Meh.... This has a real "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibe. Like a teenager who thinks their dad is a loser, and that the real men are the guys at the bottom in tough blue collar jobs, or at the top in power suits being Wolves of Wall Street. Insights like this can be fun, but they're for the third beer with your buddies, not for writing down.
Pretty ironic take given that the site you're writing the comment on was founded by pg writing a bunch of essays breaking the world down into "nerds" vs "jocks" with VCs being "high school girls". pg decided to write those down rather than share them over a third beer and it seems to have spawned a bunch of billion dollar companies.
The author refers to michael o church who had much clearer takes on the subject, not-withstanding a lot of other craziness that undermined some of his interesting opinions. He certainly was one of the first people to publicly call out that companies like Google and VC-backed startups spend a LOT of effort on PR that they are "social good" despite being as ruthlessly money-making oriented as any conventional companies they claimed not to be. He coined one of my favorite sayings that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't wake up early." Those takes are a little less novel in 2021 now that everyone realizes how morally bankrupt companies like Google are but credit's due where it's due so I'd recommend checking out his old blog posts.
Just because PG/YC has success doesn't mean that a lot of those posts aren't "third beer" observations. PG's essays didn't start the companies, and they're fair-game for criticism IMO.
I think Google really was more idealistic. With their 20% time, thinking new businesses would grow from it.
There was also Sun's business model, of free software (eg java) to sell hardware.
It's not that they were selfless... but their interests were aligned with others.
Of course, looking back, MS's open platform seems positively benign today, yet te were habitually vilified at the time... maybe today's corporations will seem similarly benign in hindsight? After all, you can't make money without some alignment with customers.
I've never watched the show, but I have to admit I'm a bit bemused by the number of times I've come across people saying they've got [professional] life figured out by realizing it's actually exactly like The Office, which coincidentally, is their favorite show. As I said, I haven't watched the show so I can't really appraise the claims properly, but it seems suspect to me.
(Incidentally I noticed a similar tendency in myself to think I had policing and Baltimore local politics figured out after watching The Wire. Did that show really teach me as much as I feel? Or do I have a false sensation of being informed, steming from my enjoyment of the show?)
> Did that show really teach me as much as I feel?
I think one thing The Wire does is show you how bad equilibria can arise from mostly rational people making mostly rational decisions in response to the incentives around them, and seeing it play out in compelling dramatic form is a good way to cement the idea. So now it's pretty easy for me to come up with a plausible reason why bad thing x happens in my city y.
I think my main takeaway from watching The Wire in college was various ways of arriving at the conclusion that things are pretty complex. Except for the war on drugs, which should mostly end.
Unrelated observation: "just do the opposite of what Michael Scott would do" is actually pretty decent management advice, and probably better training than 80% of what new managers are taught (which is usually nothing more than "here is what you need to do to not get us sued").
"When confronted by a fact that clearly goes against some deep conviction of ours, we can react to it in one of two basic ways: either simply and brutally rejecting it, or endorsing it in a “subl(im)ated” form, as something not to be taken literally, but rather as an expression of a deeper or higher truth. For example, we can either reject outright the idea of Hell (as a real place where sinners suffer endless pain as punishment for their deeds), or we can claim that Hell is a metaphor for the 'inner turmoil' we suffer when we do something wrong." (Zizek, Less Than Nothing)
It's a common form of pseudo-analysis that you'll find in a lot of "high brow" YouTube videos these days with titles like "[Movie/Show Name], a masterclass in [esoteric intellectual-sounding term]". Chock full of non sequiturs and logorrhea, sounding vaguely intelligent but having almost no meaningful content whatsoever.
Maybe you just didn't get it? How far did you make it through the article before you decided it was invalid?
As someone on the spectrum, this actually expanded on some of my own observations. For a large portion of society, much of what they do and say is driven by posturing. This posturing is driven by insecurity. It is especially predominant in the upper-middle class.
Spock said it best, humans are highly illogical. They don't say what they mean. They spend significant resources on posturing, trying to reassure themselves of their standing by convincing their peers.
This article probably isn't going to lead to epiphanies in many of the groups mentioned. It seems intentionally inflammatory, which will cause individuals with the described behaviour to become defensive.
It seems a lot of people are taking this sort of article more seriously than perhaps they should. To me it’s an interesting model to think about, regardless of its true validity; all models are faulty when they meet reality, after all. And I think with that it mind it’s interesting, and matches some of my own observations (loosely!)
It's very odd that 'baby talk' is professional. I don't think society was always this way. I also respect anyone who questions why this is the case. Assuming it's an efficiency, we should be able to justify this behavior.
I worked as a software developer, in a non software company, I sat in an odd spot off to the side half way up the org chart.
The non software people climbed the hierarchy not because they are competent at their jobs, in fact a highly competent person will often be passed over for promotion because they are useful where they are - but because of how they negotiated very complex social networks.
A senior manager, my manager at the time felt that with very little skill to separate the people working at the company, ascendancy was about positioning yourself in bullying networks, and he described this this kind of 'baby talk' as a subservience signal in which you were surrendering to and accepting a manager as your patron and any further advancement you made was by their grace.
If you chose to do the 'honest talk' with someone senior to you, it came with a risk and a potential reward, you had to do it well enough to convince them you were a worthy formidable peer and an ally. If you did it unconvincingly you would be struck down.
This seemed to be a widely held worldview and therefore more or less the social reality in the non software parts of the business. I was free to do 'honest talk' because as a software person, I was clearly to the side of the game, it wasn't really possible for me to fall or climb too far.
I don't really know what any of the things you're referring to in this comment mean. Can you expand on what "babytalk" is, maybe with an example? What is a "bullying network"? And what is "honest talk"?
User monkeycantype's comment discusses the article that this HN thread is about; it is linked at the top of the page. The terms you ask about are from that article. To participate in a discussion about it, it helps to read it first.
I'd be surprised if there was any place or time where people didn't placate and humor those with power over them. The article's label of "babytalk" for this behavior just obscures the observation; it would be like calling typical code review language "fussytalk" and then expounding on how fussy programmers are.
Hmm, well, I'm a social scientist so perhaps I'm a bit elitist about what counts as seriously understanding the world.
It's not that there's no insight in what the guy says. Some of it is quite accurate. I think I would say that (nearly all) the insight was delivered by The Office in the first place. I never saw the US variant, but I LOVE the UK version. We like shows like that because they do speak to us - we do recognize the appalling awfulness of middle managers, or how decent people get stuck in dead ends.
The problem is the attempt to systematize and generalize and make some deep "theory" out of all this. It just isn't worthwhile. There's no sensible theory where everyone at the top is a sociopath, and everyone at the bottom is a realist, and every middle manager is an idiot. I mean, come on. And this "theory" isn't meant to be tested, and never will be... at best, it'll be written down in some kind of fun, pseudoscientific book like Bullshit Jobs.
On most points here I’m in complete agreement, the only nit I would pick is that there should be room for fun insights like this. Articles that wouldn’t hold up under academic scrutiny, and woe betide the fool who bases their life outlook on an Office-based theory, but are fun to muse about, and to overthink a little bit, as you say, over beers with friends.
How do we allow for work like that to be done? I would hate for this kind of silliness to be lost because it isn’t rigorous enough.
Besides, the very people who would take this seriously are the same people who aren’t actively thinking and applying insights on how society interacts in their daily lives anyway.
