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Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capital

Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capitalism and the modern wage system is going to go over well

sdellis 2y ago
That's because hacker news is often an echo chamber of venture capitalists (or VC wannabes) whose success depends on perpetuating these myths.
- code_for_monkey 2y ago
  its a couple things its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society. sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    "sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby" I think that's a quality observation. One of the helpful observations of humans I've gained from this site is that people tend to assume that their position in society is some kind of natural given. And typically the folks here are either what some folks might term "labor aristocracy" or literal aristocracy. Hence the reason why skipping humanities classes has been so harmful- they haven't spent the effort to appreciate the vast width of human experience. So when they are confronted with ideas about how other folks live, their inclination to see themselves as naturally in a solid position makes it difficult to see why other people make the choices they make. Fundamentally the folks on this site have a highly chauvinistic picture of their culture and really, at their core, are "anti-democratic" because they don't feel other folks can make rational choices about life. It's only recently that this has become an "out loud" thing to say, but I have been hearing it quite a lot lately. This trend has been something I've been paying attention to for a long time- I've had a quicklink to search for "musk" in titles of the site since about the time he bought twitter because I could see where this is going, and I feel unfortunately validated in that feeling. But if you want to check the pulse on the nihilistic sociopaths who are now in charge of parts of the US Gov, this site is very helpful. Also good for finding out about running doom on various devices, but that's just a side benefit.

sdellis 2y ago

That's because hacker news is often an echo chamber of venture capitalists (or VC wannabes) whose success depends on perpetuating these myths.

code_for_monkey 2y ago
its a couple things its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society. sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby
- scarecrowbob 2y ago
  "sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby" I think that's a quality observation. One of the helpful observations of humans I've gained from this site is that people tend to assume that their position in society is some kind of natural given. And typically the folks here are either what some folks might term "labor aristocracy" or literal aristocracy. Hence the reason why skipping humanities classes has been so harmful- they haven't spent the effort to appreciate the vast width of human experience. So when they are confronted with ideas about how other folks live, their inclination to see themselves as naturally in a solid position makes it difficult to see why other people make the choices they make. Fundamentally the folks on this site have a highly chauvinistic picture of their culture and really, at their core, are "anti-democratic" because they don't feel other folks can make rational choices about life. It's only recently that this has become an "out loud" thing to say, but I have been hearing it quite a lot lately. This trend has been something I've been paying attention to for a long time- I've had a quicklink to search for "musk" in titles of the site since about the time he bought twitter because I could see where this is going, and I feel unfortunately validated in that feeling. But if you want to check the pulse on the nihilistic sociopaths who are now in charge of parts of the US Gov, this site is very helpful. Also good for finding out about running doom on various devices, but that's just a side benefit.