[hhaha88]

Our culture likes to believe workers are free of state intervention, quotas like Soviet Russia.

But here we have yet another story of how the rich, protected by government, guide our agency.

America is a subtle con like that. The rich are protected by government, and then dictate economic agency and priority.

Effectively government has granted others the power to do what it cannot officially.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

More generally, please don't use HN for ideological battle. That's also in the site guidelines. The reason we ask people this is not because we're against your ideology, but because in the big Venn diagram of internet conversation, there's almost no overlap between the "ideological battle" bubble and the "curious conversation" bubble. We want curious conversation here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29187971.

[hhaha88]

Relative experience dictates what is curious conversation to others; one might think a curious science minded person would understand that intuitively.

I do not acknowledge your authority to define that term specifically. You have authority over your property not others agency. Delete it from the DB after the fact.

I’m curious about a new political narrative aside from “coddle industrialists and landlords who won before you were born.” How do we get there without studying the system as is? Without comparing and contrasting it with others.

If it’s so banal why pressure myself into restraint? I understand a government that actively protects servicing the sick and needy before do-nothings whose names appear on deeds is a threat to your routine but it seems to me moral relativism is fine for you and the VC cottage industry. Why should society as a whole concern itself with your preferences?

You spend your time cleaning a database of trite commentary that, by your own language, is boring. What a deeply curious application of agency.

[Robotbeat]

I think you’re exaggerating the level of agency the government has here or actual intent versus unintended consequence, but I think you’re right about the effects. One reason I think elon has been wildly successful is not that he’s way smarter than everyone else but just that he’s a physicist/engineer-type that actually managed to become rich enough to control his businesses and dictate priority. A rich guy who is actually technically smart (as well as relatively competent business-wise) and at least in the early days did a very good job of identifying/listening to/empowering people smarter than him on some task (in part because he had the broad physics background to grok what they were talking about).

There are doubtless a lot of other Elons out there, but we just haven’t empowered them. Maybe also some that are a bit more emotionally stable.

[woah]

There are a huge number of rich engineers out there

[Robotbeat]

How many rich physicists?

[maxk42]

How many poor ones?

[hhaha88]

I’m saying the government purposely puts no agency into the issue of inequality.

That, rather than allow the story government could, we require people to cater to unelected elders who judge and manage our agency even though none of us signed a contract at birth recognizing our agreement with the arrangement. We’re talked into after the fact; or we can die. It’s legalized shakedowns for lunch money.

You’re getting hung up on technicals. I’m challenging the story that the US is free of oppressive behavior because it’s not government performing the behavior. I don’t have a contract requiring me to believe Zuckerberg is a billionaire, his forces can assign net worth to me though?

Take PGs four quadrants of conformity. Why stop at 4? Did he run out of numbers? There are billions of people on the planet; why not an essay that suggests then a billion quadrants of conformity? The effort means little to PG, just a few different letters. Why does his boundary matter?

If we’re allowed to filter as we choose why not filter you all out?

Is that the political narrative we want to foster on Main Street? 5% of the population hunts; this contemporary logistics system provides for everyone. Following billionaires who filter out those who don’t conform to their preferred of their 4 categories … why not filter out a minority of billionaires through hefty taxation to empower all the Elons we aren’t. Pre-Reagan taxation empowered a lot of these guys families, then they changed the rules.

Change them back.

[sokoloff]

> Take PGs four quadrants of conformity. Why stop at 4? Did he run out of numbers? There are billions of people on the planet; why not an essay that suggests then a billion quadrants of conformity?

At one level: because the root word of quadrant means four/one-fourth, so once he got to 4, he did run out of numbers [of quadrants].

He probably picked to use quadrants in large part because categorizing people’s broad behavioral tendencies into a billion groups isn’t that helpful of a mental model simplification. “People in group 24,825,726; those are the tattletales who like Brussel Sprouts, are left-handed, allergic to oak pollen, love dogs, hate cats, taste quinine, can roll their tongue, are AB+, and prefer sleeping in cool rooms.” How does that make for a readable essay?

[hhaha88]

Why groups? Why not 7 billion points.

Everyone is their own political agenda, their own emotional timeline of experience.

Why does an arbitrary 1 of 7 billions semantic view of the gradients mean more than anyone else’s except for his politically protected privilege?

And of course we’re not supposed to discuss that here. This forum has an obligation to high mindedness first. Questioning the assigned figurative value of someone who is a random non-contributor to millions of others, and open discussion about how they may be actively harming them, is not allowed to launch.

Stick to the rules of bounding everyone else into quadrants. Oh wait, though; you all are everyone else to me. I only see points bounded by quadrants. I’ll just stick to thinking of you as a point on a Cartesian plane … what a novel math object he discovered.

The whole thing was elementary math object and biased, insulated, white guy political opinion. I’m banal?

[sokoloff]

> Why does an arbitrary 1 of 7 billions semantic view of the gradients mean more than anyone else’s except for his politically protected privilege?

I read his essays long before YC was founded. (Online first and then in dead tree reprint format.) I chose to read them because they were interesting and thought-provoking not because of some claimed politically protected privilege.

If other authors resonate more with you, I think it’s reasonable for you to read their opinions instead.

[hhaha88]

Well, maybe it’s me but it all translates to “here’s a Cartesian plane and how one random dude would describe a bunch of points on it.”

My value store is not old school business networks, but the network available to everyone. It’s all electron flow in machines, with boundaries ingrained by history.

I see value in novel information design. The history of overloaded human languages and my age related overload on them makes me question what they really offer except traditional attempts at political persuasion.

Meh.