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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Thinking that all help that you get comes at the direct (even if diffused) harm of others is a fixed-pie mentality. Everyone gets help; most everyone gives help to others; it’s essential to the functioning of our complex society and is how we aren’t living in trees and caves anymore.

Success is impossible without receiving help. I have someone that I’ve never met who helps by ensuring that reliable power arrives via overhead wires to my house. Someone else’s help ensures that my garbage is carted away, clean water arrives under pressure, and 100s of other things that would be incredible drains on my time before I could do the first thing that was valuable to me or my family.

Take the help when you need it.

Give the help when you can.

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Everyone who proudly mentions the fixed pie fallacy usually ignores that a lot of "truths" in economics: a) Make sense only at an aggregate, whole economy, sometimes even whole world level. b) And doesn't happen instantaneously, leading to the famous Keynes phrase: "In the long run, we will be all dead". c) Are defined in very simplified models and require a lot of premises to hold, for the results to be valid (the also famous: "All else equal").

Also, your examples of help are way more broadly defined than what the parent poster is talking about. It takes a stretch of imagination to classify the fact that people are working for wage to make sure I have water with specific programs that give arbitrary groups some advantage, even when this is done with the best possible intentions.

The thing is, the pie feels as though it is fixed in tech sector due to monopolization. It's fixed in terms of who can have a slice at all. So while the size of the pie and people's slice can grow, who can sit at the table feels fixed.

Also, I wouldn't frame the person who provides electricity as helping you if you're paying them. It's an exchange since you earned that money. This isn't the definition of help I'm pushing against.

Also, help might be OK and even necessary in a different system for example, but it doesn't work in the current system IMO. My view is context dependent based on my experience in the current system and how it seems to consistently weaponize help and altruism.

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