
A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy - htk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-02/nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas
======
CivBase
This article puts a lot of emphasis on his lack of degree.

Have we forgotten what a "degree" actually means? When you receive a diploma,
it just means some institution is willing to attest that you have achieved
some sort of qualification.

You can learn something without approval from an institution. Diplomas are
typically expensive, so it's not always worth it to get one. Why is this such
a foreign concept?

~~~
mrfusion
I worked at a research institution for several years and you couldn’t be
promoted above a certain level without a PHD.

~~~
pcvarmint
I once worked at a national lab, advising postdocs on compilers and
optimization, even though I don't have a degree. Is 20 years of experience
worth less than a degree?

Most people I worked with were Ph.D.s who didn't care about their degree or
title. They were focused on technical problems and solutions. There was never
a statement like "But (s)he doesn't have a degree in this-or-that."

Only insecure managers have ever raised the "degree" issue with me. One
manager who stymied my career because I didn't have a degree, was later fired
for making a commitment for which a Ph.D. was committed to do the work. The
project was late or never completed. The Ph.D. was demoted, but the manager
who committed to his work, and who hurt me earlier because I didn't have a
degree, was fired. I thought that was Karma.

------
ohgreatwtf
In summary: Young man who has spent his entire life studying pro-system dogma
and pro-system logic runs a blog and a newsletter where he writes optimistic,
windy expositions on why what the government is doing is right, and gets paid
by a multitude of liberal journos and government officials who need talking
points and arguments that enrich their position. He's literally a yes man for
money printer go brr

~~~
unethical_ban
This sounds like a reddit comment, and not in a good way. Please explain your
issues with their content in a way that frames your opinion and the
differences with his, rather than simply attacking him and his character with
sophomoric language.

~~~
viklove
Ironic, how you disparage the original comment by attacking him and his
character through a comparison to reddit. Please attack the content of the
comment rather than its tone. Using big words does not make your perspective
more valid.

~~~
unethical_ban
There is nothing ironic about it. I was aggressive, but made my point: His
comment did not address any substance, or state is own beliefs.

My content _is_ my criticism of his tone. There was little substance in his
comment in the first place - that's the point.

~~~
viklove
> Young man who has spent his entire life studying pro-system dogma and pro-
> system logic runs a blog and a newsletter where he writes optimistic, windy
> expositions on why what the government is doing is right, and gets paid by a
> multitude of liberal journos and government officials who need talking
> points and arguments that enrich their position.

There's quite a bit of content here, but you instead focused on this:

> He's literally a yes man for money printer go brr

I think your comment is actually more ad-hominem and juvenile than his, to be
honest.

------
WalterBright
Anyone who has actually read _Monetary History_ is going to be way, way more
interesting than those that get their economics from internet memes, slogans,
and journalists.

~~~
rmrfstar
You've got to be careful with Friedman's work. He's highly persuasive, but
presents an incomplete picture. For example, he dogmatically asserts that
"market power" is not an obstacle to market efficiency. According to Friedman,
monopolists are only problematic to the extent that they corrupt government to
their ends.

The book's central thesis is that Fed monetary policy made the depression
worse. That is widely accepted by economists of all stripes.

However, Friedman also argues that the Fed should boldly step in as a lender
of last resort. He ignores the fact that no institution can make a realistic
solvency determination during a crisis. What that means in practice is he
supports things like TARP.

This amounts to a statement that the cost of financial panics (which are an
inherent characteristic of all systems with maturity transformation) should be
born by the public rather than the financial sector. That is a political
decision, not a technical economic one.

A lot of economics from the Friedman era is about clothing political choices
in technical jargon.

~~~
partiallypro
> He ignores the fact that no institution can make a realistic solvency
> determination during a crisis. What that means in practice is he supports
> things like TARP.

I don't think either of these sentences are true. Friedman wasn't for bailouts
for those that did wrong, he simply knows that a deflationary spiral can occur
if there is a cascading banking failure. Which is what happened in the Great
Depression, and what was avoided in 2007/08\. It should also be noted that
TARP made the public money.

> Should be born by the public rather than the financial sector.

