I think that government doesn't work, merit is often overridden by connections, too much greed is pointless, in time we're (almost) all forgotten are all common sense things to say.
What's odd is that he would use Linux as a metaphor, who but a hacker would get that?
What many people on HN consider common sense (e.g. Open ID, use complete sentences, use simple design for consumer sites) is not common sense to the general public (e.g. MOM, USE GMAIL INSTEAD OF HOTMAIL - CHRIST).
OpenID is a steaming pile, and I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with Hotmail -- I use Gmail personally, but if you're not a heavy email user, Hotmail is perfectly adequate (and integrates better with the rest of the MSN web properties).
"reigned in?" He asserts that the top-tier schools have been producing straw men -- suckers for the other sides of his trades. I think he's right. The level of education in this country has fallen across the board.
"They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten."
The only thing that motivates me in my professional life more than money is history. I would like to be remembered. I would like a student of history to read about me in 100 years and think that I left this place better than I found it.
Alas, this motivation doesn't stick well in my head, and the money is always there for the taking.
I like his point that people simply earning money will not be remembered. He's made his money, and he's OK without being remembered. He can now relax (Which by the way, is why money is such a high motivating factor for me, personally. I don't particularly love the sight of money, but I believe it can buy peace of mind.)
I'm not trying to be insulting. But your post is interesting. You claim not to be motivated by money, but are motivated by a desired to be remembered (fame). I can't properly dissect the ego, but I think both the desire for money and fame stem from similar places. That is, I'm not sure they're that different.
I have often though that if we ever do want a society based on merit and humanity, we need to get control of runaway egos. Maybe this requires a gene modification, so maybe we are too many years from it. Who knows. I would love to locate and find remedy for the "asshole gene".
I'm actually the opposite of the OP. I would like to have enough money for myself, friends & family never have to worry about it in my life time. But I never ever want to be famous.
One of my great fears would be having complete strangers (not founders, not YCers, not HNers) regularly recognize me. Starting your own business, no matter what it is, certainly causes some loss of privacy, but I'd prefer that 100 years from now no one gives a shit about who I was or what I did. Because if they did, it more than likely means I did something wrong.
I'd like to have people recognize what I did, but not who I am. Think Tim Berners-Lee: the average man on the street doesn't know who he is, but everybody knows what the world wide web is. And AFAIK, he doesn't have the same sort of crushing fame that say, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears gets (or even Steve Wozniak). I don't think he gets accosted by complete strangers, other than Aaron Schwartz ;-).
Exactly. I'd rather be one of the engineers who helped with Apollo than someone making money off day trading. The latter is richer, the former helped with history.
When you say "would like to have enough money for myself, friends & family never have to worry about it in my life time."...
there are two ways to go about this. One is to have a society that allows you to feel secure in that you will always be able to have an income stream that enables high quality of life. The second is to gather enough FU money so you can provide for yourself without regard to what the rest of society does.
The second route is what most have been doing. And for good reason; that's mostly all our society allows, there are few occupations or opportunity for taking the high road. The trouble is this route doesn't "scale" as a solution for everyone. This route is "get out of my way, I'm taking care of myself, family, and friends. This requires you grab a bunch of equity. And that's the part that doesn't scale to everyone and therefore not a sustainable model.
I'm also going the second route. It does scale and I'm going to make others rich in the process - creating wealth is not zero sum. And I never said "get out of my way" :).
"We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can." -Tyler Cowen
My reply was to build on your comment, not to tear down your position.
Creating wealth is not a zero sum game, but... because noone can be certain of the proper amount of FU money one needs, you overreach (I don't mean "you" you, I mean anyone). It is precisely this that creates hordes of wealth "locked up". This is a highly inefficient model and does not scale to "all" people. You reach a point very quickly where maybe less than 20% can participate before you create inflation and devalue the equity, which in turn makes people raise their "FU quotient".
It creates a culture of continual acquisition of wealth due to the fear that not to do so means your relative wealth will decline. But what if everyone slows down? What if you can follow a well understood path to financial security that did not rob you of your life as a youth or your life as a parent or of your life as a spouse?
