[TheOtherHobbes]

'Rational Self Interest' is a myth. For self interest to be truly rational you'd have to be able to model long term consequences of short term decisions extremely well.

This would be a useful way to make sure you wouldn't do something incredibly stupid and ultimately self-defeating just so you could to make a quick buck in the next quarter, if the ultimately consequence was that the same 'rational decision' was going to kill you - financially or literally - a year or ten later. (Or at least you'd be fully aware that it was likely to kill you, and were just fine with that.)

If you try to model long term wide area consequences you eventually have to accept that rational actors work within some very irrational belief systems, and long term modelling is very much a minority interest.

This is partly because you get as much useful information about the future from 'market signals' as you get from any stampeding herd, flock or school of animals - which is not much.

This has been covered over and over in the literature (e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, etc).

>Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies.

Maybe not. But it certainly makes them extremely dull and horribly inefficient, economically and politically.

>There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship,

I don't think it's a complaint about poor craftsmanship. I think it's a complaint about questionable cultural ethics.

[eastbayjake]

This is a strawman of my argument. If you can make $40k in one job or $85k in another by completing a 12-week course, it is a purely rational decision. (You may be passionate enough about your $40k job to turn down more money in other areas, but only you are capable of weighing that trade-off. It's still a rational process.) I'm not making the claim that all humans are purely rational all the time.

[norseboar]

Rational self interest might be a myth when applied to the extent that some economic models apply it, but at a basic level holds up. I know /tons/ of people that have taken one job over another because it pays more, even if it's one that they're less interested in.

Not everybody has the luxury of being passionate about something lucrative -- that's not something you really have control over (maybe some, but I don't think much. This is another issue entirely, though). I get that it might be lamentable that an industry isn't full of the most passionate people anymore, but the tradeoff is that it became a large-scale industry. If the original author wants the kind of deep, nerdy devotion he used to have, he can find it! There are plenty of research institutes and startups investing in long-term big bets that need this kind of thing. But being mad that /everybody/ isn't that way anymore seems childish.