the line between "crazy, brilliant founders who will build world changing companies" and "crazy, lunatic founders who will lie and cheat and be awful" is very hard to distinguish, especially at the series seed/series A level.
It can lead to false positives and false negatives all the time.
FTX didn't have a CFO. They didn't have a legitimate board of directors.
No VC in their right mind should ever pour billions into a finance company that doesn't have a CFO or risk management team, doesn't have properly audited financial statements, doesn't have board oversight, etc. Especially so in a risky industry like crypto where scams and fraud are well known to be rampant.
This is the main criticism I have of the people who invested in FTX. Even if you thought SBF was a world-changing entrepreneur 2 years ago, the structure of his company should have disqualified it from investment.
This, to me, is just a myth that is pushed by investors that don't know what they are doing, and media outlets who want to talk about spicy people. There's no strategic reason to put your eggs in the basket of crazy people. We only hear about the crazy people because they are newsworthy.
I also had a similar incident where I received a wrong shipment object from eBay and promptly returned it on same day. The seller issued a refund in a nonexistent PayPal account(I owned that e-mail too but PayPal never sent any notifications).
After 5 months of helpless back-n-forth trying to explain what happened(I didn't receive a refund yet), eBay simply decided that my account is fraudulent and I contact PayPal of whereabout of refund. Paypal told me, I can't be supported without sharing when and from which account the refund was issued and also blocked my PayPal account as suspicious behavior.
After 5 months of frustration, I decided to involve my lawyer and he just told me to write a new email to eBay and CC PayPal about whole incident and how if not action taken they'll expect a notice from my lawyer in 14 days.
Within 2hours of that e-mail, eBay sends me the most polite email with "heartfelt apologies" and shared the info about the refund details and PayPal suddenly offers me a nice email about how to claim the refund from nonexistent account. So suddenly my eBay and PayPal accounts are no longer blocked and a nice PayPal agent moves the refund to my account immediately and reassures me that they reported the incident "for investigation" so such inconvenience doesn't happen to anyone.
Sorry for the long rant, but these bigCo support are real cesspool of lazy support people who are too busy just copy lasting scripted responses and screwing insecure people. Sometimes you need to bring them to court.
We often worry about how to make our children exceptional, but I wonder of the people studied here, how many were genuinely happy? Shouldn’t we want our children to be happy more than we want them to be exceptional? The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course, but the pursuit of exceptionalism might lead to a less happy life, especially if that exceptionalism doesn’t materialize. I know far too many people pushed incredibly hard by their family/circumstances and burned out fast.
I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.
I think that’s a great point, and I don’t disagree with it. (Although I don’t particularly care about being “interesting” as a value). My point was more that as a parent I want to be responsive to my children instead of deterministic. I want them to find their path, not me to find it for them by declaring that they will be exceptional. My love is not conditional on their outcome of becoming exceptional, and further, an ultimately fulfilling life doesn’t require that either, nor should we teach that it does.
Provide the things to allow them to find the passions that enrich their lives while also give them the tools to manage ‘real’ life.
We sent them to various sports but my youngest found football via watching the World Cup, my eldest found swimming as we went surfing and he wanted to be better.
> not me to find it for them by declaring that they will be exceptional
I don't think providing them stimulus and opportunity is you finding it for them. Giving your child access to interesting people across various fields ensures they can learn about various intellectual pursuits. Treating them as a person with real ideas to consider ensures that they'll have the confidence to engage in the real-world as a peer. Giving them freedom and "down time" to explore their own ideas actually give them the time to find their own path.
Think of it as a vector, you can let them pick the direction, but you can ensure that they go far in that direction. They don't have to be a world-class mathematician, even being a well-respected local teacher is exceptional.
I agree. I suppose interesting is more of a compacted term for depth, and from that comes levels of fulfillment in my mind.
I think no matter what you do it will have a deterministic effect on your kid. If you're more responsive than deterministic they'll observe you for cues of who/what you have the most respect or adoration for and maybe seek to emulate it (or if they're rebellious, spite it). There's a fine line and moderation is important as with everything of course.
Those kinds of people often have a highly warped idea of what happiness is. Usually imagined, consciously or subconsciously, as a magical oasis where their parents are satisfied with them and they 'make it'. Those who do 'make it' realize thats not how it works and burn out.
Personally, I would think that some people are destined to be happy, just as some are destined to be a "genius".
I understand the sentiment that chasing happiness without "purpose" or consideration to the world around you might make someone vain and hedonistic but I don't think that applies to being career driven. I do think a strong career drive (esp. external) will not make you happy, and may even be a source of discontentment.
> Personally, I would think that some people are destined to be happy, just as some are destined to be a "genius".
