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The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.

That's not really what I'm saying. The ways in which society hands out wealth and power today are not necessarily the ways in which it always has or always will. What specific traits lend one toward success are a bit subjective and take different forms at different times and places. So if right now, some individual cannot succeed as easily as another, those tables may very well turn at some point in the future.

To the degree that we justify whoever is being rewarded now, because they are smart/resilient/beautiful (by current standards) or whatever allows them to succeed, we must also acknowledge that under different circumstances it may very well be that we would be congratulating someone else for completely different justifying reasons. By the same token, if someone is not rewarded by society, we should resist the urge to justify their lack of success in terms of some intrinsic deficiency, when indeed they very well may have succeeded with the same traits in a different version of society. The arbitrary nature of how society chooses to reward individuals clashes with attempts to justify the status quo, which would much prefer to describe outcomes as an inevitable consequence of various conditions, like genetics, that can be used to explain why some are wealthy/powerful and others destitute.

It is this framing that I find to be morally suspect, because it tries to justify the current social hierarchy in absolute terms, when the reality is a bit more complex and subject to the prevailing whims of the times we live in.

If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.

Agreed. I only want to acknowledge that these are but a few of the many ways society can choose to value its individual members. The genetics, or upbringing, or nutrition, or behaviors of those who have achieved success are not predictive of obtaining wealth or power in all versions of society, past and present, and so should not necessarily be treated as more important or superior in any universal way.

It only becomes a moral issue if someone who does not happen to stand out along one if the axes that is currently rewarded by society ends up suffering significantly as a result and cannot find ways to succeed in life. Individuals may possess a great many valuable traits that are worth encouraging but simply aren't rewarded as well when it comes time to divvy up the loot. Sort of like being an essential worker during Covid who holds the line against a pandemic to keep society functioning but can't afford to raise a family in the income from that ostensibly important job.

Comparing Bezos to Galileo, what a joke.

Back then an equivalent article would have targeted the church, and its author probably would have suffered greatly for doing so, sort of like our friend Galileo... Your obsequiousness, especially pathetic in this age when the stakes are so much lower, would have spared you from facing any similar repercussions I'm sure.

It reads like a religious sermon intended to ease the fragile consciences of a rapidly dwindling elite, jumping at shadows while they barricade themselves ever further into self-reinforcing fantasy. Complete and utter detachment from reality, complete with an imaginary foe in the form of "degrowthers," who supposedly exist and spend their days relentlessly banging at the gates of prosperity with intent to needlessly sack the city on the hill. Economics as a discipline has always been abused to justify the unjustifiable, but here it seems to be employed purely to defend the psychological safety of the most privileged, who cannot even bear to observe the destructive results of their lifestyles from a safe distance. The violence committed all around them, in their name, and the cries of anguish that result are easily brushed aside in service to maintaining the desperate illusion that cause and effect don't exist.

I like the take home tests myself. Whiteboarding and brain teasers are not outside my experience (I did mathletics stuff as a child) but doing them out loud in front of a hostile audience is not a strength of mine. The best work I have done has been largely composed of private problem solving, syncing up with peers only once I was sure I knew the topology of the problem and perhaps had run a few experiments.

It doesn't really take long to get to the point where talking about a problem with others can be helpful, less than a day most times, but starting off a new problem with verbal spitballing with peers has not been all that useful in my work. For me to really learn something I need to hold it in my hands/code editor and get to know the ins and outs, build up intuition so that I can speak about it accurately. Jumping into unknown problems in an interview by standing up at a whiteboard talking just seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. Maybe the interviewer wants to see my "thought process," whatever that means, but what does it really matter if I can get to a good solution without vocalizing every step along the way?

I often go down the wrong paths when problem solving, if only to traverse them for my own edification. If I can make 10 mistakes or false starts in a row and still arrive at a decent solution as quickly as anyone else, what does it matter in the end? I also tend to write code out of order. I might jump around between concepts and write disparate sections of a solution without linking them back right away, following my intuition without trying to enforce order on everything I do. No one has ever complained about my speed or code cleanliness/clarity, quite the opposite in fact. Yet when I am put under the microscope, these behaviors inevitably stand out to the interviewer as cause for concern.

Despite a strong track record of building numerous successful systems and apps, many solving "serious" problems that go beyond what can be assessed in an interview, on tiny teams where I shouldered large amounts responsibility, if I can't present my thoughts in a coherent, structured way, in the moment I am thinking them, I am bound to catch flak from the interviewer. So I often feel I must alter my behavior, go slower and try to only display ordered thinking, but this does not play to my strengths. Frustration and stage fright further degrade my performance. So the take home test is much appreciated for people like me. I am happy to be left to my own devices when starting a problem, and happy to talk with peers once I have gotten myself oriented, but the initial process I use does not lend itself well to interrogation.

