A lot of good food for thought here, but then it goes off the rails:
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I am no great cheerleader of capitalism, I could go on and on about the way people worship at the alter of "free markets" as if a market is inherently virtuous, but this is utter hogwash. Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser. Making everyone happy and prosperous beyond ones immediate tribe is just not an instinctive goal in large-scale humanity.
If everyone's basic needs are covered, and they are free to pursue artistic or otherwise unnecessary pursuits to fulfill themselves, they will fast begin to compete with each other about who is the most artistic, or free-spirited, or creative. Then it will become a game to be gamed, and the sheen will wear off for a lot of people.
The parts of capitalism that are worth keeping are the least zero sum of any other system. Unfortunately, "capitalism" has come to cover concepts that really don't belong to it.
Culturally, mimetic envy of one's neighbor was explicitly proscribed against in Western systems of though - "thou shalt not covet" - until fairly recently. So what changed? Probably TV advertising.
I agree. The article describes pretty interesting cultural problems, makes some interesting points, and then out of nowhere suggests radical political change as the solution.
Still worth the read, especially in the context of tech industry, where personally I see it at a crossroads of cubicle-farm vs artistic-expression. Maybe just ignore the last paragraph.
Its fairly ironic that the biggest criticism I've seen of continuing education is that academics get really out of touch with the status quo and academia becomes its own weird echo chamber of near nonsense, especially outside the hard sciences. The fact that this guy ended his little essay with a "tear down capitalism and replace it with $failed_communist_lite_ideas" fulfills that prediction.
Everyone I know who went to grad school had a "meh, I dont have anything else to do and being a student beats working" attitude as opposed to some cutthroat "fuck you losers" attitude the writer is suggesting. This is a bizarre essay unless you're to the far left and casually blaming everything on capitalism is the only card in your intellectual deck (which is often the case on the internet I'm afraid).
"Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser."
I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.
Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.
Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.
I went to grad school and published several peer-reviewed articles. Even after I die, people will be able to search my name and retrieve work that I did. To me, that is priceless.
I feel almost exactly the opposite about the work I published- I don't want anyone to look it up and ask me about it, ever, because I'll be forced to admit that I was writing about things I had no knowledge of by a guy who wanted to be able to list as many publications as possible on his academic website. The work I did had basically no relation to the industry it was for, which is the industry I now work in.
I got the job I'm in because of the work I did, but mostly because the people I work for now are even less technical than my academic adviser was, and were impressed by the people he knew and how long his list of publications was.
Apply this 10x for the patents my name is on.
For clarification, I quit two years into a PhD program and have been working in the industry for the last four years.
...which is exactly his point. People will do things that are objectively not in their best interest (become scientists, poets, or French poetry critics) because we've been strongly inculcated in that whole "do what you love" "everything is worth it as long as [you touch someone with your art] [your science is remembered after you die] [insert reason here]" philosophy.
Which means those fields get a free pass to treat their members horribly, and people will still gravitate towards them in huge numbers, because "do what you love" is so strongly ingrained in us.
A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!
Honest request: Could you elaborate this idea a bit ? I find it very intriguing; investing so much time of your limited time on earth so that random people will be able to find your name and read your work.
I have restricted the impact I want to leave to my very close circle (especially my kids), and not in tangible things, but in how they behave, think and act.
Nothing wrong with what you said, value is subjective after all.
However, couldn't you say this about about a plethora of things?
I got kids/built a commerical building/wrote a book/made a youtube clip/participated in official sport (records lasts forever whohoo!). All of these things will keep existing to some capacity when you die.
Fair enuf - everyone has their own way towards keeping some footprint once they are gone.
I personally realized half-way through undergrad that programming would help me achieve that goal - or even contributing to open source vs writing papers and trying to get published.
This feels a lot more like an unfocused rant against social norms, than anything coherent. It also, as others have noted already, totally ignored the huge number of STEM fields which encourage or require this.