I think the submitted article tried to make clear that just being a gifted child isn't sufficient to become a "genius", and favorable circumstances play a big role in turning giftedness into exceptional accomplishment.
Thus, wouldn't the same apply to happiness? Even if there were natural predilections toward happiness, circumstances can play a big role too in bringing the predilections to fruition.
Perhaps one needs to be "tutored" about how to become happy.
That's probably true. It's a well-loved aphorism that money can't buy happiness... true enough, but not having money is certainly a source of unhappiness in small and large ways.
Happiness is indeed a vague term. In the context of parenting, I would hope to foster self-esteem, an internal locus of evaluation, curiosity, and courage. These provide a solid foundation for general contentment, aside from the occasional inevitable traumas and trials of life.
> I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.
"Happiness" is an overloaded word in English, much like "love". In this context I think a better word for what parent probably means is "satisfaction".
Are these people more satisfied with their lives? Do they feel their life is meaningful and worthwhile?
Victor Frankl might argue that meaning and purpose are more important and entirely orthogonal to "success".
s/happiness/health/ and then I think we have a more reasonable starting point. (And I mean health in the holistic/whole person sense, not in the limited sense of how well your biological machine is running.)
I think this helps make it clear that any single goal can compromise overall health, even if along that dimension you're exceptional.
I guess those people that you observed being highly materialistic have a false idea about what will bring them happiness. There are people that strive for happiness and choose a different path. Money, I belive, can only get you so far.
The materialism is just a symptom. The root issue is believe happiness is a stasis point where you'll just ride off into the sunset in this fixed emotional state until you die. That belief is why they think they could 'buy' it. They dedicate their lives in search of it.
Money prevents you from being unhappy because of little things like no food, no water, no shelter, poor health, exploitation, exhaustion, social isolation, and so on.
highly materialistic? look at the hindu sages in INdia, completely content and happy within themselves and they are not matieralistic, the western concept of happiness is chase all your sense to make sure you are happy above everything else
I'm not sure if samanas are the ideal of how everyone wants or should aspire to find happiness. I'm also fairly certain they would describe themselves as content but probably not permanently happy. As far as I know they seek enlightenment, which is not synonymous with happiness as a concept.
Someone who has the capacity to be exceptional would probably not be happy to be held back. Would Ramanujan have been happier if he didn't pursue math and became a taxi driver or something instead? I don't think so.
You're creating a false dichotomy. People can be both exceptional and happy. Parents do sometimes create unhappiness by trying to force their children to be exceptional at something the child isn't interested in, but you don't have to do that. You can let the child develop and follow their natural interests and support them without trying to force them to be something they're not.
I doubt anyone is arguing to suppress a child's interest in mathematics but more against trying to squelch their interest in less obviously "worthy" pursuits in favor of making them burnish their college resumes.
The parenting approach advocated for here (freeing people from peer pressure by homeschooling them) is way more likely to produce a 4chan shut in than going to normal schools (which includes Harvard and MIT) is likely to force someone to end up a taxi driver.
However, tutoring your child intensely is obviously important and will result in good outcomes
What's fucked up is that the average Mexican line cook who doesn't speak english contributes more to the world than an MIT-trained McKinsey consultant making 10x as much.
Because some “exceptional” paths actually make the world worse. While some humble ones make the world better in some small way.
The CEO of TurboTax makes the US worse by leading a company that lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can remain an expensive middle man. A line cook is doing infinitely more good for the world.
I believe it. The consultant may change more things in the world but I don’t see how that change is necessarily a “contribution”. More like an optimization for a small set of people. The line cook however is creating from raw something that literally nourishes.
I think you're just falling on a lack of imagination. You can easily see what the line cook is producing, and it's much harder to see what the consultant is "producing" cause it's the stuff of thought and ideas, often. But that doesn't make it any less valuable - and often it's more valuable. The market certainly thinks it's more valuable and rewards it as such, which is a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution.
Also, you say:
> More like an optimization for a small set of people.
As if that's a bad thing or a not-as-worth-it thing. But this is what a lot of software is. I personally work with schools, and one of the things I do is create tools to make teachers and school administrators more efficient and effective at their jobs. It's a fairly small subset of people that I'm helping, but I believe I make their lives a little bit better by providing them better tools that are time-saving.
Is what I'm creating less valuable than a line-cook? I don't think so.
> The market certainly thinks it's more valuable and rewards it as such, which is a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution.
I've often wondered why 'the market' doesn't understand that if garbage men disappeared, my city would look like a hellscape in a week. Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
> I've often wondered why 'the market' doesn't understand that if garbage men disappeared, my city would look like a hellscape in a week.
I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the market. I didn't understand this either until I (self-) studied a bit of economics.
