If you're not willing to engage with what they have to say charitably, maybe you should just leave it. Their comment is plainly relevant to yours, and "shutting down conversation" is not at all a good faith interpretation. It is a huge weakness in your argument that you say people should leave jobs that aren't stimulating to them, when we live in a world where people have to work to survive and frequently cannot make decisions on that basis.
Imagine for a moment you are talking to someone who works a minimum wage job at McDonald's to provide for their children. How do you imagine they would respond to your suggestion they abandon their responsibility to their children to find a more mentally stimulating job? How would that be anything but patently absurd?
> How do you imagine they would respond to your suggestion they abandon their responsibility to their children to find a more mentally stimulating job?
Did I say that? Also, there's a career ladder at McDonalds open for all their employees. Apart from this, the skills you learn at McDonalds is transferable to other occupations in the same sector or other sectors. I should know, I worked those kind of jobs, much worse than McDonalds. So it's quite easy for me to imagine what that's like.
I'm not going to entertain the idea that somebody is locked into their current occupation for life, unless they are a literal slave. My suggestions and advice has no benefit for people who are enslaved, but does that mean that the ideas cannot be discussed at all? Does your comment have any benefit for somebody in that situation? Maybe we should never discuss exercise and health because some people have medical conditions? We shouldn't discuss diet and cooking because some people have allergies, and so on.
Most of us need to work to survive, so let's make the best of it. I also need to sleep to survive, and I do my best to enjoy it. The same with eating etc.
The replies to my initial comment demonstrates the spiritual divide. Just by me stating that i love working, people here get the wildest assumptions into their head, because they cannot imagine anybody enjoying work by and for itself.
Yes, you kinda did say that. You said people should leave their jobs if they weren't stimulating, and when someone pointed out this was lacking in nuance, you waved it off completely. Now you're dismissing anyone who is in that situation, oh they're just a slave, of course my remarks don't apply to slaves.
So yeah, you are refusing to acknowledge the flaws in your argument or the reality of people who don't have the privilege to prioritize their own enrichment over other responsibilities. And I'm not very impressed with that.
> Does that mean that the ideas cannot be discussed at all?
Just because someone challenges your ideas doesn't mean they're trying to shut you out of the conversation. I'm engaging in conversation with you. I wouldn't respond, and certainly wouldn't respond with questions, if I just wanted you to stop talking. Again, this is not a good faith interpretation of my criticism.
> You said people should leave their jobs if they weren't stimulating
If you have dominated your work completely, generally you are looking for a promotion. And if you can't get it, then you start looking for another place to work. You don't have to leave your current job before you've found your next job. But it doesn't matter that I explain this, because spiritually negative people will find just another negative perspective to latch on to. Because life to them is only suffering and misery from birth to death, no matter what.
What's your advice to those who don't have the "privilege"? Can you help them? Or do you think that is my duty?
I appreciate your thoughtful replies. Sorry to have not expanded more before.
I think agree with you in spirit but maybe from a slightly different perspective. I see people divided between whether they spend the time they have control over consuming vs creating (content, art, whatever) more-so than their “work” but work is a pretty loose term.
I enjoy working on things. I enjoy pulling the weeds in my garden and I enjoy the sanding of my woodworking pieces. There is no morality in those individual tasks to me and I like a nice healthy garden and beautiful furniture.
Also, I’ve yet to have a salaried job where I wanted less three day weekends.
You are right that these topics are hard to talk about.
That's a story you tell yourself about the internal lives of others, but it is not knowledge. You don't actually know what's inside other people's minds. All we ever catch are glimpses of each other.
It's tempting to make sweeping generalizations about others to explain the ways they confound and frustrate us. But it's essential to hew to the truth and accept that life is ambiguous, people are baffling, and simplistic narratives do more to give us comfort and reinforce our biases than they do explain the world around us.
I’m not sure this claim has any more validity than his. Calling people unknowable flies in the face of a bunch of modern disciplines. We can see people behave very predictably with Game Theory, for example.
Still, I respect the view that the individual is private unto themselves in a profound way. But I would also say people tend to show you what they believe in how they act. If you pay attention you will begin to notice when someone has put their hopes in power, finances, achievement, or ideology, to give a few popular examples. And it’s not about what people say animates them, or even about what they believe about themselves—it’s how they act.