I wouldn't call it unfocused. I think it pokes holes pretty accurately in the psychology behind the pieces (and those like it) which it was a reaction to. It shows a lot of the pot-shot-taking and one-upsmanship for what it is; namely, a psychological defense to feeling like a failure in a society where to simply be adequate is perceived as failure--you have to be better(™) than some other class of your peers. It could just as we'll be a piece about how we all gather around to defend ourselves or join in throwing stones when there is a new "Why Johnny Can't Code" or "Fizz-Buzz" article.
This whole article is filled with negative stereotypes, incredibly warped views of capitalism, and seems hell-bent on pushing its own message independent of the truth of its supporting "arguments".
> This is why we’ve created all these bullshit “arty” corporate jobs in marketing and related fields, why software engineering is discussed in terms of people really making things rather than in terms of sitting at a computer, staring bleary-eyed at your code
What...? I love my job, and it does involve making things while I sit at my desk -- incredibly cool things. Not only that, but my manager is awesome and discourages anything of the "up late bleary-eyed" variety.
Sure, there's a lot of crap jobs out there, but also a lot of amazing jobs where we do make incredible things that change the world. That's the "capitalist american dream" this article loves to call totalitarian propaganda (read the article if you don't believe he said something so absurd).
The article hits it right on the nose about our culture's fetishization of education and credentials. My brother is a trader at a bank. Going to grad school would cost a ton of money between tuition and opportunity costs, while doing nothing to advance his career, yet my parents still lament that he has "only a bachelors degree."
I don't know what can be done. As jobs continue to get automated away, the emphasis on education will only become more extreme. To listen to some Presidential candidates talk everyone should have a PhD in underwater basket weaving, paid for by the government. It's insane.
Unless a few hours twice a week amount to severe opportunity costs, why not work and do grad school? My brother and I and many of my colleagues took advantage of the benefit that many employers offer to get a masters after work at their expense.
So according to this author, if other people write about the pragmatic problems with getting a PhD, those articles are worthless... but he comes to the same conclusions for different (cultural) reasons, and we should listen to him?
Everybody has different goals. If your goal is simply to maximize your income, you will have a different decision making process than someone who is pursuing their interests, which will also be different than someone who is pursuing a job to pay bills, while keeping time for other interests outside of work.
Any articles written that make presumptions about your goals are going to miss the mark.
Interesting, but sort of whiny, until he veers off into "Capitalism Bad!" Socialism Good! Wait it didn't work the last 10 times? "No true scotsman! no true scotsman!"
Your severe exaggeration weakens your critique. I read the comments here before the actual article and after reading yours I expected the article to devolve into a juvenile defense of communism at the end. The author blames the problem in part on capitalism, but there was a distinct lack of "no true Scotsman" fallacy toward socialism.
Your anti-socialism bias is far more overt and absurd than the article's vague anti-capitalism bias. You got so bent out of shape at the mere mention of socialism in a positive light that you made up an argument that the article didn't put forth just so you could accuse the author of a fallacy. I don't know what to call this. It's not even a strawman. It's intellectually dishonest.
There's lots of countries that have socialist policies that are doing just fine, many of them western countries. Sometimes they are better off than the USA. Socialism just happens to be a dirty word in American culture.
Agreed. And if I can make a plea to anyone who wants to comment on this thread -- please make your comment without using the words "capitalism" or "socialism" since neither word has a proper, consensus definition. Using those words will just lead to tedious flamewars with people talking past each other and rehashing old debates. Rather, talk about the underlying structure of incentives that create this dynamic, and how incentives can be changed, if they can be at all.
I disagree with the premise. I went to grad school to do research. None of my cohort sees ourselves as losers.
The trick is to go to grad school in a field where you can get funding. Then, you can get paid to learn and write papers. Then it's like a day job -- no losing necessary.
I haven't seen any of the "Who goes to grad school?" thinkpieces the author mentions, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet the authors of such thinkpieces probably haven't been to grad school either...
> [R]ecognizing the sickness within capitalist “success” is necessary to inspire broad rejection of a cruel, embittering, inhumane system [...] Once you are among those lucky enough to pay for your basic material needs, the fear of being a loser keeps you motivated to work those 60 hour weeks that people are so proud of in American achievement culture.
