
Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance - api
https://medium.com/better-humans/c9ef444da2a0
======
gutnor
> There’s not all that much being done that demands thirty years of experience

That is key isn't it. I don't live either in the Valley, but observe it
through HN goggles.

There seems to be an infinite amount of money thrown to vastly similar
projects. That's like brute forcing as much marketing ideas as possible and
see what sticks, using cheap resources cajoled into that life by ego boosting
measures: countless meet-up, conferences, conveniently all across the country
(amazing how traveling makes people feel important). You are no mere
developers, you are talents. Only you can do it, and your time is running
short: by the time you are 30 you are braindead. Do it, you only have one
chance to show the world who you really are.

Reminds me of the 90's, it used to be selling stuff online, now it is
distributing ads. Hopefully this time it will not stop violently like it did
last time, and for the time being that is at least a sector where money go to
the younger generation.

The negative point IMO, is that prominent figures try too hard to drive people
off school. Sure education price is absurd in the US and I understand that a
ROI is necessary, however, there are many many industries that will not look
at you without that piece of paper. When time get tough (and they will, a
career is 40 years long !) even the company that are hip and open right now
will use that token when scanning a stack of similar looking resume.

They did the same trick during the Internet bubble. Countless of people self
learned development, change career, and paid the price after the bubble had
exploded. PHP God / Web Developer was a golden ticket to any company or
sector, but as of 2002, you better had that backed by some formal education to
catch a high paying job, or even a job at all.

~~~
api
Yeah I think that's the crux of the age-ism too. Anything that's going to lead
anywhere in the same solar system as consciousness uploading is going to be a
wee bit harder than serving ads at volume from the cloud. The lack of a large
enough market for skills at that level speaks of the lack of problems that
hard being tackled.

You're right about SV being underpaid, too. Those salaries look big until you
factor in the cost of living and the number of hours you work.

Hint:

If you make $120,000/year and work 60 hours a week, you actually make about
$80,000/year when compared to someone who works 40 hours a week and makes
$80,000/year. Now plug that into your cost of living calculator in a city with
$3000/month for entry level rent. Now you make the same as someone who makes
$50,000/year in Austin, Texas.

Six figure recent college grads in SF/SV are cheap labor.

Oh, and I wonder who owns all that real estate? It couldn't be the same people
who own a lot of the VC funds and large shares of the tech companies could it?
Think about the journey the money is taking from the point it reaches your
pocket. If that's true, it ends up right back where it started in short order
minus taxes.

Bottom line:

You are a business selling your labor. Your _net profit per hour worked_ is
what you make, not your gross income. If you live check to check, you make
nothing.

Edit:

The only _minor_ wrinkle here is debt. If you have a lot of debt, then making
the numbers bigger works to your advantage provided you use those bigger
numbers to reduce your debt in nominal terms. Example: paying 10% of a 100k
income against your debt will pay it off _exponentially_ faster than paying
10% of a 60k income. This is why politicians love inflation. So if you have a
200k student loan maybe you should chase big numbers in nominal terms until
that's gone.

~~~
humanrebar
Also, saving 15k of a 120k income is probably easier than saving 15k of a 50k
income.

------
jmillikin
It's not cognitive dissonance for two groups of people to have different
goals, and ways to reach those goals.

Fresh young startup CEOs only hire other young people because they're more
interested in getting paid to play Xbox than they are in actually getting work
done. The goal isn't to make money, it's to make friends and network.
Programmers don't need 20 years of experience to write a shopping cart in
Rails.

The companies who actually solve hard problems are still hiring anyone they
can get their hands on, regardless of age, because if HR's willing to spring
for an extra $100k a year they can hire the co-inventor of TCP instead of a
new grad who wrote their first client-server app a month ago.

~~~
sjg007
That's funny... Of the co-inventors of TCP one works for Google (Vint Cerf,is
70) and Bob Kahn is 74 years old.

------
FD3SA
I enjoy seeing these introspective posts and hope they become prevalent among
technical people all over the world. What technical people need to understand
is that the system that we operate in is just as important, if not more so,
than our own aspirations and potential contributions.

Politics, economics and culture are usually taken for granted by technologists
and scientists. Some are informed pessimists, and some are apathetically
uninformed. The truth is that these systems serve as the silicon upon which we
must build. We often try to abstract our way out of it, but if we want real
change, we have to go right down to the hardware and begin making changes.

The OP correctly identifies the cognitive dissonance in SV, as well as some
aspects of classical capitalism. The reality is that we are running a society
based upon assumptions made hundreds of years ago as to what a society
constitutes and how it should work. These factors are all changing rapidly,
and it’s becoming clear that our systems aren't keeping up.

In the USA, we face an unprecedented technological tidal wave in a winner-
take-all capitalist society. This has massive upsides for the winners
(entrepreneurs, VCs, hedge funds, banks, etc.) and devastating consequences
for the losers (unskilled labor, outdated/sidelined skilled labor, the sick,
poor, unemployed, etc.). Furthermore, this type of laissez-faire economy
incentivizes short term investments at the cost of long term projects (Apollo,
Human Genome, etc.). As the role of government and its spending becomes
increasingly demonized, we will undoubtedly see these trends strengthen,
leading to more emphasis on the present at the expense of the future. Projects
that don’t have immediate benefits will be cancelled, and long term research
will grind to a halt. We are already seeing this with the plateau and decline
of government research institutions, soon to be followed by the demise of
publicly funded research in academia.

What we really have to ask ourselves is this: what is the most optimal
contribution we can make during these times? Is it better to dedicate some
time to rethink these foundations, or do we just push forward on our own high
level projects in hopes of making small positive contributions? When do we
start treating government and politics like an engineered system, which can be
planned and optimized for certain outcomes? And finally, when do we start
talking about which outcomes we want to see in the long term?

I am cautiously hopeful, but it is going to take a lot of individual
introspection by the technical community to reach the critical mass required
to enact long-term positive change.

------
_random_
That's how capitalism works, I am afraid. Strong AI and mind uploading would
take enormous research budget without strong guarantees. Also it would make
more sense to persuade people to graduate in neuroscience-computer science
double major rather than preaching to generic software developers.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It might be cheaper than you expect once you apply good VC.

Might not; but that's what VC about.

------
VladRussian2
age-ism is for the "over 40" folks in the Valley except when the next rule
applies

transhumanism is for the folks who've made the money, and age doesn't matter
for transhumans

and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance is how it looks for the folks
outside of the Valley to whom the above mentioned distinction blurs away due
to the distance (in mental and real space).

------
wissler
The reason why youth is preferentially valued is that wisdom is not: the youth
work within existing systems and frameworks with agility and without
questioning them, they don't yet have the experience to deeply challenge those
frameworks.

It's not that there are no older people at companies, it's that there are few
at the top, who don't want to be challenged. They want people who will
efficiently follow orders. The best kind of person to follow orders is one who
doesn't even know how to begin questioning them yet because he simply does not
have enough experience yet.

Ironically then, the preference for youth exists in order to prop up old
paradigms. This is a cultural artifact of the current era not some timeless
principle.

