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How to Escape from Immoral Mazes
- knzhou 7y ago> What do you do if you find yourself inside a maze? > Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today. That's it, right there. The whole article could have been replaced with just that. I've heard people express the opinion that they have absolutely "no choice" but to work at McKinsey, or some random hedge fund. I don't understand how anybody can reasonably come to that conclusion. The worst case for people like this is making only medium six figures.
- jandrese 7y agoThat's practically poverty level after you factor in the Manhattan apartment rent, yacht, private schooling, etc...
- seisvelas 7y agoOne way to avoid poverty in that case would be to not buy a yacht, for example. Any amount of money is nearly poverty level if you spend it all on luxuries. Edit: I am dumb and completely missed the joke. Poe's law in action!
- uoaei 7y agoThat's the joke
- RobRivera 7y agoHA! I appreciate your perspective and comment. I'm nearly 3 years into wall street and, while on the lower end of the payscale, I KNOW that if I pursue the more ambitious high six, low seven figure lifestyle, I will have to 'play the game'. People who claim they have no choice but to play the game have already decided they will tolerate it as much as possible.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoYou should have read the rest of the article. It actually talks about why people say that and how they can work up to quitting.
- perl4ever 7y agoAt some point I decided that there's a fundamental difference between working for the government vs. private industry. I'm happy doing much the same thing for the government that I was unhappy doing in private industry or for a government contractor, because it no longer makes sense to give up. To a lot of people, the maze may look the same, but in one case, it's always worth trying to fix, and in the other the whole thing is dispensable. The maze aspect of a situation, or the immorality aren't really the important things! The thing that matters is whether you have a purpose in participating, to make anything better. When a private company is going down the tubes, there's an inherent non-linear and self-fulfilling type of behavior where people give up when they think others are giving up. It makes a large difference in what can be achieved when giving up is not an option for a significant number of people.
- kazinator 7y ago> How to Escape from Immoral Mazes Keep to the Right at all times? Or else Left works, too. Just don't vacillate. :)
- rantwasp 7y agounless... you run into a moral loop
- gliese1337 7y agoWell, then you weren't in a maze to begin with. Escaping immoral labyrinths is a whole other problem!
- JDazzle 7y agoImmoral labyrinths come with immoral minotaurs... how do we escape those before they eat us alive?!
- intrepidhero 7y agoWatch out for the moral grue.
- FZ1 7y ago> Young people starting out in the labor market often have The Fear that they will never find a job or never find a good job or another good job. Young people fear it. Older people know it. > Quit. Not everyone is a 20-something silicon valley kid with companies falling all over themselves to throw money at them. Hiring is effectively broken these days - especially in the software world. If you're not from a top-flight university, maybe a little older, or in any other way less flashy/attractive in the job market, it can take months or sometimes years to get decent job interviews. You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
- thiagomgd 7y agoTHIS! Consider someone with a spouse and kids... Let's just quit, right?
- sokoloff 7y agoGiven the trouble we have hiring, it’s hard for me to imagine someone qualified to be a median talent software engineer would have trouble easily finding new employment elsewhere. (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.) If you’re median or better and in a city with a reasonable tech scene, you are probably going to have a straightforward path. If you’re median or better and not where tech is, look for remote jobs (admittedly harder) or move where tech is. If your skills are notably below the median, staying put and working on your skills might be the most sensible course and changing jobs once you can interview and place well.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 7y agoMinimalists and anti-materialists are fond of pointing out that your possessions can end up owning you instead of the other way around. What they tend to neglect is that when your possessions begin to own you, so too does your boss. Kids, medical problems and bad luck can all contribute, but we generally have a very low degree of control over those situations.
- newnewpdro 7y ago> Kids, medical problems and bad luck can all contribute, but we generally have a very low degree of control over those situations. Bad luck sure, but kids are an entirely deterministic and preventable outcome. Most medical problems are arguably preventable as well. I agree regarding the link between possessions and employer leverage.
- sokoloff 7y agoSo much so that it’s a trope to hire a salesperson with an expensive leased car, a flashy watch, and an overall expensive lifestyle.
- kranner 7y ago> kids are an entirely deterministic and preventable outcome. You may not want kids, but you can't choose not to want kids.
- newnewpdro 7y agoThere are many things I want but can't afford, and instead of putting myself in a vulnerable position to get them I choose to do without.
- kranner 7y agoYou’ve missed my point. I was referring to Schopenhauer‘s statement which is translated as “one can do what one wants, but can’t want what one wants.” https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/32731/what-does-schopenhauer-mean-by-a-man-can-do-what-he-wants-but-not-want-what-he https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/32731/what-do... Some people are so compelled to have kids that they don’t have a choice in the matter at all. Personally my wife and I chose not to have kids, but we know many more people who had to have kids than those who felt they had a choice in the matter.
- aalleavitch 7y agoWorker-owned co-ops are a cure for all of this.
