IsaacL

Somalia's a crime-ridden hellhole - I'm not an anarcho-capitalist and I believe that freedom requires the rule of law. Hong Kong and Singapore are two places which remain close to the pre-WWI classical liberal ideal of genuinely free economies with the rule of law, and both have income tax rates of around %10 IIRC. I'm strongly considering relocating to the latter if the UK continues on its current trajectory.

I second my sibling poster. You are clearly a very smart person who has no qualms about confidently misrepresenting a book you haven't read. It's not a charming combination - acquire some rigour in your thinking (for your own sake, if nothing else).

"Genes as the unit of selection" was, at the time TSG was written, a controversial theory. Group selection was the popular viewpoint (the very tempting notion that individual animals make selfless sacrifices for the herd). Dawkins meticulously showed that the contrary gene selection viewpoint was the best theory for the observed evidence - original, conceptual scientific theory at its best.

He introduced "memes" as a speculative addition at the end of the book. There's nothing wrong with speculation, and it can be a valuable tool to discover insights which later form theories, but its fundamentally different to the rigour needed to establish new scientific knowledge.

"Memes" are an interesting concept, but people take the idea too far IMO, and Dawkins was right to confine his speculations to one chapter. I'd definitely agree with a weak version of the theory - ideas which include the notion that 'spreading this idea is good', tend to spread more. (Compare Christianity and Islam versus Hinduism or Buddhism). The strong version of the theory, though, goes too far, and sees people as being entirely determined by their ideas. People have independent minds and can analyse, judge, refine and/or reject the ideas they encounter - they're not passive slaves to memes.

Sentences like: "The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes" - once upon a time I would have said "oh wow, what an interesting possibility". Nowadays I see this kind of thinking as fundamentally vapid and lazy. Historians already knew how to analyse the spread of ideas throughout a society long before the concept of a 'meme' - Gibbon, for example, was writing about how the differences between the different sects of Christianity affected their spread, 300 years ago. (I could say something similar about social scientists, though I'm not a huge fan of modern social science for other reasons).

Saying that memes are alive, or that liberals and conservatives represent two different species, to me represents an ungrounded way of thinking, where concepts float without touching reality.

TL;DR - Dawkins achievement lies in definitively stating the case for gene selection (and writing a damn good popsci book); his concept of 'memes' is mind candy for the reddit crowd.

As Zach mentioned, quite a few interviewers like to use recursion-based puzzlers, and I actually enjoyed those - I seem to have one of those brains which is wired up for understanding recursion. On the other hand, I'm actually more drawn towards the product/UI side of things than the hardcore algorithmic tech innovation. These days I rely much more on discipline than on natural talent.

There's always been silly startup ideas, but that's mainly because a lot of people are silly. The "playing house" thing seems to be a different phenomenon: over the last few years I came across people who were very smart, very driven, but completely focused on other people's opinions. They like winning contests and climbing ladders. Now that startups are becoming a respectable career path, more and more of these people are trying to start startups.

In the corporate world, you can always focus on the next presentation, the next interview, the next hurdle, and gradually iterate upwards. To build a company you need to think in terms of fundamentals, to think long-term, and to think independently: members of this type can be very good at producing polished and sensible-sounding market analyses but distinctly bad at those three.

[...] Another commonly displayed “libertarian” approach that I struggle to respect is the puerile desire to offend, bolstered by the dubious claim that this is somehow a noble and worthwhile antidote to the equally tedious culture of taking offence.

[...] There is no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s personal liberty is furthered by such infantile sneering; yet swarms of supposedly liberal followers rejoice in this toxic effluence with excited applause, like an encouraging mother will celebrate her toddler’s first shit in the potty.

I long had libertarian-ish leanings, but I agree with the author's points above. By coincidence, in another tab I was just reading "The Fable of the Cardiac Surgeon or Why I Don’t Support Libertarian Organizations" - http://www.philosophyinaction.com/blog/?p=663. It's an interesting read for those of similar mind.

