I hope this doesn't come across as being cynical in my old(er) age, but instead I just hope it's a reflection of reality
Lot's of organizations in the tech and business space start out with "high falutin", lofty goals. Things about making the world a better place, "don't be evil", "benefitting all of humanity", etc. etc. They are all, without fail, complete and total bullshit, or at least they will always end up as complete and total bullshit. And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.
I think it really went in to high gear in the 90s that, especially in tech, that companies put out this idea that they would bring all these amazing benefits to the world and that employees and customers were part of a grand, noble purpose. And to be clear, companies have brought amazing tech to the world, but only insofar as in can fulfill the profit motive. In earlier times, I think people and society had a healthier relationship with how they viewed companies - your job was how you made money, but not where you tried to fulfill your soul - that was what civic organizations, religion, and charities were for.
So my point is that I think it's much better for society to inherently view all companies and profit-driven enterprises with suspicion, again not because people involved are inherently bad, but because that is simply the nature of capitalism.
I didn't understand GP's point at all because I think the author makes this exceedingly clear: if you want to paint only for you, and only stuff that appeals to you and a limited few, that's totally fine (and I think the author really emphasizes that's totally fine), just don't expect to make a living off of it.
I thought this article was excellent. In particular, I liked the emphasis that you really just have to produce lots and lots of art to find "image market fit", because it's nearly impossible to know what will resonate with people before you create it. There is just an undeniably huge amount of luck in finding something a lot of people like, so it's important to give yourself as many swings at bat as possible.
It's not like Ireland is getting rid of unemployment insurance. And insurance sales and carpet installation are professions where there are jobs that actually pay a living wage.
A lot of societies have realized there is value in supporting art and culture. For thousands of years that activity was sponsored by monarchs, royalty and other nobility. Up until actually quite recently, most first world countries without monarchs and nobles also provided substantial support for the arts.
> A lot of societies have realized there is value in supporting art and culture.
Basically outlandishly rich and gaudy benefactors have always had so much money they could employ OTHERS to do trivial pursuits. Now - the average taxpayer will bear that cost.
I'm sure if you asked the average tax payer they would prefer programs like these rather than corporate welfare nonsense. So yeah, seems alright to me. I'm a tax payer.
What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.
Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.
If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].
In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.
Even when people are paid, it’s not necessarily fair nor driving the price paid - like clothing/purse manufacturing in low income countries for high income markets.
I do. My aunt is a pattern designer for ... Shower curtains at Walmart. Yup she works for a supply house in NY that designs shower curtains and her main customer is walmart
Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.
God knows Walmart couldn't exist with all this rampant welfare.
walmart solves a major logistical problem: provide government subsidized goods to low income neighborhoods. the government should like to give walmart money, as it is plausibly a cost-effective way to provide these goods to people who need them. the administrators of walmart are well rewarded for providing this public good.
You can both be right. Walmart is a valuable corporation; there are useful idiots who choose not to see that. It’s also a profitable one, which means it doesn’t need subsidies; another set of useful idiots can’t seem to see that.
The only thing Walmart solves is destroying local ecosystems both biological and human. Acting like the executives paying themselves exorbitant salaries is a virtue is frankly odd and deeply disgusting as a human being, I'm sure the lowly workers wished they could vote themselves higher salaries too.
Maybe if workplace democracy was enforced upon Walmart it would be an entirely different entity, likely for the better too.
> Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.
This is not the case.
Walmart doesn't have the lowest prices because they are efficient, yes conventional wisdom might dictate that but you are forgetting wholesalers exist from which conventional retailers buy from and the margin definitely tilts towards walmart but there was a time where they could easily compete against walmart and set their prices.
Now what's happening is that walmart has these special deals (in this case with pepsi) where pepsi would literally surveil all marts and see which is selling cheaper than walmart (FoodLion did that) and then what Pepsi did was cut off all the promotional money of FoodLion and increase their wholesaler prices.
Is this legal? Hell no. It's all completely illegal but the govt. stopped enforcing the law
Then when it was released by FTC, the whole document was almost redacted and Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to stop it from going out but some journalists dug/pressured for its release.
So walmart isn't the base because they are price competitive, hell-no. It's because they set the floor & have special deals with other companies to maintain that floor artificially.