- badpun 7y agoDo you think that, for example, a worker-owned Intel could ever be a thing? I think this model works only for simple businesses.
- dirtyaura 7y agoHuawei is/was worker-owned.
- teddyh 7y agoOne could argue that Huawei, and all chinese companies, are effectively state-owned.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoThere are some quite substantial worker owned businesses around the world.
- aalleavitch 7y agoDo they need to be so complex? Would it not make as much sense for Intel to be broken up into a large number of individual autonomous entities that then cooperate with each other on their own terms?
- radu_floricica 7y agoCommunists tried that. Didn't work very well. Worker owned co-ops will indeed solve this problem, because they are very hard to scale. So they won't ever reach the level where mazes are a real problem. This being said, they also have the potential to come with their own set of issues - trying to get a bunch of people to decide things is also a very time consuming endeavor.
- cmhnn 7y agoI am convinced that people who write things like this don't believe intelligence is genetic. You no more earned how smart you are than you earned your race. Wisdom? Determination? Scars? You can claim to earn or learn some of those. Don't get me wrong, I am not aligned with the hnn society of smart idiots who think Harrison Bergeron was a how-to manual. The genetic dice roll can be cruel. I don't look like Clooney nor am I built like The Rock. But them's the breaks. The only thing worse than that unfairness is the unfairness well meaning and smart idiots would create trying to rectify the inequities. Still, I am empathetic enough to be amused by rantings of the intelligent regarding economic options when they seem to have not seriously considered some other people are less intelligent and may really have less options. In the abstract I will side with those who declare no one is trapped. But there is a continuum. You pretty much have to get me to Vichy France or San Francisco levels of disgusting society before I advocate a waitress with a 6th grade education just decides that supporting the evils of Cheesecake Factory is beyond the pale and worth joining the resistance, the kid's be damned. Seems to me some of these smarty pants could create a utopia for the lesser folks who feel trapped by mortgage's, child support and other meaningless pursuits instead of wasting their horse power on blogs.
- imgabe 7y agoThere is a genetic component, but nobody is born looking like Clooney or the Rock. At the movie star level it is basically your full time job to look that way with personal trainers, nutritionists, steroids, whatever you need.
- cheese4242 7y agoI don't follow the Clooney example. Wouldn't he still look more or less the same if he had become a pickle salesmen rather than an actor?
- imgabe 7y agoHe'd probably be fatter, you know from all the sandwiches he'd have to eat taking out pickle clients on sales calls
- ph0rque 7y agoSo after 3 or 4 clicks, I ended up on an amazon.com page with the book on moral mazes. Can anyone offer a short summary of what a moral maze is?
- wtracy 7y agoThe article links to this page, which offers a definition near the beginning: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-immoral-maze/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-i... FWIW, this author seems to use the terms "moral maze" and "immoral maze" interchangeably, which makes their writing harder to follow than it needs to be. EDIT: On rereading, that page only offers an implicit definition of the term. Basically, it's an organization that is steeped in perverse incentives. Most individuals are incentivized to behave in ways that are detrimental to society and to the long-term profitability of the organization, and the corporate culture implicitly accepts this.
- ph0rque 7y agoThanks. I got to that page, clicked the "moral maze" link, and did not read further (which I should have).
- senderista 7y agoThe article touched on something that's always bothered me about the "effective altruism" movement: some of its adherents seem to think it's OK to work literally anywhere as long as you contribute enough of your income to worthy causes. That has always seemed incredibly dubious to me: make the world a worse place so you can make it a better place!
- retsibsi 7y agoIt just comes from a focus on marginal effects (my replacement at evilcorp will probably do roughly as good a job, and probably not give a large fraction of his/her income to charity) and caring about actual outcomes for the people you're trying to help, rather than your own personal purity. Like everything, the approach can be abused (I feel fine about taking this high-paying morally dubious job, because I'm earning to give... but oh wait, now I have a family to support, and the cost of living is surprisingly high here, and I've got to wear good suits and drive a decent car or my professional reputation might suffer...) but a lot of people are sincere about it, and it does make sense.
- senderista 7y agoIt makes sense only if you’re already a convinced utilitarian. Not all of us are.
- retsibsi 7y agoIt's consequentialist reasoning, not necessarily utilitarian. And you don't have to be a thoroughgoing consequentialist to agree that in a world full of preventable misery, it's best to focus on actually preventing it, rather than on keeping your own hands as clean as possible. (And realistically we're talking about working for an oil company or a casino or something, not being a Nazi prison guard.)
- CathedralBorrow 7y agoMaybe the adherents you mentioned are? I'm missing the requirement that the advice apply to "all of us".
- greypowerOz 7y agoor, you know.. be the change you want to see. I'm also cynical enough to think that taking all the "moral people" out of one workplace / school / whatever and forming a "moral maze / company" will still not be a utopia... People are what they are...