The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
The answer to this led us eventually to the theory of supply and demand. Sure, without garbage workers, the city would be terrible. That's why we pay them. But the supply of garbage workers is apparently much larger than the supply of e.g. software engineers. If you have 100 people who can do one job, vs. person who can do the other job, that 1 person has a lot more leverage and you have to pay them more. Even if both jobs are equally important.
That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
> My conclusion was that 'the market' isn't a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution but as with all things human, there's also politics involved.
That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it. I think it's really true that one Einstein contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. One software engineer contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker. And so on. It's mostly due to scale effects - one garbage worker can only do so much. One software engineer does a lot more because their work is easily duplicated and scaled and affects a lot more people.
I've also self studied economy and am jaded with all the examples that go to the root of the economic theory while reality is oftentimes more complicated. Such as in the example with me working for a VC backed company, my friend working for the utility company and GPs consultant working for whoever pays the money.
> The classic question in economics was this - why are diamonds more valuable than water? Without water you're dead. Without diamonds you're mostly no worse off.
Would people pay more for diamonds if they were dying of thirst? People pay more for diamonds vs. water only if the water problem is already handled. The economy is such a complex model of every interaction that I find it disingenuous to base the assumption that market rate == usefulness on pure theory.
> That's how a market works. If your friend quit his team, he would presumably be easy to replace. If you quit your team, it would be harder. That is eventually reflected in your salaries.
In this particular circumstance, no. He's a lot harder to replace in terms of quality and knowledge than I am in my current team. We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
> It's not perfect - since no one has perfect information, a lot of this stuff is based on guesswork and consensus. But you can very clearly see that the principles are correct.
The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play? If we'd be designing for the real world like we study physics in high school (no friction, perfect spheres...) there'd be a lot of difference between the theory and practice. I'm not sure why people suggest economy is otherwise.
> That's a fair conclusion, but I disagree with it.
Likewise. We can agree to disagree. But taking politics aside, I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
Bravo. You understand that textbook economics (and a huge chunk of research economics) is a hilariously oversimplified model of the fiendishly complex field of human interactions.
I believe it is simply useful for many people to be able to state textbook economic orthodoxy as "a fact", even if it is almost trivially broken (as the supply and demand curve story is on many levels) or historically wrong (as the fable of money arising from barter). This lets people justify all weaknesses of the current economic system by simply saying "It may suck, but this is what it is, a law of nature. We can change it about as well as we can reverse gravity. Conform, and propose no change."
> The economy is such a complex model of every interaction that I find it disingenuous to base the assumption that market rate == usefulness on pure theory.
I agree, but I think this is also generally true. It really is true that a garbage worker is generally less valuable on a societal level than a software engineer (in terms of work output - they might be far more valuable for other things which are just as important!)
> We were lucky to get injected with millions of dollars of capital while he works for a utility company. He is useful for thousands of people. My lines of code have not been used by anyone yet and possibly will never be.
Look, that's true of a lot of software that gets written. There is a lot of waste. For sure if you look back and see that lots of code written was never used, that code in particular wasn't better for society than something more concrete.
But I look at it like with science. Lots of scientists are conducting research that won't ever pan out, doing experiments that end up going nowhere, etc. Was that value-less for society? I don't think so. If we could know ahead of time what would work and what wouldn't, then of course that wouldn't be valuable. But throwing out 100 bad ideas and ending up with a lightbulb is still worth it for society, and the markets react as such.
In your case - the reason VCs even have that money is because in the long run, given enough bets, they make money back, which for the most part translates into "they created enough value." Even if individual bets ended up not mattering.
> The principles are correct; is it possible that they are correct because they are fundamental, and not the actual reality where politics come into play?
Oh for sure there's a lot of distortions, both for good and ill. No argument there.
I just think that for the most part things are correct and adhere to the economic theory, and outliers are relatively rare. As opposed to
> I am glad that at least on some level, one can find a software engineer in a poorly managed country making less than a garbageman in a well managed one. So, somewhere in the world there exists a garbageman that provides more value to society than a software engineer.
Ahah, funny but true. This btw is itself the result of regulations - if people were free to e.g. change countries as much as they wanted, fairly rapidly wage gaps like this would disappear, which would be good for the world IMO. At least economically speaking.
> In your case - the reason VCs even have that money is because in the long run, given enough bets, they make money back, which for the most part translates into "they created enough value."
The VCs get the money from their limited partners. As a rule the VCs don't have meaningful skin in the game. They invest other people's money and get paid a percentage of the money they invest. They don't reinvest their winnings either, that money goes back to the LPs!
Most VCs are also pretty bad at their jobs. They're totally undifferentiated, are not able to recognize great startups, and don't have much to offer to founders. You wouldn't expect an industry with those characteristics to do very well. VC investment is much riskier than investment in some boring 60/40 stock bond portfolio, so venture as an industry has a high hurdle to clear if they want to deliver superior risk adjusted returns.
