Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.
You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.
In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.
I'd argue that, while it may not be selfish to have kids, most people who are having kids do it for selfish reasons. They don't want to "die alone". They want to show that they can afford it. They want to vicariously get into Harvard and work in publishing (if traditional publishing still exists in the 2040s at all) and live some imagined high life... even though the probabilities are minuscule and most children are going to inherit a world even shittier than the one we were stuck with.
I don't think I'll have kids. It's the one vote I've got. Why would I stake anything I care about on a society that will almost certainly fail them?
The best route is either to roll your own or go with a service like Ghost. Sure, you'll have to pay hosting, but you're not going to have shitty ads run on your blog.
Substack seems to be a decent technology; the problem is that it's owned by Y Combinator, which means it can't be trusted--if you piss off whoever's running YC at the time, you can be suddenly banned and have your data stolen.
Our healthcare system is an absolute travesty for the poor, but it's pretty lousy even for people who can afford care. I know plenty of people with 7- and 8-figure net worth, people who have connections to the medical system, who've still received substandard care. It's at the point where no one's winning.
> I see that phrase thrown around a lot. It's a variant of "you're never going to be a billionaire (so you shouldn't be against X)." Why do people assume that you have to think you'll be a billionaire to be against something that would affect billionaires negatively? Is something only wrong if you think you'll find yourself in that position one day?
Obviously cappies (meaning people who support capitalism, who are not necessarily actual capitalists--most aren't) don't walk around believing they personally have a greater than 50% chance of being billionaires. It's hyperbole. That said, they do overestimate their future earning potential while severely underestimating the number of ways in which preexisting social class will block them. This is evidently true; behavior and preferences reveal beliefs, and no one supports capitalism and its extreme inequities unless they harbor a belief--perhaps an underexamined and irrational one--that they'll one day be invited to join the capitalist class, since there's literally nothing to justify the system but "It's good if you're one of them."
This is absolutely going to be used against unionizers, which is what's really meant by "colluding". In the US this is going to get a lot of people fired. In other parts of the world, it's going to get them killed. This kind of software is Zyklon B for the 21st century.
> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?
There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.
> If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.
Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.
If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.
That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.
I think this is a great idea, but for a different reason. "Elite college" is a relative and somewhat zero-sum term, since it refers not to the quality of education but the quality of job and networking opportunities that are available once a person graduates. The embarrassing truth of these elite colleges is that there's not a whole lot of value-add. The classes are good--well, some of them--but you can find classes that are just as good at a decent state university. Elite colleges don't give anyone the ability to beat the job market; they select those who are likely already to beat it.
They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.
So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.
The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
> I bet there are also bodies of work by posters on internet forums, social media etc. that would constitute great works if properly compiled, edited, and promoted.
I'd be careful. People get banned for merely mentioning that guy.
Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example.
If the bosses (the higher-ups, not the middle managers) don't like you, you're not going to get this anyway, and 99% of whether they decide they like you is based on preexisting social class similiarity. The pre-anointed winners with rich, connected daddies benefit from this--they're the ones who get tapped to be CEO's proteges--and they'll be just fine without going into an office.
The rest of us, if we have to go to an office, are just wasting our time so someone else feels important, and that's really it. They don't see us as one of them, so they're not going to invest in our careers, so we have no reason to care beyond the minimum and having to pretend otherwise (that is, indulge and uphold bourgeois false consciousness) is emotional labor we're better off without having to do.
The headline's a bit of a stretch compared to what is really going on.
We're nowhere close to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and we may never get there, because humans with malevolent intentions, bolstered by algorithmic utilities, are already quite dangerous. Give a capitalist or imperialist a computer and you have something far more dangerous than any robot that exists now or will in the next 50 years.
AI (which, in today's world, is mostly advanced statistics) isn't inventing racism, of course; it's picking up on the racial injustices that exist in our society. A loan decision engine that is allowed to use ZIP code (or similarly precise residential information, given the history of redlining) will discriminate against racial minorities not because "the AI is racist" but because it's picking up on preexisting social inequities, like the fact that even in 2022, black Americans get fucked over on the job market (longer periods of unemployment, more likely to be the first ones laid off) and suffer financially as a result.
The fact that human culture is adjusting to unexpected innovations (including, in Go, those generated by programs) is not new. Scientific and technical progress have been major influences on human culture since they have existed.
The other problem with the "we need to fix the system" arguments is that they often ignore the much greater problems in our society.
Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.
We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.
People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught.
Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.
> The article describes what it takes to getting published; ie, passing an ever increasing number of gatekeepers. Agents, "blurb writers", publishers, reviewers are all professional gatekeepers, organized in a giant, very strict filter.