That is also not true. The issuer of money explicitly a tool of the government
(even if the Fed itself is technically private.) The reason the Fed has to
step in, is because the actual equation for money supply includes the velocity
of money. If economic activity crashes, the money supply goes down. That is
accelerated further due to complex financial instruments such as derivatives.
The Fed shoring up balance sheets with low interest loans alleviates that
during economic downturns. There is a side effect that some firms are able to
use this opportunity to enrich themselves, but it is rarely at a great cost to
the public, relatively speaking.

~~~
rmrfstar
Abstract away all the money supply stuff.

Banking systems have multiple equilibria [1]. That is one way of saying that
financial crises are like floods. They are a fact of life, and happen from
time to time.

Who should pay for flood insurance, the public or the people building on flood
plains?

If the public pays for the flood insurance, there will be too much
construction in the flood plain.

The fact that TARP provided a small accounting profit to the Treasury is sort
of immaterial. It was a free put that was never exercised. People should pay a
premium for insurance. An efficient market prices risk...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model)

------
DevKoala
His piece challenging Frank Partnoy’s fear mongering comparison between CDO’s
and CLO’s is great.

[https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/worst-case-scenario-
or-i...](https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/worst-case-scenario-or-
inconsistent)

~~~
FabHK
That article was my first introduction to Tankus's writings, and I must say
that I disagree - it's not great.

I found Partnoy's article quite persuasive, and Tankus's response [1] not
convincing.

For example, this is confused, in my opinion:

> Remember that collateralized loan obligations are simpler instruments than
> collateralized debt obligations. There is one layer between individual loans
> to corporations and CLOs whereas CDOs were two layers away from individual
> mortgages. Second, because CDOs were made up of mortgage backed securities,
> what mortgage backed securities were in them mattered. It's important in
> this context to know what the purpose of CDOs were. They were the equivalent
> of kitchen leftovers thrown into a lunch special the next day and cooked in
> such a way as to hide that they aren’t fresh. CDOs generally took the
> riskier and lower rated portions of mortgage backed securities and made up
> entire securities out of them.

I disagree. They are quite similar. Mortgages are wrapped into Mortgage Backed
Securities, yes, but they are typically not tranched. So it's basically more
or less like one big "average" mortgage. Those then are put into a CDO, and
tranched. (Two levels of tranching are normally called CDO-squared.)

Next, house values are somewhat floored - a house can loose 30% value, maybe
40 or 50%, but that's really quite unlikely. Debt, per se, will normally also
have some significant recovery value if equity goes to zero. However, a
comparatively junior loan might easily go to zero if a company goes bad.
Partnoy mentions this explicitly and highlights that many underlying loans are
fairly junior:

> > We already know that a significant majority of the loans in CLOs have weak
> covenants that offer investors only minimal legal protection; in industry
> parlance, they are “cov lite.” The holders of leveraged loans will thus be
> fortunate to get pennies on the dollar as companies default—nothing close to
> the 70 cents that has been standard in the past.

Thus, it is CLOs that have something akin to double-tranching, more so than
CDOs, contra Tankus's assertion.

> The point is, a proper comparison between mortgage securities and syndicated
> corporate loan securities would compare the value of outstanding “subprime”
> Mortgage Backed Securities to outstanding Collateralized Loan Obligations,
> not to Collateralized Debt Obligations.

No. Compare the CLOs to CDOs, or corporate debt to mortgages, or corporate
bonds to MBS.

> In other words, in nominal dollar terms the current CLO market is ⅓ of the
> size of the subprime mortgage backed securities market then. This actually
> understates how relatively paltry Collateralized Loan Obligations are.

That's not paltry. A big problem with CDOs was that it was very intransparent
where the losses would accrue. The underlying mortgage market went down, say,
10%. If every bank took a 10% hit, fine. But given the opaqueness, it could be
that one bank would take a 5% hit, the other a 25% hit. Nobody could tell, and
that made every bank suspect. CLOs pose the same problem.

> The key here is to understand that the problems with CDOs were not because
> of losses on the underlying mortgages. They were dynamite, engineered to
> explode. The nitroglycerin was not the mortgages but credit default swaps, a
> type of unregulated insurance that let purchasers bet on whether a specific
> security was going to fail or not.

Dynamite is engineered to be stable and less explosive than nitroglycerin, and
most CDOs were not engineered to explode either. Towards the end, when smart
money wanted to short the market, some products were built and sold to long
investors so that the smart money could short it, sure. But Tankus doesn't
provide evidence about the relative size of that.