I'm not saying you or anyone else is a bad person for pursuing wealth. I am saying the model we have in which to do so is flawed. Most of us are aware it is flawed but don't bother to describe or attempt to fix it as there appears to be no alternate solution (i.e. we only live in one economy, we don't get to go hang out in a different one if we find the one we're in unappealing or flawed).
My hypothesis is that the only/best timing for creating alternate solutions is in harsh times. Times when people are hurting and willing to open their minds to new things. After all, this is the original secret of any entrepreneur: "find someone who is hurting, he'll take a chance on a tiny company he's never heard of." I think the same lessons apply to changing our local and global economy.
What you call "the high road" is actually the low road, because it involves telling other people how to live. It's an enormous privilege to live in a time and a place where you can get ahead without imposing on other people. If I found myself shunning this privilege, I'd question my own motives.
"The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men."
Actually, I did claim to be motivated by money. I said the only thing that motivates me more than money is history.
I don't necessarily associate fame (or celebrity) with being remembered. There are many great filmmakers or company founders who have left an important mark on history and have easily walked into a mall without getting recognized.
That is how I would like to be remembered. Being super famous in my own time would not be very cool at all.
I know this sounds like egomania, and maybe part of is that., but this is what it boils down to: I want to leave this world in a significantly better place than I found it. And I'd like that legacy to last for a while.
(I had to avoid writing: "And I'd like people to know it". Wow, that does sound terrible. Maybe I need I do need to rethink that particular philosophy.)
He made 866% betting AGAINST the subprime collapse? (from the opening sentence of the article). That doesn't make sense. Surely they must mean betting FOR the subprime collapse. Or am I missing something?
Exactly. The guy is plainly a crackpot. Making 866% return in a single year makes you lucky, not necessarily intelligent or prone to have an intelligent take on the problems of society. His suggestion for government is particularly laughable:
*My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man's interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles.
Isn't that what John McCain said about medicare in the 2nd debate?
"What we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, of the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations, and then like the base closing commission idea we had, then we should have congress vote up or down"
Not to make this political, but why is it laughable when this guy says it, but not laughable when one of our 2 candidates for president says it?
4. Y'all can have socialism. We'll call it "meritocracy".
If I remember correctly, socialists rile against "meritocracy" precisely because it veils the unfair "merit" of those who can afford private tutors (or prep schools).
Why so much resentment for those with rich parents?. A genetic endowment of intelligence and conscientiousness is also a stroke of luck,
There's a good chance that his regressed-to-the-mean progeny will avail some of that financial fortune and social capital in getting ahead.
Intelligence is a capacity, not a trait. You don't get opportunities in life simply because you're smart, you get them because you've built upon your intelligence, applied it, and in some way proven yourself. Inherited wealth exists irrespective of effort.
> You don't get opportunities in life simply because you're smart,
I really wish I knew this earlier. For a significant part of my adolescence, even through part of college, I believed intelligence alone would prove your worth. Now, I feel like people think you're actually dumb if you don't have a list of major accomplishments in your wake; you tend to get that feeling when interviewing for a job.
"Inherited wealth exists irrespective of effort." I look at it from a pan-generational perspective. If the correlation of your habits/traits/capacities with those of your progeny was purely random, then yes, your progeny has lucked into wealth. What if I assume a significantly greater-than-chance correlation? Then, your offspring can be considered to be minor perturbations of yourself, now attempting to continue success in the same or other fields.
If, you agree, that these capacities are inherited, then you must answer why giving these lucky offspring an advantage is bad.
Luck has nothing to do with it. The point was that we'll have a better society when we filter aggressively for morons. Wealth playing a role in the selection process weakens our ability to do that.
The author bemoans the fact that he was handicapped in his early life by his unlucky (un-wealthy) circumstances. Being born into money, or with a good intellect, sporting ability, or looks (to name a few other valued traits), that isn't luck?
Being born into money is somehow different from the others?
Wealth is a proxy for one of the other talents. Wealth has always played a role in our selection process. Smarts, at some point, lead to an accumulation of wealth. Wealth signals, a lot more often than not, good genetic material that was awarded in previous iterations. Wealth offers the carriers of this material a better chance at survival, even if the current generation has regressed to the no-good-frat-boy mean. And if the chances are not availed, wealth is squandered in a few generations.