It would be easier to listen to concerns about creeping wokeness if the alleged dangers were actually different and worse than the problems that already exist. In many states people are fired from their jobs for not being conservative, for being lgbt etc. It happens with full knowledge of the state and is completely legal; the media doesn't even bother trying to follow up. Worse than that: our prison system, our overseas military belligerence etc etc. Wokeness? Add it to the list I guess, but the only reason some people spend so much time screeching about it is because they have been lucky to avoid getting nailed by one of the many other long-lived dangers that continue to stalk our society.

It's human nature to ignore the excesses of your own tribe and focus on problems originating across the border, but when it's just pure hypocrisy (another feature of human nature) it's hard to really give a shit. If we were discussing an asteroid hurtling toward the planet I'd like to think we could reach some kind of rough consensus that it is indeed an imminent threat, although my confidence in even this contrived scenario playing out as one might hope has been significantly shaken the more time I spend around large groups of humans. When it comes to trying to mediate the culture war, while real injustices occur on both sides and should punished/prevented, the fact remains that justice is often slow or absent for many, if not most. The truly powerful in our society are conveniently immune from the petty struggles, happy to watch the little people tear each other apart over skin color or religion or anything at all.

It is tragic how we seem to be unable to enjoy peace and prosperity. Blame it on politics, or the media, or perhaps just the national character, but Americans are a restless bunch. Prone to paranoia and rebellion, our reflex is to respond aggressively to perceived threats, and we can be tricked into rattling our sabres over any old thing these days.

Maybe rising authoritarianism is simply the natural outgrowth of overusing this impulse. The population, exhausted by the constant blaring of sirens over increasingly esoteric threats, would rather hand over the task of vigilance to some authority so they can finally catch some shut-eye.

Thanks for these names! I will have to look into them.

Rebirth is a tricky one for me because it just seems too fantastical, but then many things about our world and our selves remain inexplicable, if not outright fantastical themselves.

Rebirth also might not be a true continuation of our individual consciousness, but a repackaging of sorts.

I try to square these ideas with the physical world we inhabit, where our consciousness is very much affected by the environment and the state of our bodies and minds. It seems hard to believe in a soul (or anything ineffable that is a part of us lasting beyond death) in the traditional sense, when we are so malleable and our experiences so subjective. A tweak to my brain chemistry can drastically alter my behavior etc.

So if I still want to think about rebirth, I feel I must conclude that whatever can survive death must be quite a bit more abstract than the consciousness I am familiar with.

That seems reasonable to me, emphasis on "potential."

Whether that potentiality can be realized here on earth, in this life, is where I would start to quibble.

It's always a bit fraught to bring up the upsides of irrationality and potentially dangerous/destructive emotions and impulses. Bukowski didn't win a lot of popularity contests. I agree with what you've said here though.

We may be abstracting the conversation beyond the limits of what is appropriate in the workplace here, but I tend to think the workplace should and could be a more relaxed space if we were more patient with the negative emotions of others. At least for me, that starts with recognizing my own emotional states, and not always being afraid to experience them authentically.

It's important not to judge the world by its effect on your internal state. The world isn't party to your internal state, although you walk around with an illusion of transparency. People are doing things for their own reasons, not for yours.

Sure, I agree. This isn't a contradiction with my post.

Referring to the Buddha in order to make emotional regulation seem like an unachievable perfection is not really a good support, because the argument you're making is that we shouldn't always try to control our irrational emotions, not that we sometimes fail to control our irrational emotions, even when we try.

One core message of Buddhism is that we fundamentally cannot control ourselves, even when we try. You are correct that I am saying we shouldn't always try, and I stand by that, but the idea is that it isn't actually possible to achieve. Buddha is indeed an unachievable perfection, and supports my point because trying is truly futile in the end.

That is not to say we should always act however we want and treat others terribly for our own amusement, just that we are not actually in control. We can try to steer the elephant, and may have some success with that on occasion, but complete control is not possible. What I am saying, is that it's ok to let the elephant do what it wants sometimes, because ultimately it's going to do that a lot of the time anyway.

Getting away from billions of years of reaction is the reason why we have civilization.

How would you say that experiment is going? Civilization isn't more powerful than evolution is what I would say, and we have seen a lot of man's worst impulses expressed with greater force than ever during the modern period. We haven't escaped evolution yet.

