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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

We programmers tend to be a fairly self-reliant bunch.

For a very special meaning of "self-reliant". The majority of programmers I know could not produce their own food, make their own clothes, build their own shelter, treat their own illnesses. These are the fundamentals of life; how "self-reliant" can someone claim to be without being able to do these (I can't do these either, but I'm not claiming self-reliance)?

We can play into an illusion of "self-reliance" only because these foundations and so much more have been made so pervasive and efficient.

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Of course I'm speaking in terms of our work. I'm not claiming I could kill a cow and render it nor knit a scarf nor do much more than basic first-aid. My point is that there is a certain culture of being self-reliant, which is perfectly demonstrated by the phrase RTFM. We're saying the knowledge is out there, I've figured it out, why can't you?

The truth is, we are all just standing on the shoulders of giants. One cannot truly claim to be purely a product of one's own hard-work and effort, because others helped you get there, but the idea that you can figure out anything be reading the manual, the source, by rubber-ducking, and so on relates very well to the Puritanical notion that one's place in life is earned through hard-work and thus just.

That's not what self-relaince is. Nobody is self-reliant by that definition because even people trained for wilderness survival will die from some mundane thing without modern medicine.

Self-reliance is when you can contribute enough to society on your own to get the things required to live in return without hand-outs.

Ha. Sure it is.

I think you've mistaken "not in debt" for "self-reliant".

This. There are other forms of altruism than charity. Being born to privilege is a pretty large subsidy towards sufficiency. Caring for your own children is a form of altruism.

The poster seems to express an affinity towards Objectivist thinking based on some other comments (I wouldn't assume an ideology they haven't overtly claimed.), but has a very narrow definition of what altruism is. I would argue that this is a problem, because objectivism and its usefulness to society depends almost entirely on how you think of altruism.

Proponents of the viewpoint in general are very dismissive of things like paying for the care of the diseased, even when there's a strong and perfectly reasonable objectivist argument that you should do so purely out of self-interest because of how diseases live and are spread.

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