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> If someone like Holmes can become a billionaire by peddling nothing except lies and hope, what’s the real value of the software and tech industries if you tak
by Radim 8y ago
> If someone like Holmes can become a billionaire by peddling nothing except lies and hope, what’s the real value of the software and tech industries if you take away the hype and money machines that surround them?
"Real value" is a tricky concept. What is and isn't real? Clearly societies have evolved (and are still evolving) to incorporate "dreams, future potential and hype inertia" into the equation, so anecdotally and tautologically, there's some value in that. Future considerations affect today's reality, so they're "real" in every sense of the word.
We don't know what exactly it is that captures the human imagination—a combination of history, ancestral stories, greed, a tangled mess of primal urges—but peddling improbable futures is definitely a well-established evolutionary pattern.
Dreams and ideologies are the rudder that helps civilizations steer away from local minima, overcome adversity and plod through suffering.
My point is that Holmes is a somewhat extreme example because her confrontation with reality was so head-on, so clearly falsifiable. But if you take away the "hype and money machines" en-masse, I suspect you'll end up with something that isn't human. It's all a house of cards. And it's nonsensical to discuss money, economy and value without humans, these are purely social constructs.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI think you missed the point of the parent comment. It wasn’t to debate relative value in a philosophical sense. I think it was trying to say that if someone like Holmes (& board members) get rich this way (and it takes such effort to catch what they’re doing and bring actual consequences), then it in turn greatly devalues software labor. Think of it this way: if people think this is a good strategy because it does work for various start-ups and even in this extreme case Holmes made over a billion dollars and it’s yet unclear what punishment, if any, it will be — why would start-ups care about actually building something, actually having engineers who produce things. This company made vast sums of money while not doing any of that. It basically encourages a template for trying to print money with secretive refusal to explain the methods, and engineering hype. Which in turn makes being good at engineering worth far less to these people. The more this looks like a viable option, the less valuable engineering skill is.
- Radim 8y agoI agree with that. What I am contesting is that what you and OP describe is such a bad thing wholesale. Holmes should definitely be punished, and the engineering/dreaming trade-off corrected. No question about that, it seems she was outright lying, not just "chasing dreams". My point is that hype and chasing (improbable, stupid, exploitative) dreams are a spectrum, not a binary. Calls for appreciating "real value" (WTH is that? who defines?) and "removing hype" bring painful memories — it's not just a philosophical point for me, coming from the Eastern block. These feedback cycles are shorter than you think. The objective function of what we should optimize for is unknown, but I'm sure 100% "honest engineering labour" and "good at engineering" and 0% hype would be a terrible, short-sighted, deadly idea. We need dreams and inertia to escape local minima, we need the collective goal correction. That's the silver lining in this Holmes case too: the public debate brings about such correction. I voice the dangers of over-correction.