It's a little more cowardly to interpret the world in terms of how it makes you feel rather than the complicated, messy problem of navigating the world in terms of how it may be making everyone feel.

Not sure how this relates to what I said. Sounds like you just wanted to turn my words around. I never said anything about substituting personal feelings for the act of being empathetic with others, and the topic is about not taking things personally, so this is a new goalpost. Nonetheless, I don't disagree. Part of having empathy for others is not judging their behavior from a position of assumed superiority.

Counterpoint: enlightenment is overrated and life is meant to be taken personally. In some senses, it is a bit cowardly to run away from the current moment we live in by stepping back and viewing the big picture too often. "Negative" emotions and experiences are valid parts of life. Anger, anxiety, fear etc are all part of being a human being and have evolved over billions of years to reach their current forms. We may not always enjoy these parts of life, but avoiding them completely would mean stunting ourselves.

Learning to observe and not react to the complex interplay of emotional states that constantly dance across our consciousness is a powerful tool, but you cannot survive inside the epiphany. We all must descend back into the messy day-to-day needs of maintaining our bodies, no one is actually the Buddha. I think we should all have more patience with inability to behave appropriately under all circumstances, because we will all fall short of grace.

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

What is the most impressive programming feat PG ever accomplished? A Lisp dialect maybe?

I sort of get the sense that he doesn't realize how many crazy talented (but not famous) programmers there are out there. He's got a microphone and is determined to keep using it to tell us how great his ideas are, but the audience has gotten a lot more discerning since the 90s when producing a CRUD app in Lisp could still be considered a feat.

I don't really think you or Terry knows what hard work even looks like. We hold this conversation about personal advancement from positions of extreme privilege while billions live without running water. If you want to limit your view to only those of us with access to all the delights of modern society (and none of its externalities) I'm sure you can find plenty of evidence for the meritocracy.

You can personally thank my grandparents, all four laying dead in their graves before the age of 60, for your opportunity to "work hard" in America.

Is this supposed to be a tale of overcoming adversity, almost failing some exam? The stakes are so low I can barely identify the conflict in the story. Actually failing something of actual importance and then overcoming the odds to succeed anyway would be a little less boring.

He sounds like he's lived his entire life in a university basement and mistook the petty challenges of academia for real life.

I hear slavery is an even bigger competitive advantage. Moritz should chain himself to his desk if he really wants to succeed.

It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.

This is how I feel as well. I am a pessimist in the sense that without more progress on certain issues, I think life will get worse for future generations. This isn't ignoring the historical arc of progress, and I would argue that pessimists get an undeserved bad rap for pointing out problems when that is exactly how progress happens. Find problems and try to fix them.

Pessimists aren't just people who assume everything will collapse no matter what is done. I believe humanity is capable of overcoming the challenges set before us, but optimism often seems to be naive, or merely a way of ignoring problems in the short term so that we don't experience unpleasant emotions. If we work on solving problems rather than ignoring them, then I don't care if you are a pessimist or an optimist because we are on the same team regardless of disposition.

Appreciate this comment, thank you.

For many years I had a sort of ruthless determination to get ahead and work hard. It mostly helped me back then, as many obstacles then were the sort that could be brute-forced, and it was addictive in a way as well. I could feel myself improving, could see the progress happening etc. I made lots of money for a while, got myself and my husband ahead in life etc.

A few things happened that sort of scuttled my motivation. The intrinsic rewards for the hard work I was doing stopped arriving. In order to keep progressing personally, I would need to engage in ever more competitive search for fun/challenging work. The competitive aspect might have excited me in the past, but I had by then been shafted one time too many by petty politics and discrimination to feel much interest in engaging with that aspect of the industry.

I could keep doing senior engineer work, mobile/backend whatever, and occasionally find some new topic to excite me, but often spend most of the time rehashing similar ideas, or cleaning up other people's messes. So I burned out, took some time to address my depression and have gotten myself back together mentally, for the most part (some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto).

But even now, when I look at new programming things I could work on, I can't help but see them all as simply paths back into a world that has lost its luster, full of people and situations that waste my time and energy. I can still work hard and build good software, but I just don't see why I should when it will inevitably lead me back to a place that almost destroyed me. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I should be better about forgetting the past and not presuming what my new experiences will look like. I'd love to be that foolish again someday, but I just can't afford to take that kind of risk anymore.

My temporary solution has been to work on stuff that isn't programming, to become like a beginner again in some other field. Philosophy, political science, history, anthropology, classic literature and others have been great to explore on my own and I've grown from these explorations. So now I'm getting my rewards from new sources. I still have the urge to make money, like a survival instinct, but I'm fortunate to have a decently stable life raft that I can float on for the time being.