A separate link leads from Kant to Frege, Russell and modern analytic philosophy. Which is hardly on the level of Marxism, and it still respects reason and reality, but it led to the idea of logic as meaningless symbol games, rather than a vital tool to understand the world.

Rand didn't found her whole philosophy on 'A is A' - this is a common misconception. She isn't trying to create a philosophy based on geometry, where everything is deduced from a few axioms. The law of identity is fundamental, but it's not sufficient - you need observation of reality too.

Oversimplifying out of necessity, there's been a long running philosophical conflict between empiricists (focus on reality) and rationalists (focus on theory). The hard sciences have managed to avoid the problems of philosophy for the last few centuries, but are increasingly running into fundamental methodological limitations. If, following Hume, induction is unreliable, how can we ever know our scientific theories are valid?

Ayn Rand developed a novel epistemology and theory of concepts to deal with these issues, but she's almost universally slammed in academia for her political views.

All I can suggest is to read both her and her critics and make up your own mind. (But do read her own words, not just what her critics say about her - the book I mentioned above is a good starting point).

This article also made me think of Rand, and I wish they had some awareness of Rand's epistemology. They do mention Bayesianism, which is a useful framework, but still has limitations. (Recently I've been reading through classic papers on probability theory (Bayes, Bernoulli, E. T Jaynes) to see if it can be combined with Rand's neo-Aristotelian view of concepts).

By the way, look up comments by the Hacker News user ahoyhere (Amy Hoy). It was her comment on the physical causes of burnout that motivated me to quit when I did. I think that nipped in the bud something that could have become much worse.

You mention you keep working because of "shame" and "having to pay the bills". Hypothetical situation: if you had another medical condition, say a heart attack, and your doctor ordered you to take 3 months in bed, could you do it? Live off savings, move in with your parents, etc?

If you're really living on the edge financially (no savings, in debt, no support network) then keep working. But, my theory is that people in that situation don't feel "burned out" - they feel stressed and exhausted, maybe, but they're motivated to keep moving. Burnout is when you're pushing hard on something that feels ultimately pointless. For me, it was working on a project I knew was going to fail, a position I could have financially walked away from at any time, but I stayed because I felt it wasn't socially acceptable to walk.

After I quit my job I had a background anxiety on what I'd do when my savings ran down and I needed to find something else. I honestly thought I'd rather Howard-Roark it and lug boxes around in a warehouse or work as a garage mechanic than write code for money ever again. (Funnily enough I'm also in SE Asia, Chiang Mai right now). What saved me was easing my way back into goal-directed activities, but goal-directed activities which I found intrinsically fun and rewarding - swimming, playing strategy games, riding a motorbike around. Eventually I wanted a more challenging project and took 2 weeks to research and write a long article for an online blog, unpaid but I treated it as a full-time job.

Just this last week I've finally got back into coding again, and realised that I enjoy frontend web coding, making something which looks cool and which you can show to people. I was a very good CS student and used to think I should work on something more challenging than HTML/CSS/JS, but - frontend web dev is something I know I can well enough to be useful.

Engineers have a problem that we're always "failing". Our work is so complex and error-prone. In most other jobs its hard to tell how well you're doing. Salespeople are one other group who also "fail" often, but salespeople also get a lot of social validation and buzz when they succeed. Engineers don't, and combined with their low self-esteem end up feeling they need to hit 100% accuracy, everything done on time with no bugs, or they're below par. Clueless and disinterested managers don't help.

Having rediscovered my confidence in one particular specialism (frontend web dev) is very powerful. If in future I encounter another hairy, undocumented ball of PHP and JS - I'll simply tell whoever's responsible that I can't fix it until they fix their workflow. On the other hand, if I find a good team, with technical (or at least technically-aware) management, realistic goals and a useful product, I know I can be valuable and useful to them.

