_xhok

If someone accused me in such a fashion, and persisted despite me asking for clarification and trying to actually explain my view to them, I'd probably be a lot more vitriolic than Travis was. (It's a character flaw of mine.) And saying that some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit is, well, true?

I don't like that billionaires are held to a different standard. People say, "they don't need protection; they're rich." Ok, but if you discount something a billionaire says for no reason other than that they're rich and have easy lives, you're not a dispassionate truthseeker.

  Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months.
  Fawzi: It’s good.
  Travis: You probably saw some email.
  Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices.
  Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black.
  Fawzi: But in general.
  Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business.
  Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride.
  Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business.
  Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you.  You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day.
  Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black?
  Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices.
  Travis: On Black? Bullshit.
  Fawzi: We started with $20.
  Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!
  Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.

I find myself suspicious of this new culture of "standing together in solidarity," "letting vulnerable people tell their narratives," "being supportive," etc. These all sound like perfectly upstanding things to do, but nowadays they dominate discourse. Facts, reason, and inquiry are now considered oppressive.

I've met some people who have asked, why is this a problem? Who cares if a couple people make things up, when there are so many people hurting out there? Well, people who make things up make real stories less believable. And it incentivizes victimhood, which nowadays carries with it the reward of not having to engage in debate, because anyone who voices doubt is considered a monster. Someone earlier got flagged for saying what you said. Not just downvoted so his post would be light gray, but flagged so his post would disappear.

And really, at the end of the day, what can trigger-happy moral outrage accomplish that a quiet sense of justice backed by reason, fairness, and determination can't?

* The internet was supposed to democratize this stuff. People like Balaji Srinivasan say the FDA should be replaced with Yelp for drugs. Why isn't Glassdoor more effective? Why wasn't Uber's toxic work culture public knowledge, gorgeously pinned to the top of Google's search results?

* When people like Mike interrupt meetings to tell his subordinates not to be a "whiny little bitch," presumably it makes all the quiet, thoughtful people in the room teem with unease. Ideally every instance of this adds a quantum of incentive for them to leave the company. How can that be encouraged?

* Do unions offer any protections to a group of Uber engineers who decided tomorrow to just walk out together?

I think your point would've been better made if you'd written this comment first, instead of the privilege thing.

However, HN has lost its mind if merely saying you don't believe a story is now flag-worthy. Why should the odiousness of a claim influence our evaluation of whether or not it's true?

She doesn't have to, but putting it that way, people don't have to believe her.

Has the word "privileged" so lost all meaning that it's privileged to merely want evidence? I reject that I'm somehow contributing to an oppressive patriarchy by wanting claims to be substantiated in the post-Enlightenment way: with proof. People do make things up.

In every institution I've ever been at, people talked about how to recruit more women, but in practice this meant grabbing the first woman who applied and using them as a prop to show how diverse they were. Professors have blatantly admitted to my female friends that they were being used for that purpose.

This sentence is true, but whoever is in charge of picking a database for the engineering team shouldn't base his decision on such a criteria.

Why are the people in charge of deciding what database to use the sort of people who would allow their disgust toward an animal whose name is shared by a database to block discussion of its technical features?

All the best technical people I know would feel a visceral disgust at the thought of a product being discarded due to its name. Someone who was truly suited to attacking the problem of database selection would proactively make sure he wasn't letting nontechnical features into the discussion.

Whoever creates the successor to Linux should name it Holocaust OS or something just to mess with people, and laugh at those who due to its name thereby do their computing on an inferior system.

"cannon fodder lining up on his doorstep willing to eat Ramen and gleefully line the coffers of his investor’s portfolios"

characterization, which I've read a good twenty times now. How does this make sense, when generally speaking, if an investor gets rich, it means the company succeeded, and thus the founders get rich too?

I think your disagreement with Graham is over a definition of words. You seem to be saying that creation of value is the indivisible sum of efforts to (a) decide what to build, (b) build it, and (c) sell it. He assumes a and b can be isolated out.

In any case though, take any highly successful company. Imagine if all the marketing people and product/engineering/design people were suddenly segregated, and forced to work without the other. Who's more worried?

I'm not at all saying marketing people are useless, which seems to be the idea you take issue with. They provide value. But (I'm sorry) less than the designers and engineers, and measurably so, from successive thought experiments like the above. That's why they're paid less.