How many venture bets in the past 15 years have produced companies that will become the next Google or Microsoft or Apple or Facebook? Zero. It's those winners that make the venture business work on paper, and when they don't show up for a decade the entire industry is in the red.
You can postulate that venture must be profitable because otherwise how could it possibly exist. But if nobody is investing their own money (not the VCs, not the LPs, not the startup founders) you're not going to get an efficient market.
I think a lot of this is about perceived value. A gardner gets to see the products of their labour around them every day. A software developer at a bank might write lines of code and never even know when they are run, but those lines of code might, protect against a risk that would otherwise have brought down the company, or optimise investments for a pension fund that help generate additional tens of millions of dollars for people's pensions over the lifetime of the code. A lot of code makes only a tiny difference, but it can make that difference for millions of people over decades.
The entire idea that money is a good representation of value to society boils down to a really poisonous just world fallacy built on a lot of ugly assumptions.
I disagree. Do you have a reason to think you're right? Or a better way to represent value?
(Note again: I'm talking specifically about productive value to a society. Someone without a lot of money can still be enormously valuable in many other respects, e.g. a beloved family member.)
Many of the people who are extremely wealthy did so by exploiting society and corporations are well known for consistently dumping their externalities on society to deal with while reaping the benefits for themselves and their shareholders.
To say that money is a good proxy for value to society seems incredibly naive at best and downright disingenuous at worst.
I know yours is a common view. I just think it's wrong.
There are certainly some wealthy individuals who "exploited society". But I don't think that's a majority (depending on how you define wealthy.) I also don't think most corporations are just dumping externalities on society and reaping benefits. The age of corporations is also at least partially the age with the best standards of living and the best life for most people, at least in terms of wealth.
> I also don't think most corporations are just dumping externalities on society and reaping benefits
Are you measuring most in terms of where the money goes or just the number of corporations? Because some of the biggest are quite literally causing climate change, poising the land, and getting people killed (if not killing them directly).
Of those that are left I'd still make the argument that they're destroying public health through marketing, but apparently "having ads shoved at you all day every day damages your mental health and that damages society as a whole" is somehow a controversial statement because marketing helps people make money.
> one Einstein contributes more to the world (on average) than one garbage worker
And so does one Putin. Your point about scale is valid but the implied value judgement of choosing Einstein is not (whether you intended that or not, choosing Einstein ensures everyone will read it that way).
One software developer or engineer working for a big nasty corporation like Shell or Facebook does create more change in the world than one garbage collector, undoubtedly. But it's fully possible for the change they create to be entirely negative. An engineer who creates a faster rainforest cutting machine, for example, or a better method of catching fish that results in destruction of an ecosystem, or a developer who writes ever more sneaky ways to invade your privacy. More change does not equal more value.
Even the most naive don’t believe that a perfect capitalist market exists today, so that’s irrelevant. He isn’t arguing that “in a perfect system this would be true”, he is arguing that in this system, it is true.
Because it requires the literal use of government force to suppress market forces, ie to prevent the slaves from refusing to work and running away to find better opportunities.
That doesn't work. You're effectively saying that if I create an army and simply steal from you, that is capitalism because its my own private army. It violates many tenets of capitalism. Buyers and sellers must act voluntarily and enslavement against the will of the slaves, certainly seems to violate this.
That said, even if you simply view the slaves as property with no agency of their own, my original point was more that you can't compare the net worth of the slaves against the slave owners in terms of value created.
>Buyers and sellers must act voluntarily and enslavement against the will of the slaves, certainly seems to violate this.
Can you go into this a bit. In general sellers can acquire materials (oil say) by invading a country and mining it. If that seller then sells the oil acquired thus, I can't see how the buyers and sellers are not acting voluntarily? Is war/violence antithetical to Capitalism in some way that I'm not aware of?
Do you have examples of widespread slave economy that did not require a government framework to support it? All examples from modern civilization i can think of involved laws specifically blocking slaves from participating as equals in the market economy, ie anti capitalist?
> I've often wondered why 'the market' doesn't understand that if garbage men disappeared, my city would look like a hellscape in a week
Maybe it's because "the market" believes you would be a garbage man if there weren't enough garbage men, because the price of garbage men would exceed what you were willing to pay for it.
That one doesn't trouble me as much as this one:
> Or why my cousin whose team keeps an entire county electrified, makes shit pay compared to me.
Now is it so much easier to hire people to electrify a country than to hire nerds to make cool shit?
Maybe so... Some of these big tech companies have massive headcounts and rarely (if ever) make anything cool after the first thing that made them rich. How big is your cousins' team and how many electricians are there in your country?
