yrimaxi

Aha. So you agree.

These kind of comments always get downvoted but it is pretty accurate. Certainly people like Madison didn’t want a thriving, egalitarian, democratic, civic culture and nation.

The thing is that editing/text-navigation modes are so universally useful that it makes perfect sense to make a supposed “OS-level” text editor. How many plugins, extensions, etc. are there so that people can use Vim bindings in web browsers, IDEs, the window manager, etc.?

Good that it’s working well for you! :)

> First, Facebook avoids titles, so there's no such thing "senior software engineer".

How egalitarian. Let me guess: you are an IC6, or perhaps IC7? You just give off that vibe.

What does it mean to “extend String” in Java? You can’t, of course, literally do that.

Land, i.e. the classic example of rent-seeking.

The land doesn’t become “valuable on its own”, it’s just used to extract value from other things.

> In that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him.

> ...

> As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise, or collect from it. His rent makes the first deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon land.

Wealth of Nations

The point of most things that you can buy should be the thing itself, not its investment-value. If not there is probably rent-seeking going on, i.e. a market failure.

All things degrade due to entropy. Things cannot truly become more valuable by themselves.

Pretty obvious stuff. Of course GUIDs are more unweildy to read etc. compared to simple auto-incrementing integers.

I don’t see a reason to prefix an id with something like `task-`. I would rather leave it to the display logic.

I keep getting impressed by the EA-proponents ability and eagerness to frame EA as “true altruism” (an actual quote in this case!), as if EA is some purely-rational approach with no philosophical baggage or assumptions. How utterly self-congratulatory.

Another problem I have with EA is how incredibly fragile it is: because it is so reductive and narrowly-focused, you are likely to optimize for the wrong thing (the map is never the territory) and might even do more harm than good. In the best case scenario you might do a lot of good, though.

You’ve set up a convenient dichotomy where one through pure reason alone arrives at the inevitable conclusion that one should “liquidate and donate any excess they produce”, or else one is merely being driven by pure sentiment/feel-goodiness. For some reason though it is only these tunnel-vision engineer types that seem to be sentimentally drawn towards this oh so obvious conclusion.

(As an example: a socialist will probably not think that making the most money possible and then giving a lot of it away is the most ethical thing to do.)

And yes, of course my obvious point is that everyone should just quit their jobs and travel to Africa.

Describing non-alienation as “feeling good” (as another commenter did) or “not feeling weird” is a great way to pathologize my observation of how weird it is to work a six-figure, ad/surveillance-optimizing job at Google in order for there to be more malaria nets in Africa. Trust me: I don’t believe that EA is sound in any way (or “effective”, if you like), but in this thread I chose to focus on just one aspect of it, indeed its most bizarre feature, which apparently isn’t bizarre at all to all of the Soylent-drinking life-optimizers out there, so my point has been like, as they say, seeds on barren ground.

What alternative? How is that even a question? The answer is obvious: do good directly, with your own mind and hands, not indirectly. That’s the obvious alternative. Maybe not everyone has the opportunity to do that, just like not everyone has the opportunity to get a non-alienating job.

> Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others.

You see? Both of these things are still indirect do-gooding. Donating to charity? How about being good, doing good? Or are you only able to assess the moral weight of something if you can read about them in some spreadsheet?

I guess it’s affirming to think that people reject one’s ethical outlook because it would necessitate such an awe-inspiring commitment or burden. Rather than for more analytic reasons.

Burn out wasn’t the point. I explicitly disregarded that by putting in the premise that the hypothetical person is not and will not get burned out with that philanthropy schedule.

I could have just as well have written that they made a million a year and only donated 5%—that’s besides (my/the) point.

I guess we are all so alienated these days that we don’t find working on Wall Street—or Main Street—in order to indirectly help other people with our money instead of helping directly not the least bit weird at all. Or to help people by working as a programmer and donating a lot of your salary to some school instead of just working there as a teacher, helping people directly (to use another example). (Oh, that reminds me. I need to take my vitamin D supplements right about now. I calculated that being in the Sun is not worth my time so I have to compensate a bit, you see.)

Maybe you are pursuing a different point than mine, but my own point was about alienation, not supererogation. I don’t put EA proponents on such a lofty pedestal.

> Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective.

Do you have proof? Because whether it “feels good” (or rather, feels like you are actually doing something, rather than trying to motivate yourself by convincing yourself that the numbers are correct and you are (indirectly) doing something) will influence how much good you can do.

Some things—like only eating Soylent or maximizing your goodiness-output by working on Wall Street (or wherever else)—might only work well on paper.

In any case my point all along was the alienation factor. That’s the point, to me. Raise whatever other point you would like. (Of course an EA-enthusiast would only care about the supposed numbers.)

A scenario: you want to help people. You have the opportunity to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street (finance or whatever). You reckon that you would optimize your good-output by working more rather than helping directly (you don’t have the skills or know-how to help directly, you also reckon). So you get a well-paying job, work 60 hours a week in order to earn more money and advance your career, live frugally and donate 70% of your income to charity. At this point you are spent: you cannot do more good than working those hours without burning out and thus hurting your career long-term.

Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.

What about bananas? Referring to banana republics.

> Because we have a term for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know to be aware of it, etc.

Or rather, we are more accutely aware of how everyone else might suffer from it.

No wonder Singer didn’t end up liking Marx. EA is the most alienating code of ethics that I’ve seen.

I think we can just end the whole thread with this comment (the parent’s). It’s perfect.

To summarize: unions might in general be good or bad, but any talk of tech unions on HN will be controversial because of how massively—and this cannot be overstated—, stupendously better the average HN reader is compared to the average tech worker. Thread over.

It is.

The we are the power elite, you is everyone else. That there is such a thing as a power elite seems obvious enough. Pick a sociology book at random?

Political candidates are (in America) in effect picked by moneyed interests, i.e. groups and people who have enough money to throw tens of thousands or millions at political campaigns etc. You can of course volunteer for political candidates, but it’s a safer bet to just have money to spend.

> Also, your conclusion(s) does/do not follow

That’s the point!

Flip side implies symmetry.

Indent with spaces, don’t align.

> If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world. We're driving around in electric cars, carrying around cell phones that are orders of magnitude faster than desktop PCs from 1996, and communication technology has evolved to the point that many of us are seamlessly working from home.

But these things were not driven by software innovations.

Indeed the reverse of my point.

How about the democracy syllogism:

1. We will pick a handful of people that you may choose from

2. You pick one of them (because there were no other choices)

3. Therefore you freely chose that person and are solely responsible for what that person does

d/