If you self-publish, you have to anticipate the tastes of readers. There are millions of them; you have to reach the right ones. The best and the worst are out there, and sometimes the best for one genre are not the right readers for your book. Hit the wrong crowd, and you'll (arguably deservedly) get lackluster reviews.
As a no-name self-pubber, you'll also have to price your first book low--which itself is tricky, because the most price-sensitive readers are not the ones you really want... at some point you run into the boos from the cheap seats problem... so there's a fine line, in discounting, between rewarding early adopters (which you must do) and courting readers who won't be invested enough in your book to generate desirable word-of-mouth, and who might leave lousy reviews.
Ultimately, if you self-publish, you're betting on readers--you're betting on people with no status (nobodies like you and I and 99% of authors; mostly under-25, 75% female) but who are (of course) just as smart as the literati, and who actually read. They will push your book, but they're not influencers or "book buzz" people, so it will happen slowly (the best you can hope for is a slow exponential).
Or you can aim for trade publishing. In that case, you're betting your career on a small number of expensively educated and overly connected people who haven't read for pleasure--haven't read deeply at all; reading for work at a 45-minutes-per-book pace doesn't count--since... well, since they were under-25 nobodies with no social status.
If you do trade publishing, you have to give up on the idea of "great literature". Don't write books you love; write books people will show to their bosses, because that's what you need to get through... a manuscript that people aren't afraid to show to the next person up the chain... and it takes several decision-makers to give your book the nod to even have a chance at playing.
And yeah... MFA fiction is quite a plague. If you write enough books that nobody reads but lots of people claim to read, you can get a prestigious job where you teach other people how to write books that nobody will read. Where have we seen this before?
I want to compare OKRs to Performance Reviews and Roadmapping. They’re all worthwhile ideas that can bring discipline and structure to the chaotic world of business, all dreaded by their participants for some reason.
It's not mysterious, why those things are hated.
In business, there are innate conflicts of interest. The company wants to suck as much out of people, and pay as little, as it can. You want... something else. Not to be exploited. To have a career. To make more money. Doesn't matter. The company is a paperclip maximizer and you are made of atoms it can use for something else. When you write OKRs, you have to generate information that will only be used against you--never for you. You have to pretend that you're doing this out of some sense of mutuality when, in fact, the situation is inherently adversarial.
You might have a decent manager. Great. That happens sometimes. However, all these devices exist as ways for companies to make managers unable to protect their own people. That's why "Agile" time-tracking exists. That's why there are two management structures (product and people management) for reptilian executives to pit against each other. That's why performance reviews with failure quotas exist. For your boss to be able to protect you from the company is the last thing the company wants.
Ball packing (no, it's not some new thing Bay Area VCs are doing--I mean, it probably is also that but it's not what I'm referring to here; rather, it's the n-dimensional analogue of sphere packing) gets stranger in n-dimensions as well.
If you have an n-dimensional integer lattice with unit n-spheres at each even-numbered point, you get inscribed n-spheres. For n = 2, those circles are tiny: about 29% (1-1/sqrt(2)) of the radius of the bigger (r = 1) ones. At n = 3, they're somewhat bigger but still small. At n = 4, they're the same size. At n = 5+, the inscribed n-spheres are actually larger than the unit spheres, which means they extend farther despite being "inscribed". This is probably impossible to visualize, because it's never that way in our 3-dimensional world.
High dimensional spaces also make it difficult to come up with good distance metrics. In 1000+ dimensions, nearly all the volume is on the boundary, and neighborhoods in the classical sense (e.g. visible clusters) don't exist. It's trivial to come up with metrics that "work" but it often requires domain knowledge to come up with ones that are useful.
Casinos haven't wasted the bulk of a generation's top talent to enrich a small number of pederasts in a tiny geographic area.
My view of "morals" laws is that harm reduction should be the policy. Do I like gambling or drug abuse? Of course not. Do I think they should be illegal? Probably not, because empirical evidence shows that harm is better reduced by making these things legal and then regulating them.
Of course, if I found that casinos were having huge negative externalities, then my opinion would change.
Most venture-funded startups solve silly non-problems or in fact cause serious harm to society, but make billions of dollars in doing it.
Meanwhile, we haven't been to the moon since the '70s, life expectancy in the US is declining, and a substantial percentage of our energy comes from coal. Oh, but if you want to bet your life savings on (entries in a distributed ledger that say you own) digital pictures of dog penises, I imagine there's a way to do it.
Technology didn't fix the evil of neoliberalism. It didn't clean anything up. It accelerated the corrosion.
Ninety-nine percent of private equity profits come from taking strategies that are illegal with regulated, public companies and applying them to unregulated assets. And venture capital is a subset of private equity. Almost every conversation VCs have amongst themselves would be considered market manipulation if it pertained to an exchange-traded company, and of course the fact that it's all insider trading goes without saying. So no one should be surprised.
You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.
In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.