But one day, everyone will want to be a programmer... what will happen then?
Having spent some time working for the city there are very few difficult jobs at a technical level. It’s almost the definition of the job existing as the city level. Everything that is hard is outsourced and paid accordingly.
The problem here is that you're equating market value with everyday value. A bit like when people say evolution is just a theory, and there's a line between scientific theory and everyday theory.
Only in this case, why should we think the market value is the only thing to care about? Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
> The problem here is that you're equating market value with everyday value.
As I said somewhere else, water is far more valuable than diamonds. But selling water doesn't earn you nearly as much.
That's not a sign of the "market value" being different than "everyday value". That's a sign that water is plentiful, so however much you want and need water, me selling you water is not really helping you - you can just go get water yourself.
> Sure the market gives a number to every good and service, but are we not entitled to dispute whether that number is the right number?
Of course. And it's sometimes wrong. We have lots of rules and regulations that try to make the market more in line with other things we care about.
But you do have to provide an alternative. And I know of no better mechanism than markets to, in general, give a price to something. Almost everything else is flawed and/or biased in some way.
And btw, parent comment wasn't providing a nice justification for why the pay of consultants is flawed - it was just quipping that they are clearly not worth the money. Which is offensive to me, I dislike just writing off a whole profession. That's why I asked for clarification!
The way I see it marginalism gives us some numbers, but given some constraints. For example, you can't be sending kids down your mine. The market then gives you an alternative figure for the price of diamonds. The question then is what constraints are reasonable. That whole discussion is a debate about our values in another sense.
About consultants (the MBB/B4 kind), all I can really say is that they tend to confess on their own that they don't provide much value. Everyone I know in the profession seems to say so. They find it utterly baffling that 23 year olds can be rented out at about 6x their salary to do presentations to managers with decades of experience. They often tell you that they are simply rubber stamping some internal decision with some nice slides, and that the slides have no real insights.
There doesn't have to be a contradiction either, it may well be that these guys are scarce like diamonds, but also like diamonds, they aren't really valuable in another sense.
Why did you feel personally attacked? OP didn't mention software.
OP specifically mentioned Mckinsey consultants, i.e. "advice givers" and PPT generators who mainly exist to provide cover for higher ups. I'm inclined to agree with them.
I’d assume we’re arguing about general principles, not about specific jobs, it seems like navel gazing if we’re truly having a discussion strictly about “who is more valuable a garbage man or a McKinsey consultant”.
It’s merely an illustrative example to stoke the broader question of “are people who are more highly paid actually more useful to society?”
The premise is still worth challenging. It's not inconceivable that some of this thought-stuff is actually bad, or bad from a certain perspective, and the contribution is outright negative.
I agree that that can be true. But I don't think it's true in general, certainly not such that you can simply dismiss an entire profession as not providing any value.
An executive for the Coca Cola company or Marlboro will be paid more than the Mexican line cook as well but they are also actively more destructive. Salary is more of a proxy for impact, less so for value.
>The market certainly thinks it's more valuable and rewards it as such, which is a fairly good proxy for actually providing a contribution.
The market has really bad metrics when it comes to contributions. One can see it very well with entertainment for example. What do people like MrBeast exactly do other than simply specialise in creating viral videos and therefore wasting the time of millions on individuals?
Look, I don't mean to be offensive, but this reads to me as "people like things that I don't like, therefore they're wrong and the market is wrong".
People like MrBeast! That's why he's successful. What is he actually doing? Creating entertainment for people. It might not be your cup of tea, but there's no inherent difference between what he's doing and what Shakespeare did. One generation ago people lamented reality tv, before that tv in general, there was a time that books were considered bad, etc.
This is exactly why a market mechanism is good! Because I don't want your views, or mine, to be what decides whether something is "worth it". You and I have different tastes, and we have different tastes to millions of other people, we shouldn't get to decide what they find valuable - they should.
I see a clear difference between what he does and Shakespeare. People like MrBeast focus on exploiting the human brain simply to get more views with thumbnail design or keep you watching with sophisticated editing. Moreover they focus on exploiting the algos on these sites. In fact they specialise on everything but true and valuable content.
Shakespeare focuses on exploiting the human brain simply to get more people in to see his plays, by playing on people's emotions, giving them empty feelings not connected to the real world, writing stories whose sole purpose is to keep people engaged until the end to find out what happened, etc.
What's the principled difference except that you like one and don't like the other? Or that society considers one "valuable" and the other less so?
Do I think MrBeast is doing anything as deep and rich as Shakespeare? No, I don't. But I don't think I get to make that choice for other people. I love reading fantasy novels and think they are often every bit as deep as Shakespeare, sometimes more so. Many people in the world look down on that and think they're not as valuable as "real literature". Luckily, I get to decide what's good and what isn't, what's valuable and what isn't.