> Many of these collateralized debt obligations were filled with credit
> default swaps tied to the riskier and lower rated tranches of Mortgage
> Backed Securities which I discussed earlier, which were guaranteed to fail.

Again, CDOs are tranched, MBS aren't generally (except in the sense that a CDO
is an MBS in the wider sense). CDOs based on CDS are synthetic CDOs, and yeah,
they were constructed and sold.

> One way of recognizing how fundamentally different circumstances are is by
> examining what happened to AAA rated mortgage backed securities. If, as
> Partnoy implies, the losses on CDOs were simply a matter of defaults on the
> underlying mortgages, triple A rated Residential Mortgage backed Securities
> should have taken losses comparable to CDOs.

That's nonsense. The whole point is that the expected loss of an MBS is
independent of correlation, while the expected loss of a CDO tranche depends
on correlation. That's really the basic feature - if you have a non-linear
payoffs of an underlying, vol enters, and if you have an underlying consisting
of many other underliers, the vol depends on the correlation.

And really, that's what this is about. Higher tranches of CDOs or CLOs are
safe when correlation is low, but when one massive black swan hits, namely a
pandemic, then correlation is not low, and tranches considered safe before
might fail. And one still has the opacity of CDOs.

> In fact, it’s likely that collateralized loan obligations made up of the top
> portion of a portfolio of loans will do the best of any of the Bank’s
> corporate loans [note: presumably he means the top tranches of such a CLO].
> When a bank originates and holds a loan, it immediately takes losses if the
> borrower defaults. In contrast, it takes very substantial levels of defaults
> before holders of the top portion, or “senior tranche” of a collateralized
> loan obligation realize any losses. For any given portfolio of loans, given
> the same overall default rate and the same loan modifications, senior
> tranche holders will experience less losses than outright holders of a
> portfolio of loans. This structure may encourage originating lower quality
> loans and investors may overpay as a result of tranches being mis-rated by
> credit rating agencies.

Indeed! That's the problem. Correlation, again.

> However, it can’t be said that this structure, in and of itself, magnifies
> losses for investors in the senior tranche. In fact, it works as intended-
> other investors bear the bulk of the risks.

Not the structure in and of itself... but the problem remains: you construct a
AAA security out of worse quality loans assuming low correlation, and then a
pandemic hits...

Finally, Tankus imputes ulterior motives on Partnoy without any warrant.

To sum up, using Tankus summary:

1\. No, collateralized loan obligations are not a major systematic risk to the
banking system. - well, he hasn't refuted that claim though.

2\. No, collateralized loan obligations are not like Collateralized Debt
Obligations. - well, they are somewhat. It's the correlation, baby.

3\. The Great Financial Crisis was a credit default swap crisis, not a
mortgage crisis. - CDS (like all derivatives) are in net zero supply. So, they
just redistribute the wins and losses. The losses came from mortgages. CDS
redistributed them, CDOs made them very opaque. CLOs can do the same.

4\. Credit Default Swaps are not threatening another banking crisis. -
Hopefully. CLOs neither, hopefully.

5\. Even the leveraged loan market is only somewhat important
macroeconomically. - Ok.

6\. Liquidity and capital issues are being handled differently today. -
Hopefully. But we also have an unprecedented crisis at hand.

7\. Leveraged loan issuance is not the major cause of financial distress among
businesses. - Not yet.

In the response to Partnoy's response, Tankus reiterates his misunderstanding:

> I do not think that popular press pieces should present Collateralized Loan
> Obligations as similar to Collateralized Debt Obligations when the unique
> and dangerous feature of Collateralized Debt Obligations is that they were
> securitizations of already structured products and not securitizations of
> underlying loans directly.

That's not the unique and dangerous feature. The unique feature of a CDO is
the tranching, which it does have in common with a CLO.

> Mortgage Backed Securities are the proper analogue to Collateralized Debt
> Obligations and if Partnoy’s piece were edited to reflect this, a large
> degree of its rhetorical force would be weakened and the premise of the
> article may not even hold up to scrutiny.

Same same. Or:

> However, a major overarching point of my piece is that that extreme scenario
> is only plausible when it is implied that top tranche CLOs are like subprime
> top tranche CDOs. I’m claiming that this is an apples to oranges comparison.

Same same. It's a valid comparison, in my view.

> Further, it’s important to grasp that to the extent to which the top
> tranches of CLOs are threatened on the scale that Partnoy speculates about,
> no other portfolio of loans would be safe.

