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It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because
by crusso 13y ago
It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because of externalities.
It's a strange schizophrenia in a community pursuing entrepreneurialism.
- JonnieCache 13y agoOn top of everything else, you should probably look into what schizophrenia actually entails.
- Sagat 13y agoBoth ideas can be valid at the same time. You can know how to think or be able to autonomously change your life, but at the same time you can also be severely limited or constrained by your circumstances. Humans have a degree of agency (assuming free will) but that doesn't mean they can always realistically escape the human condition.
- eru 13y agoI wouldn't say doomed---they just have much harder hurdles to overcome. We should both inspire people to overcome the hurdles, but also work on creating an environment with less artificial hurdles.
- victoriap 13y agoRegularly, competing views are upvoted, for example for tech stacks or languages. More than one mind end up in schizophrenia everywhere, don't they?
- crusso 13y agoYeah, but you can get a startup company's technology going with Ruby, Python, or PHP. However, if you espouse an absolutist "victim of circumstances" ideology like the article: The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. You are doomed.
- victoriap 13y agoAs far as I see, it happens the following way. Some people see some article on HN, their mind flashes in dissonance. They upvote the next article which opposes that one. So that's why, right after we see an article defending X, we see one defending an anti-X, or not-X.
- crusso 13y agoI'm sure that happens just the way you said. I just think it's strange that people who would come to HN looking to learn more about entrepreneurial things would resonate much at all with "the environment determines outcomes, not the individual" type thinking. Not only does that mindset doom entrepreneurial success, but I wonder why people with such a defeatist attitude toward self-improvement are here in the first place.
- floobynewb 13y agoWhere you say schizophrenia you probably mean split personality disorder. I am not even bothering to re-read your first sentence because of your perpetuation of this horrendous misuse of language.
- crusso 13y agoYes because pedantry is so much more meaningful than engaging in communication.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoActually you're talking about the medical definition whereas he's using the colloquial definition. I agree that the mismatch is unfortunate and perpetuates stereotypes about the medical definition, but he isn't wrong to use the word like that, according to the dictionaries I've checked.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]