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I do wonder how much of HN culture is affected by very smart people (in one domain) being subconsciously led to believe things by the machinations of tech. As s

I do wonder how much of HN culture is affected by very smart people (in one domain) being subconsciously led to believe things by the machinations of tech. As smart people, they take very passionate positions on issues they believe strongly. Perhaps they wouldn't have believed them so strongly in a vacuum though?

BuckRogers 5y ago
You nailed something that I've noticed. Highly competent and intelligent people tend to lean libertarian in my experience. It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. Simply a roll of the dice. Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. If you have all 3 of those traits, which are both from your discipline and genetic predisposition, the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  > Simply a roll of the dice. In that case, so is this very conversation, the fact that we're both on this website, and even the fact that we are both interested in tech. If it's simply a roll of the dice, then nearly all aspects to existence are pointless, there's no point in trying to think for oneself, etc. Perhaps this is what you truly intend to convey, but until you explicitly state this, this is an incoherent perspective.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The author's point was that "inherent" advantages and third-party support are more to luck than to any intrinsic value a person brings to the table. Having conversations on a website is a choice. Interest in tech is probably a blend of luck and choice (hard to be interested in something you're never exposed to, and hard to sustain interest in an environment where people consistently discourage it; people ending up in those situations are the "roll of the dice" the author is referring to). In short, justifying a lack of empathy with "they made their choices" underestimates the amount people do not choose their circumstances in life.
  - BuckRogers 5y ago
    shadowgovt said it very well and he speaks for me there. But I do believe that when hard work and preparation meets opportunity, good things happen. I'm not saying everything is pointless at all. I've earned every one of the few pennies I have the hard way, believe me. I have a non-stop work history going back to when I was 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe to buy my own video games and toys. My efforts mattered. These experiences and my self-discipline built my character and who I am today. There's some luck involved though. Whether it's your genetic makeup, how you were or were not groomed by your family, and simple right place, right time. To dismiss everyone as "failures in the meritocracy" is short sighted. For example: John Carmack is a very successful programmer. I'd bet there's many here just as hard working, and as intelligent. He did the right thing, when he was at the right place, at the right time. That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
    - CPLX 5y ago
      > 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        >"Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?" I'm not the GP but you're being obtuse and counterproductive. The idea that no one does anything completely on their own is not particularly revelatory or insightful. It comes off as dismissive more than anything else.
        BuckRogers 5y ago
        As GP, I agree. You hit the nail on the head there. I actually think the guy you're responding to and myself agree if we sat down and discussed in a more open and honest way. He's trying to prove a point about my opportunity, and win the internet. My response to that attitude always is: you win! See ya! It's why I don't use Twitter. That's the thing- I'm 50/50 on this issue. I believe there's inherent advantages that people have, and it's also about discipline and will. Some people will never grasp opportunity when it comes knocking. That's why many that do grasp (and are lucky to have) opportunity are often pretty upset when others try to dismiss their success. I get that. It's true too. Both can be true at the same time, some are fortunate by no effort of their own, and some are unambitious. It's a Venn diagram of conditions. But in 2022, everyone wants to be the victim. I don't believe in victimhood as a lifestyle. I firmly believe that "no one has more control over your life, than you".
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  You are describing privilege, although it's a bit of a tainted word now.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    That word, whatever its meaning, is triggering to a lot of people here.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      Ideally we would parse words according to their definitions but the vernacular and it's connotations are impossible to ignore. "Privilege" is a trendy word that gets thrown around haphazardly in arguments, especially in a condescending manner. In my anecdotal experience, the p-word is most often invoked as an explanation for why a critic of [x] doesn't see the merit of [x] because they simply can't understand due to their background.
- Fordec 5y ago
  From my experience, I find this is true only in the very core of core tech hubs that you can count on one hand. And also with a bias towards finance, adtech, crypto, fintech and other industries that rely on extracting wealth than creating it. Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for that geographic area in regards to the mix of political leanings. I disagree it's about hard work, but about ego about how society deserves to value them. That correlates only really under the age of 35 before their first health scare when suddenly society owes something to them that they never previously wanted to feed a cent into.
  - hindsightbias 5y ago
    Before FAANG was really a thing, I worked in/with/around blue collar folks. Ron Paul types were not that uncommon. Vocal pro-union folks who voted for Reagan and embraced Milton Friedman even after their jobs got shipped somewhere else. As their benefits and health collapsed as they aged, any change to healthcare became Hillarycare and the root of communism. At universities though, the libertarians had actually read The Road to Serfdom and could debate with you. Today’s libertarianism is google search deep, just another veneer over tha antipathies of our time.
