> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.
The question becomes "what rules matter?". And the answer inevitably becomes "only the ones that work in my favor and/or that I agree with".
I think someone trying to defend this would go "oh come on, does it really matter if a rich actress gets slightly richer?" And no, honestly, it doesn't matter that much. Not to me, anyway. But it matters that it establishes (or rather, confirms and reinforces) a culture of disregard and makes it about what you think matters, and not about what someone else might think matters about the things in their life. Their life belongs to them, a fact that utopians have forgotten again and again everywhere and everywhen. And once all judgement is up to you, if you're a sufficiently ambitious and motivated reasoner (and the kind of person we're talking about here is), you can justify pretty much whatever you want without that pesky real-world check of a person going "um actually no I don't want you to do that".
Sometimes I think anti-tech takes get this wrong. They see the problem as breaking the rules at all, as disrupting the status quo at all, as taking any action that might reasonably be foreseen to cause harm. But you do really have to do that if you want to make something good sometimes. You can't foresee every consequence of your actions - I doubt, for example, that Airbnb's founders were thinking about issues with housing policy when they started their company. But what differentiates behavior like this from risk-taking is that the harm here is deliberate and considered. Mistakes happen, but this was not a mistake. It was a choice to say "this is mine now".
That isn't a high bar to clear. And I think we can demand that tech leaders clear it without stifling the innovation that is tech at its best.
> But exercise has very little effect on weight compared to diet. It's a known fact, even for the fans of counting calories.
I recognize that this is conventional wisdom, but it hasn't been borne out by my own results losing well over 100 pounds / roughly 40% of my body weight over the course of several years.
I've counted calories strictly, with the same methodology and same limit, and documented weight regularly, both during low-activity low-altitude winters and medium-activity, high-altitude summers. The results I got, over the major windows in which I got them, were as follows:
I'm defining "high" activity here as "regularly exercising to physical exhaustion", "medium" as "regularly climbing up hills that cause me to breathe heavily but don't exhaust me", and "low" as "regular walking but nothing that strains my body meaningfully".
This is now data collected over years of weight loss and multiple seasonal changes in location and activity, and I find it difficult to explain this within the context of standard weight loss advice. Exercise at altitude seems to burn far more calories than it "should", by a factor of four or five times.
I walked a mile or two every other day on average across this period, meaning the only difference is a roughly 15 to 30-minute walk up a steep slope roughly every other day. A typical calculator will tell you this "should" burn on the order of 100-150 calories, but the data suggests it's closer to 500-1000.
I'm not a doctor, so I don't know why this is. I've largely ruled out:
- Diet, which is conserved across locations fairly well (I cook most of my own food using widely-available ingredients)
- Seasonal effects, unless they happen to produce very sharp discontinuities at the exact time I relocate each year
- Emotional state, since these results have been robust to both positive and negative emotional states in both locations
- Temperature, which is near-constant year round (because I live in warm places in winter and cold places in summer)
- Groundwater, because I drink almost entirely bottled water and not local water supplies
- Major underlying medical causes (my bloodwork is great and I don't have any reason to think I'm sick)
I have a working hypothesis that the studies that established calorie burn from exercise (which I believe largely did it by measuring CO2 exhalation) were missing a great deal of the actual energy cost, because the costs of anaerobic respiration take place over hours following exercise and not just during it. But I also can't imagine people with actual medical expertise haven't thought of this before. A negative correlation between altitude and obesity rates is well-established, so something is going on.
In any case, the data is the data, and it points very strongly towards altitude and exercise, synergistically, being almost exclusively the source of my own weight loss.
Speaking as a person who once suffered from extreme mental illness (see my other post in this thread), mental health treatment saved my life. Full stop. If not for the very, very persistent efforts of a psychiatrist and a therapist both, there's no way I would ever have been able to sort myself out.
Mental health care is hard because people are complicated. It's been almost seven years since the woman who saved my life sat with me in her office for no less than four hours telling me that yes, I should really take these pills, and I am still sorting things out to some extent.