Which actually leads to small retailers/chains shutting down because they can't compete on price and this essentially leads to a monopoly of walmart where it can dictate prices & increase them and the people are forced to STILL go to them.
And all of this while being immensely govt subsidized as you say too while paying their employees peanuts.
Actually Walmart when it was launched in germany was sued quite a lot for such practices that iirc they had to take an exit. No country wants a walmart because they know that they might use their american profits (which we discovered how come from shady practices themselves) and then use it to run marts at losses until the competition dies which is still immensely bad long term for the average consumer of whole world but particularly the americans in my opinion as all other govts are more protective of such industries for this good reason and walmart fails to measure up to those standards in other countries.
A lot of my points were heavily influenced by this video so I would recommend you to watch it to help understand more as well about what I am talking.
The deception of walmart actually fools a lot of people but the economical margin is actually quite low. It's the artifical floor that they set which gets unnoticed by many and this is why other retailers aren't able to compete, all of which is highly illegal but once again, the govt. stopped enforcing this law.
A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.
or
B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.
The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.
Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.
if walmart unfairly used its monopolistic position to steal from consumers, then of course i support serving justice.
is the point of this conversation just to proclaim you don't like some guys? what is your claim here? what action do you desire the collective to take? what is the rule that society should follow?
why do you expect that rule to lead to a more prosperous, thriving society?
I wish more intellectuals had their "brain on capitalism".
It is dismaying to find out how many American academicians take Marxism seriously - unless they stem from countries like Cuba that had the misfortune to actually let Marxist ideas rule them. It is mental fentanyl for certain kind of collectivist mind.
It's possible to criticize one thing without endorsing another. Your comment reads like a response to someone criticizing what the current US administration is doing by saying "yeah but the Democrats..."
Binary thinking is analogous to quantizing an LLM to 2 bits (worse, actually). You're not going to get good results.
Most countries that tried experimenting with various systems settled on a combination of a relatively free market with a welfare system supported by taxation of the resulting economic surplus. Which indicates that this is what the population at large finds most acceptable.
In theory? The most obvious is labor theory of value, plus false consciousness and the division of the society into exploitative class and exploited class.
In practice? For example, nationalization of businesses and collectivization in rural areas, including suppression of "kulaks".
Walmart is an insanely profitable business that pays most of its employees well under a living wage.
Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.
Man, these "hot takes" on the impact of AI are all becoming so tiring. I'm especially sick of all these "code was always the easy part" missives I see everywhere now, mostly because I think they're flat out wrong.
As another comment said, "easy can still be time consuming". I've seen plenty of projects that were well defined take months in implementation time (and then still sometimes fail for technical reasons). But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years? Because business people knew the difference between a successful tech company and an also-ran usually was, in huge part, due to the quality of their software engineers. If "code was the easy part", then you go write Google Maps in 2005, or Netflix streaming in 2007, or self driving cars in 2010, or, heck, ChatGPT in 2022.
Sure, good code for a bad product still fails, but this revisionist history trying to pretend coding was so easy, so LLM-assisted coding tools won't have a big impact, is nauseating.
> But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years?
The vast majority of developers are not paid to write code. They are paid to produce, deploy, and run bug-free and efficient software systems. That does not necessarily require you to type anything at a keyboard.
Ask yourself this: how come the more you progress in seniority the less code you write?
> That first thing do necessarily require you to type on keyboard.
Not exactly. Working on the problem domain to shift the solution domain is a tried and true technique to deliver higher-quality software. This happens away from a keyboard.
> Because they delegate the work. Nothing to do with seniority. CTO of 2 person startup still needs to write code.
No, that's quite wrong. The role of senior engineers is not defined by delegation. No organization pays someone a higher salary for a job description which focuses on shifting work onto everyone else around them.
Systems architecture, drafting and reviewing roadmaps, planning technical directions, tackling high-complexity work. Overall, figuring out what work we can and want to do. That does not involve a keyboard.
Writing code is hard. It is just as hard today as it was 10 years ago. Maybe harder, because stacks have become much more complicated.
Leaving aside the world of a startup that needs a simple CRUD app written, when you write software that is successful, it gets large and complicated. It fills up with features, and is really hard to understand.
Onboarding new people into that codebase takes time. When you don't know the code, you are not very productive, you make mistakes because you don't understand the repercussions of what you are doing. Your code hurts performance, it interferes in subtle ways with other parts of the system. It breaks conventions.