    - Fordec 5y ago
      Half the population are conservatives at least, which is what I mean regards to reverting to the mean in a geographic area. Plenty of people are not libertarians but just base level, Fox news repeating (eg. Hillarycare), auth-right quadrant conservative and are ashamed of the moniker.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  > It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. People with terminal diseases also usually become religious. Perhaps atheists are faking it too. > the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't. Tomorrow an asteroid may, very unluckily, fall and strike me so as to kill me. It would not be due to my merits or lack thereof. Yet if you want to get ahead, you should generally work hard and do the right things while being sufficiently savvy.
- sunaurus 5y ago
  I have the opposite experience - I’ve found that people who are good at abstract thinking (most of my software engineering colleagues) tend to also have more empathy than average people. In fact, I believe empathy is just a form of abstract thinking.
  - mgaunard 5y ago
    Sympathy yes, empathy not so much. Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      > Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others. That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.
- caskstrength 5y ago
  > It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. It is surprising to me since I'm not from US. Don't tech workers at Google have good health and life insurance for such cases?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    They do.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Well also "highly competent and intelligent people" are people who have had some success. Even if someone is very smart, if there's no success, it's hard to call them "highly competent". Therefore it's really successful people who lean libertarian. Which isn't that surprising since people don't like considering how much luck went into their success.
- brightball 5y ago
  IMO, this is a fairly simplistic view. You're assuming that highly competent and intelligent people don't see the forces at work which create and exaggerate these different situations. I lean libertarian because I see all of the problems that come from federal level programs trapping us into a status quo that we are mostly powerless to change. You want to change the way that healthcare or education works...let's just say in your county of residence. It's virtually impossible, not because we lack smart people with better solutions but because the money for healthcare and education is already tied up. Wealthy people can afford private schools or alternative approaches to healthcare if they want. The rest of the population is stuck with what they are given, whether they want it or not. I don't know anyone who is happy with the state of public schools in the United States: teachers, students or parents. We're all mostly powerless to change it though. It's not a lack of humility that creates these views, it's empathy for people who are stuck and want things to be better. I lean libertarian because I see the effects that are making it harder to improve all of our lives. I simply want to reduce the barriers between a person having an idea of how to do things better and trying that out with other people who agree with them. If it works, it will be imitated and improved upon. If it doesn't, it will be discarded. This type of experimentation naturally leads to constant improvement. People need freedom to make their own choices without having to ask for permission.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  That seems backwards to me. Many libertarians are above average in intelligence, in part because it's a less mainstream viewpoint, but I don't think it follows that intelligent people tend to be libertarian. I could be wrong about that, but I've met enough intelligent people whom are the opposite of libertarian that if there is any relationship between intelligence and libertarianism that it's probably small. > Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that you're wrong if that's a result of your experience. On the contrary, I've found that those who are competent, as you say, and have their heads down in hard work a lot, are as liable to viewing the world as being anti-meritocratic. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say whether the world is strictly meritocratic or anti-meritocratic, I think there's more of a relationship between having such black and white viewpoints and having one's head down in work for so many hours that little time is left to read about different facts and opinions. My best example is a good friend of mine who is also above average intelligence, but works in a field outside of tech where he is, in contrast to me, much more of a slave to the office, hence he spends a great deal of time staring at one subject and not interacting much with information outside his field of view. His perspectives are often very black and white, and he would view the world as being entirely anti-meritocratic. Being an openly communist type, I could make some educated guesses about why that is, but I'll leave my opinion on that vague for now. When we have discussions about any number of things, including meritocracy, it's pretty obvious to me that he holds these black and white opinions because he's rather oblivious to the various counterarguments and experiences of others outside of his narrow field of study. Yet he is at least 120 IQ. I just realized I indirectly insulted your view on meritocracy. I'm not really here to debate that, and your conclusion may be entirely valid. (and I would say not completely unjustified) Yes, it's one anecdotal example, but that's a repeated observation of mine. Besides, pigeon holing people into single categories is a flaw of its own.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I don’t think this kind of analysis is ever productive. Have you considered the possibility that they’ve been convinced not by subconscious machinations but by arguments they believe are valid? If someone went around saying that your beliefs come from subconscious influence operations, is there any way you could prove them wrong?
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >I don’t think this kind of analysis is ever productive. Not even if it's true?
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    The problem is that it's always true. If you're open to changing your mind in response to evidence and arguments, then your current beliefs will depend on which information you've seen, and thus you will have been influenced by organizations who chose to promote information supporting their own beliefs. We're affected by the machinations of tech, but also the machinations of retailers and unions and political parties and editors and... I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
    - p_j_w 5y ago
      >The problem is that it's always true. Is it, though? We've got here an article about a multibillion dollar company using its money and influence to peddle a view that's beneficial to them and trying very hard to make it look like it's not actually coming from them. This is absolutely not always the case. This is more than just run of the mill people being open to changing their minds then, is it? >in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded I think you've misread the post above, because at no point in that comment was it suggested that said belief should be disregarded.

