[ksec]

I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem )

I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?

[BurningFrog]

    "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

--- George Bernard Shaw

[roenxi]

I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to change the world for the better because they don't understand the essential futility of it all.

Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.

[javajosh]

Your risk-taking realist needs at least one more quality -- a high pain tolerance. There are two pains you need to deal with, the pain of fearing failure, and the pain of failure itself.

Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)

[ksec]

That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.

I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.

I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.

[unapologetic]

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo. Especially on this site where a lot of people seem to take a weird pseudo-detached outlook. Trying to analyze things in an almost entirely emotionless judgement free manner. I think this is seen by people as enlightened.

Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.

[nostrademons]

This isn't really the site for people who want to create genuine social change in the world, other than through startups. The site guidelines say that what's on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Curiosity is more about knowing things than doing things. I think one implicit belief held by the folks who started this site is that if you do want to challenge entrenched power structures, the best way to do that is to be very circumspect about who you tell that you're challenging power structures, because you can expect to have a strong negative reaction from the power structures themselves. (Peter Thiel describes startups as "a conspiracy to change the world".)

There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.

[unapologetic]

Peter Thiel has an extremely vested interest in preserving the status-quo. Frankly I think the notion that he knows all that much about genuinely creating any sort of movement to be questionable at best.

It's not about changing the world it's about not dehumanizing everything.

[celticmusic]

I love how you defended not trying to make the world better because HN has a ToS.

[leetcrew]

I think GP is merely suggesting that, if you are doing something truly subversive, it is best not to shout about it on a public internet forum.

[tmpz22]

Its telling that the people touting this view most often directly benefited from the situation they are now conveniently apathetic towards.

1. Make millions of dollars doing grey area work

2. Grey area work is now identified as black hat work

3. "Thats just the way it is"

[thu2111]

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo

It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.

For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.

This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".

To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.