291–300 of 326 posts
"You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty" Do you think programming is like this?
I can't help but feel this advice runs contrary to communitarian ideals, to the point that were we all to follow it, not much would get done.
The best Engineers I have encountered surely have 'always been learning' but it had little to do with careerism, or 'trying to shape the world', rather just plain curiosity. Outside of that they'll have had 'normal' careers, more or less satisfied with the work to be done ahead of them. Why? Because it makes them happy to be contributors, doing their jobs well, getting a decent income, possibly raising their families etc.. There is a lot of mundane work be done even in the most creative of environments.
When Steve Jobs said 'you should try to nudge the Universe forward' my first thought was 'which way is forward?' - meaning that lack of at least some kind of moral impetus (of course a very difficult, grey thing) it's hard to know.
It's a very self oriented treatise, specific to the accumulation of power and influence of the individual, while effectively externalizing the 'other', and of course, all those aspects of life which are not very well described in terms of 'career' , 'money' , 'power' etc..
I'm trying to find an example of someone doing something 'purposeful' but who also had such 'compounding' effects: Ingvar Kamprad. Founder of IKEA.
He wanted to make reasonable design, available to the masses for a reasonable price, and his 'small compound rate' spread over a life seems to have built something that I think will outlast most of the FAANGs. And maybe there's some 'good' in there as well.
Thanks Sam, fine words for young entrepreneurs maybe, but let's try to keep this in context.
The world is very big, diverse, full of all types - if the Valley wants to 'win' in the next phase of evolution, it's going to have to figure out how to promote ideals that aren't just suited to the 1%, but everyone else as well.
Trying to do this while maintaining that creative/exceptionalism will be hard, but there's no way around it.
You can't be 'irreverent feisty antagonists upstarts' and 'managing major parts of the economy and influencing global affairs' at the same time.
It does feel like shoehorning people into fitting some particular "pattern" that the author believes to be the "secret" to obtain said goal.
I always find it surprising that such short (relatively) articles, choke full of relatively difficult to apply advice gain a mass following and plenty of readers.
It does remind me of the rather stupid advice that depressed people get every day: "pull yourself up!" Amazing how we do seem to forget the complexity that riddles our minds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right. The first big step in Emotional Intelligence is being able to understand and regulate your own emotions, and it's the first step for a reason. Kids who passed the famous marshmallow test (were able to resist the impulse to eat the marshmallow when unsupervised) were far more successful in later life I have two brothers who occasionally get very angry, cut off relationships on whims and sabotage…
> I have two brothers who occasionally get very angry, cut off relationships on whims and sabotage themselves through acts of defiance and misplaced protest, and neither of them is very 'successful' On the other hand, becoming the POTUS is presumed to be the definition of "successful" (cf some comments on here yesterday) and Trump is all of those ^ things and more.
I'm sure this is to my benefit. If suffering comes, I chose to use it to make myself stronger, more determined and focused. i close to learn. and instead of rushing to optimize for their objectives, I get to really create my vision.
Everytime they reject me, I like to think about how I will make a point of how much of a broken system I think it is, when I eventually get successful.
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The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witne…
What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
It's also very successful, if you have built a stable business and a way of supporting yourself and a few others around you. Being successful doesn't always mean having a 1BN valuation. But sure, it's nice to think that one day, it could happen. I'm just grateful every day that what I've got now - stability and plenty of resources - was a result of pretty much what Sam said. Believing in ourselves and not giving up,…
As a force multiplier have a stable business that supports you but doesn't take all of your time can be huge. It allows you to take risks that others won't. That said, there is something to having risks be actual risks. A friend of mine who has been much more successful than I have decided to take out a huge second mortgage on his house to start his own business (at the time it was an ISP and he spent nearly all of t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witne…
> Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it…
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
This is a recent blog post I wrote:
http://www.greshm.org/blog/life-is-just-a-game/
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witne…
Won't basic universal income give rise to more inflation and negate the benefits in the first place?
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.