BuckRogers 5y ago

You nailed something that I've noticed. Highly competent and intelligent people tend to lean libertarian in my experience. It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. Simply a roll of the dice. Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. If you have all 3 of those traits, which are both from your discipline and genetic predisposition, the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.

AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
> Simply a roll of the dice. In that case, so is this very conversation, the fact that we're both on this website, and even the fact that we are both interested in tech. If it's simply a roll of the dice, then nearly all aspects to existence are pointless, there's no point in trying to think for oneself, etc. Perhaps this is what you truly intend to convey, but until you explicitly state this, this is an incoherent perspective.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The author's point was that "inherent" advantages and third-party support are more to luck than to any intrinsic value a person brings to the table. Having conversations on a website is a choice. Interest in tech is probably a blend of luck and choice (hard to be interested in something you're never exposed to, and hard to sustain interest in an environment where people consistently discourage it; people ending up in those situations are the "roll of the dice" the author is referring to). In short, justifying a lack of empathy with "they made their choices" underestimates the amount people do not choose their circumstances in life.
- BuckRogers 5y ago
  shadowgovt said it very well and he speaks for me there. But I do believe that when hard work and preparation meets opportunity, good things happen. I'm not saying everything is pointless at all. I've earned every one of the few pennies I have the hard way, believe me. I have a non-stop work history going back to when I was 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe to buy my own video games and toys. My efforts mattered. These experiences and my self-discipline built my character and who I am today. There's some luck involved though. Whether it's your genetic makeup, how you were or were not groomed by your family, and simple right place, right time. To dismiss everyone as "failures in the meritocracy" is short sighted. For example: John Carmack is a very successful programmer. I'd bet there's many here just as hard working, and as intelligent. He did the right thing, when he was at the right place, at the right time. That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    > 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      >"Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?" I'm not the GP but you're being obtuse and counterproductive. The idea that no one does anything completely on their own is not particularly revelatory or insightful. It comes off as dismissive more than anything else.
      - BuckRogers 5y ago
        As GP, I agree. You hit the nail on the head there. I actually think the guy you're responding to and myself agree if we sat down and discussed in a more open and honest way. He's trying to prove a point about my opportunity, and win the internet. My response to that attitude always is: you win! See ya! It's why I don't use Twitter. That's the thing- I'm 50/50 on this issue. I believe there's inherent advantages that people have, and it's also about discipline and will. Some people will never grasp opportunity when it comes knocking. That's why many that do grasp (and are lucky to have) opportunity are often pretty upset when others try to dismiss their success. I get that. It's true too. Both can be true at the same time, some are fortunate by no effort of their own, and some are unambitious. It's a Venn diagram of conditions. But in 2022, everyone wants to be the victim. I don't believe in victimhood as a lifestyle. I firmly believe that "no one has more control over your life, than you".
Wiseacre 5y ago
You are describing privilege, although it's a bit of a tainted word now.
- klyrs 5y ago
  That word, whatever its meaning, is triggering to a lot of people here.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    Ideally we would parse words according to their definitions but the vernacular and it's connotations are impossible to ignore. "Privilege" is a trendy word that gets thrown around haphazardly in arguments, especially in a condescending manner. In my anecdotal experience, the p-word is most often invoked as an explanation for why a critic of [x] doesn't see the merit of [x] because they simply can't understand due to their background.
Fordec 5y ago
From my experience, I find this is true only in the very core of core tech hubs that you can count on one hand. And also with a bias towards finance, adtech, crypto, fintech and other industries that rely on extracting wealth than creating it. Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for that geographic area in regards to the mix of political leanings. I disagree it's about hard work, but about ego about how society deserves to value them. That correlates only really under the age of 35 before their first health scare when suddenly society owes something to them that they never previously wanted to feed a cent into.
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  Before FAANG was really a thing, I worked in/with/around blue collar folks. Ron Paul types were not that uncommon. Vocal pro-union folks who voted for Reagan and embraced Milton Friedman even after their jobs got shipped somewhere else. As their benefits and health collapsed as they aged, any change to healthcare became Hillarycare and the root of communism. At universities though, the libertarians had actually read The Road to Serfdom and could debate with you. Today’s libertarianism is google search deep, just another veneer over tha antipathies of our time.