Surprised this didn't get more notice on HN. I thought this could be a really huge advancement.

Appreciate this follow-up response, and I apologize for running with what I perceived as a hostility in your earlier response, it's a struggle for sure.

1) Completely agree, the history is important to understand the threads that continue into the present, but there is no going back.

2) At this point, I think the West should stay out of it in any official capacity, which isn't totally confident statement on my part, but there it is. I also don't think white people suck, and I think focusing on that would be a distraction, the same way it sounds like you do. I intend my criticisms to target abuse of power, which of course happens to fall into the hands of white people fairly often, but it's not the crux in my mind at all. In my original comment I did not mention race for that reason. These kinds of power abuses are ubiquitous wherever people live, and it is absolutely absurd to blame the West or whites as a group for succumbing to the same failures and abusive patterns as people do everywhere.

All of that said... I still think it's important to bring up the lingering influences of colonization, and that an understanding of the forces at play, even going back hundreds of years, is likely crucial to trying to make progress in the present.

Who is responsible for this legislation passing in your mind

I'm not totally sure, of course from a fundamental view it is the politicians who are enacting the legislation. They are directly responsible for the bill, but I think this is potentially simplistic. Money from outside sources can make a lot of things happen that never would have otherwise, including putting politicians into power and steering their agenda. So if the situation in Ghana can be directly tied to that kind of corruption, I would shift most of the blame to the people who the ultimate driving force behind these bills.

As a fellow gay, I understand your desire to steer the conversation toward more immediate concerns, but I would contest the characterization of the region's history as purely academic. Teasing apart the fractal of influences that create any behavior, including violence toward minorities, can be difficult if not impossible. Spreading more contextual awareness can be a tool to help shift attitudes, at least as far as the limits of a HN comment are concerned.

Yes this sort of ironic seesaw across times and places is interesting to behold. Sort of reap what you sow kind of thing where old traumas replay themselves across boundaries between people. The positions change back and forth, but the conflict remains.

I was responding to a comment that implied these laws were an example of self-determination, and removing them would be an effort to control population growth.

My comment makes the point that these laws are actually more foreign in origin than they appear, and before they were imposed by the brutal process of colonization, the population was doing just fine.

My comment was never intended to describe how to fight the laws, just to flesh out some background missing from the one I replied to. It is your comment that came in with these additional themes out of left field. My guess is that you felt triggered by the word "colonization" and perhaps by being reminded of the atrocities committed in former colonies. Why these would be an irritant to you is beyond my ability to guess, sometimes truth hurts I suppose?

Let me know if you need any addy help navigating other conversations.

Let me tell you bout the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees.

There's also adoption.

The existing laws against homosexuality in many countries are largely inherited from the era of colonization, which was not an era of self-determination for African nations, to put it mildly. More diverse views of sexuality are likely to be closer to a true representation of normal human behaviors than prohibition. Newer laws, in Ghana in particular, have been similarly influenced by imported ideals from the West.

As another example, before colonization, South American societies were well documented as having attitudes considered quite permissive toward a variety of sexual behaviors as compared to the repressive European powers of the day.

Saying things that might damage the (apparently quite fragile) self-image of the wealthy and powerful is the real outrage, not workers attempting suicide on shift, pissing in bottles or being forced to take welfare and 2nd jobs while already working full-time. Questioning gross inequalities and imbalances of power is seen as a personal attack for the Bezos of the world.

I'm curious: does being showered with more wealth and power than humans have ever known automatically make you a narcissist, or is it more of a prerequisite to obtaining all that stuff?

This is not an appropriate comment for HN.

Evolution, by definition, occurs over the course of generations. So angry and yet so wrong.

If a population lives forever, do you really think they'll continue having kids the entire time? Of course not.

Physical and cultural evolution don't stop.

If someone lives forever, they don't evolve physically. This is basic. To the degree we evolve culturally, most of our culture comes to us in our eponymous "formative years." Leaving those behind tends to result in comparatively little change in culture over the remaining course of our lives.

Selfish immaturity? It seems that you yourself is a reflection of culture.

I rest my case.

One of our very first epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh basically railed against immortality and accepting one's fate.

This was not a call to try and live forever, this is a call to live boldly, take risks and not to fear death. Striving for immortality is the absolute opposite, the coward's response to the challenge made in the poem.

The quest for immortality is popular, but it would mean the end of physical and cultural evolution. Seems as though this topic is gaining steam now, only as a large corpus of aging narcissists are finally grappling with the concept of death. It's another sign of the selfish immaturity ingrained into our culture.