SSRIs don't work for me. But one of them worked for a short time, and that short time was enough to completely change my understanding of myself. It changed me from thinking of myself as a terrible person who deserved all the considerable suffering I was enduring at the time, to thinking of myself as someone who was very very very sick and needed help to survive. If you've never been severely depressed, it's hard to explain what a revelation that is. I broke down sobbing for hours at the feeling of understanding for the first time that my suffering wasn't my fault. It was (in part) due to my actions, but my actions were due to my mental state, and my mental state was not something I had gotten to choose. So when I say that I strongly, strongly, with all my heart, recommend that you try them if you're depressed even though they only worked for me for a couple of days - well, that should tell you just how important that was to me.
Therapy didn't fix me. But it did give me the tools to work on myself, in fits and starts, for what is now half my adult life. Having someone I spoke to every week, who understood the patterns of mental illness, helping me to see the feedback loops for what they were, was critical in understanding the nature of how I was sick. That didn't make those loops go away. But it did train me to listen to them less, and helped me know where to find them when I had the mental energy to work on them.
Without mental health care, I would be dead. With mental health care, I've shed my constant fear of the smallest changes, I no longer scream at myself for the smallest mistakes, I've had healthy romantic relationships, I have a career most people would envy, I take care of my personal environment, I'm in the best physical health of my life and have shed 40% of my body weight to be not-obese for the first time since childhood, and I smile. I smile a lot.
Has society failed many people? Yes. Environmental factors are relevant to mental health. In fact, it's part of why mental health is so dangerous: once your health deteriorates and you lose control and maintenance of your environment, you create a feedback loop that worsens mental illness. I am by no means arguing that we could not take care of people far better than we are. But I, at least, believe in the importance of mental health care as strongly as I believe in anything else on this Earth, because of what it did for me.
(a) I have suffered from severe mental health issues in the past and struggle with better-controlled ones to this day,
(b) I was pretty explicitly suicidal for several years (I still have the note I wrote on my desktop as a reminder; it's something I keep close to my heart as a thing that is precious to me),
(c) I very, VERY strongly believe in the idea of mental health as a health problem and not a moral one, largely because of my own experiences, and
(d) I agree with you that the failure to recognize (c) is a far larger problem than even poorly-justified assisted-dying would be.
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All that being said, though, I think there's legitimate reasons for concern here. I absolutely would have said my life was unendurable and that it could never improve, and I would have said that persistently for a long period of time (for around two years, so a substantial chunk of the approval period here). And the claim that my life wasn't going to improve was, in retrospect, a fairly reasonable belief - my life was in bad shape and even if I could talk to myself at the time I'm not sure how I'd ever justify the way it worked itself out.
But it did work itself out. Things did turn around, in a way I could never have predicted. My life improved, and in the years since, I have overcome basically every personal issue I thought I never would. That's not to say my life is perfect, by any means, but it's better than - and I use this phrase in its full literal sense - I could have imagined at the time.
I suffer(ed) from basically the same spectrum of conditions this woman does. I was roughly the same age. I had tried medical treatments that, while transformative in terms of the way I looked at mental health, had not offered sustained relief (and to this day have never found a medication that works effectively for me).
I have no doubt her desire for relief is sincere, because I have no doubt that mine was too. She's quoted in the article as saying:
> People think that when you’re mentally ill, you can’t think straight, which is insulting
I can't speak for her. But I think if someone had told me this during the depths of my own worst battles with it, what that would have sounded like to me is "you're not really in this much pain". In that sense, I agree (and would have agreed at the time) that it would be insulting.
But, again, while I can't speak for her, I was empirically not thinking straight, in the sense that my perceptions of the world and of myself were distorted. I was trapped in a system of mental processes that rounded "my life is really bad and I can't see any way it gets better" to "my life is unbearable and it is impossible that it ever gets better". I was, objectively, wrong in my predictions of the future and my judgements of myself, and that's not someone else talking, it's me, with the benefit of greater experience.
I didn't have the options on the table that she does. But if I had, and things had continued for more years the way they were? I might have taken them. I'm not sure. I know I had a plan for how I would end my life painlessly. I never got to the point of quite executing it, but that was as much a statement about how hard it was for me to do anything at the time than it was a statement about how much pain I was in. And my life came within hours and a lucky roll of the dice of going further down into despair.
When I think I might have made that choice, and I think I would have been incorrect to make it, it's hard for me to feel entirely comfortable with her choice as the correct one. Perhaps it's a choice she nevertheless should have the right to make (I think you can make pretty good arguments for that), but the choice you have the right to make, and the choice you should make, and the choice that deserves social endorsement, are different matters.