The idea that the wealthy, but dumb get a free ride, ultimately jeopardizing the entire system is foolish. There will always be smart people around to either guide them and their finances for a percentage, or fleece them and penalize them for their ignorance.
Enron filtered aggressively for morons. A fat lot of good it did them. A society is only a larger collection of vested interests.
Money hasn't existed long enough for it to have any hand in human evolution. Social and economic Darwinism don't describe the real world, they describe how some people feel the real world should operate.
Furthermore, the fact that inherited wealth is a longstanding tradition isn't a qualitative judgment one way or another, post facto rationalizations notwithstanding. Not everything that's existed for a long time is necessarily some happy equilibrium that benefits all sides.
Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this?
Money by itself does not promote the well being of its holders, the underlying factors do. Lottery winners squander theirs within a few years, let alone a generation.
Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.
Inherited wealth is much a tradition in the same way gestating your young (outside of the womb) is. Happy equilibrium or not, that is the way culture and nature have co-transformed, and determining the causative reasons is not necessarily blind Darwinism.
Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that? Or do you agree, but attribute the correlation to happenstance?
>Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.
The unintelligent wealthy are more lucky, because they don't have to struggle. The letter writer struggled his whole life doing things he appears not to enjoy very much to get into the right school, make the right deals, etc, so that he could retire and go live on a diamond-studded houseboat and smoke weed or whatever he's going to do with his life now. If he had been born extremely rich, he could have done what he's doing now from the start. If he had been born moderately rich or an Ivy League legacy, he could have done it with less difficulty.
>Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy.
If you want to select for smarts, looks, or height, then select for smarts, looks, or height, not some proxy which will never be as good as direct measurement.
Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this?
Yes, there is: wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring. Survival is a relatively low economic hurdle, as is raising and nurturing children. By asserting any real similarity, you're conflating survival with some modern concept of success.
Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?
I agree that wealth is a social signal. It might even imply things that aren't immediately apparent (though you'll know someone is tall and attractive before you'll know they're rich, most of the time). But even the facile comparison of a peacock's feathers and a rich person's designer clothing doesn't really hold water in my mind. I think a lot of our evolutionary urges might be sublimated in our struggles for success, but that doesn't make them the same things.
wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring
It did in preindustrial times, which is to say for practically all of human history. I recently read a quite impressive study of birth records in a scandinavian country (forget which) that showed a significant difference in the number of surviving children of rich and poor women.
I would argue that in preindustrial times the rich and the poor were on different sides of a subsistence level income. This was a huge distinction until recently, but in the present day Warren Buffet doesn't have a harem, nor does he have several hundred children. Wealth and progeny don't scale.
On average the wealthy attend better schools, receive tons preparatory courses, are providing with learning assistance, receive better health care and endure more plastic surgery than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?
Most "white male Americans" have inherited "wealth". They were born white male Americans. You start at the top of the global order even if you are penniless relative to a few others.
The author may bemoan it and may secretly (or openly) want all the unfair advantages he can get but that has nothing to do with the point he is making regarding meritocracy.
It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it.
"It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it."
I agree, and say the same about being rich and providing capital to the smart, or passing it on to your own progeny who stand a relatively better chance of ending up with the "good, success determining, bouquet of traits.
Ah - but the argument is that society would be better off with a real meritocracy rather than the current wealth-distorted one. Not to speak of a society where everyone was given the opportunity to succeed as thoroughly as possible. "No Child Left Behind" - really.
Most social organizations filter for other criteria, and tell successful applicants they are screening for intelligence. No different than looking for "rock stars" and telling them they're genuises.
Where can I track political contributions as well as voting records? I'd like to see which politicians received the most contributions from various industries and compare it with their voting record. Is anyone doing this already?
I seem to remember hearing about something similar this past weekend at http://conference.freeculture.org in berkeley, but I can't recall it.
If you're interested in the area, I'd ask Joshua Tauberer, razor.occams.info, who made http://govtrack.us/. He's really into it and I think could quickly give you a complete overview of what's been done and what hasn't.
Not that I don't agree with it, but weird seeing that, I guess that guy is a hippie finance nerd. (I mean that in the best way possible).