I've worked in companies where it basically takes a year to get really productive, and you need to give people a lot of mentorship and supervision in that first year.
And the second year you are better than your first, and every year you get better, because you understand the code better. As you understand the code better, you get more productive and more valuable to the company.
You have to keep all that code in your head and really understand it well. Not many can do this for large codebases. Code has gotten easier to write, with more ergonomic problems, but understanding a complex code base and being able to add features to it while maintaining performance requirements and quality requirements remains as hard as it was, and being able to do that remains a skill that companies desperately need. AIs, with their limited context window and shaky reasoning ability have not changed this.
Now, what happens with developers who grow to rely on AI to write code? You lose comprehensibility of your own code.
Again, ignoring the simple CRUD app or demo project, if you are working on a million line codebase, after 6 months of having AI write code, you no longer understand large parts of that codebase.
But you are the one responsible for catching the AI bugs! How's that gonna work?
It takes a great effort to read and understand code that someone else wrote. It is much, much easier to understand code you wrote. As you write less and less code, your mind drifts away from that productive zone, and you become less valuable, not more.
Microsoft is a great example of a company that lost the ability to ship features in a timely manner and that meet basic quality checks. Windows is a large, complex codebase. I'm pretty sure I know what got MS into the problem it's in.
And AI is just headshotting tech company after tech company, causing them to miss deadlines and ship buggy features as they de-skill their own developers and lose the ability to stay ontop of the complexity of their code.
Fortunately it's not happening to every tech company, but a good chunk of them are slowly turning into companies staffed by people that don't understand their own codebase.
This is not going to end well for these companies, or for the developers that stop writing code. I am not worried about programming as a profession, as cleaning this mess up is gonna require massive labor, but I am certainly worried about what is happening to companies like Microsoft or Facebook as they go all in on AI. When those companies fail, a lot of people will lose their jobs.
We are already seeing many well known companies really struggle with shipping code on time and meet basic quality requirements.
Repeating this banality does not make it true. There were tons of tech companies over the past 30 years or so who, despite solving the same problems, lost out to competitors because they had worse programmers.
I actually agree that the code is one of the most important things to get right at a software company. Still. I would argue very few companies win on code merit alone either though. Strategy, customer communication, market timing, etc on the business side; design, system architecture, dev velocity on the technical side. So many factors are important beyond the quality of the code.
If anything matches the definition of banality in this discussion, it's the puerile assertion that writing code is software development.
It isn't.
Even at FANGs the first thing they say to newjoiners and hiring prospects for entry level positions is that the workload involving writing code amounts to nearly 50% of your total workload.
And now all of a sudden are we expected to believe that optimizing the 50% solves the 100%?
Now we are shifting the goalpost. Who even claimed AI solves 100%. I would even be damned if AI can solve 50% and it would be huge. Personally I don't even think current AI solves even the 50%.
> Now we are shifting the goalpost. Who even claimed AI solves 100%.
I think you lost track of the discussion. I pointed out that in the absolute best case scenario LLMs only focus on tasks that represent a fraction of a software engineer's work.
Then, once you realize that, you will understand that the total gains of optimizing away the time taken on a fraction of a task only buys you a modest improvement on total performance. It can speed up a task, but it does not and cannot possibly eliminate the whole job.
Again, only a fraction of the tasks of a regular software engineering role involves writing code. Some high-profile roles claim their entry level positions at best spend 50% of their time writing code. If LLMs can magically get rid of said 50%,the total speedup is at best 2x speedup in delivery.
You can look at that and think to yourself "hey that's a lot". That is not what's being discussed here. I mean, read the blog post you are commenting on. What's being discussed is that LLMs reduce time spent on a fraction of the software development tasks, but work on other software engineering activities increases as it's no longer blocked by this bottleneck.
As others have wrote, the so-called AI doesn't reduce work: it intensifies it.
Oh man, I was composing my own opinion, and I can see that Hacker News is brimming with opinions. But that’s perfectly fine, I believe. All the diverse perspectives that we engage in this intellectual sparring match is a positive thing, isn’t it? :)
Welcome to the real world. The UK is obviously in no position to challenge China. And with the US invading and threatening to take over other sovereign nations solely because "it's in our national interest", we're certainly not one to talk.