The "sickness" the article speaks of -- fear of being a loser -- isn't a sickness at all, in my mind.
It's a boon to the world. Fear of letting down your customers, fear of letting down your employees, your cofounders, your investors -- that's a GOOD THING. That encourages people to try and make their new businesses work: to figure out what's wrong with them, to figure out how to make them better. And the point of that business is to provide customers with something valuable. And when you have lots of humans doing that across the whole world, you get a better world -- a world that turns typewriters into laptops, unused cars and houses into shared rides and shared vacations, long lost acquaintances into Facebook friends, etc etc etc.
I think it's possible that its both a sickness and a boon. I fully agree with your point that the "fear of being a loser" does drive people to work harder, do better, etc. All of that has (generally) positive effects (well, assuming that you are willing to ignore the fact that many people will use less-tan-ethical means of making more money).
However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.
Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.
I can't understand why everyone doesn't go to grad school. In grad school in a computationally focused biology lab, I'll be able to come in every day and code on whatever projects I want (well, in my case all of the projects I want to work on are in my field) to in whatever language I want to. It'll be open-source, on github, and be shared with other scientists through publications. It will contribute to advancememts in environmental and medical genomics (however small!), which are important and morally/intellectually fulfilling fields.
Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source, has to be be whatever your supervisor tells you, won't even be owned by you, and may never see the light of day for the first 4-5 years out of college? Grad school seems more fulfilling, interesting, better for portfolio development, and you just happen to get a PhD out of it than most entry level coding positions.
>Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source,
why? because I have a BS in engineering and I make 6 figures. My wife spent 5 years after college getting her phd in a hard science and she now makes less than half of what I do and has to work way harder.
Are you really extrapolating your one example to apply to all cases? Maybe you should take a few stats classes while you're still in grad school.
Firstly, you seem to be really lucky because a lot of grad students basically spend their masters working on what their advisors want them to and being lab monkeys. Things change once you get to PhD sure but you have to grind out two years to get there.
Secondly, not all corporations are closed source. Many companies, especially tech-focused companies, have tons of open source initiatives. A lot of amazing tools come from industry. And it's not like all grad programs are havens of FOSS - there's an endless supply of papers and projects whose code is either a) non-existent or in the form of snippets or b) blocked by a paywall (to get to the article to see the snippets if they exist).
Additionally, you can choose what company you work for. If you want more autonomy or ownership, you can filter for that. I joined a company fresh out of undergrad and I was pushing product-changing code in a few weeks.
Most of all, the reason why everyone doesn't go to grad school is because not everyone can get into grad school. You are going to a top tier program at a well-regarded (and well-funded) university. That's probably why you are having such a positive experience. These positions are, by their definition, exclusive and available only to a very small percentage of coders. People rag on industry about gatekeeping (throwing resumes in the trash if they are from the wrong school) but it happens even moreso in academia. I've coded plenty of projects in my spare time, have created and implemented novel solutions, can talk intelligently about a wide range of topics and have spoken at conferences...but if my GRE / GPA scores are too low, then you're SOL for the most institutions. They'll still keep the $100 application fee of course.
I'm a grad student as well, just finished my third year. Yeah it's super fun and I have a ton of freedom, but I make roughly 1/5 of what people I graduated with. I'm sure that holds a lot of people back. That being said, I really enjoy it, especially since you continually get to learn new things.
As someone who spent five years as a "sad French poetry PhD student," I'd like to know when French poetry became the single most pathetic thing anyone could deign to study. Probably ~40% of the people in my grad program ended up in translation or international affairs/relations jobs solely or largely because of their strong language skills, so I think French literature is a safer choice than English or history.
Heck, even my software engineer colleagues who are trying to pick up French are glad there's another engineer who can help them with what they're learning or accompany them to a French conversation meetup.
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I guess, I mean, this feels like fighting fire with fire. Which is fine ... but what bugs me about competitive humble-whine-bragging is that I feel it's ineffectual. So hearing this as a pro-grad-school rant actually feels even a little worse than hearing the anti-grad-school rants he's complaining about.