Correct. But the portfolio of loans wouldn't be rated AAA, while the CLO
senior tranches are. That's the problem.

So, I haven't read much of Tankus, but from this one piece (and the reply to
the reply), I am not that impressed.

[1] [https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/is-there-really-a-
loomin...](https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/is-there-really-a-looming-bank-
collapse)

~~~
DevKoala
You are making an argument of CLO’s having more risk than CDOs by using the
following from Fartnoy:

> Later this summer, leveraged-loan defaults will increase significantly as
> the economic effects of the pandemic fully register. Bankruptcy courts will
> very likely buckle under the weight of new filings. (During a two-week
> period in May, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, and J. C. Penney all filed for
> bankruptcy.)

1\. We have hit 2014 highs, but we are reopening, and the Fed keeps buying
bonds allowing the companies to incur on new debt while keeping their dues
with banks.

> We already know that a significant majority of the loans in CLOs have weak
> covenants that offer investors only minimal legal protection; in industry
> parlance, they are “cov lite.” The holders of leveraged loans will thus be
> fortunate to get pennies on the dollar as companies default—nothing close to
> the 70 cents that has been standard in the past.

2\. I don’t see him even throwing a percentage of the number of CLO’s that
would have to default for this to be a problem. It would be nice to understand
where we were, where we are, and what are the possible outcomes. Moreover, the
assumption that companies will go down to zero net worth that returns pennies
on the dollar implies that the market for companies is inefficient, the risks
and pros are not assessed properly. If that was the case we wouldn’t be seeing
so many mergers. Companies that will rather be acquired by other companies on
pure stock transaction rather than going down to zero, and the leader in the
space absorbs the debt. These mergers are driven for a hunger of client
expansion and space specific technology acquisition.
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-masmovil-m-a-
loans/masmov...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-masmovil-m-a-
loans/masmovil-buyers-secure-first-leveraged-loan-since-covid-19-crisis-
idUSKBN2442AL)

After that, you continue making analogies between them by assuming there is
more shadow banking and a short market exists, without proof. You also go into
a layer structure comparison while ignoring the fact that the CDO’s risk was
being assumed recursively while sold linearly. There is also no comment on the
fact that the debt on non financial organizations, consumers of CLOs is 23%
less than that in 2008 without even adjusting for inflation.

I understand your argument, but it seems you have convinced yourself already
of a worst case scenario that is not occurring so far because the Fed is
bailing the banks out by buying bonds.

------
viburnum
Tankus has been studying economics full time for twelve years! He's earned it.
His posts used to be not good but he's paid his dues.

~~~
melling
What’s the famous saying about the best way to get the right answer? Something
about posting it to the Internet and having the crowd correct you?

~~~
gen220
Cunningham’s Law! It is great and has many applications, when you’re trying to
squeeze good information out of a system that doesn’t circulate it naturally.

~~~
swyx
I have a fun anecdote about this one. I once misattributed this on a podcast
and called it Godwin's Law. A listener pinged me about it to correct me on the
next day.

Cunningham's Law is self-healing.

------
donw
Universities, in their current incarnation, offer a poor return on investment.

When a degree was scarce, it was valuable. As was when a degree guaranteed a
certain level of knowledge and skill.

But that really isn't the case nowadays. The vast majority of degree programs
exist simply to collect tuition dollars, and the students that undertake these
programs would be better-served by a vocational or professional education
system.

The standard counter-argument here is that you gain social skills in
university... but the same is true when you join the workforce.

Germany gets this one right, by the way.

That is not to say that the idea of a university has outlived its utility! We
need spaces where curious minds can seek answers from and challenge themselves
against well-practiced experts. That's part of how you set a country up for
future success.

But that's not what we have now, not from my experience in the United States.
What we need are Schools of Athens, but what we have are Temples of Amun.

So it's not all that surprising that, in the information age, curious people
look to both the cost of a degree, and to the legions of unemployed graduates,
and figure they can do better.

~~~
akudha
Yup. I was a shitty student (I used to read novels on my way to the exam hall)
and still got a masters degree without breaking a sweat (with decent grades).
And this is from a good institution with a fairly tough entrance exam.

Everything I learned, I learned outside school. Sometimes I wonder if the only
things that schools provide are friendships and connections, and in some cases
brand recognition. Something is not right about the way we teach youngsters.

------
lukev
Interesting article, but it feels like it's grinding some weird axes. Like the
way it harps on his lack of a degree, and awkwardly mentions the political
alignment of people Tankus learned from (like "[he read a book] by the liberal
John Maynard Keynes" or "[he studied with] with the leftist economist J.W.
Mason").

Is this standard for Bloomberg?