"The fact that value is subjective and immeasurable doesn't insult anyone who tries to make good things. I try to make good things too, the value I get from them is the sense of accomplishment that I've done a good job."

But by your argument, I can steal your sense of accomplishment by saying, who knows how much of your success was due to you? How much was due to the marketing team? 10%? 50%? 80%?

"But whether my "good job" translates into a $1bn unicorn is up to luck, not simply my effort."

On this topic I mostly defer to Hamming's point in You and Your Research. I'd say there's luck involved, not that it's up to luck. While it's true not everyone who can become Bill Gates does, some people outright can't become Bill Gates, while others can. The point is, this doesn't show that value is subjective.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Statements like these are pointless theatrics. The more wrong someone is, the easier, not harder it is to point out where and how. What's the argument?

You have to wait until section 2 to find one:

"...there are actually several critical errors in the above reasoning which render Graham’s conclusions baseless. The first is the idea that measurement of things like quality and success can be objective, perfect and fair. These are not objective facts, they are highly contextual and can be manipulated by power struggles, charisma, clever marketing, or outright fraud. Value is a social construct..."

After about eight paragraphs about how "pedestrian" PG is, his point (finally) is basically that value is subjective and immeasurable. I don't know how true this is philosophically, but for all intents and purposes, if it were true, it would mean that nothing could be better than anything else. [1] It's also a conflation of ideas. Marketing doesn't create value; it distributes and sells it. Value as defined in the original essay is the meaty stuff people want: a home computer, for example, or an affordable spaceship.

"Graham identifies that “Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff.” So what exactly do they contribute to the wealth generation process? Does Graham imply that without these others working at “one remove”, the programmers could still create the wealth they do? Without the human resources team to coordinate their medical benefits, would the programmers be as productive? Without the legal team to fend off frivolous lawsuits brought by patent trolls [...]?" (And so on.)

All Graham is saying is that programmers are directly involved in the creation of the product itself — its design, engineering, and maintenance. Other people create the social environment that makes it possible for this product to be distributed and not be killed, but don't make stuff in the artisanal sense.

I can understand why it would be insulting if someone claimed that anyone who isn't a maker were somehow useless, but Graham never did.

I'm ten minutes in, and everything I've read is basically a verbose form of "it's all relative" and "things are more complicated than that." Philosophy has a standard refutation to this: we deal with complex phenomena by isolating principles. For example, the abstract idea of value, the distinction between creation and distribution, and so on. It's the most boring thing in the world to hear, "the universe is more complex than that idea captures." All abstractions are reductions.

This sort of argument based on moral outrage and authority about how the real world works holds back truthseeking discourse.

[1] I also have a hard time understanding how someone who has earnestly tried to make good things could want this to be true.

The annual number of 18yos who have done genuinely remarkable things is less than the size of the Ivy league freshman list.

Apparently the latest outrage on Twitter is over Elon Musk's condemnation of Trump's order not being tough enough. They're mad at him for trying to convince Trump to modify his proposal, because "making compromises with the opponent validates them," and he's being "morally cowardly." Well, ok. But at this point the order is (unless the ACLU wins) a reality, and the pragmatic thing to do is to work within the bounds of reality to make things better. Would these people rather he not do that, just to show that he's "standing with them"?

I have an increasing suspicion that the word "solidarity" is becoming a word the means less and less. As far as I can tell, when applied to public figures, it mostly means sending the message that you care. I wish we'd care less about messaging, and more about what works.

Today, if I read an article describing someone as racist, that gets me no closer to understanding them as a person, because I have no idea what the article means by that, or if the author can be trusted to wield that word.

I realize one feels uneasy making long-winded arguments about something that seems so obvious, but that it is necessary is just a consequence of diversity of thought. There are actually people who disagree with your characterization of this order as racist or bigoted who are also sincere and thoughtful.

One argument I hear is that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the West's values, that immigrants from those countries don't integrate well, and that the dangerous ideas within Islam aren't limited to radical fundamentalists. Under this view, a temporary ban is not necessarily a bad idea, nor is it necessarily racist except in the literal sense.

I disagree with this — I think the perfectly reasonable people from those countries need to be shown compassion, not to be lumped in with their oppressors — but the discussion should be about that, not who can scream "racist" louder.