The problem is the relationship between what those people do and what they gain. Why should videos in which you throw eggs from a bridge wrapped in drinking straws give you millions each year?
this is just obvious wrong allocation of resources in the market.
I also don't think throwing a basketball really really well should earn you millions, nor do I think that creating new fashion styles should earn you millions. And lots of people don't think that Shakespeare's plays are any good and that he should've earned anything off of them.
Maybe the world would be better off if I (or you) were a dictator and could impose our views on everyone else. But I don't really trust anyone to do that, so a market mechanism is better than anything else. And whether we like it or not, more people find watching MrBeast or Michael Jordan "worthwhile" than other things that we care about more.
(If I were a dictator, I'd put most of our resources on advancing scientific discoveries, with an emphasis on figuring out how to make humans immortal, and a huge part of our resources would go to figuring out AI safety, then to AI. That is the correct way to allocate resources in this point in time, IMO. How many people would like to live in such a world?)
There's a big problem here. MrBeast does what drug dealers do, in a less obvious way: they change the apparent value of the thing they're selling. Essentially a trick: use this product and your desire to use this product increases.
That is not how the conventional free market is supposed to work. I'm happy to give that the market wants weird things, but the basic thing that's missing here is a feedback loop: you go and eat at a restaurant, you like the meal, you come back because your guess about the subjective value of the meal to you was correct.
The market for addictive experiences breaks this loop. You snort some drugs, and you feel you need to break into people's houses to get money to buy more. Ask any recovered drug addict whether they think it's actually worth it, and they will tell you of course not but the addiction is so compelling. People in this situation are robbed of their freedom, the essential ingredient in a free market.
Now I don't know a heck of a lot about Mr Beast, but a lot of internet influencers do the same thing as candy salesmen. It's bad for you to eat loads of candy, you don't want to be fat and get diabetes, but in the moment you make the wrong decision. Influencers do the same, it's a cheap thrill designed to make you forget you're in control of yourself.
Shakespeare is the opposite. You're supposed to be thinking about human nature, but you don't get your dose of satisfaction without quite the mental strain. You can't overdose on Shakespeare; you'll fall asleep first. People can and have overdosed on silly internet videos, staying up until 3am.
Because it's entertaining. It's more entertaining to me than reading most of Shakespeare.
I imagine that if you gave the choice to a person to watch what you described or to read Shakespeare then the vast majority would choose to watch the eggs.
Well it depends on what you mean by "contributes to the world". For sure I don't think we can measure people's contributions only based on their work.
But assuming that's what parent was talking about (since that's the only thing they mentioned) - the market is sometimes wrong, for sure, but not as a general rule. If someone is earning a lot of money, they are giving some value that is worth it to the company that is paying them. More money = more value.
This doesn't always track with "contributions to society", because you can do things like e.g. stealing, which "gets you money" but doesn't contribute to society.
But consultancies as a general rule aren't stealing, they aren't as a general rule doing unethical things, etc. They are, for the most part, helping businesses. And that help is worth real money. This isn't theoretical either - if a consultant helps a business be more efficient in some process, that means real money to the company, which means real-world additional wealth is generated, which is a good thing.
The parent just made a quip because (I imagine) they think consultancies are a waste of money. And sometimes they are! But c'mon, I've known plenty of good, smart people working as consultants and I wouldn't want to jokingly quip that their job is meaningless. It's not worthy of a site like HN where we try to actually talk about things thoughtfully and critically.
You skipped over the part where we consider if the concept of a business is a good thing for the world.
In a capitalist society, these are basically competing entities seeking to maximise their own profits. This entails minimising expenses. That is, in capitalist society, businesses work to charge as much as possible, give back as little value as possible, and put as much pressure on their suppliers as possible to lower prices.
The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
> The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
The majority of societies that have tried anything different were/are significantly worse for the average person. That seems like more than a little substantiation.
I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment but I think at this point it is good to take a step back and consider the magnitude of the statement you just made.
Consider the extent of human societies that have existed, what it is that we know of them and through what lens we know of them. What do we mean by the words "significantly worse"? Where does this idea of "worse" stem from? And let's not forget the average person. How do we measure what's good for this average person?
Sorry for the random remarks your comment caught my eye for some reason. The point here isn't for some bogus relativism but merely to state the obvious, that the human condition can be far more complicated than we give it credit.
What is the alternative to businesses. A centralized authority that dictates what is made and who gets to make it?
All the reasons you say businesses suck are also the reasons why they work well. They need to react instantly to market pressures. If someone is making something no one wants they will crumble, if a new demand springs up businesses will instantly be created to meet it. I can't think of another system that is instantly responsive to a changing world and doesn't require much oversight.
