> Relatedly, it’s unfair and wasteful for the people who could be out there exploring and building the future on their own dime to be either working normal jobs or simply managing their money for profit. This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
This part really shows you what he thinks of himself and others. He is a "responsible elite" after all and it would be completely unfair to the world if he and his friends (all intellectuals, naturally) would have to work "normal" jobs with all of us unwashed heathens.
Some studies say this behavior is ingrained into men's DNA. Being true, what gives me the ick is people denying the humans' behavior. We literally spent millions of evolution-years going around conquering and spreading.
Getting ready to quit soonish and was drawn to this article. It wasn't what I was looking for but that's okay. Well written but a bit whimsical and dogmatic for me
For example, it starts out arguing that certain kinds of knowledge come best from exploration in leisure, yet near the end it also argues that you learn the most on the job when you're under pressure and everything is at stake. Which is it? (The latter I will say is false: In high risk situations, I often retreat to safe answers -- and I could construct an argument that this is very rational. More often I first learn in play, and then apply later in times of trial.)
More disturbingly, it mixes religious language, including religious/academic/artistic ideas of monasticism, with ideas of (I assume Silicon Valley style) entrepreneurship. This is sick. And exactly as professors preach monastic values to their students (so they will work for free), the VCs at the top of Silicon Valley preach individual risk-taking to the each-probably-doomed "founders" who comprise their diversified portfolios. The people who believe it are being suckered.
There are elements of this that I think are true. That we should sometimes leave the narrow, tracked paths that constrain us. That we should sometimes explore, without killing ourselves to increase whatever metric is used in this month's OKR. That we need longer term and bigger goals for our lives than the ones given to us by our bosses. All this I agree with. And yet -- still this essay leaves me with a very uneasy feeling, and a little nausea.
> But even our human desires are mostly good. When we see evil in our midst, that is mostly not a failure of our own moral perception, nor of an unjust world, but just another problem that we have yet to solve. We are young in our reign and despite our occasional lapses into evil and failure we have been rewarded richly thus far for pursuing our best visions of flourishing futures and charitable goodwill. There is no reason to lose faith that this providential bounty will continue.
kudos to the author for this high quality unintentional satire
This part really shows you what he thinks of himself and others. He is a "responsible elite" after all and it would be completely unfair to the world if he and his friends (all intellectuals, naturally) would have to work "normal" jobs with all of us unwashed heathens.