We need to use our skills to build platforms that have both high retention and diffuse ownership that uplifts its users. We need to build a media ecosystem that isn't just a toy. My generation treated social media like it was just an amusement, and didn't notice it slowly turn the flow of information back into AM talk radio until it was too late. There have to be genuine alternatives to Tiktok and X and Instagram that are just as obsessive about UX as the proprietary apps are, but can't be owned.
Seems like we need a news 2.0 that isn't something controlled by a couple of entities that can filter and shape narrative at the whim of a political party (either political party). Problem that we don't seem to have a good answer for is, how to make such a thing trust worthy and trusted by the public.
If only there was a group of people that were given the legal rights to make that decision... We could call them like... A Congress and we could like write those processes down. Maybe call that document a Constitution.
Being under 30 and already having this mindset is going to take you far. I would argue it makes you even better at work because you'll over time iterate towards things that you value weighed against all the other good things in life rather than just try to find the biggest paycheck making a Belching as a Service app that some VC thought up on ayahuasca.
So you're spending time with your families and communities instead of working during the day then. That thing you're calling "forced socialization" has another name. It's called work. Your ability to have conversations with your coworkers and customers about your work is in fact part of most jobs that involve developing products. Most of us making over $200k don't just pull the code lever at the code factory all day and if your idea of what work in software is doesn't involve people, you've put a permanent ceiling on your career.
Somehow, I manage to work, have an ambitious career ahead of my peers, clear said-pay, pull the ol’ code lever at the code factory as it were… I.e “work and advance,” while seeing my spouse consistently from 9-5 instead of Brad in marketing, and seeing my community consistently because I buy coffee and lunch in town vs StarQdobaDonalds. That adds up, and I hope you get the chance to experience it as well. And those conversations you mention - nothing that can’t be achieved by Zoom, modern Slack usage, and quarterly off-sites or similar models. No ceiling found yet but maybe depends on what ceiling one counts as mattering. But so far, I haven’t found any yet.
> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts".
> it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore
It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored.
Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.
I couldn't speak for silicon valley, but the personality changes you're describing as being associated with shrooms... those are not typical.
I have a few friends in psychedelic assisted therapy and the effects I've noticed in them are the same effects I've noticed with regular psychedelic use outside of therapy: you don't identify the bad vibes and shy away from them, you end up making decisions that are uncomfortable in the sort term to improve things in the long term. Myself, I started going to college.
Maybe it works differently among wealthy people.
If you're in a cult of positivity, adding psychedelics to the mix is more likely to make you acutely away of the inauthenticity of the situation.
Psychedelic assisted therapy is so good an powerful precisely because it exploits the best case scenario of set and setting with the way the drug has an impact on your mind. I'm far from against psychedelic and have done the therapy myself.
However, if you're in a positivity cult, and don't realize you're in a cult, and don't have someone guiding you to consider you might be in a cult, the shrooms are just as likely to make the cult seem like the most profound and important experience in your entire life.
If you are a lead in a company, you suddenly have a profound spiritual experience based around your ability to hire and fire people and tell them what to do and can use the drug to convince yourself that the ideas you are coming up with are the most profound thoughts a person has ever had. You won't even realize you're shutting out good ideas, because you have a messianic belief in AI or crypto or whatever the thing is, and you take the shrooms to reinforce that belief and you create an environment around yourself and put people around you that reinforce that belief.
It's a very different experience than going to therapy to work through your fear or depression.
Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.
This kind of argument is starting to really bother me. Do you really think that the only part of the debate that matters is the actual debate itself? Are you ignorant of the massive amounts of shit that we learned when researching a topic?
I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall
a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS
b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.
With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:
- What is USAID, how does it work
- How does foreign aid to Africa work
- How does the Govt actually allocate funds
- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it
With the alternative energy topic, we learned:
- How does national alternative energy policy work
- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others
- Does nuclear count as alternative energy
What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.
This is a long battle, "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."
To many an audience, that's all that matters. I have a persuasive essay due tomorrow night. Part of that is transferable rhetorical strategies removed from the actual specifics. On the flip side of your argument, just presenting a list of facts is not persuasive.
Which I want to point out as the root of the problem. Debate is not really about learning, not in the arts and sciences sense.
I remember once an MIT lecture made the point that medicine is not really science. I'll extend that and say, debate is not really about the truth. There's nothing to learn, all it is is learning the rationalizations to serve one side.
So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?
You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.
But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.
Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.
It absolutely has become a new faith. A lot of the cryptocurrency faith healers moved into the space as that grift began to collapse and moved from copying the prosperity gospel to apocalyptic "the end is nigh, repent for the second coming of Christ is at hand" type preachers. LLMs that these people envision are not about intelligence. They're about creating a God you can pray to and it answers back, wrapped in a veil of scientism. It's a slightly more advanced version of 4chan users worshiping Inglip.
Just at first glance, and maybe there's a better way to get this data (I guess not anymore with the API changes!), but if you just look at upvotes on popular posts it seems like nothing has changed in terms of how many people are engaged with the site. At a glance, I doubt the blackouts have had any impact on their DAU or concurrency. New subreddits will likely form to replace the permanently blacked out ones, but just like Twitter, all these addicts aren't going to leave, they'll just have a worse experience but carry on. After all, the good fight against the evil Reddit corporation... is taking place almost entirely on Reddit.
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