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The Toxic Grind

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The Toxic Grind

#61

Post by president »

czbond wrote: post #31
president wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe I should have re-phrased it to "Capitalism with maximizing shareholder value characteristics". Toss human nature on top of that, and you're biased towards "late stage capitalism".

I disagree. My context - I am an ardent, to the core capitalist - but a humane capitalist. I believe in continued failure until success. Letting failure die. Capitalism in it's current form has it's incentives mis-aligned. When aligned correctly, and not solely chasing the highest returns or Internal Rate of Return - capitalism can be the most potent force I feel on Earth. Why? Because it aligns humans incentives (do…

Yes, I agree. My criticism is of the current form of capitalism that is so entrenched that we won't ever seem to escape without some kind of forced reset.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#62

Post by lanstin »

chasd00 wrote: post #21
throwaway9980 wrote: post #6

Hitting my mid-40’s with a reasonably successful multi decade career in tech and I’ve recently realized that some gigantic percentage (plurality, maybe majority) of all the hard work has gone into competing against the people around me for opportunities. Not into actual value creation for others, not in service of others, purely focused on beating out other people for the chances. I’m not sure how to reorient myself.…

competition between organism is pretty fundamental to the way life works. Convincing humans (or any other lifeform) to turn that off is going to be a tall order.

It helps to classify things as coopetition - it is a matter of coordinating the group effectively. sometimes each person goes off and tries different strategies alone, and sometimes people share info and coordinate activities. The determinative factor is the problem to be solved. Some problems are bigger or big but well understood and you can cooperate pretty easily. Some are less well understood and you need to send people off to be mad geniuses in their labs.

Human default is pretty biased towards cooperation, what with our speech and long childhoods and social organization, but of course, as the great success of science these past few hundred years shows, sometimes you need the loners pushing towards a hard to find insight.

Of course, if you don’t care about solving problems or making things more pleasant and interesting and just want to optimize the number of dollars in your banks database, then maybe you wouldn’t care about the most efficient way to solve problems. In which case, good luck, but there are reports from people that have pursued that path that it doesn’t hold a candle to contributing to a Great Common Task.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#63

Post by douglaswlance »

pbourke wrote: post #13
douglaswlance wrote: post #7

The point of work is to contribute to society. Sustaining your own life is a side-effect, though it is an important one, as it allows you to contribute more to society. Overworking can negatively impact how much you can contribute, so in that sense it should be avoided.

The point of your work is to contribute to society. The point of my work is to sustain my own life.

Can you sustain your own life without society?

Re: The Toxic Grind

#64

Post by czbond »

president wrote: post #61
czbond wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My context - I am an ardent, to the core capitalist - but a humane capitalist. I believe in continued failure until success. Letting failure die. Capitalism in it's current form has it's incentives mis-aligned. When aligned correctly, and not solely chasing the highest returns or Internal Rate of Return - capitalism can be the most potent force I feel on Earth. Why? Because it aligns humans incentives (do…

Yes, I agree. My criticism is of the current form of capitalism that is so entrenched that we won't ever seem to escape without some kind of forced reset.

Totally agree - lawmakers (who are currently attorneys) should be replaced with engineers & company leads need CEO & CFO priority re-alignment, although that is asking a whole lot.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#65

Post by fuzzfactor »

krembanan wrote: post #14
throwaway9980 wrote: post #6

Hitting my mid-40’s with a reasonably successful multi decade career in tech and I’ve recently realized that some gigantic percentage (plurality, maybe majority) of all the hard work has gone into competing against the people around me for opportunities. Not into actual value creation for others, not in service of others, purely focused on beating out other people for the chances. I’m not sure how to reorient myself.…

What exactly do you mean by this?

If you could redirect the competitive effort normally required for nominal advancement into participatory co-operation instead, some incredible returns are unachievable any other way.

Too bad there is not normally the structure in place to better reward co-operation rather than competition.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#66

Post by BeFlatXIII »

captainbland wrote: post #56
krembanan wrote: post #26

I've always been confused by this, as most studies show around 5~ hours a day is the maximum your brain can do work that requires deep focus (programming etc). So what are these people doing where they can work 10+ hours days? You will see seriously diminishing (and often negative) results when overworking. You'll end up waking up the next morning cleaning up and fixing bugs from your overworked brain.

A lot of people who claim to be like this seem to tweet a suspiciously large amount.

Or discuss it on Hacker News.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#67

Post by fuzzfactor »

carimura wrote: post #45
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #30

This is disappointing to see on the front page as it's the 600,000th article since 2007 about why family and health are better life priorities than work. As usual the author, who invariably lives in the white collar tech-bubble, and therefore is bombarded with "hustle culture" stuff in their LinkedIn etc...sets up a strawman and then attempts to dismantle it: >This is a universal longing in a capitalist world — getti…

maybe if it keeps getting upvoted despite being the 600,000th, there's something that continues to resonate with the audience?

>The Toxic Grind

>They’re not glorifying the process of achieving this wealth, not the journey, just the end result, just pure “Here’s my yacht, bro”.

Kind of takes on a whole new meaning for someone growing up in a yachting community who aspires to work closely with chemicals regardless.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#68

Post by blahblarblar »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #6

Hitting my mid-40’s with a reasonably successful multi decade career in tech and I’ve recently realized that some gigantic percentage (plurality, maybe majority) of all the hard work has gone into competing against the people around me for opportunities. Not into actual value creation for others, not in service of others, purely focused on beating out other people for the chances. I’m not sure how to reorient myself.…

It seems so strange, you’d think there’d be no shortage of problems to go around.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#69

Post by lanstin »

czbond wrote: post #22

It's like article author has never watched a nature documentary where gorillas kill other gorillas for territory (or most other species similar). Humans are bell curve like all other species. Nature rewards either strength, physical advantage, or mental advantage.... and there is constant competition. That's just the way it works in human nature.... humans are wired that way. You either participate, don't, or find a…

Humans are biased biologically towards cooperation. E.g. language skills and social organization into small groups, extended childhood, ability to empathize with outhers emotional states.

Humans who are not part of a group do not live long or well. Competition is just an artificially set up arrangement to find good solutions where the answer isn’t that obvious, like the allocation of goods and services in a multi-producer, multi-consumer money based economy. Free markets can work quite well when they avoid concentration of power in large corporations that start to violate the axioms of a free market, or when the corporations can overwhelm the government and stop regulation. But the sense of competition of all against all they seem to inspire is not accurate.

Re: The Toxic Grind

#70

Post by lanstin »

chasd00 wrote: post #43
czbond wrote: post #22

It's like article author has never watched a nature documentary where gorillas kill other gorillas for territory (or most other species similar). Humans are bell curve like all other species. Nature rewards either strength, physical advantage, or mental advantage.... and there is constant competition. That's just the way it works in human nature.... humans are wired that way. You either participate, don't, or find a…

i don't know why you were downvoted. I mentioned basically the same in another comment, you can't just turn off competition between humans. Competition is a fundamental component of all known life. You can opt out but then complaining that the rest of humanity has not chose to opt out isn't really fair.

Because without cooperation you don’t get the internet, you don’t get compilers, you don’t get HTML on top of C. And humans are strongly biased towards cooperation. Saying everything eats each other is flat wrong about people. Better to understand cooperation and competition as two ends on a continuum of “how to allocate people to solve problems”.
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