Ask HN: How do you deal with destroying other people's happiness?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3578407

by diminium • 14 years ago

4 6 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A lot of us deal with disruptive technologies that attack and in some cases, destroy the status quo. The thing is, there is a lot of people out there who actually like the status quo. They are happy about it and they enjoy it. It's their life and their dream.

How do you guys deal with the realization that by making this disruptive technology, you'll be destroying their happiness?

nostrademons• 14 years ago

You think about all the other people whose happiness you are improving.

If you are not, on balance, creating more happiness than you're destroying, perhaps you should rethink what you're doing.

mohene1• 14 years ago

When you automate things you eliminate jobs. That is the key factor. Are you eliminating someone's work? Can they still be retrained? Greed is making money by directly disrupting someone's livelihood.

If technology creates new sectors of the economy by providing insight it is beneficial.

Happiness is a construct and subjective. One might say happiness is going to a newly gentrified section of town and buying shoes made in Italy, another person my say that's crazy and prefer to keep rents low in town so local cobblers can afford to make basic shoes.

The best definition is to ask people what they want, but usually people try to tell people what they should want.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Hah, if I'm lucky! There are very few companies destroying any part of the status quo. There are many trying, but there are just as many that have gotten just a bit bigger before getting co-opted by VC or signing a disruption-calming deal with a partner. Most of the remaining get sandbagged with IP lawsuits if they're at all successful, which leaves a tiny number of companies with names like wikipedia, or khan academy, or beatport (maybe).

wkearney99• 14 years ago

It's a two-way street. If your status quo is valuable then what are you doing to keep it that way? Just depending on someone else not to do things better is no recipe for success. Also consider that just because you might think you're creating something wonderfully new and disruptive doesn't mean that existing ways will change. Sure, you can make a better mousetrap, but who says people will beat a path to your door for it?

baremetal• 14 years ago

The fact you can disrupt a market means youre generating a net benefit or you wouldn't be able to disrupt the market in the first place. The opportunity for disruption implies market inefficiency and thus a failure to maximize social benefit.

arthole• 14 years ago

ha. the status quo gets destroyed sooner or later anyway. stasis is a form of change because stasis turns into degeneration. The status quo requires energy to remain the status quo.

the real problem is not moving fast enough, in not being able to develop fast enough, in not learning fast enough.

for instance, unemployment is both caused by and a failure of the speed of development. if a person is unemployed, the problem they have is not being able to transition to a new or different industry because they can't learn fast enough.

arguing to keep the status quo is arguing to "slow down". And it's usually a disguised argument of sentimentality or of a vested interest.

Ask HN: How do you deal with destroying other people's happiness?

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