Can you please explain (TFA doesn't mention patent laws, just unregulated drugs)? For example, my understanding is that semaglutide is protected by patent in the US - I had assumed HIMS was including semaglutide in some of their formulations under an agreement with the patent holder, but I guess that's not correct?
Side note, I'm all for the true innovators being able to patent drugs (like semaglutide) that they put a lot of research dollars into, but seriously fuck all these additional "method of delivery" and "formulation" patents that are bullshit that just get added on later by the patent holder solely as a way to try to restrict the entry of generics into the market after the original patent expires.
I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.
As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.
If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.
I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid.
Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.
I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.
Upthread someone made the point that adult "physique" for lack of a better word matters more for some pursuits than others. Chess prodigies don't need to grow to 6ft tall, but if a basketball prodigy doesn't get tall enough, he's never making the NBA.
I think the same concept could generalize: for pursuit X, the impact of childhood skill is inversely related to the impact of adult form.
There are no child prodigies yes or no in musical instrument playing. Because regardless of whether one is a prodigy or not, to become a basic,only basic, fundamental performer, one already needs to practice diligently from a childhood.Sometimes it's just a difference in the pieces they practice. Some children played musical pieces when they were young, while others only played etudes. The former might make people think they are child prodigies, while the latter might make people think they are not, but in fact they are the same.
Playing a musical instrument is far more athletic than sports, requires more scientific practice, and is more "competitive." The only difference is the scoring method. Music doesn't test "who can finish playing in the shortest time," but during practice, speeds faster or slower than the original tempo have already been practiced. Sports are about "who can push their limits"; in musical instrument playing, the very act of "practicing a complete, challenging piece" is already a limit. The difference is that it doesn't require pushing further limits.
There are 7 year olds[1] who can play better than I can despite 30+ years of playing piano, and even with fairly dedicated practise the progress is so much slower than someone with actual talent.
I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.
why do we never hear of 7 year old bands then? i think there's more to music than just technique and vast majority appreciate the artistic aspect. but i can imagine musicians appreciating the technique.
Are you looking for facts that will contradict your opinion?
Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.
Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.
There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.
As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.
And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.
There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.
Did you watch the video? Her expressivity and musicianship is far beyond many adults..
She had also just finished a concerto playing with an orchestra
EDIT Also with band music or non-classical music so much of it is to do with platform and distribution, and 7 year old prodigies don't get much interest outside of talent shows or Youtube. Justin Bieber (as mentioned in another reply) though is a good example of someone who did at age 12
Michael Jackson is another. And there were child stars in the movies.
One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.
I am a believer that in popular music there is an element of the "X factor" which is something intangible but to do with charisma/stage presence/force of character and that is probably exceptionally rare to find in pre-pubescent individuals and then to commercially market them beyond just a novelty factor - the real problem is distribution if anything
In classical music there is a slightly more "objective" character to performance given the high technical requirement and the audience culturally is more willing to earnestly listen to a child prodigy.
Most, if not all, musicians in any professional symphony orchestra was at one point an unusually talented 7yo.
It just takes many years worth of practice to get from being good by 7 years old standards to being good enough that people buy tickets to see your performance, especially in the classical music culture where skill, or "virtuoso", is everything.
Art still requires technique, and technique takes practice. Words like "prodigy" and "virtuoso" are typically reserved for techniques which take a large amount of practice to get right, like playing a violin. (You would never call someone a kazoo prodigy, for example.)
I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.
And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.
Is it against the rules to say that most of the comments here (at least right now) are drastically missing the point? "Rich countries exploit poor ones!!" - ok, fine, you could argue that's been happening since the beginning of time, doesn't change anything about the conclusions of the article. "The article obsesses over GDP convergence!!" - you can argue GDP is not the perfect metric but the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter.
The fundamental thrust of the article is that poor countries only "converged" for a short while due to the Chinese-driven commodity boom, and I think this argument is very compelling. Worse, as history has shown tons of times, commodity booms often end up being bad for a country in the long term because they don't lead to meaningful investments in other productivity-improving endeavors (e.g. Dutch disease that the article mentions).
