5 ms·

There's a difference between relying on others in general and relying on some specific entity or some particular way of doing things. In general, I rely on lot

There's a difference between relying on others in general and relying on some specific entity or some particular way of doing things. In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I value that choice and the freedom to change. The distinction is important. If you rely on a single person or entity, they have some kind of claim to your success or failure. If you rely on people in general but nobody specifically, then your success or failure is attributable to you, and that's what "self-reliance" means to me. I'm not suggesting that self-reliance is all-important or an unqualified good. But I don't think that it's a myth, either. You don't have to be abandoned in the jungle as a baby to be called self-reliant.

vkou 7y ago
> In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I value that choice and the freedom to change. You don't have as many choices as you think, many of the choices that you do have are meaningless, and many of the choices you can make are only possible because of the particular level of wealth, power, and social standing that you currently have. If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only recourse is to cut off my nose to spite my face. (Opt out of credit entirely.) If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a competitor, which has the exact same policies, that bring about the exact same outcomes as the one I'm currently with. I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change, but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same. Even when you have actual freedom to choose (Do you want to buy unorganic poor-person kale, or fully-woke, hand-raised, cruelty-and-gmo-free, organic kale?) - your choices are highly constrained by powers and circumstances you have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth and status. Someone with cash in the bank, in-demand skills, useful connections, and no debt hanging over their head has the choice to tell an unreasonable boss to back off. Someone without that level of wealth, power, and status doesn't have a meaningful choice in this regard. (And, ironically, are more frequently in a situation where they have to make that non-choice.)
- ixtli 7y ago
  Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million. That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that original 0.2%. You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly. EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya; about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    What's your point? That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY? I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said. But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.
    - ixtli 7y ago
      The top-most comment said > I value that choice and the freedom to change. and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices. I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.
celticmusic 7y ago
I think a good way to put it would be if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well and they have control over you. Instead, rely on many people, that way any single person's damage is fairly well mitigated. In fact, I had a company find this out about me the hard way late last year. They were harmed much more than I was, in fact.
- smt88 7y ago
  > if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well Strict adherence to this rule would have prevented nearly every successful startup and romantic relationship. Better advice would be to increase your resilience in the face of disappointment, betrayal, failure, and accident. All are guaranteed to happen no matter how carefully you try to protect yourself.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    The whole problem is that there are circumstances which you cannot absorb. So, each trust of that level is a gamble. Startups and (chemically driven) romance are gambles, the difference is stakes. So do not gamble that which you cannot lose.
mirimir 7y ago
OK, gotta quote David Chaum from "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms", published in 1981:[0] > This paper presents a solution to the traffic analysis problem that is based on public key cryptography. Baran has solved the traffic analysis problem for networks, but requires each participant to trust a common authority. In contrast, systems based on the solution advanced here can be compromised only by subversion or conspiracy of all of a set of authorities. 0) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/chaum81.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/chaum...

vkou 7y ago

> In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I value that choice and the freedom to change. You don't have as many choices as you think, many of the choices that you do have are meaningless, and many of the choices you can make are only possible because of the particular level of wealth, power, and social standing that you currently have. If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only recourse is to cut off my nose to spite my face. (Opt out of credit entirely.) If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a competitor, which has the exact same policies, that bring about the exact same outcomes as the one I'm currently with. I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change, but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same. Even when you have actual freedom to choose (Do you want to buy unorganic poor-person kale, or fully-woke, hand-raised, cruelty-and-gmo-free, organic kale?) - your choices are highly constrained by powers and circumstances you have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth and status. Someone with cash in the bank, in-demand skills, useful connections, and no debt hanging over their head has the choice to tell an unreasonable boss to back off. Someone without that level of wealth, power, and status doesn't have a meaningful choice in this regard. (And, ironically, are more frequently in a situation where they have to make that non-choice.)

ixtli 7y ago
Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million. That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that original 0.2%. You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly. EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya; about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  What's your point? That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY? I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said. But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.
  - ixtli 7y ago
    The top-most comment said > I value that choice and the freedom to change. and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices. I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.

celticmusic 7y ago

I think a good way to put it would be if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well and they have control over you. Instead, rely on many people, that way any single person's damage is fairly well mitigated. In fact, I had a company find this out about me the hard way late last year. They were harmed much more than I was, in fact.

smt88 7y ago
> if you're in a spot where a single person or entity could seriously damage you, you haven't protected yourself sufficiently well Strict adherence to this rule would have prevented nearly every successful startup and romantic relationship. Better advice would be to increase your resilience in the face of disappointment, betrayal, failure, and accident. All are guaranteed to happen no matter how carefully you try to protect yourself.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  The whole problem is that there are circumstances which you cannot absorb. So, each trust of that level is a gamble. Startups and (chemically driven) romance are gambles, the difference is stakes. So do not gamble that which you cannot lose.

mirimir 7y ago

OK, gotta quote David Chaum from "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms", published in 1981:[0] > This paper presents a solution to the traffic analysis problem that is based on public key cryptography. Baran has solved the traffic analysis problem for networks, but requires each participant to trust a common authority. In contrast, systems based on the solution advanced here can be compromised only by subversion or conspiracy of all of a set of authorities. 0) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/chaum81.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/chaum...