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Comment by tedks | Hacker News Reader

>What isn't always obvious is the ways that new abuses are being perpetrated, but once that reaches a certain level then the threshold for action is crossed, and new safeguards can be implemented.

Why do you assume that the novel abuses of the system become non-obvious in time for anything to be done about them?

It's perfectly feasible that the creeping forces of darkness stay hidden until far after it's too late to do anything to stop them.

Life is not a movie. In reality, you sometimes lose; the hero sometimes dies alone; the person you love sometimes marries someone else and lives a happy, fulfilling life never thinking about you. In reality, you can't rely on literary clichés to save you. Nothing will save you. You are on your own.

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Yes, there always is the possibility of "full fail", but look at how difficult it is for autocratic regimes of the world today to suppress human curiosity. My faith is in the endless reaching and searching embedded in the human DNA, though one worry is that we could reach a future state which may not be obviously dystopian but still represents a far from optimal resource configuration. We may in fact we approaching that now. One trump card humans have always held is violent revolution, but the TV shows keep getting better and better, and as long as they aren't murdering union members and forcing children to work in dangerous factories, our corporate overlords may be able to escape a new round of safe guards.

>but look at how difficult it is for autocratic regimes of the world today to suppress human curiosity.

Westerners say that, as if the Reganesque march of progress will destroy any and all nation-states not ideologically subservient to the US of A, but in reality, China is never going to fall; Iran is never going to have free elections; not even Myanmar or even North Korea are going to shift.

The greatest and most heralded revolt of the 21st century replaced an autocratic president with a military dictatorship. But we pretend that Twitter can solve the dire social problems we face; that autocratic regimes can never suppress human curiosity; that one day, maybe not this day, maybe not the next day, but one day, freedom will ring.

But again, life is not a movie; you are not Mel Gibson; you live in reality, and in reality sometimes you lose.

I wasn't making a jingoistic point, but you can take the opposite side of 'never' quite easily. China already has fallen, the communist revolution took place in 1949. Iran recently (from a historic perspective) had free elections in 1951, see Mohammad Mosaddegh. Ideas really are the most powerful things in the world.

The Soviet Union did actually fall, as well; that was before globalization. Iran will never fall while the world buys its oil. China will never fall while it makes your computer.

But this point is too far afield to be useful here.

In reality, when you lose you usually end up redefining the victory conditions so that you've won. Life's not a board game where you play it by someone else's rules. You are, to a large extent, free to make up the rules so that they suit you.

This is very true! But that doesn't make it right.

Life usually has objective victory conditions. Even if you're playing by your own rules, the rules tend to be objective, because humans tend to care about the real world, not what we can convince ourselves.

If your startup fails, you are not going to wave a wand in your mind and say "I've won!" If you do, you will not feel fulfilled. You will not feel happy. Even if your startup was viciously heaving its death throes for years and you finally, finally pulled the plug, you will not feel "victory" in the sense you would if you were bought by Oracle and made a millionaire, because of your stock options.

Your employees will not sit around a table clapping, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nObH1R9ONw

It's very true that people try to convince themselves, following a loss, that they in fact won. They try to convince themselves that now they're free to start the next company, which will surely be a success, or that the person who left them wasn't right for them anyways, and that they'll meet someone new.

But in reality, the next company is sometimes also a failure, and the person who left you sometimes was your only soulmate, driven away by your workaholism or your nagging or whatever else you did.

We can lie to ourselves, but it's hard to truly deceive yourself. Think back to the times in your life when you've lost; you know what they are, and you know how they feel. When you lose again, and you will lose again, you'll know that you've lost then too.

FWIW, my startup failed, and I ended up taking a job at Google.

I didn't exactly say "I've won!", but I did feel happy, and I did feel fulfilled for what I'd accomplished. Yes, I would've liked to have been bought (not by Oracle though, ick) and left a millionaire. However, I was hired by the best company to work for (according to Forbes) in the worst economy since the great depression (it was Oct 2008 when I applied). I know plenty of people who work their whole lives to do that. When I moved out to California, my friends and roommates were like "Well, I still have a job. I haven't been laid off yet." That puts getting hired in a somewhat different light.

I've had plenty of losses since - I've had projects canceled, projects succeed but been kicked off out of my leadership position, projects that succeed within the organization but fail in the marketplace - and a few genuine successes too. Ironically, it's often the successes that feel like more of a let-down, because suddenly this big ambitious goal that I thought was just a dream is now a reality, and...what next?

The key is to remember that the goals themselves are artificial. I set them because I like having a sense of purpose and ambition to my life, but then I remember that I set them, and they wouldn't even be valid if somebody else set them. And so if I don't reach the goal, one interpretation is that I'm a failure and a loser. But another, equally valid interpretation is that the goal was wrong in the first place - it was infeasible, or something I didn't actually want enough to trade away other things in my life, or too dependent upon external events. And then I've learned something too.

The goals that you set -- are they objective, dependent upon a real configuration of the real world such that your goal is achieved, or are they purely subjective, dependent only upon your opinion that the goal is complete?

Since you seem intelligent, I entirely disbelieve that you think an "equally valid interpretation" is that any failed goal was misguided. Presumably you've written buggy code -- do you want to convince yourself that you didn't want correct software enough to trade other things in your life? The only way we improve is by acknowledging mistakes.

(You can always blame external events, so I'm not going to touch that, except to say that for the responsible person, everything is their fault.)

The goals I set are objective, dependent upon the state of the outside world at some future point in time. The meta-goal I set, of living a happy life, is subjective, dependent upon only my own experience. I don't always achieve it, but I take failure to be happy at any given point in time as a signal that I need to change something in either the internal or external world.

The point I'm making - and this is pretty much straight out of a few philosophy courses in college - is that there's a fact/value distinction. Whether or not you achieved a goal is a fact - if you're setting them right, it's measurable and externally verifiable. Whether that goal is good or not is a value - there is no possible way to answer that question other than resorting to your personal value system (or adopting someone else's personal value system). Your personal value system might decree that "It's a good thing when I achieve my goals" - but there is nothing inherent about that, only that you have decided to live your life in a goal-driven way. Other people may hold different values. I do, for example - after much self-examination, I figured out that I'm really discovery-driven, and for me, learning things is an inherent good and achieving my goals is only instrumental.

Also, there's a distinction between inherent and instrumental values. An inherent value is something that's intrinsically good, based on your value system. An instrumental value is something that helps you achieve an inherent value. Many of your goals will be to satisfy instrumental values - if they fail, then you try another approach, you don't think of it as a failure.

To answer your (rhetorical) question: yes, I've written buggy code, and sometimes I've written buggy code deliberately. The reason - in the instance I'm thinking about - was because writing the correct code would've increased latency (this was Javascript, where all the program logic has to be shipped to the client). User happiness was the inherent value, and performance was judged to be a more effective instrument to get there than correctness. So the decision made was to ship the buggy code despite it being buggy, because that actually achieved our purposes much better than making it correct.

That's the sort of flexibility you get from understanding what you're really going for and what are just steps to get you there. You can swap out the steps if they don't work out.

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