> The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
I can make the theoretical argument all day, but really, we've lived in a world that has done this experiment for us. I look at capitalist countries, I look at communist countries, and I think it's pretty clear which ones are better to live in.
We are concerned with exceptionalism as a society because we want to benefit from the exceptional person. We tell people it is better to be great than happy and assign all sorts of value judgments around that.
We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.
People think that the happiness (in the way society thinks about it) is a given. It is not.
There’s a lot that goes into you being able to “do nothing” / be present / mindful / enjoy the moment.
Many exceptional people sacrificed their happiness to build the world that you can enjoy. And if you want that to continue, many more will have to do the same.
The people described in the article don’t seem to have been “pushed incredibly hard” by their family or circumstances. For the most part it seems like the opposite - they were just given access to a lot of resources and expertise to help them in the directions they were already heading.
Yep, copying the external surface behavior of exceptionalism misses how a lot of exceptionalism is due to compounding internal motivation and meaning making.
A way of being that constantly re-emphasizes that way of being. Super-linear growth that doesn't stall out or crumble when external motivation is absent.
I don’t buy that truly intrinsic motivation exists. If anything I think the display of intrinsic motivation is an external performance more than anything.
If everyone a person cared about was taken away, I can’t convince myself that they’ll still have the motivation to perform the same way they did before
Happiness is like flux and is predicated upon moving goalposts (hedonic treadmill).
It seems to have emerged that way to drive evolution / progress.
In order for happiness to be sustained, you need economic / technological / societal growth. Who do you think is capable of producing that? Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?
> Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?
This is the basic problem of what is our purpose. There's no definite answer. What if it's better to optimize towards having no unhappy people rather than average happiness?
Because technological progress is not an iterative process.
There is a certain level of talent x struggle needed to get to the next frontier.
If everyone decided to not suffer in pursuit of excellence and simply work on iterating on what we have, the rate of growth needed to sustain our happiness will never come.
There are no guarantees, and trying to optimize for happiness could very well lead to more unhappiness than doing nothing or optimizing for exceptionalism or something else instead. And that's even if you have a theory for how to optimize the thing in question. If instead you're just stumbling around or working off vague hunches or the latest parenting fads, or perhaps overcompensating for something in your own childhood you thought was a parental mistake, don't be surprised if whether they do or don't become or achieve what you hoped for seems pretty uncorrelated with your own efforts.
As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.
Maybe the kids were happy to have these activities, to feel unique and privileged, and happiness in childhood to feel like shit in adulthood because we missed out so many opportunities as your life is mostly defined about what you are doing as a teenager just suck more.
Maybe they were, and then they ran into real competition to be at the top of their field, and that dream just disintegrated.
What are you left with when you are raised on one specific value system and reality proves you’re not going to excel in that system?
We need to teach our children to have a variety of value systems, and that, of all of those, their academic or professional performance is not the priority.
Teach the kid to neither over estimate (arrogance) himself or under estimate (lack of confidence) their abilities. Shattered dreams come from setting wrong expectations and abilities, it's easy to be the best at a town level, but regional, national or worldwide level is another thing, be it academically, sport or arts.
Have fall back in place, that's also where rich and supportive parents come : blow money on different endeavors without sacrifying school.
Study end goals for what the kid wants to do, how to achieve these outcomes, what are the best paths, support the kids etc etc.
If we speak about sport at a professional level, an injury can kill a career, but still, if the "kid" is at a professional level, he has other means to be still successful in any cases, being resilient is also a skill.
For a variety of reasons I would say I am exceptional. (Since this account is anonymous I don't consider it bragging). I would say I am a happy person with some resilience, but that is because my upbringing had two facets, not just one:
(a) A lot of encouragemeent to explore things, and the benefit of family members in the sciences
(b) My family teaching me a healthy attitude of not caring what others think too much
I was never pushed. I was always told just to do whatever I wanted....so I think those two elements are crucial, since I grew up never caring whether I "succeeded" or "failed".
These are mutually exclusive or positively correlated slightly, that is, successful people generally being happier. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other.
Doesn't the research on happiness say that by and large you can't change happiness? That thing about people who've won the lottery or gotten seriously ill?
Money can improve happiness, but there are diminishing returns to money. Winning the lottery is really one of the worst possible ways to improve one's happiness. For example:
1) Wanting to be ultra-wealthy is arguably a vice rather than a virtue. A form of gluttony. It doesn't make you a better person.
2) Hardly anyone is prepared for the massive, sudden change in lifestyle brought by winning the lottery. Not to mention that everyone you ever knew, and also people you never knew, suddenly want a piece of you and your newfound money.