"People respond to incentives and we can model this with game theory" is a model that notably does not assume anything about the content of people's character or mind. And it frequently fails to explain the behavior of individuals, because you may not understand the incentive landscape they're in. You may offer to pay someone to do something, and it sucks the joy out of it for them, or they feel offended by your offer, and they become less likely to do it.
There's light-years of difference between observing an individual person's actions and drawing conclusions about what they believe (this is in line with what I was referring to with "catching glimpses") and generalizing to conclude that everyone is predestined to be either enthusiastic and lively or a miserable wretch. It's far more likely you caught someone on a good or bad day, to pick just one alternative hypothesis. People contain multitudes.
I also pay attention to the difference between what people say and what they do, and I agree it is meaningful and would even says it's a critical part of being around people. But it's easy to get carried away and pretend we know more than we really do, simplistic stories that explains everyone's behavior is very seductive. A model's ability to generalize is inversely proportional to how powerful it's predictions are. Stories like this that take people and bin them into two groups that control their destiny have huge predictive power - and apply to almost nobody.
Whereas to return to game theory, assuming people are black boxes that optimize some unknown and idiosyncratic utility function which we infer based on their revealed preferences can apply to nearly everyone and everything. But it's predictions are very narrow in scope. You can use an A/B test to optimize any change to any UI flow, and it'll tell you which one converts better. But it won't tell you why.
+0 for what it's worth, I don't understand the ranking algorithm any better than you do but I suspect there's a lot at play and the flagging of other comments is probably related. Pure speculation.
If you wanted concrete answers, consider emailing the mods and asking.
All communities (which survive) establish norms of behavior and eject or restrict people who don't abide by them. That doesn't mean the moderation of HN is beyond reproach, but "apartheid" is hyperbolic to the point of absurdity.
Apartheid wasn't about taking privileges away from people as a moderation action. It was about denying inalienable rights to people from birth. Your privilege to post on a forum is voluntarily extended to you by it's operators, and may be rescinded. It's an act of hospitality, not an inalienable right. You don't have a first amendment right to post on a forum and note than I have a first amendment right to compel your speech or demand you host me for dinner.
Apartheid wasn't enforced by mild and easily bypassed forum account restrictions. It was enforced with brutal violence.
People can get so myopic about mild inconveniences introduced to online interactions they expect to be frictionless and that they feel entitled to, and lose all perspective at the drop of a hat.
You asked what you thought were open ended questions but turned out to have concrete answers. Maybe you are also one of these people who should reflect?
Same way "7" is a concrete answer to "How many colors does the Rainbow have?". But the answer does not relate to the physical object at all, but is actually the idea of Isaac Newton.
Nope, not in the same way as all. One of your questions was just a straightforward misunderstanding of the terminology. It just wasn't as deep as you thought it was, and if your desire is to be honest with yourself and grow, you should recognize that. If you're trying to challenge other people's ideas to provoke them into a new position, but aren't ready to recognize when your own ideas have fallen short, than I'd suggest tending your own garden before worrying about whether your neighbor is underwatering.
Again, don't worry about whether I failed to think or question, worry about whether you are actually engaging in the way you prescribe. If you were as enlightened as you believe you are, you wouldn't be so defensive.
Is your argument really so paper thin that you can't even attempt to defend it? You need to go straight to asserting that those who disagree are delusional? Makes me wonder if you even believe what you're saying or you're just taking comfort in repeating it, like an old yarn.
There is nothing to defend. The National Socialists were defeated 80 years ago. That only exists in their imagination, not in reality. Anyone can go to YouTube and listen to the speech. Not a Nazi rally.
We've all seen. Other commenters explained in great detail what they saw. You choose to plug your ears and then insist everyone else is crazy. Everything you've brought up here is irrelevant. No one thinks that the Nazis are secretly living on the moon. The defeat of the Nazis is entirely orthogonal to a gesture made in recent history. The Hunger Games is fiction but I can still hold up three fingers if I choose to.
Imagine for a moment you are talking to someone who works a minimum wage job at McDonald's to provide for their children. How do you imagine they would respond to your suggestion they abandon their responsibility to their children to find a more mentally stimulating job? How would that be anything but patently absurd?