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Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#21

Post by zhaomizhi »

mortivore wrote: post #20
winkeyless wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might as well imagine a company you work for that is trustworthy and does none of the spy/sell data business. And also imagine that the product of the company has been rapidly replacing a million jobs in 5 years and creating merely 200 different jobs in San Francisco demanding higher level of education. A bit extreme but I don’t think it’s unimaginable. Would you feel the same if I may ask?

If I were in such a job I would be very happy about it. I view work as a means to an end. Work to live, don't live to work. A society without jobs would be wonderful. If something I was working on would eliminate the jobs of millions, then we would be closer to having no jobs at all. In such a position I would feel like I was really contributing to a greater future.

It is true that lots of job in market do not treat people as human. Lots of them are just repeatable labor work and require very minimal level of creativity or innovation. In this sense, i agreed that eliminating these jobs would be a huge step for the whole society. However, I don't think the government and these giant capitalist tech company is ready or have a plan about how to distribute resource and money they earned. Also, i am not sure how you define the work here. Instead of eliminate work, i would think working for what you truly believe can give you satisfaction since you are being rewarded for what you do and make.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#22

Post by wait-a-minute »

gervu wrote: post #17
wait-a-minute wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected? https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty "In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17 On every day in the last 25 years there could…

The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced. I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial…

The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet.

So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.

Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#23

Post by simplecomplex »

perfunctory wrote: post #4

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, wh…

By definition if person A pays person B for something, person A values that something. By definition a job is not meaningless or without value. David Graeber‘s “bullshit jobs” betrays an ignorance of basic economics, and an understanding of what a job is, what trade is, the fact that people have different preferences and values, etc.

The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced from reality.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

throw51319 wrote: post #7

Yeah 100%. I'm in my second job out of school working at a big bank in tech. It's mindnumbingly uninteresting to me. And I also don't think it does anything to help society. Though sometimes the technical problems fit the bill of being interesting, it doesn't come close to filling the gap.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#25

Post by jlokier »

simplecomplex wrote: post #23
perfunctory wrote: post #4

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, wh…

By definition if person A pays person B for something, person A values that something. By definition a job is not meaningless or without value. David Graeber‘s “bullshit jobs” betrays an ignorance of basic economics, and an understanding of what a job is, what trade is, the fact that people have different preferences and values, etc. The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced fr…

Meaningfulness of work is not transitive.

Typically person A pays _someone else's money_ to person B, and the someone else (person C) isn't around to pay attention to the details.

I think that makes all the difference, especially when it's iterated over many layers of indirection.

A is in some sense a custodian of what person C values, but that indirection means A is also optimising to keep A in a job without distracting too much from the joy of running a fiefdom, hiding the fact they don't really know what they are doing, etc. So A is paying B for what A thinks looks good enough to C, not necessarily what C would actually value if they understood what was going on.

Let's suppose that indirection only adds a tiny amount of BS, say B is doing 10% BS work to satisfy A's misguided impulses (using C's money not A's), and 90% what C values.

Then add a full economy. Now B is paying D using money they got from A, who got it from C. B is optimising to keep B in a job, so they try to do things that look good to A, while avoiding too much effort for B. To keep ths model simple, let's say the BS adds up and C's money ends up paying for D to do 20% BS work and 80% what C values. But it's all in a good cause, as far as C knows, this is great stuff - literally, the best money can buy.

Throw in a few more layers of indirection and the BS compounds.

Of course the world isn't that simple. By your definition, D's work is all meaningfully valuable to B, B's work is all meaninfully valuable to A, and A's work is all meaningfully valuable to C.

So this does not mean people pay other people for no _local_ reason.

But it's not transitive. C's money may be paying for D to do work that is not meaningfully valuable to C, despite everyone in the chain providing value to each other.

So is it BS work or isn't it? My take is that a significant fraction of work is BS when viewed from a wider perspective: what does this work do for society, people more broadly; yet at the same time, it is much more useful when viewed looking at neighbouring relationships, close up. After all, a job helping someone else keep their job is of immense personal value to the latter person, so that's a factor in how they allocate their ability to spend other people's money.

Since "helping someone else keep a job" is highly valued by those people whose jobs are kept, it's almost inevitable that a big feedback system emerges in which a significant fraction of all work paid for is for the purpose of keeping people in jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#26

Post by hashkb »

psv1 wrote: post #10

> I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a whole. Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this negative sentiment.

You can easily find this yourself. One major issue is that we're pricing people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for years.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#27

Post by psv1 »

hashkb wrote: post #26
psv1 wrote: post #10

> I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a whole. Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this negative sentiment.

You can easily find this yourself. One major issue is that we're pricing people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for years.

Are you saying that tech salaries being generally higher than other industries' is a problem?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#28

Post by bjourne »

Yes.

To much tech is likely not helpful. I think social media makes people lonelier, porn and online games are also not completely nonproblematic. If you plot a curve with amount of tech on the x-axis and happiness on the y-axis then I think it would look like a parabola (hill). And most people in the Western world are probably beyond the maximum.

Someone will object that pacemakers save lives, Facebook helps people reconnect with old friends and Fitbit motivates people to get in shape. That is all true, but such tech-enabled activities seem to be in the minority... Like reading news sites for 15 minutes per day is time well-spent. But reloading news sites and idly browsing through headlines every 15 minutes per day is a waste of time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#29

Post by tomjen3 »

I don't believe that the public as such hate tech. A bit more weary about Facebook, perhaps, but not much more than. The rest is just obsolete media hating tech for being better than them.

We are nerds, we should be able to spot bullies and their tactics well by now. As a minimum we should not allow them to bully us.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

#30

Post by hashkb »

psv1 wrote: post #27
hashkb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily find this yourself. One major issue is that we're pricing people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for years.

Are you saying that tech salaries being generally higher than other industries' is a problem?

No, of course I am not saying that. I'm saying it's a complicated issue that's currently playing out in public and you can read about it from many well-articulated points of view if you do a bit of Googling.
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