Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum • Hacker News Board

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#71

Post by hash-set » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

allemagne wrote: post #30

vixen99 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and this: http://www.unz.com/freed/uniquely-talented/

>"Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose." Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.

I'd be very careful about that "won the popular vote" meme. First off, it isn't relevant. Second off, if people who were ineligible to vote, aka illegal immigrants and felons (and maybe dead people, too) then what we know about the popular vote is a fallacy, too.

The media does nothing but propagandize 24/7.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#72

Post by noir-york » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:10 PM UTC

jmkni wrote: post #17

noir-york wrote: post #7

On one hand you have increasing immigration increasing the supply of labour. On the other hand, you have increasing automation reducing the demand for labour. And in the pinched middle you have falling wages. This cannot end well. I don't know which is the most dangerous scenario: the working classes taking it out on immigrants, or the working classes making common cause with immigrant labour against a Victorian econ…

Yeah I agree. At the moment the anger felt by people who fear for their jobs seems to be focused on immigration and free trade deals. Immigration because people fear that somebody will come from another country and take their job, for less money, free trade deals because people fear their job will be outsourced to somebody cheaper in another country. I believe this was a primary driver behind Brexit/Trump. At some po…

> believe this was a primary driver behind Brexit/Trump.

Yep. The feeling of being forgotten, of not being in control of one's life.

> At some point these people will start to understand that it isn't just the immigrants threatening their jobs, it is also the programmers at home who automate them.

Exactly. And once that anger turns inward, it can tear society apart.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#73

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:10 PM UTC

theWatcher37 wrote: post #59

pmoriarty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why were they patronized and treated like children again? Oh, perhaps it was because they claimed Obama wasn't born in the US. Or because they denied global warming. Or because they hate Mexicans and Muslims. In short, because they bought in to the steaming pile of bullshit that is the right wing media echo chamber. When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surpri…

Dude was a media darling for 30 years, was never called a racist until he ran against a Clinton.

First I ever heard of his political views was when he ran for President.

If he'd been open and up-front about those views, I'm sure they would have been opposed, had anyone bothered to take him seriously. Though more likely he would have just been written off as some rich crank, much as he was at the start of his campaign.

The serious political opposition to him really mounted as his chances at getting political power increased. That, combined with people starting to realize what he and his biggest fans (Neo-Nazis and other white nationalists) stood for was why he's been called a racist now as opposed to when he was just another business man with his politics in the closet.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#74

Post by hash-set » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:11 PM UTC

rhodri wrote: post #57

adamnemecek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know this was still debated.

I am a software engineer, and also a luddite. technology destroys jobs. the question is whether that destruction liberates or oppresses. do we fire some workers and overwork others, or find ways to reduce and share the burden and benefits of labour?

Technology also creates jobs. I think what you are missing here is that technology is neutral to human ambitions. Technology doesn't care--it could empower us, destroy us, whatever. Technology does not care about human destiny.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#75

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

theWatcher37 wrote: post #59

pmoriarty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why were they patronized and treated like children again? Oh, perhaps it was because they claimed Obama wasn't born in the US. Or because they denied global warming. Or because they hate Mexicans and Muslims. In short, because they bought in to the steaming pile of bullshit that is the right wing media echo chamber. When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surpri…

Dude was a media darling for 30 years, was never called a racist until he ran against a Clinton.

He was called a racist many times before, including all the times he was sued for illegal racial discrimination (the first of which was more than 40 years ago.)

Now, maybe that hasn't gotten a lot of media player in places that you would notice while those in the Presidential campaign did, but that says more about your personal media consumption than anything else.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#76

Post by hga » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

allemagne wrote: post #30

vixen99 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and this: http://www.unz.com/freed/uniquely-talented/

>"Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose." Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.

Hillary comfortably won the popular vote

Which is Not Even Wrong, for it implies the unknowable counterfactual that if Trump had been running a campaign for the popular vote, he wouldn't have won that. E.g. lots of people don't bother to vote when they're in "enemy territory" and they know their vote won't count for anything.

You can't take a situation based on X strategy, and then change the rules to Y strategy after the game has been played by X, and make anything more of it than a silly rhetorical point.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#77

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

theWatcher37 wrote: post #59

pmoriarty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why were they patronized and treated like children again? Oh, perhaps it was because they claimed Obama wasn't born in the US. Or because they denied global warming. Or because they hate Mexicans and Muslims. In short, because they bought in to the steaming pile of bullshit that is the right wing media echo chamber. When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surpri…

Dude was a media darling for 30 years, was never called a racist until he ran against a Clinton.

This is ignorant of his history: http://nytimes.com/2002/10/23/nyregion/trump-draws-criticism...

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#78

Post by hash-set » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

jmkni wrote: post #17

noir-york wrote: post #7

On one hand you have increasing immigration increasing the supply of labour. On the other hand, you have increasing automation reducing the demand for labour. And in the pinched middle you have falling wages. This cannot end well. I don't know which is the most dangerous scenario: the working classes taking it out on immigrants, or the working classes making common cause with immigrant labour against a Victorian econ…

Yeah I agree. At the moment the anger felt by people who fear for their jobs seems to be focused on immigration and free trade deals. Immigration because people fear that somebody will come from another country and take their job, for less money, free trade deals because people fear their job will be outsourced to somebody cheaper in another country. I believe this was a primary driver behind Brexit/Trump. At some po…

The reason jobs went to China is simply because US companies were being made to pay for their pollution. China is cheap in comparison. Lower wages, less trouble with employment laws, no trouble with environmental impact. It was an extremely cynical maneuver to go and find the cheapest labor with the fewest consequences to have to manage. Same with India.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#79

Post by internaut » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

Silicon Valley threatens the majority of blue collar workers last. This is Moravec's Paradox. The kinds of jobs blue collar labour does flexibly and in situ are extremely difficult for robots and AI to accomplish. The jobs that are rote and can be performed in a centralized production have already been automated or outsourced to China!

That is why blue collar workers are more worried about migration and globalization than computing technology. The 'robots' that threaten their jobs are other people.

It is the white collar jobs Silicon Valley is destroying. Journalists, Accountants, Lawyers and many more to come.

Solution definitely isn't education, or at least not education as it is classically understood.

Korea and Japan have already tried the education route and they have met diminishing returns. Go there if you want insane working hours for low pay and pointless competitions.

Here's a crazy idea.

Maybe young people should leave the universities and exit the cities altogether. They could live in small communities in the countryside and be ramen profitable. Integrating into the broader economy could be accomplished by traveling to like-minded communities to avail of services there e.g. an artist's colony, a computer person colony, etc

I think this is happening already but it's flying under the radar of journalists as some kind of Timothy Leary move.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#80

Post by Bartweiss » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

discordianfish wrote: post #47

...as you see by the rank of such articles here on HN. For real, I'm not saying SV is doing enough but taking SV as the prime example of everything bad in capitalism has a weird touch as well..

I realized we were doing another one of those articles when I hit "Others have decided that the real villains are Silicon Valley giants, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Google, for spreading fake news stories that vilified Clinton and helped elect an unpopular President."

That's not a Valley opinion, it's a traditional-media opinion. In my experience, Facebook and SV types more generally are acutely aware of how unhelpful and oversimplified the 'fake news' panic is. Facebook's "news" sidebar sucks, sure, but they can't actually stop people from sharing crappy, dishonest information back and forth. And the lines between fake and misleading and simply uninformed are blurry - anything that stops fake news will have people screaming censorship in a heartbeat.

This feels an awful lot like the usual gimmick of "SV is powerful, therefore all societal problems should be solved by SV - even the ones we blame it for!"