Comment by davesque
2 months ago
Thank you for saying what I didn't have the patience to say. Although I sincerely worry that empathizing with people like this is a trap. I hate that I have to think this way, but nothing is worse than feeling like a sucker. I only hope I'm elevated above all of this in the afterlife.
> Although I sincerely worry that empathizing with people like this is a trap.
I have a similar sense. However, I’m not sure empathizing with them is itself the trap. You don’t want your empathy to make you overly credulous. For example, while you might empathize with him feeling directionless at the acquiring company, I don’t think you should therefore conclude that he is right about the new coworkers being “NPCs.”
Empathy is about understanding people from their perspective. I would think that highly empathic people would be harder to scam, as they would recognise the con artists for what they are.
The trouble is, if you think in abstract terms at all you'll start seeing the patterns in the reasons many people are suffering, and the patterns in your relationship to them.
Then you'll have to ratchet up boundaries to address the relational patterns with people who are having a hard time, so that you're not a participant in their suffering.
And you'll have to start working on the patterns underneath the problems, which when you get into it starts to look more and more like the kind of megalomaniacal moonshot ("give computers arms and legs" / "fix the government now!") that the author ran out of gas on.
I think where you end up if you think about this is just recognizing that a) you probably should try to do some ambitious, high-leverage project to make the world better and b) reflecting about the world and about life in a thorough way is emotionally difficult for most people, so you also have to deal with those emotions.
The author's original somewhat manic intentions were probably right, and maybe he needed a bit more of a rest but was plowing forward out of fear that he'd lose his nerve. Now he's getting some rest and will probably figure out something big, important, and hard to work on in the next few years.
The barriers/boundaries thing I think is interesting.
I've never really been able to identify with this sort of "make money and then fix the world" stuff because I feel that everyone hugely simplifies every issue and looks only at first or maybe second order effects.
You fix malaria/give to the poor/raise the minimum wage/etc. Cool, now we have a wealthier population with more people doing more stuff to modify the environment. We accelerate biosphere collapse and global warming. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I think that if you're being truly logical about these things you could just as easily come up with a grand solution that's something like drawing a graph of social connections from you, go out a few layers, and then press the button to delete everyone else on the planet and rewild most of it. Or go back in time and don't discover oil (or was the suffering of the pre-industrial era worse? maybe it was, probably it was...!).
I don't think I'd be chosen to go to Elysium but I can't really see the logical flaw in the argument either. Why should the super rich care about the rest? Move forward a few years/decades; why should superintelligent AI care about humans? We don't care about mosquitoes.
Making a company that makes a prettier table or a faster car or whatever feels like it's directly solving a problem. Making a company that aims to "improve the world" just seems like a fool's errand to me, second law of thermo, that sort of thing.
Big waffle.
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Many people con others into giving their emotional currency. Rich people are the worst about this, because it's the only value from the world they've failed to actually extract. So they want it from everyone.
Rich people have problems. This dude is clearly focused on himself. He doesn't need the emotional currency of others unless he's willing to give a lot more his (love and empathy).
> Although I sincerely worry that empathizing with people like this is a trap
What exactly is "people like this"? I thought this was a very genuine account from a regular person who worked hard, made a ton of money from it, and now finds that the money didn't give him the satisfaction he expected. It's honest and, frankly, extremely unsurprising and straightforward.
Well, for one, categorizing the people he'd have to work with at Atlassian as "NPC Coworkers"