I'm so glad I quit when I did. Had I stayed another 6 months by burnout may have lasted 3 years, not 3 months. But recovery wasn't a linear process, it was more digging around in my brain until I uncovered my natural sources of motivation.

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"The crucial assumption is that the abstract program, as a mathematical object, requires design and therefore intent. Accordingly, only artificial things can compute. We cannot say, for example, that a brain computes."

I would argue that living things represent the spontaneous emergence of teleology in nature (i.e., evolution doesn't itself have a goal but it implies the greater success of creatures which do have goals). Brains evolved to help organisms survive and reproduce by allowing them to better process sensory data. So brains were "designed" for an "intent" (survival/reproduction), in the sense that brains that did not serve the intent died out.

I met a startup in Hong Kong, CafeX, who were working on a coffee-making robot, and my first reaction was that they were using cutting-edge technology to solve a trivial problem. I do like good coffee though, so I thought through the business case.

It seemed to fit into an awkward gap between "cheap coffee vending machine" and "cafe kiosk with trained barista". People grabbing a convenient coffee in places like gas stations and convenience stores, care about price over quality and will be fine with a cheap machine. People who like quality coffee will usually prefer a trained barista if one is available, unless they want to try the novelty of a robot.

The two niches I can see are:

1) Inside fancy office buildings, where the drones don't want to walk outside to get good coffee. (The robot is also good for impressing visitors).

2) Places without decent cafes around, i.e. shopping malls, theme parks, airports, where the robot might be as good or better than Starfucks burned-for-consistency beans.

I'll take a look at your other books. Also, do you have an email address? I'd like to chat more. Mine is in my profile.

1984 probably packed more of a punch when it was distributed covertly in totalitarian Soviet states. You're reading about a society which bans books, in a book banned by your society. It's less meaningful in a liberal democracy where 1984 is widely read.

Likewise, in Atlas Shrugged you're reading about a society which doesn't ban certain ideas but sneers at them and makes them unseemly in polite society. Which is exactly how Atlas Shrugged is treated.

For the record, I think the Fountainhead is the most literary of her books. Rand is more original when discussing psychology than politics, and the Fountainhead paints a more interesting spectrum of characters than Atlas Shrugged, especially in her "almost-heroes". Gail Wynand, the tabloid newspaper tycoon who transformed the idiocy of the masses into a personal fortune, who lives a shamelessly public life except for a secret private art gallery he only enters alone -- in Rand's words, a man who "could have been", who possessed every other Randian virute but who had abandoned his integrity -- is such an original character, and shows how nuanced her views could be. Were her political ideas not anathema to modern academia, the Fountainhead at least would certainly be more widely studied.

I found Atlas Shrugged to be a good page turner, but to my eyes it's clear that Ayn Rand was pissed off that everyone misunderstood the Fountainhead and so she turned the intensity and contrast up to 11, making everything as black-and-white as possible, at the expensive of believability. The political focus means people like or dislike AS based on their prior feelings towards libertarian philosophy, which obscures the fact that her ideas have some distinctions from libertarianism. In particular the focus on maintaining an independent mind; something which always requires effort, not rote formulas or blindly relying on other's opinions. In one memorable scene a group of people invest in a company based purely on the stock price movement going up, in another the heroine bets on a new alloy, going against the scientific consensus which, after studying it, she believes to be unfounded. In the first case people who follow the herd go down with the herd; in the second case one who goes against the herd succeeds.

On the same note, her best non-fiction book is the obscure Romantic Manifesto, a set of her essays on art. Her philosophical essays aren't as bad as some people make out, but she oversimplifies and makes false dichotomies, and there isn't much which is original in her political ideas. She also has some horribly confused notions about intellectual history which alone are enough to exclude her from the top rank of philosophers. She's a philosophical novellist but not a philosopher; her gift is for portraying characters which embody particular ideas.

