Yea, thank you for your feedback!
I don't mean the fact checking part - thats legitimately a good thing to pursue. What I mean is that the value of this (to you and your co-creators) has enormous value to you way beyond the social good it might provide.
For example at some point you're going to have to deal with nuance. Things are rarely purely right or wrong. (The earth is not round, but its a good first approximation for geological beginners.)
So, I'd encourage you not to measure success here with "does it work", or how many users, or if LLMs are a suitable approach, or any metrics like that. The goal here shouldn't be popularity or "correctness".
The most value you will get is the experience of building something, ideally in team. Of facing road-blocks and challenges and overcoming them. Or, to put it another way, have fun. And things that are easy are not fun...
Congrats on the project. May it lead you forward to discovering more about how to code, more about the world, more about yourself. Don't shy away from the hard questions. But above all keep it fun.
This is awesome, and you're doing great. This is such strong signal for an amazing career and impact.
Keep going!
I find this is one of the more difficult things for people to learn to fully integrate into their psyche. Many people never learn to truly care about this and everything it means. They go on forever primarily caring about what’s good for them personally.
I mean look at the world. Essentially everybody puts themselves first and it’s clear as day. Don’t trick yourself into being the sap doing things for the greater good.
And who cares if there’s equal potential for harm and good? The harm might be less than we imagine and the good might be better than we think it could be. “This might be bad” is a terrible reason to not do something. Nearly everything might be bad!
People are pretty resilient. They can generally deal with you being selfish.
This sort of hustle culture belief is definitely present in the world, especially among finance and us techie types, but there's tons of examples of people Not acting like this. Teachers don't do it for the pay, etc. There's a reason meaningful jobs tend to pay less, and its because so many people want to do useful helpful things that badly.
Anyways point is, that I want to explicitly condemn this type of thinking. Yeah don't let fear of doing the wrong thing paralyze you but also think through the consequences
Are they actually making the world better or just hoping they can?
Everybody in the developed world, if they wanted to make the world better, would live drastically differently because of their impact on the environment/climate change.
But it’s more fun to just say that we’re hoping to make the world better so we don’t have to acknowledge how selfish we actually are.
I’m not talking about hustle culture here. I’m talking about the selfishness we all partake in and do our best to ignore.
Which is why advice to be explicitly selfish is jarring. We don't need advice yo do that, we excel at it naturally.
There are however great rewards to be had from being unselfish. We can see that around us too. Being at least aware of our proclivities is the first step in discovering the benefits of countering them.
It’s like a burglar telling you it’s a good idea to leave your doors unlocked.
Selfishness is not a binary characteristic. There are degrees of selfishness - and spheres of selfishness.
Just because something is in our nature, it does not mean we have to behave that way all the time. Most people are neither purely selfish, nor purely unselfish.
To answer your question though, since selfishness exists on a scale, your assumption that people offering advice are not also practicing it is, at best, a conclusion without data.
> I agree that most (privileged) people behave selfishly
Another great example are the tech bros telling kids to go into the trades. If it was such a great idea, why aren’t they plumbers?
Now I don’t. It’s too hard to enter tech right now. Juniors not coming from colleges are basically ignored in the job hunt.
I generally think trade skills are better for most people than a college degree (I don’t even have one.)
And anyone living an unsustainable lifestyle (almost everyone) is selfish though its such a huge problem that putting the blame on any individual feels wrong.
I think where we disagree is that you're so all or nothing with this. People can be selfish in some ways and not others. You can live unsustainably while also having principles in other ways. Things could always be worse. I encourage anyone to care about the world as much as you can without being self destructive about it, and I really try to live that way myself.
And are you a good judge on if it's better? Better can be very complicated, it could be better in part and worse in another but it's not wrong to try... (Unless well it really becomes really corrupted) We as people tend to overcorrect and so life will always swing from one end of a spectrum to another.
I think people do want to do good in the world they just get overwhelmed, or think it's impossible, or discredit the small good things they do.
Sometimes people think if you don't do a major good thing all the small things don't add up - honestly though it's often better to do smaller good long term things then a major non lasting one.
Besides the world is getting greener, healthier and happier all the time if you look in the right places. You will always find what you ask for, so look for good and you will find it. I follow so many YouTube channels showing how much the environment is improving and how such small things really get better. I try to sponsor them when I can and I hope to do more in the future too.
I also personally grow local fruit trees and various plants in my backyard to help local native species and while minor I am doing something even if small.
I take back everything I said about people being selfish.
Thank you for your service.