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

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

#491

Post by totaldude87 » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

lowercased wrote: post #310

pmiller2 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that unemployment benefits aren’t the metaphorical ejector seat here. But, regarding “fired” vs “laid off,” at least in California, you’re generally eligible for unemployment benefits even if you were fired, as long as you weren’t fired for illegal or malicious activity. In particular, if you didn’t care about losing a reference and burning bridges, you could get fired for poor performance and still collect u…

thinking about it again, that's possibly closer to the mark. I did let an employee go years back, and he then filed for unemployment and I had to answer some questions from the state - did I agree, or want to deny the claim or something like that. It was for poor performance, and I was probably at fault for the poor performance on his part (not as much as he was, but still partially).

So what did you do? did you say OK to the State?

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

#492

Post by disambiguously » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

solveit wrote: post #450

jpg_converter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> It's like people who object to love being a chemical reaction. What else could it be possibly be?

Did you learn that by study, or did someone tell you that? Where else have you looked for love?

You might find “love” contained in the electrical impulses in a computer program. It might be in the words of a screenplay. A complicated mechanical automaton might experience love. You could notice it in a melody, or in the pattern of behavioral incentives among a society of human beings.

None of these things are chemical reactions in any systematic sense. You may notice chemical reactions everywhere you find these things, but that’s just because chemical reactions are contingently intrinsic to your own cognition. You’re only noticing yourself noticing the subject, and what you learn from that is almost entirely arbitrary.

Heartbreak is a form of neurotransmitter withdrawal, and it can be treated in similar ways to substance abuse issues. That’s because “love” is a “chemical reaction”. But that’s just a random fact about earthlings. It won’t help you write a pop song, let alone make a friend.

This is the reason “reductionism” has become a bit of a dirty word in philosophy. You feel like you are understanding the world better and better the whole time you are decomposing it into its constituent parts. Then you get to the bottom and you realize that the universe is made of many kinds of constituent parts, and you have decomposed a useful idea all the way down into nonsense.

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

#493

Post by tehjoker » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #347

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…

> Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea This is absolutely brilliant, going to favourite it and steal your quote! The only thing I'd contribute is to also think about the system from your perspective, wherever you've ended up. Zoom out. Think about how you got here. How much of it is truly delibe…

The reason you get angry at those people is because when you try to change the system they try to stop you. ;) Just my 2c

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

#494

Post by anbotero » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

teucris wrote: post #469

solveit wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. I honestly can’t deduce from your comment what the misunderstanding is. Is it that certain people see optimizing systems as an empathetic action?

What OP means is (I hope), yes, people are complex entities, each with their own nuances, but our behavior is not something astral, magic, that cannot be analyzed and figured out just yet. In fact we can be (to a certain extend, at least) profiled and we can act and plan upon such results.

Making a date happy? Sure, at first there can be some luck/lottery if you don’t know the person, but if you know your game you will try to know as much from that person as you can in order to do/give/say things that will make a moment turn out better for you, or for both even.

You may not like some people think like that, thinking they are just thinking of people as systems, but some of us actually just use that information to complement our spontaneity. Also, I don’t see what fuzz is all about, just because there was an example with people relationships.

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

#495

Post by RocketSyntax » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

Success is not just the hard work in the things that ultimately succeed.

It's more than meets the eye. It's also about the hard work in failures and decisions about things you decide not to do.

For example; trying 3 different workarounds to get 1 buggy piece of code to work.

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

#496

Post by kqr » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

This is what becoming an adult has taught me. I'm still baffled that things work as well as they do given the incredible levels of incompetence you find everywhere.

Growing up, I had this idea that adults always know what to do, at least within their specialities, or at least know how to figure out what they don't know. So far from true. The vast majority is just winging it. To the best of their abilities, of course, but it's still all improv.

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

#497

Post by mncharity » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

People greatly underestimate how rapidly expertise can become ramshackle as one moves away from the small areas where that expertise is actively exercised and tested. Few would ask a "Doctor" of medieval literature for cancer treatment. But people are surprised by first-tier business school students having middle-school misconceptions about Earth's seasons. Or by first-tier astronomy graduate students pervasively getting wrong a five-year old's "what color is the Sun ball?" (with half-ish of the few exceptions having learned it studying astronomy education, common misconceptions in, rather than from their own, atypically extensive and successful). Or by many first-tier medical school graduate students having no idea how big cells are.

Similarly, many people underestimate how badly science education is working. But that's a longer story. But has a speculative corollary, that most everyone is underestimating how awesome science education could be. It's sort of the inverse of the swiss-cheese model of reliable system failure. Holes of success are so unlikely to line up, that the light of understanding currently never makes it very far into the cheese.

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

#498

Post by ScottFree » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #404

have_faith wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redpill is a much older concept than recent incel usage. It has been around online as idea of revealing the true nature of something for a long time.

Yes, but a quick internet search will highlight only the incel community. Much like how "meme" has evolved in meaning.

A quick internet search will show you lots of dumb and incorrect things. It's a bad idea to define concepts based on what a quick internet search shows you.

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

#499

Post by anbotero » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #481

mnsc wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why in the world would (...) people being systems to be optimized rule out treating people with respect, empathy, and kindness. Because seeing people as systems to be optimized is per definition dehumanizing which is an action that is not respectful or empathetic?

Have you ever told a woman, after coitus, how you ran the same Game on them that you've run dozens of times before? Did they get pissed and never talk to you again? I'm going to guess "no", at least neither I nor anyone I know has had that happen. They'll usually just laugh it off / not take it seriously. The empathy and connection has been built successfully, and no amount of ex post facto chastisement about "hey yo…

I’m beginning to believe people is pissed because the example was dating, and now they think the whole argument was how some people can be made to do/feel things, instead of a miserable simple example on how even people is a system that can be analyzed (to a certain extend)

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

#500

Post by solveit » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

teucris wrote: post #469

solveit wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. I honestly can’t deduce from your comment what the misunderstanding is. Is it that certain people see optimizing systems as an empathetic action?

People who say such things seem to think that abstraction and reduction to components inherently carry a moral valence. They don't. People think that if you think of love as a chemical reaction it must mean that you think it has no value. I think that it only shows their narrowminded arrogance in thinking that chemical reactions can have no value. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and all that.

We all take on different points of view depending on what's most useful at the time, and what patterns of thought come naturally to us. If you're a specific type of person, it's useful and natural to think of people as a system to be optimized. And if you love the people you're modeling, what you're optimizing for is their happiness and dignity. But some people can't conceive of this being the case. They see someone saying sciency words about mushy feelingy topics and pattern-match to the first supervillain they can think of. "People are just atoms, I guess that means I can blow you all up! Mwahahahaha!" Perhaps the people who wrote that supervillain never studied refraction and realized that it made rainbows more beautiful, not less. But probably they just didn't care. They needed a flimsy excuse to justify the awesome fight scenes they wanted to write. And that's all the reader was looking for too, It doesn't take much to let someone suspend their disbelief.