This has turned into quite an effortpost so I might as well finish with a comment on her and Nietszche, someone she's often compared to, though who is surprisingly much more tolerated in the intellectual establishment. Nietzsche didn't originate the wave of Nihilism which spread over European culture from the top down in the 20th century, but he was the first to properly anticipate it. The guy managed to inspire a diverse array of groups, from Nazis to French postmodernists to new age shamanists, but I think the Objectivists might be the ones with the seed of an actual solution. Specifically, their focus on reason and a purpose-driven life, and their embrace of industrial capitalism (as the most natural thing for man, even).

This is definitely an American point of view. The US is a) a very large country which b) has been growing in power throughout modern history and c) has a cultural aversion to 'empire' (whether they are an empire or not is a different matter, but it seems they don't want to be).

Compare that to many European countries, which are a) very small, b) have lost a lot of power in the last 200 years and c) have a (admittedly not universal) nostalgic streak for the glorious days of empire, when they were world powers.

For Americans to sympathise, imagine if in 2100 various states have seceded and the US has split into multiple nations, with the remnant USA consisting only of the New England states. Then Canada offers to buy Maine, which is otherwise a burden on the treasury. Can you see why you wouldn't want to sell?

I'm 25 (and planning to marry and have children) but I'm realistic about what child-raising will be like, and don't entertain egalitarian fantasies. This is partly because I went through two divorces in my childhood (mum & dad, then mum & stepfather); and also because my parents were quite liberal.

People who've had traditional upbringings can daydream about bringing up their own children in a more liberal way, but having lived it from the inside -- it does have advantages but there are also glaring flaws.

China seems to have a loose definition of "city". This sounds more like a densely populated area, with multiple cities connected by high-speed rail. Chongqing is another example -- it's billed as one of the world's largest cities with 30M+ people, but it's really a province that China has officially designated as a city.

"Paul Graham and Y Combinator are on the cover of June's Inc Magazine" - this was exciting news back then! YC was a really speculative effort, even in the tech world. I wish I'd applied in the early days!

"Chrome Now Available for Mac or Linux : Hackers Only" - goes to show how many established products were back then only used by the nerdy early adopters

"20 Developers to follow on Twitter" - again, back then I only knew a few people outside of tech circles who used Twitter, and a lot of people hadn't even heard of it

"How I Got A Job From A Blog Comment" - this also wouldn't be news today

"Google Wave “is anti-Web”" - one speculative product that didn't make it

It's interesting looking back. I discovered this place as a first year CS student, and startups as a career path were not on the radar for 95% of my classmates at the time.

Rails was still fairly unknown, IE6 was a big problem for web developers, jQuery was the exciting new Javascript framework. All this meant that the standards for web apps were lower and it was easier to ship an interesting hack and get people to check it out.

> I'm a couchsurfing afficionado as well, but this site appeals to me, partially because it ISN'T free. I always feel too obliged to my hosts, and handing over a small some of money would assuage my guilt that I hadn't thanked them enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653727

To be clear, Couchsurfing was entirely no-money -- you didn't pay the hosts either, the idea was you "pay-it-forward". Are you asking for a paid marketplace with no fees?

Anyway, you can disintermediate AirBnB. The last AirBnB I stayed in, in HK, I booked for 3 days via AirBnB and then decided to stay 3 weeks, paying the owners in cash.

(I also did that with an Uber driver in San Jose. We'd gone to the office in an Uber, but I realised I needed to head home, and my phone was broken. The driver asked my friend to book a journey via Lyft, as he wanted the ratings from that platform. Then I needed a 3rd journey, and realised I could simply pay him in cash. Makes you realise that all marketplace sites do is connect people, once two adults are in contact with each other they can arrange any economic deals they want).

(He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is "government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one of their biggest inspirations).

I think the next big wave of economic growth is not 3d printing, or AI, or anything like that; it's figuring out how to actually run large organisations effectively. Nick Szabo has a bunch of essays on how it was the printing press which enabled mass literacy, which enabled large bureaucratic organisations. Relatively new in human history.

Email-powered organisations are only a few decades old, and we're still ironing out the kinks.