One important thing to remember: Belgium requires the sign off of three medical doctors intimitaly familiar with the case, and they must assert that all courses of treatment have been exhausted, that the patient is incurable, and that the patient is suffering from "unbearable pain", and crucially: that the patient is sound enough of mind to make the request.
Making the request itself is grounds for significant psychological involvement. Doctors are opening themselves up for lawsuits for manslaughter if the conditions are not met (see the Tine Nys case[1]).
All this to say: it's not just a matter of making the request twice and wham bam thank you ma'am.
I recognize that, which is why my response is sympathetic concern and not outright opposition.
I am sure that everyone involved here thinks they're doing the right thing, and that they're approaching it with the seriousness and gravity the topic deserves. And I think this is a topic on which reasonable compassionate people could disagree. I'm just not sure if the solution here is the correct one.
For the curious, here's [1] an IPCC paper on the subject of this sort of climate engineering. It's among the more promising geoengineering approaches to counteracting global warming if carbon emissions continue, although there's still a lot of uncertainties about it.
It's generally believed that we're already doing this by "accident". Along with carbon emissions, humans have released aerosols that block sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface + increase cloud cover, and are believed to be counteracting climate change to a significant extent (not enough to stop it, but enough to slow it down). We're pretty sure this works, because big volcanic eruptions that emit a bunch of sulfur aerosols are known to cool the Earth down (c.f. the "Year Without A Summer" [2]), and accounting for aerosol reduction has long been part of climate models.
A natural experiment of sorts has been going on for the past couple of years that further suggests this might matter. In 2020, new regulations on sulfur emissions (which are a significant pollutant in addition to their climate effects) went into effect for shipping around the world. Aerosols went way down almost overnight, and ocean temperatures promptly spiked to new record levels. Here's [3] an article from last year, when ocean temperatures were beginning to separate from the historical record; this process has continued dramatically through to the present [4], with global sea surface temperatures at record levels for the entirety of 2024 so far - despite the fact that last year's El Nino (which leaves a large patch of the Pacific warm) is largely gone and a La Nina (which leaves a large portion of the Pacific cold) is replacing it.
There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
The distinction between business and capital is pretty blurred right now, and it shouldn't be. Operating a charity that delivers donated food to orphaned victims of war is a business in the broad sense of the word, and there are many things that go into operating it well, including things like management and finance. Those things do not, inherently, have to be in the pursuit of capital growth; there are many humanistic ends they can be directed to. But in our world as it stands they usually aren't - they're directed towards capital growth and that fact corrupts them like it corrupts everything else.
Or, put another way, there is a difference between "making enough money to run a sustainable business" and "making all the money it is possible to make". Many large businesses run reasonably substantial profit margins, and every dollar of profit a business makes is a dollar it could afford not to make in the pursuit of more humanistic ends if it so chose.
There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
Just as people should specialize, institutions should too.
We should not have this whole movement to jawbone companies into being “nice.” All we are going to get is a creepy facsimile. See, e.g. greenwashing.
Instead we should understand that profit maximizing firms operating in competition with each other is an incredibly powerful but one dimensional tool. We in our sovereign capacity should set the incentives and rules such that those tools are used to accomplish the things we collectively desire to see in the world.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable. A “better businessperson” is just transient luck.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable.
I wish this were true. But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against these things and attacks any sort of institutional infrastructure or notion of accountability whenever it's politically expedient to do so. In a less obvious way, that movement is also dedicated to the dismantlement of the administrative state - ostensibly in the name of returning legislative power and accountability to the Congress, pragmatically because it adheres to a vision of commercial activity with far less legal restraint.
But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against …
The point is you have to convince these people. That’s the whole and only ballgame.
Trying to pressure companies into wearing skinsuits via external or internal pressure might be satisfying but it’s a waste of effort.
Convince one company not to work with UAE and another one will gladly take its place. Elect a President that takes human rights into account in foreign policy and now you might get somewhere.
But to do that you have to actually go talk to people that disagree with you. Not just post preaching to the choir posts about how terrible those other guys are.
People (including me) have been trying that for years; but dialog only works if both parties approach it in good faith. When you have a political movement that leans heavily on orthodoxy and loyalty, and whose response to repeatedly losing elections is to simply insist they're rigged and the results are invalid (absent any credible evidence) discussions based on mutually agreeable priors and conventional logic are not fruitful.