The link title here is misleading - it's about an article titled 'why people go to grad school.' A better title would be 'A reaction to "why people go to grad school."'
[+] [-] dasil003|10 years ago|reply
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I am no great cheerleader of capitalism, I could go on and on about the way people worship at the alter of "free markets" as if a market is inherently virtuous, but this is utter hogwash. Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser. Making everyone happy and prosperous beyond ones immediate tribe is just not an instinctive goal in large-scale humanity.
[+] [-] reptation|10 years ago|reply
There's very little on that list before the Industrial Revolution
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
Culturally, mimetic envy of one's neighbor was explicitly proscribed against in Western systems of though - "thou shalt not covet" - until fairly recently. So what changed? Probably TV advertising.
[+] [-] MattyRad|10 years ago|reply
Still worth the read, especially in the context of tech industry, where personally I see it at a crossroads of cubicle-farm vs artistic-expression. Maybe just ignore the last paragraph.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
Everyone I know who went to grad school had a "meh, I dont have anything else to do and being a student beats working" attitude as opposed to some cutthroat "fuck you losers" attitude the writer is suggesting. This is a bizarre essay unless you're to the far left and casually blaming everything on capitalism is the only card in your intellectual deck (which is often the case on the internet I'm afraid).
[+] [-] fghrthtb|10 years ago|reply
I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.
Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.
Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_m_b|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoonmoose|10 years ago|reply
I got the job I'm in because of the work I did, but mostly because the people I work for now are even less technical than my academic adviser was, and were impressed by the people he knew and how long his list of publications was.
Apply this 10x for the patents my name is on.
For clarification, I quit two years into a PhD program and have been working in the industry for the last four years.
[+] [-] whateveridunno|10 years ago|reply
A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!
[+] [-] Aelinsaar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteo|10 years ago|reply
Honest request: Could you elaborate this idea a bit ? I find it very intriguing; investing so much time of your limited time on earth so that random people will be able to find your name and read your work.
I have restricted the impact I want to leave to my very close circle (especially my kids), and not in tangible things, but in how they behave, think and act.
[+] [-] F2468|10 years ago|reply
However, couldn't you say this about about a plethora of things?
I got kids/built a commerical building/wrote a book/made a youtube clip/participated in official sport (records lasts forever whohoo!). All of these things will keep existing to some capacity when you die.
Seems pretty trivial for it's own sake.
[+] [-] wrong_variable|10 years ago|reply
I personally realized half-way through undergrad that programming would help me achieve that goal - or even contributing to open source vs writing papers and trying to get published.
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aelinsaar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] preordained|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electrograv|10 years ago|reply
> This is why we’ve created all these bullshit “arty” corporate jobs in marketing and related fields, why software engineering is discussed in terms of people really making things rather than in terms of sitting at a computer, staring bleary-eyed at your code
What...? I love my job, and it does involve making things while I sit at my desk -- incredibly cool things. Not only that, but my manager is awesome and discourages anything of the "up late bleary-eyed" variety.
Sure, there's a lot of crap jobs out there, but also a lot of amazing jobs where we do make incredible things that change the world. That's the "capitalist american dream" this article loves to call totalitarian propaganda (read the article if you don't believe he said something so absurd).
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
I don't know what can be done. As jobs continue to get automated away, the emphasis on education will only become more extreme. To listen to some Presidential candidates talk everyone should have a PhD in underwater basket weaving, paid for by the government. It's insane.
[+] [-] mimo777|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnore|10 years ago|reply
Why is that insane? What else should people be doing instead of learning -- especially when they don't need to work?
[+] [-] unprepare|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|10 years ago|reply
Everybody has different goals. If your goal is simply to maximize your income, you will have a different decision making process than someone who is pursuing their interests, which will also be different than someone who is pursuing a job to pay bills, while keeping time for other interests outside of work.
Any articles written that make presumptions about your goals are going to miss the mark.
