[thomasahle]

The ironical thing about the "Follow what creates value for other people" advice - for math graduates in particular - is that most of modern math doesn't seem to be motivated this.

I'd probably agree that research math also doesn't come from a goal of "self growth", but maybe it should be something like "follow your curiosity".

[talldatethrow]

As others stated, who the 'people' are varies.

I used to sell cars and was top 0.1% in the country at it.

Yet others would say I was a parasite costing them money for nothing. But they were ignoring I was providing value for the dealership and its collection of employees even beyond the owners. I worked for a public corporation. Tons of stake holders profited via stock value while I was there.

On a tangent, people always say they'd rather just buy cars online. Great you can do that for one. Second, if all manufacturers did that, month 1 results would be whatever they were. On day 1 of month 2, some MBA would say "hey, if we had a human these people could call, chat with, or even visit with for a test drive, wouldn't sales go up? Let's try it!" And within a month you'd have salespeople interacting with customers again.

[jessriedel]

> On a tangent, people always say they'd rather just buy cars online. ... within a month you'd have salespeople interacting with customers again.

If that were true, it wouldn't be necessary to outlaw direct-to-consumer sales.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/economic-effects-state-bans-dire...

[talldatethrow]

Well you mean buying direct from manufacturer for their asking price online.

I mean that you can buy from a dealership for asking price online.

I have done countless deals over the Internet and had a driver or a truck deliver the car to a customer. Some for asking price, some discounted.

[jessriedel]

> you mean buying direct from manufacturer for their asking price online. I mean…

Ok, but buying from their local dealership’s website is not what most people mean when they say they want to buy cars online. Likewise, when they say they buy their pens online, they don’t mean they buy them from the website of their local mom & pop stationary store.

[talldatethrow]

I suppose, but if the price is non negotiable like with the Tesla model, does it really matter?

Would you really prefer to buy online and it gets shipped to your house via a trucker, vs buying it on the dealer website and their local driver or the salesperson delivers it?

[jessriedel]

For a big purchase like a car, I don't think home delivery vs. pick-up in town matters much at all. I'll defer to your experience, but my expectation is that cars are such a big purchase that the time cost of one trip to pick up the purchased car is negligible.

The reason people want to be able to buy directly from the manufacturer is that they want to see real posted prices so that they can comparison shop from home without needing to drive around to twenty separate dealerships (or have painful email conversations with twenty separate salesmen) to discover the real price for each car. In other words, they want an efficient public market where the posted prices reflect the actual going rate, so that they can be confident they are getting the fair market price, rather than needing to negotiate to avoid price discrimination.

[dehrmann]

> parasite costing them money for nothing

Don't dealerships (and the salesperson) only make hundreds on a $30k car? It's almost a loss leader for the service department.

[talldatethrow]

Absolutely. If a vehicle is discounted towards invoice, a salesperson can easily end up making $250 on a $100,000 fully loaded Audi A8.

Heck, I've sold used cars at asking price and still made $250 just because the dealership overpaid on the trade in.

All in all it all adds up and evens out, but mentally it can be frustrating coming into work on 4th of July and spending hours with someone trying to have fun looking at 4 cars and then leaving. And then finally selling one at 7pm and staying late, to make $250.

And with the way the pay plans are structured, it's hourly pay OR commission whichever is higher..so if you sold a few cars Wednesday Thursday for $2k, you can end up coming to work Friday Saturday Sunday, not selling anything, and technically didnt get paid anything more for those hours.

[j7ake]

“People” need to be better defined. In the case of pure math, “people” are your fellow mathematicians in your specific subfield or adjacent.

[gradschoolfail]

The “other” in “people” needs to be there :)

One may cite Grothendieck as counterexamples, but maybe they still only had themselves in their adjacent subfields (at the time they made their most impactful discoveries, anyway)

[rockemsockem]

This is such a math answer, lol. I love it.

[j2kun]

> for math graduates in particular

I don't think it's ironic at all. The vast majority of math graduates don't do pure math research after graduation. And modern pure mathematicians dramatically undercut how much of their research was, in relatively recent history, driven mainly by practical value.

[aleph_minus_one]

> The ironical thing about the "Follow what creates value for other people" advice - for math graduates in particular - is that most of modern math doesn't seem to be motivated this.

I do believe that the results of math research (even the pure one) create an insane value for other people, but that we live in a world full of ignorant people who don't see this insane value (yet). Thus, the modern math research may not be motivated by this criterion, but in most cases nearly tautologically creates a lot of value for other people.

[mitthrowaway2]

I agree. You can still make a great living just by sifting through the nuggets unearthed by people like Gauss, Euler, and Laplace, which continue to pay dividends centuries later, let alone inventing new math.

[chii]

also, creating value is different from capturing value.

You can create value but not capture it (or don't have the ability to capture it). But somebody tends to capture the value, and if it's not you, it's probably going to be your boss (or their boss, etc).