The prevailing orthodoxy in this group is that losing elections or court cases is a priori evidence of fraud, violent action to overturn negative outcomes is often permissible, and that this right is reserved for future negative outcomes. They're not willing to be convinced, and loudly advertise their belief that it's OK to impose their point of view on others by force. I mean, if you're dealing with someone who avers that you should be fed into a woodchipper, it's not wise to put one arm in pursuit of a compromise.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's too controversial to say that those checks are not working very well right now. Changing the nature of regulatory capture isn't in my power. Starting a company and trying not to be crappy is.
the issue is as soon as you enable the power for some to set incentives and rules to see certain outcomes, it gets taken over by the rich entrenched status quo that is easily able to use the tools of modern propaganda to drown out any true grassroots opinion, and see to it that their horse is the one to win the race. It almost takes a total reset event like a gigantic war to shake up the economic status quo but even then, what forms in the dust is almost naturally these oligarchs like stardust accumulating into black holes after the big bang.
How can you separate capital from human interest when the majority of people on earth spend the majority of their time in pursuit of it? Less people starve today than ever in the past, and that is because we have more capital, not because we are more charitable than back then. Charity is not any less corrupt, it is just more emotionally appealing because of the illusion of selflessness and a whole lot less effective.
You say "your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions." But I claim that it's not your average businessperson it's your average person with business people just being a subset of that.
And that's not even getting into the problem of how does anybody really know how to make the world a better place. In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
I agree with you that this is not unique to businesspeople, although I suspect it's probably disproportionately represented there - both because business is attracted to people pursuing self-interest ruthlessly and because it often presents excellent conditions for tilting people towards self-interest even if not naturally inclined to it. But I would also make a distinction between what a business does and what businesspeople are. It's not hard to build incentive structures that turn good people towards bad ends.
I tend to think, for example, that your average Boeing engineer probably wanted to do a good job and not have doors fall off their planes. But when you put multiple layers of abstraction in the way and have leaders looking through business metrics, it isn't hard for everyday crappiness to maneuver its way to the point where that isn't prioritized. Almost no one in the chain really thinks they're sacrificing safety, they think they're doing their job and improving efficiency by cutting redundant steps.
> In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
Sure, because there's a difference between a performative "mission", a self-obsessed founder who makes their own success a story about the future of Earth, and someone who makes concretely difficult decisions when the chips are down.
This is kind of what I mean by the corruptive effects of growth. Having a mission is a good thing, but most companies' "missions" are implicitly always secondary to their financial growth, or worse, a cynical ploy for employee engagement. When people write crappy press releases about how "this will enable us to serve more of our users" (read: expand our market), that's not a statement about how serving users is bad, it's just that for most businesses it's necessarily with an asterisk of "we want to serve our users* *as long as it pleases our investors".
Do the majority spend their time in pursuit of money because they want to or because the rent is so damn high? Because it’s what we’re educated to do? I don’t mean academic education either. I mean Main Street social norms where there’s no longer being friends with neighbors. But they’ll mow your lawn for money if you’re ever too busy (had that exact conversation with a neighbor recently; we aren’t going to be friends/friendly but will serve you for $).
I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
> I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.
I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something.
Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).
That anecdote at the beginning brought to mind a personal event recently that I keep meaning to write a proper blog about.
A friend of mine, who is much younger than I am and to whom I've acted as something of a mentor for many years, has her first proper job in a long time. It's a blue-collar job for an understaffed place, and she's been working her ass off to keep things moving along smoothly. And she likes that! She likes holding things together, overcoming the challenges that workplace puts on her, being the one standing between them and the whole place falling apart. She likes doing a good job, and finds personal value in it.
She asked me whether or not that was okay.
Because, she reasoned, the harder she worked, the more her employers would just use that as an excuse not to hire the people they need. Every time she plugs a leak, she's removing pressure from the owners to fix it. Her hard work, she reasoned, isn't rewarded, it's exploited, and it paves the way for further exploitation of both my friend and her coworkers.
That's horrifying! It's way beyond alienation from your product, it's punishment for pursuing virtue and excellence.
Work is a good thing! It's a natural part of who we are, it can be a massive source of self-worth and self-esteem, it's a core defining part of human life to the point that a lot of our very names come from the labor of our ancestors. For me, it proved to be the cure to many of my mental health ills almost all by itself. Working hard at a job I liked turned my entire life around piece by piece, and not working for a bit afterward turned out to be poison to my well-being. I was so stressed about my current work I couldn't sleep last night, and it's still better than I felt not working, because work is that important to my stability and self-esteem.