~~~
Miner49er
Isn't that important when talking economics? Liberalism as a political
philosophy has a lot to say on economics (very pro capitalist and pro markets)
and "leftism" informs the reader that Mason isn't a capitalist.

It shows that he's learned from people with very different theories/opinions
on economics.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/THHp4](https://archive.is/THHp4)

------
vesche
Paywall bypass:

    
    
      wget -U "Mozilla/4.0" "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-02/nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas" && firefox nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas
    

I don't really like when non-formal education is highlighted as surprising in
a talented individual. At least in the US, a college education will often put
you in serious debt and seems to currently be teaching all sorts of non-
technical inaccuracies while ill-preparing people for the real world.

With so much knowledge & resources being available for free online: why would
any smart, independent young person want to go to college in the US? The only
reason I can think of is to become something that you actually _need_ to go to
college for like a doctor or lawyer.

It's pretty crazy when people like Jordan Peterson, who used to teach at
Harvard, is suggesting that young people go to trade schools. The college
system in the US needs to be restructured or die.

~~~
bmitc
People are absolutely obssessed with institutions, mainly via justification of
their own passage through those institutions. I have seen it at every level of
education where people a notch below them or more on the educational ladder
are looked down upon. People holding bachelor's or master's degrees will look
down upon those with only an associate's degree or a high school
certification. Those with a Ph.D. will look down upon those who don't and
elevate those who do. I have both seen this and experienced it.

A book that covers this is _Disciplined Minds_ by Jeff Schmidt.

~~~
vesche
I definitely agree with this, and I will check out the book you suggested.

The title of the posted article is particularly relevant to me, as I'm also a
28 year old without a degree. I gained my technical skills from schools in the
military, OJT, and self-teaching. When I was applying for software engineering
jobs in the civilian world, my resume often wouldn't even be looked at because
I didn't have a college degree.

------
nikivi
Nathan made a thread as a reply to this piece on him

[https://twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1278777095670370304](https://twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1278777095670370304)

~~~
hardwaregeek
I've been thinking about this exact issue with respect to my accomplishments.
How much benefit have I drawn from looking like a programmer? I'm an Asian
American male with glasses. I fit the part. Looking back, people gave me
respect and their ear far before I deserved it. Would I have gotten the same
level of encouragement if I were Black? Would I have gotten the same level of
respect if I were a woman? Probably not.

Any social engineer can tell you that appearances are half the battle. A white
male in a hardhat with a clipboard could get into most construction sites. A
white male in a suit could probably get into most office buildings.

There's some rather vehement responses in this thread. I wonder how many
people are threatened by the idea that their accomplishments are partially due
to them "looking the part" and not just their work and skill.

~~~
usaar333
> How much benefit have I drawn from looking like a programmer

On the other hand, our profession does have the benefit of being able to be
done with zero knowledge of appearance. In fact, I credit that fact to
enabling smart teenagers to make key contributions to open source they
otherwise would be excluded from due to assumptions coming from age.

~~~
aliante
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog)

------
ixvvqktiwl
Also check out r/investing or r/wallstreetbets, lots of free opinions on
what's happening in the world.

~~~
HenryKissinger
> check out ... r/wallstreetbets

Don't. At least not for anything other than the memes.

~~~
acwan93
Serious question: does anyone know when/why that subreddit became what is is
today? I used to follow it in the early 2010s and it actually provided some
reasonable insights.

~~~
joshmn
I can tell you for sure that Robinhood hasn't contributed positively the
quality of content.

~~~
ForHackernews
I have to beg to differ. The Robinhood "infinite money cheat code" was WSB's
finest hour.

~~~
StavrosK
What was that, for those of us out of the loop?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I don't remember (and maybe never read) the exact details, but as I recall it
wasn't so much "infinite money" as "infinite leverage". You could somehow buy
assets leveraged, then make the system "forget" that those assets were already
leveraged, so it lets you leverage them again to buy something else.

------
motohagiography
He shouldn't be so humble, he's not that great.