[+] [-] mimo777|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpark|10 years ago|reply
Your anti-socialism bias is far more overt and absurd than the article's vague anti-capitalism bias. You got so bent out of shape at the mere mention of socialism in a positive light that you made up an argument that the article didn't put forth just so you could accuse the author of a fallacy. I don't know what to call this. It's not even a strawman. It's intellectually dishonest.
[+] [-] echlebek|10 years ago|reply
Here's one example of socialism in western culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care
It's not all-or-nothing.
[+] [-] oortcloud|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcr|10 years ago|reply
The trick is to go to grad school in a field where you can get funding. Then, you can get paid to learn and write papers. Then it's like a day job -- no losing necessary.
I haven't seen any of the "Who goes to grad school?" thinkpieces the author mentions, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet the authors of such thinkpieces probably haven't been to grad school either...
[+] [-] methodover|10 years ago|reply
The "sickness" the article speaks of -- fear of being a loser -- isn't a sickness at all, in my mind.
It's a boon to the world. Fear of letting down your customers, fear of letting down your employees, your cofounders, your investors -- that's a GOOD THING. That encourages people to try and make their new businesses work: to figure out what's wrong with them, to figure out how to make them better. And the point of that business is to provide customers with something valuable. And when you have lots of humans doing that across the whole world, you get a better world -- a world that turns typewriters into laptops, unused cars and houses into shared rides and shared vacations, long lost acquaintances into Facebook friends, etc etc etc.
[+] [-] marketforlemmas|10 years ago|reply
However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.
Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.
[+] [-] aninhumer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tstactplsignore|10 years ago|reply
Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source, has to be be whatever your supervisor tells you, won't even be owned by you, and may never see the light of day for the first 4-5 years out of college? Grad school seems more fulfilling, interesting, better for portfolio development, and you just happen to get a PhD out of it than most entry level coding positions.
[+] [-] grillvogel|10 years ago|reply
why? because I have a BS in engineering and I make 6 figures. My wife spent 5 years after college getting her phd in a hard science and she now makes less than half of what I do and has to work way harder.
[+] [-] yolesaber|10 years ago|reply
Firstly, you seem to be really lucky because a lot of grad students basically spend their masters working on what their advisors want them to and being lab monkeys. Things change once you get to PhD sure but you have to grind out two years to get there.
Secondly, not all corporations are closed source. Many companies, especially tech-focused companies, have tons of open source initiatives. A lot of amazing tools come from industry. And it's not like all grad programs are havens of FOSS - there's an endless supply of papers and projects whose code is either a) non-existent or in the form of snippets or b) blocked by a paywall (to get to the article to see the snippets if they exist).
Additionally, you can choose what company you work for. If you want more autonomy or ownership, you can filter for that. I joined a company fresh out of undergrad and I was pushing product-changing code in a few weeks.
Most of all, the reason why everyone doesn't go to grad school is because not everyone can get into grad school. You are going to a top tier program at a well-regarded (and well-funded) university. That's probably why you are having such a positive experience. These positions are, by their definition, exclusive and available only to a very small percentage of coders. People rag on industry about gatekeeping (throwing resumes in the trash if they are from the wrong school) but it happens even moreso in academia. I've coded plenty of projects in my spare time, have created and implemented novel solutions, can talk intelligently about a wide range of topics and have spoken at conferences...but if my GRE / GPA scores are too low, then you're SOL for the most institutions. They'll still keep the $100 application fee of course.
[+] [-] tcpekin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] booleandilemma|10 years ago|reply
Jeff Schmidt goes into great detail on this in his book, Disciplined Minds. I'd recommend everyone check it out.
[+] [-] chrisra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giaour|10 years ago|reply
Heck, even my software engineer colleagues who are trying to pick up French are glad there's another engineer who can help them with what they're learning or accompany them to a French conversation meetup.
[+] [-] awt|10 years ago|reply
Academia in the US is not capitalism.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcnamaratw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m4dc4pXXX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkinom|10 years ago|reply
Grad schools help produce them.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhapsodic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|10 years ago|reply