Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#11

Post by snikeris »

gervu wrote: post #6
perfunctory wrote: post #4

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, wh…

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance.

What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them.

A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#12

Post by gervu »

snikeris wrote: post #11
gervu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them. A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply.

But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter.

It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it.

Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#13

Post by snikeris »

gervu wrote: post #12
snikeris wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them. A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply. But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter. It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like…

No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#14

Post by gervu »

snikeris wrote: post #13
gervu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply. But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter. It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like…

No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.

I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed.

Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others.

People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#15

Post by wait-a-minute »

gervu wrote: post #6
perfunctory wrote: post #4

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, wh…

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected?

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17

On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.

Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#16

Post by winkeyless »

psv1 wrote: post #10

> I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a whole. Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this negative sentiment.

There exits and now there’s a new word “Techlash”

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#17

Post by gervu »

wait-a-minute wrote: post #15
gervu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected? https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty "In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17 On every day in the last 25 years there could…

The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced.

I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#18

Post by winkeyless »

mortivore wrote: post #2

Nope. My conscience is clean. I don't work for a company with a spy/sell data business model.

We might as well imagine a company you work for that is trustworthy and does none of the spy/sell data business. And also imagine that the product of the company has been rapidly replacing a million jobs in 5 years and creating merely 200 different jobs in San Francisco demanding higher level of education. A bit extreme but I don’t think it’s unimaginable. Would you feel the same if I may ask?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#20

Post by mortivore »

winkeyless wrote: post #18
mortivore wrote: post #2

Nope. My conscience is clean. I don't work for a company with a spy/sell data business model.

We might as well imagine a company you work for that is trustworthy and does none of the spy/sell data business. And also imagine that the product of the company has been rapidly replacing a million jobs in 5 years and creating merely 200 different jobs in San Francisco demanding higher level of education. A bit extreme but I don’t think it’s unimaginable. Would you feel the same if I may ask?

If I were in such a job I would be very happy about it. I view work as a means to an end. Work to live, don't live to work. A society without jobs would be wonderful. If something I was working on would eliminate the jobs of millions, then we would be closer to having no jobs at all. In such a position I would feel like I was really contributing to a greater future.
Post reply on HN