The headline and the article were incredibly patronizing. I'd argue his
response was undignified, as the implication is that due to his privilege, he
might have otherwise earned his success if only he had in fact finished his
degree. It was a smug gesture that betrays the legitimacy of every other
person who has also succeeded without one. The phrase "unctuous git," sprung
to mind.

Good on him for succeeding, and one hopes he isn't just being elevated because
he can be relied upon to toe the party line, but as someone with a similar
background, Tankus is not representative.

------
Thorentis
(From Nathan's Twitter after this:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1278777095670...](https://mobile.twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1278777095670370304))

> I do have a credential- the intersection of my whiteness, maleness and
> cisness.

Wow, wasn't it just yesterday a post blew up about political correctness gone
mad?

I suppose Nathan wanted to get in first and "apologise" for his whiteness,
before his rise to fame (which has coincided with the rise of a... particular
socio-political movement) punishes him for it.

Isn't it enough to just say "if you're good at something, you don't need a
degree"?. But no. He took to Twitter to perpetuate the woke, self-denigrating
culture of white Twitter to ensure that his success wasn't hampered by the
mob. PC culture has reduced people to snivelling, grovelling shadows of
themselves that can't think for themselves.

Forget blind-hiring practices! Should we be putting disclaimers on our resumes
that points out if we're a white cis-male so that a company can appropriately
punish us for the sin of being born a particular sex and race?

~~~
brbrodude
This kind of rant is just as boring as any other that would be considered "PC"
just for the sake of it and it works by the same logic of first and foremost
not being charitable to what was intended/tried to be communicated to then
deliberately making up wrong interpretation to try to conjure up ridicule, so
yeah, tell me how is it not the same shit on an inverted signal? Seems though
that he actually has something else to add rather just acting out butthurt or
laying down The New Law, plus he also writes with some humility something
which I grew up thinking it's a good thing.

I'm not uncritical of "PC culture" or whatever you wanna call it, I call it
left-moralism and I don't like it because it's also a lot of times entirely
based on being uncharitable or purposefully misinterpreting others, which is
no good for making sense of stuff, I do however care first about if there's
truth on statements I may be reading/listening and second about if it brings
me or others emotions in one way or another, and that I call:
reading/listening.

~~~
Thorentis
My rant wasn't about his intentions. He almost certainly had good intentions.
I'm sad that his good nature has been corrupted by the current PC trend, and
that he is suffering from imposter syndrome where he is attributing his
success to his "whiteness".

~~~
brbrodude
When you read that much into a text, how can you be sure you're not projecting
your own conceptions and stereotypes on it? It's impossible. Nobody really has
access to the cogs running inside ppls minds, you're just claiming you know
his ulterior motives. Plus, I'd have to assume that not only you have this
special knowledge but that it surpasses the authors own words directly saying
otherwise(1), sorry, I can't trust that thought and I do not follow your
conclusions. I just don't buy it.

I haven't talked about 'intentions' anywhere either, I criticized your
reasoning and you restated your beliefs. More on what I meant by
"uncharitableness" is here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

(1):

" __ _This isn 't to bemoan or disclaim my success or my hard work_ __. The
point is there are plenty of people who have worked just as hard as me, and
many harder than me, who aren 't having the success I am. It takes my social
credentials to take a glidepath to the most interesting and advanced
subjects."

" __ _I don 't feel guilty for my success_ __but I won 't be satisfied until I
see a Black trans person given the social license to do what I've done"

~~~
Thorentis
> "I don't feel guilty for my success but I won't be satisfied until I see a
> Black trans person given the social license to do what I've done"

"I can't enjoy eating until there are no hungry children in Africa". Good
intentions, not a healthy way to live in my opinion.

~~~
brbrodude
I see what you mean. I mean, nobody should be expected to be always tuned in
on this sort of stuff, much less so to, and this is something I specifically
think is very wrong, to forget that whatever one may have learned, he was once
ignorant of it that this is absolutely natural and normal and should be
treated as such, _inclusive to those that think they 've gotten the absolute
unquestionable knowledge_.

So, any kind of moralism is just bullshit to me, and this just goes back to
the "charity gap" I meant. Ppl going overboard with sermons, that is
completely misguided, I don't think that was specifically the case here but I
know what you're talking about.

To me this comes from insights I had from philosophy & stoicism, for the whole
it's a much more complicated matter.

