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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#291

Post by tonyedgecombe »

andykx wrote: post #14
seanhunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took it to mean that smart people sometimes have low-status jobs, and conversely people in high-status jobs are not always smart. That's definitely something I have personally experienced given my career has taken me from working as a building labourer and factory worker through to being a C-suite exec, with stops through the trading side of investment banking and Silicon Valley on the way. It's a huge mistake to l…

As the years go by, I find myself craving a job with a physical labor component to it. A friend of mine studied enology (wine making) at Cornell and his job is about 50% business management and 50% wine making. Some days he has to wear a suit to work, other days he comes home in a wine stained smock. It seems like a good balance.

This is why I always cringe a little when people here say they want to create an app on the side or an open source project. If you spend your work time staring at a screen then it's probably better to find something to do with your hands in your spare time.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#292

Post by muzani »

anotheryou wrote: post #262
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

how do you think about politics and capitalism than? can the system still be simplified enough to grasp it well enough to change it? where would an individual who has grasped it find the power to change anything? capitalism seems super stable for now one of the most sad thoughts I heard: if you try to change the system to the better you might keep it from hitting the wall and actually stabilize it

It's clear it doesn't work perfectly - depression rates in capitalist countries are very high, salaries are still a problem, even when GDP improves. The Communist revolution took off all over the world, but later everyone learned that communism isn't better.

All change takes time and energy.

I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it. We've put a lot of our energy into things like electronics, computer, medicine in the past century, because that's where all the big problems were.

It's likely someone will revise capitalism soon enough, especially given all the computing power we have to make models, and even the data that can be pulled from things like MMOs.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#294

Post by TomVDB »

jaggederest wrote: post #31

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the onl…

However...

Inaccurate, optimistic estimates are often a feature.

Many projects that turn out to be very valuable in the end would never have been started if the real time to completion had been communicated right from the start.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#295

Post by networkimprov »

People, i.e. you and I, are inherently irrational much of the time; even those with sharp reasoning skills. And we're hardly ever able to see our own irrationality, tho we discern it in others constantly.

We're also ingenious; even those with poor reasoning skills can be ingenious.

Realizing that you're adrift in an ocean of ingenious, irrational beings will not increase your happiness, so do your best to forget what I told you, and return to pondering how miraculous you are ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#297

Post by beefield »

Geee wrote: post #234
beefield wrote: post #51

That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…

No, that's not true. Money can be either debt-based or non-debt-based. The current government issued money is based on debt. It means that in order to create new money, someone has to be in debt for that amount. I.e. someone has to promise to create value in the future . When more promises are made, the monetary base inflates and money loses value. Money is created at the central bank (public/national debt) and in co…

> No, that's not true. Money can be either debt-based or non-debt-based.

Well, you are right in that money _can_ in theory be non debt based. However, currently it is not, and I am quite confident that if you tried to come up with money that is non debt based, first, it would work horribly badly and second, there would emerge almost immediately a debt based money. You see, it is practically impossible to forbid a debt based money. If I have three friends that trust me, I can write on a paper that "if you give this paper to beefield, he will give you five apples". Now that paper is literally money between my friends. And there is very little you can do to stop that. You see that also in crypto world. Crypto people are vehemently against fractional reserve banking and anybody being able to generate money. Obviously there are now instruments that are newly created money supply for all practical and theoretical purposes (e.g. tether and exchange deposits), but somehow the cognitive dissonance seems to be too strong to admit that.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#298

Post by dsfyu404ed »

shantly wrote: post #256
fxtentacle wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, I just remembered another consultant story the other way around. I was trying to do a banking deal and they sent me a draft that had the requirements listed as checkboxes. [X] Form 123-AB has been signed [X] Project duration less than 2 years ... [ ] Company financials have been audited and confirmed And the offer was timed to expire within days. At first, I thought this was a joke in bad faith, as there would b…

> In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done. The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be: Almos…

>The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in.

So? It clearly works.

People want everything to be high quality master craftsman type work but almost nothing is and it almost never matters. People like to think that the auditors are going over the papers with a magnifying glass and that their landscaper is applying exactly the right fertilizer for the soil conditions. In reality the auditors are skimming the papers and the landscaper is just using whatever brand has worked decently in the past.

Most work done most of the time is little more than the minimum and that's all the world needs. You can either look at that as sloppy and low effort or efficient allocation of resources.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#299

Post by hans1729 »

tatar wrote: post #278
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…

I've thought about this a lot, it's my goto "one day I'll write a book about this".

I frame the problem slightly different (heh):

Different disciplines, branching out, will (or so says my hypothesis) discover the same topologies, but express them differently due to different scopes (perspective, dimensionality, DSLs [...]).

What I'm thinking about is: how can we parametrize the manifestations of these scopes, and, ubiquitously, reverse-engineer them, thus linking all the systems?

Then: which systems are topologically identical? If there are classes, how many? How do they differ? Are they (the systems OR the classes of systems) related?

If so, is there a hierarchy (or are there multiple hierarchies)?

My urge for this came from the intricate geometric representations for arithmetic problems; different scientific disciplines and industries just appear to fall into the same pattern.

If someone knows a book that touches on this topic, please let me know about it, this thought is haunting me for years now :-)

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#300

Post by beefield »

grecy wrote: post #220
beefield wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the "own money" in the bank is not technically his money in the bank, but money the bank has borrowed from your friend. So the bank is in debt to your friend. Now, in order for the bank to be able to be able to pay its debt to your friend one day, bank has assets. I.e. someone has borrowed money from the bank (e.g. mortgage), and those assets can be used/solde to pay your friend if your friend really wants the…

I guess I don't see it like that at all. I see it as the olden days where banks (or countries) actually had gold reserves for the amount of money that exists. (I know it doesn't work like that anymore) I also don't really agree that the bank owes my friend that $100k. They're just holding it for him. If you store your car at my house I'm not in debt to you. Your car is just sitting at my house for a while and you can…

> I also don't really agree that the bank owes my friend that $100k.

I am sorry if I sound blunt, but I do not see this something that is a question of opinion or something one can feasibly agree or disagree with. This is pretty much true by definition.

Yes, I know it feels different if you lend your money to a bank or to your friend, but it is only because you can use the debt of the bank as means of payment more easily.

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