  - Fordec 5y ago
    Half the population are conservatives at least, which is what I mean regards to reverting to the mean in a geographic area. Plenty of people are not libertarians but just base level, Fox news repeating (eg. Hillarycare), auth-right quadrant conservative and are ashamed of the moniker.
vorpalhex 5y ago
> It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. People with terminal diseases also usually become religious. Perhaps atheists are faking it too. > the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't. Tomorrow an asteroid may, very unluckily, fall and strike me so as to kill me. It would not be due to my merits or lack thereof. Yet if you want to get ahead, you should generally work hard and do the right things while being sufficiently savvy.
sunaurus 5y ago
I have the opposite experience - I’ve found that people who are good at abstract thinking (most of my software engineering colleagues) tend to also have more empathy than average people. In fact, I believe empathy is just a form of abstract thinking.
- mgaunard 5y ago
  Sympathy yes, empathy not so much. Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    > Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others. That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.
caskstrength 5y ago
> It's only when they get cancer, or finally meet some form of humility that they see the inherent advantages they had over others for what it is. It is surprising to me since I'm not from US. Don't tech workers at Google have good health and life insurance for such cases?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  They do.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
Well also "highly competent and intelligent people" are people who have had some success. Even if someone is very smart, if there's no success, it's hard to call them "highly competent". Therefore it's really successful people who lean libertarian. Which isn't that surprising since people don't like considering how much luck went into their success.
brightball 5y ago
IMO, this is a fairly simplistic view. You're assuming that highly competent and intelligent people don't see the forces at work which create and exaggerate these different situations. I lean libertarian because I see all of the problems that come from federal level programs trapping us into a status quo that we are mostly powerless to change. You want to change the way that healthcare or education works...let's just say in your county of residence. It's virtually impossible, not because we lack smart people with better solutions but because the money for healthcare and education is already tied up. Wealthy people can afford private schools or alternative approaches to healthcare if they want. The rest of the population is stuck with what they are given, whether they want it or not. I don't know anyone who is happy with the state of public schools in the United States: teachers, students or parents. We're all mostly powerless to change it though. It's not a lack of humility that creates these views, it's empathy for people who are stuck and want things to be better. I lean libertarian because I see the effects that are making it harder to improve all of our lives. I simply want to reduce the barriers between a person having an idea of how to do things better and trying that out with other people who agree with them. If it works, it will be imitated and improved upon. If it doesn't, it will be discarded. This type of experimentation naturally leads to constant improvement. People need freedom to make their own choices without having to ask for permission.
ravenstine 5y ago
That seems backwards to me. Many libertarians are above average in intelligence, in part because it's a less mainstream viewpoint, but I don't think it follows that intelligent people tend to be libertarian. I could be wrong about that, but I've met enough intelligent people whom are the opposite of libertarian that if there is any relationship between intelligence and libertarianism that it's probably small. > Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that you're wrong if that's a result of your experience. On the contrary, I've found that those who are competent, as you say, and have their heads down in hard work a lot, are as liable to viewing the world as being anti-meritocratic. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say whether the world is strictly meritocratic or anti-meritocratic, I think there's more of a relationship between having such black and white viewpoints and having one's head down in work for so many hours that little time is left to read about different facts and opinions. My best example is a good friend of mine who is also above average intelligence, but works in a field outside of tech where he is, in contrast to me, much more of a slave to the office, hence he spends a great deal of time staring at one subject and not interacting much with information outside his field of view. His perspectives are often very black and white, and he would view the world as being entirely anti-meritocratic. Being an openly communist type, I could make some educated guesses about why that is, but I'll leave my opinion on that vague for now. When we have discussions about any number of things, including meritocracy, it's pretty obvious to me that he holds these black and white opinions because he's rather oblivious to the various counterarguments and experiences of others outside of his narrow field of study. Yet he is at least 120 IQ. I just realized I indirectly insulted your view on meritocracy. I'm not really here to debate that, and your conclusion may be entirely valid. (and I would say not completely unjustified) Yes, it's one anecdotal example, but that's a repeated observation of mine. Besides, pigeon holing people into single categories is a flaw of its own.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I don’t think this kind of analysis is ever productive. Have you considered the possibility that they’ve been convinced not by subconscious machinations but by arguments they believe are valid? If someone went around saying that your beliefs come from subconscious influence operations, is there any way you could prove them wrong?

p_j_w 5y ago
>I don’t think this kind of analysis is ever productive. Not even if it's true?
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  The problem is that it's always true. If you're open to changing your mind in response to evidence and arguments, then your current beliefs will depend on which information you've seen, and thus you will have been influenced by organizations who chose to promote information supporting their own beliefs. We're affected by the machinations of tech, but also the machinations of retailers and unions and political parties and editors and... I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
  - p_j_w 5y ago
    >The problem is that it's always true. Is it, though? We've got here an article about a multibillion dollar company using its money and influence to peddle a view that's beneficial to them and trying very hard to make it look like it's not actually coming from them. This is absolutely not always the case. This is more than just run of the mill people being open to changing their minds then, is it? >in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded I think you've misread the post above, because at no point in that comment was it suggested that said belief should be disregarded.