We talk a lot about big lottery winners, because it's fun to imagine, but it would honestly be better for most people to win $10K or $100K rather than winning $10M or $100M. You can improve their lives without radically changing their lives, which can be a curse rather than a blessing.
Unless you already have a very specific idea of what you would do with lottery winnings, e.g., start a business or foundation that required $X million in capital, a newfound giant pile of unanticipated money doesn't necessarily do you good. Money needs a purpose.
I'm not familiar with the research, but from experience, you can change it without a doubt. Happiness is an outcome, if you change things that prevent it then you'll have better chances of achieving it.
Tons of money alone is not a guarantee of happiness, there's a cutoff of income beyond which happiness maxes out. Getting seriously ill can of course induce depressive traits, however I've just seen a documentary about using psychedelics for cancer patients and it did improve their lives significantly, although not curing cancer itself.
I'm not familiar with the research you mention (it would be great if you could cite it), but from reading and thinking about this, I'd say that happiness is intrinsic, and that external factors can't change it.
If you were miserable before winning the lottery, the money probably won't change that. If you have a bright outcome on life before getting cancer, you're more likely to cope and stay happy.
To quote another comment but "Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits."
I think this isn't just a simple discussion on competition and copyright, I think it's a much larger question on humanity. It just seems like potentially a bleak future if enjoyable and creative pursuits are buried and even surpassed by automation.
If the pursuit is enjoyable, it should continue to be enjoyable as a hobby, no?
Meanwhile, where is my levy of custom artists willing to do free commission work for me? It’s enjoyable, right?
I see a lot of discussion about money and copyright, and little to no discussion about the individual whose life is enriched by access to these tools and technologies.
As for your bleak future… will that even come to pass? I don’t know. Maybe it depends on your notion of “surpass”, and what that looks like.
> If the pursuit is enjoyable, it should continue to be enjoyable as a hobby, no?
I think for most people the enjoyable and fulfilling part of life is feeling useful or having some expression and connection through their work. There's definitely some people who can create in a vacuum with no witness and be fulfilled, but I think there's a deep need for human appreciation for most people.
> As for your bleak future… will that even come to pass? I don’t know. Maybe it depends on your notion of “surpass”, and what that looks like.
I don't know either, maybe it will be fine. Maybe this will pass like the transition from traditional to digital. But something about this feels different...like it's actually stealing the creative process rather than just a paradigm shift.
Yeah maybe, but I think we also already have a problem with overconsumption of media though. I am not sure this is helping.
It seems inevitable and I don't think we can stop it, but I just am kind of worried about the collective mental health of humanity. What does a world look like where people have no jobs and even creative outlets are dominated by AI? Are people really just happy only consuming? What even is the point of humanity existing at that point?
The only signature and branding for a artist when they solicit commissions and clients for future work than for selling completed paintings (unless their dead)
No, the appeal of the artist is the artist. The art does offer a means to connect with the artist. It does not follow that the art may not offer its own appeal besides.
If they competed with me by throwing my product through a decompiler, fed it into an AI model, and selling the generated output, I'd be pretty upset about it.
Which is pretty close to the actual issue here, that artists did not give their permission to use their own work to generate their competition.
Draftbit | Senior Software Engineer | Full-Time | Remote, Anywhere (US Central Time overlap of >=4 hours) | https://draftbit.com
We're building a new way for teams and enterprises to visually design, build, and iterate on mobile apps. We're a no-code/low-code platform but that also generates source code as an output, which enables collaborative product development between both engineers and non-engineers; our early users have described us as the Webflow for Apps. We're backed by YC, Fuel, Floodgate, and a bunch of others. https://draftbit.com
We're building Draftbit with a combination of Typescript, React, React Native, Rescript, Node, Hapi, Postgres, Graphql, Apollo, Fly.io, and more.
Lol, this whole discussion is like a bunch of architects talking about how folks shouldn't do DIY projects on their own, and yet... DIY is a huge thing because most people are actually reasonably intelligent and capable of doing things on their own.
Draftbit | Senior Software Engineer | Full-Time | Remote, Anywhere (US Central Time overlap of >=4 hours) | https://draftbit.com
We're building a new way for teams and enterprises to visually design, build, and iterate on mobile apps. We're a no-code platform but that also generates source code as an output, which enables collaborative product development between both engineers and non-engineers; our early users have described us as the Webflow for Apps. We're backed by YC, Fuel, Floodgate, and a bunch of others. https://draftbit.com
We're building Draftbit with a combination of Javascript, React, React Native, Rescript/ReasonML, Node, Hapi, Postgres, Graphql, Apollo, Fly.io, and more.
the line between "crazy, brilliant founders who will build world changing companies" and "crazy, lunatic founders who will lie and cheat and be awful" is very hard to distinguish, especially at the series seed/series A level.
It can lead to false positives and false negatives all the time.