I ended up telling my friend that yeah, she should feel okay about it and try to better herself, because she can take every way she grows with her when she leaves. But it's hard to argue that she's wrong about the adversarial calculus, and I get why people check out. It's a painful thing to see.
When we feel bad in our jobs, we tend to put blame on coworkers, managers, or the organization's structure. But often the situation is not as bad as we think, we just feel bad and want to find a cause.
As long as we feel good on the other hand, we tend to think, where's the catch?
So indeed as long as she likes the job, she just should keep doing it and get personal growth out of it.
I would be interested in reading mentioned personal blog.
> Wouldn't the easy problems have been solved as they are by definition, easy?
Only in an efficient market. And real world markets often have vast inefficiencies. The reasons they're inefficient don't always generalize, either. Companies can behave in certain ways because of personalities (2024 Twitter vs 2018 Twitter), embedded institutional norms (2024 Boeing vs 2020 Boeing vs 1980 Boeing), changing conditions (any 2024 startup vs any 2019 startup's finances), or a million others that don't necessarily spell doom for trying a different approach.
One that's relevant a lot in the real world is market share. Large organizations very frequently get away without doing easy good things for long periods of time, which they can do because network effects and platform lock-in are powerful defenses against disruption. A lot of startups get founded on the idea "large incumbents are not doing this easy good thing, so let's do that and beat them". The fact that this ever works is a sign that incumbents must be leaving a _lot_ on the table, or their lock-in would never be overcome. The very existence of the startup scene is proof of the frequent inefficiency of markets in the short-to-medium-term (or at least of investors' belief in such).
Even in cases where the incentives _are_ aligned and the market _is_ efficient, the world is often in non-equilibrium states. I like to think of incentive gradients as something akin to a (very complex) differential equation, and consider what _simple_ DEs can teach us about them. Consider, say, Newton's law of cooling: dT/dt = -k(T-T_e). Some calc 101 will tell you that solutions to this equation trend (exponentially! so not even slowly!) to a constant stable equilibrium T = T_e. But if you try to use that analysis on a fresh batch of french fries, you're going to get burned, because it turns out T(0) is very relevant to predicting T(1 minute) for realistic values of k.
"We need to know our hires are comfortable being part of a herd. We're low-ego, and we know that no one can do it alone. We're scrappy, and we'll crawl to get where we're going if we have to. No one is so important that they should stand up by themselves while everyone else is doing the hard work of moving forward."
I think I need to go take a shower now.
Memes aside, it sounds like this was a student job, which makes me think this was more "college kid screwing around" than "corporate toxicity".
I think I’d crawl and moo in an interview if my future direct manager did it first. If it’s so important then they shouldn’t have a problem doing it. I would mostly do it for the story of telling someone I did.
> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.
The question becomes "what rules matter?". And the answer inevitably becomes "only the ones that work in my favor and/or that I agree with".
I think someone trying to defend this would go "oh come on, does it really matter if a rich actress gets slightly richer?" And no, honestly, it doesn't matter that much. Not to me, anyway. But it matters that it establishes (or rather, confirms and reinforces) a culture of disregard and makes it about what you think matters, and not about what someone else might think matters about the things in their life. Their life belongs to them, a fact that utopians have forgotten again and again everywhere and everywhen. And once all judgement is up to you, if you're a sufficiently ambitious and motivated reasoner (and the kind of person we're talking about here is), you can justify pretty much whatever you want without that pesky real-world check of a person going "um actually no I don't want you to do that".
Sometimes I think anti-tech takes get this wrong. They see the problem as breaking the rules at all, as disrupting the status quo at all, as taking any action that might reasonably be foreseen to cause harm. But you do really have to do that if you want to make something good sometimes. You can't foresee every consequence of your actions - I doubt, for example, that Airbnb's founders were thinking about issues with housing policy when they started their company. But what differentiates behavior like this from risk-taking is that the harm here is deliberate and considered. Mistakes happen, but this was not a mistake. It was a choice to say "this is mine now".
That isn't a high bar to clear. And I think we can demand that tech leaders clear it without stifling the innovation that is tech at its best.
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