follow the rules, challenge the rules, or break them.

Wallstreet is calling, it's for you.

Your post reminds me of a fictional example taken from Star Trek where Kirk (just a cadet at that point) cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test. For those who are not familiar (or even fans) of the franchise, the Kobayashi Maru[1] is a simulation that's designed to test a cadets ability to cope with failure when faced with a scenario that is unwinnable. In Kirks case, he hacked the computer to give him a better odds and thus went on to beat the simulation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru

> Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal.

Really? I'm not sure I've experience of this. Might be a geographic/cultural thing, I guess, but business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.

You may need to get out more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC

See "Money Laundering".

I wouldn't use the term "corrupt". For example, a mafia's members can be quite upright in following the institution's rules. Likewise, at the height of when the UK sent legions of killers outside its island, to terminate and replace the rules other people must live under, it's not important if anyone was particularly corrupt.

When an institution is at its core about lying, cheating and stealing, then it redefines the rules to make these actions just and moral... part of its own natural functioning. This filters down into all its sub-institutions, like its economic and educational systems.

(Then "lying, cheating and stealing" becomes anything which goes against its functioning. For instance, "terrorism" is redefined to include defending your country against the terrorists some foreign power sent to control you.)

You live in a high trust society with an impartial and competent state, where the rule of law is a real thing and opportunities for real, lucrative corruption are relatively limited. Given the demographics of this website there is an above average chance you work in an industry or sector that is dominated by literal minded men that tend more autistic than the general population, and associate mainly with people who are basically bourgeois in their values. All of these characteristics make the level of rat bastard weaselness in your environment lower than it would otherwise be.

Nonetheless the upper echelons of the corporate world in the UK probably resemble those in the UK in that sociopaths are ten to twenty times more common in the executive class than the general population. I can't see any reason politics would not favour the same group in the same way.

For further reading see gwern's notes on psychopaths and the psychology of power.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fzy/notes_on_psychopathy/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dtg/notes_on_the_psychology_of_power...

I have also heard good things about Ashok Rao's Psychopaths, Losers, Clueless series.

> I have also heard good things about Ashok Rao's Psychopaths, Losers, Clueless series.

That would be Venkat Rao's Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless series.

"business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt"

You should read up on the City of London Corporation.[1][2][3][4]

[1] - http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residen...

[2] - http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2011/04/state-within-sta...

[3] - http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporati...

[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

Sorry, what does that have to do with anything? I'm well aware of it, I work within the City - it's just local government. It, in common with many ancient bodies in the UK, has quirks, but none that are corrupt.

Go read Le Carré. Or examine the record of News Corp phone hacking, and the politicians with whom they are entwined.

> business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.

Read any issue of Private Eye and you might form a different opinion.

> ... routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective

It's a prisoners dilemma thing. It works while they are suckers to cheat, but the refutation of that entire way of thinking comes when everybody cheats and everyone suffers.

Do you have a link to the keynote where he mentions this perhaps? Would be very interested in it and my google powers didn't find anything.

While I haven't done it, I have recommended it to various people to lie on their resumes if they think it is the resumes preventing them to get a job. I was lucky to enter the work world in a time that they accepted just about everyone, but I see very smart folks nowadays scrapping for a job because they don't 'cheat' the interview process.

This is why we have a crappy world: the tragedy of the commons.

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