301–310 of 344 posts
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So difficult. Used to be easy. Stopped caring. Want to care. But black tshirts and air force ones are just so easy.
As long as they fit well you're probably doing perfectly fine.
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I view the reliance upon the idea of status as a low-status activity. Low status or high status only emanate when you're playing the status game, but it's not a game that you necessarily need to play. And if you're not playing the game, low-status or high-status doesn't matter; they're just different colors. Nothing wrong with playing the game either.
Status is about what people think about you, with a special focus on what other people think other people think about you. And many things people want in life are dependent on what others think of them. If you're looking for a promotion what your boss thinks about you and how others will perceive your promotion matters, when you're looking to raise money, looking for a co-founder, convincing your co-founders you woul…
If you accept all of this, you'll get the following surprising results:
1. If status is about what other people think about you, then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, by a single person's opinion about you changing based on new info they receive. If status is a discrete or binary measure, then apply marginal status change along with the intermediate value theorem and there will be a point where your status changes by a single person's arbitrary flux in opinion about you or people like you.
2. If status can be modeled as some sort of scalar dot product (as a weighted measure of people's opinions about you), then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, without any other person's opinion about you changing, simply by having another person get to know you (and thereby tipping your status scale in one direction or another).
3. If status is also about what other people think that other people think about you, then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, or anyone that knows you making any changes or changing any opinions, simply by having their status change according to someone else's opinion of them (and you may not even know this person). Which leads to the counterintuitive result that you can be in a room with everyone you know having a great time, but you suddenly go from high-status to low-status because someone outside of that room changes their opinion about someone else inside that room.
4. If status is a global measure (everyone's opinion of yourself and everyone else matters), then your status can change without you making any changes, without anyone you know making any changes or changing any opinions about themselves, and furthermore, without anyone else in the world making any changes or changing any opinions about anyone else in the world. This would happen if aliens were watching us and had opinions about our status.
A rebuttal might be that status is not a global measure, but a local one--only certain people matter within a certain space-time boundary. Fine, then if you stop caring or thinking about what those people think you can stop worrying about status.
If you take the localization principle of status to its conclusion, the only person's opinion of your status that actually matters is your own. So if you stop caring or thinking about status, it doesn't matter.
A rebuttal to that might be that status determines what you can do among or get from other people (i.e. what your boss thinks about you determining your promotion). Fine, then try and associate with people that don't care about status and it won't matter.
A rebuttal to that might be that regardless of whether people think about status, you'll still be judged on SOMETHING for your compensation, raises, promotions, etc. At this point I would concede that your ability to get things done, to be a likeable person, to add value, to communicate, to organize, to bullshit, etc all matter. But there is no simple measure of this (like how well-dressed you are, whether you look rich/poor and are actually poor/rich, whether you counter-signal, etc), except maybe for beginners that need a simple model of social interaction to get started.
My own belief is that status is nothing more than a game that only has meaning when you are playing with others who are playing the same game as you. It does not have any global meaning in and of itself (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)). Sometimes I play it for fun and sometimes I don't, but I don't place any real value in it. Maybe doing this makes me a (low|high) value individual. Who cares?
Not sure how this will sit with the HN crowd, but a couple of years back I got into menswear, and I derive some pleasure from being the "best dressed guy" at the office. Beyond personal opinions on that particular hobby, I can confirm first hand that living at the intersection of two or more personas (e.g. a programmer that dresses well) brings a peculiar sense of joy. I might no have much status in either of those c…
How did you get started? I've never been able to figure out how to break into wearing nice clothes that mesh well with my age. I have tried the typical fashion-in-a-box things, but the clothes always seem (to me) to skew too young. I don't want to be a well-dressed college kid or entry-level professional...
Peruse clothing from high-quality shops and try out a _lot_ of things to get a feel for how clothes fit you and what fabrics you like. Clothing look good because it fits you and goes well with your style and palette and makes you feel comfortable. You'll likely find soon enough that expensive clothes are generally expensive for good reason.
Find a good tailor (or a couple) and develop a simple wardrobe that can be combined easily. From then on be willing to experiment a bit and spend some money trying out a few things a bit further outside your comfort zone.
Sometimes you see articles like this that insist that you have to play a status game of some kind etc etc. The hacker in me sees that as even more reason to look for examples of ways alleviate myself of such nonsense. If you read books like "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" you run across stories of him playing with Status games and poking fun at them. Though I'm sure one could argue Feynman had status games he play…
Somewhat ironically, refusing to acknowledge or honor conventional status games is itself a status increasing play among hackers, which invalidates the spirit of the advice if not the advice itself! This is also probably terrible advice for a different milieu.
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Somewhat ironically, refusing to acknowledge or honor conventional status games is itself a status increasing play among hackers, which invalidates the spirit of the advice if not the advice itself! This is also probably terrible advice for a different milieu.
yeah, you assert your status by being able to ignore cultural/office norms.
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lol, i think that's why i failed my first interview or two. dressed down for my last one and got hired no problem
Am I the only person who thinks it’s very plausible that that was indeed a factor, and also that it’s crazy for that to be the case?
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/who-wants-to-play-the-...
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Worked with a guy who wore a suit to the office as a 2-year experience dev and he was always taken into client meetings last minute when they needed someone. Helped his career a fair bit I think!
Opposite here. My office had people wearing dress pants and dress or polo shirts. I decided to add a tie. I was taken aside and told not to do that since it made me seem out of touch with the culture. Seemed like a pretty small step up from the based line to me. So much for dress for the job you want, or next job up BS...
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Bain Capitol is a classic example. They bought companies, sold off their assets, wrote themselves huge bonuses, bankrupted the companies, and wrote them off as losses to avoid paying taxes on any of the above. They made their money by destroying value, not providing any. And then there's multigenerational wealth. Rich brats don't provide intrinsic value, but they're born rich. They don't get that way by providing val…
Why rule out the rich kids so glibly? Wealth preservation is something that doesn’t get talked about - imo this is what the rich kids should be schooled in assuming they aren’t good enough to multiply their wealth like Elon. They keep it together for a future generation to take advantage of.
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"It says something about the company" might be a moral salve in your eyes, but you have not established that they provide value to anybody but themselves. Specifically: how does pilfering pension funds, and then declaring bankruptcy provide "value" in any meaningful sense? It provides greater wealth to the already filthy-rich and destroys the considerable investment that life-long workers have earned, sending those w…
>pilfering pension funds, and then declaring bankruptcy That's a bit of a straw man there. The classic target for these corporate raiders is a business whose capital (real estate, equipment, IP etc.) is worth more than the total market cap of the business itself (which, for most established businesses is a proxy for profit). In this way, the typical corporate raider buys up a business who is using a valuable asset in…
No, it isn't. See below.
> In the process, they'll generally fuck over a whole lot of workers
The only way they can do that, since the workers' pensions were an obligation of the company that got broken up, is to declare that company bankrupt and void the obligation. But bankruptcy is not supposed to be a way to make money by voiding a company's obligations and then selling off its capital. The net value of the company is its assets minus its obligations; the process of cashing out the company should involve paying the obligations, not voiding them.
> there is real economic value (not necessarily social good) in this process of capital redistribution
Now who is using a straw man? Again, the "economic value" in a company is its assets minus its obligations. Cashing in on the assets while voiding the obligations is not creating "real economic value". It's stealing it from the people to whom the obligations were owed.