Earnestness • Hacker News Board

Re: Earnestness

#441

Post by boh » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #407

boh wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty, self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful. Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded i…

> We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists. ... > No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. There's a premise here that unless you are Picasso or Steve Jobs, you…

> People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity.

Being mediocre is such a scary prospect given the requirement of differentiation for professional and personal attainment, that people seem to ignore its existence entirely. Any minor differentiator is magnified to represent a "uniqueness" which frees the person from the burden of the mediocre. I agree, everyone has something to contribute and the large swaths of mediocre people drive our civilization forward--but why can't they just be mediocre? Why is it bad news?

Re: Earnestness

#442

Post by darkerside » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #406

wombatmobile wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy to physics is useful. "Everything is physics" might be true, but as you say, it isn't very useful because it is too broad a brush. That's why we talk about atomic physics, astrophysics, dynamics, optics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, and for that matter, chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. Each of these is a discipline with its own nomenclature and epistemology that enable practitioners to home in on…

Sure! I don't mean to deny the importance of the insight; a lot of people do have seriously mistaken beliefs about how social and economic facts come to be, and learning a bit of political science is a critical part of correcting those mistakes. The problem is that electoral politics, at least as practiced recently in the US, rarely has much to do with this. I'm on a few donor lists, so I got a lot of political fundr…

Not making things worse is another expression of making things better. I also dislike where politics has gone in terms of how it's being exercised these days, but I would agree that the building blocks of politics are still, how do we make decisions as a group. Some people have managed to pretend the most important decision is that "person X most not enact their agenda", but it comes from the same root.

Re: Earnestness

#443

Post by DoreenMichele » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #438

DoreenMichele wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earnest but interesting is sometimes a recipe for drama. Nothing worse than being well-meaning, right about something and saying something no one really wants to hear. If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for "boring" while being publicly earnest. Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse . There's a downside to being interesting.

> Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse. There's a downside to being interesting. Another (possibly better) saying to illustrate the downside might be "The nail that sticks out gets hammered."

Thank you. That's a much better way to say that.

Re: Earnestness

#444

Post by neilv » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #366

neilv wrote: post #20

Great. Now my company's engineering recruiting email "honest and earnest" turn of phrase about culture is less likely to make candidates pause and consider why I focused on that, but instead probably gets classified as regurgitating whatever everyone read on HN. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088200

You just need to convince everyone that you thought of it first and pg is following you around and regurgitating your brilliance. Problem solved! (Do I needy a winky or something to clue people that this is intended as good clean fun?)

That's my new answer to "if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich": all my ideas were stolen by Paul Graham! :)

Re: Earnestness

#445

Post by webmaven » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

nthj wrote: post #269

rst wrote: post #49

Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...

It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.” This is a huge generalization we could easily find cou…

> It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.”

> This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.

You're correct in identifying the mental model in operation, but you're missing the fact that the people in question are profoundly deluded.

Staggering piles of money (including Bill Gates') were, almost without exception, a result of the ability to capture value, not the ability to create it. And this is worth noting: many of the most significant decisions that led to increasing the value being captured were value destroying, such as "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".

That isn't to say that value wasn't created at all (quite a lot was), but only that it isn't quite what is measured by, and rewarded with, wealth.

In the most benign cases of extreme wealth, much (even most) of the value captured IS also created by the person or organization doing the capturing, but invariably, more value is being captured than created (or at least, the market believes that will eventually be the case).

Re: Earnestness

#446

Post by bluntfang » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #299

bluntfang wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have company.

That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

maybe GP was baiting for this to get a response from you, have you considered contacting them? something like "consider not making posts that make it look like you're doing something bad with children"

Re: Earnestness

#447

Post by walleeee » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #428

walleeee wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, do you have any friends with deep pockets and chaotic energy? In seriousness, no clue. Forking the financial system, which crypto is arguably intended to do, seems hard enough. Forking the kernel (as I understand you propose) seems even harder; you can't rely on traction from anyone with spare hardware, you'd need voluntary opt-in from established players, right? I'd never heard of capabilities until I follo…

Forking the kernel won't help. There needs to be a new security model... Genode is a step in that direction... I've been waiting for them to get something to the point where I can get it working well enough to be a daily driver. It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.

Would you mind helping me understand your idea better, then? I gleaned my (mistaken) assumption from your Capabilities Digest:

> The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0]

[0]: http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-root-caus...

Re: Earnestness

#448

Post by mikewarot » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #447

mikewarot wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking the kernel won't help. There needs to be a new security model... Genode is a step in that direction... I've been waiting for them to get something to the point where I can get it working well enough to be a daily driver. It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.

Would you mind helping me understand your idea better, then? I gleaned my (mistaken) assumption from your Capabilities Digest: > The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0] [0]: http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-root-caus...

Forking the Linux kernel would just result in another monolithic Linux kernel, with all the drivers all tied in.

There are microkernels, which is the specific thing Linus Torvalds didn't want to do when he started Linux. In capability based systems, not even the drivers have access to everything. Any given process is giving a list of capabilities, like file handles to resources, and those are the ONLY things that process can access.

Consider a word processor... under Windows, Linux, etc the application calls a system dialog box to select the directory/file name, the uses that name to open a handle to the files, because the assumption is that any program you run should have full access to all of your stuff.

The fork of that word processor in a capabilities based OS would call the OS, and the OS would show you a similar dialog box, but the OS would then return the file capability to the word processor... it wouldn't be able to access anything else.

Consider the Linux model as handing over your wallet at a checkout, and the Capabilities model as handing over exact change. People are used to handling actual money and thinking in terms of risk like that... thus they would do well in a capabilities based system, and from their perspective not a lot has changed.

From the application programmer perspective, opening/saving files is a bit different, but everything else stays the same. The big plus is that no matter how bad any application crashes, due to bug or deliberate fuzzing, etc... it can't be used to take over the system, like it could in Linux.

We could stop having to worry about security when writing applications, and only worry about it in systems programming, where it belongs.

Does that help?

Re: Earnestness

#449

Post by zemo » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #374

zemo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny. hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe…

I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.

is your argument that he's a genre writer and his genre is his own cult of personality, and that his pieces should not be judged on the coherence of their arguments, because making strong arguments is not the point of his writing?

Re: Earnestness

#450

Post by adamsea » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

telesilla wrote: post #437

enriquto wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic. Of course they were trolling. I don't claim that there isn't a lot of bogus stuff in ethomusicology (as the OP sarcastically proves), just that it is a perfectly legitimate field. You can also find a lot of pompous bullshit in machine learning publications, but that does not mean that ML is bogus.

Not trolling and absolutely serious. I've spent a lifetime exploring the world through the lens of music and I'm an admirer of the field of ethnology. Such studies have been highly useful to how I view the importance of music in society, aside from being entertainment it bonds communities and the study of it sheds fascinating light as to our cultures and ways.

Cool : ). Yeah I honestly wasn't sure and appreciate your response : ). And I agree.

Just for fun I'll throw out Ursula le Guin as one of my favorite science fiction authors because she explores issues of human nature via anthropology and such.