And I think a subtext of this article is that the economic profession in general has a ton of soul searching to do. Too often economics has depicted rosy outcomes for a host of activities where it has just been flat out wrong. This article goes into detail about how "convergence" almost never happened except for a short "sugar high" driven my Chinese commodity demand. Similarly, I've seen a few mea culpas over the years arguing that the once orthodox view that globalization would be great for everyone failed to take into account how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power, one aspect in the rise of populism and some of its dangerous effects.
> how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power
Far from me to defend globalisation, but what would have been the alternative here? Is the idea that authoritarian governments have less hurdles in a more globalised world?
> the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter
What kinds of measurements are you referring to? Because poor countries are absurdly clearly converging since the end of WWII, but only if you don't ignore things like political independence, lack of civil wars, lack of state sponsored terror, or food security.
Those things contribute less to the GDP than fridges that break every 4 years.
Anyway, yes, there is some serious discussion on whether that process has stopped. This article isn't very good, the source it's extending from isn't trying to compare actual wealth, but still something may have happened recently.
And yes, it's probably the culprit everybody suspects, and economists should be louder in recognizing that some of their schools are in fact fraudulent.
Fine, I'll speak plainly, because your original post was exactly backwards. "Economic losers" in rich countries are those who did not benefit from globalization - think of all the hollowed out Rust Belt towns in the US, smaller villages in France that aren't on major train lines, etc. If anything, immigrants are largely economic winners because they are able to change their situation and go where there is more abundant opportunity.
Economists do a lot of soul searching, it seems, but quite enough to quit being economists.
I wonder if anyone has calculated the economic impact of diverting smart, math-capable thinkers from some other useful pursuit into economics. Surely they’d be more productive as accountants, or car mechanics, or as people who throw bricks through windows in the dead of night.
From the outside it looks like the field is an intellectual circular firing squad that produces little of tangible value.
> From the outside it looks like the field is an intellectual circular firing squad that produces little of tangible value.
The biggest value of economists is that they provide stories around the accumulation and destruction of capital.
It's always been odd to me that we took just one social science (with a massive case of physics envy) and use it to explain the world. Like, what would the world look like if we'd picked sociology instead?
Arguably, we'd have fared worse: we'd be starting our days by taking a power stance while listening to the TV broadcast of lists of positive words to prime ourselves into greatness, then we'd go out and salute people with "Most people in your neighbourhood are having a great day". All exams would be not-eating-marshmallows exams. Only upshot I can think of is HN would be called PHackerNews.
No, if there's one social science we should have picked, it's anthropology I tell you.
> Arguably, we'd have fared worse: we'd be starting our days by taking a power stance while listening to the TV broadcast of lists of positive words to prime ourselves into greatness, then we'd go out and salute people with "Most people in your neighbourhood are having a great day".
This is all psychology research (which presumably you know). (I definitely do as I have a PhD in it).
> No, if there's one social science we should have picked, it's anthropology I tell you.
I actually agree with this, will update my rant to include this next time.
Yes... I should have come up with jokes about deconstructing the power dynamics inherent to lunch, but I don't know many egregious examples of retracted sociology studies, so I chose to not only disregard HN rules but also to do so lazily...
Will do better when I reply to your anthropology-fueled rant.
> Yes... I should have come up with jokes about deconstructing the power dynamics inherent to lunch, but I don't know many egregious examples of retracted sociology studies, so I chose to not only disregard HN rules but also to do so lazily...
To be fair, this is more a function of psychology having a lot of experimental studies (as you can normally run them on individuals) which tend to get lots of press, and they're badly conducted because most psychologists suck at stats (and the incentives are towards publishing or perishing). That being said, it's really good that we now know lots of them were garbage and is a sign of decent science being done.
Sociology OTOH (rather like economics) typically deals with observational data which is less flashy and prone to all kinds of errors that make it harder to figure out what a replication would even look like (we can't generate another 100 countries to test, unfortunately).
Lot's of organizations in the tech and business space start out with "high falutin", lofty goals. Things about making the world a better place, "don't be evil", "benefitting all of humanity", etc. etc. They are all, without fail, complete and total bullshit, or at least they will always end up as complete and total bullshit. And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.
I think it really went in to high gear in the 90s that, especially in tech, that companies put out this idea that they would bring all these amazing benefits to the world and that employees and customers were part of a grand, noble purpose. And to be clear, companies have brought amazing tech to the world, but only insofar as in can fulfill the profit motive. In earlier times, I think people and society had a healthier relationship with how they viewed companies - your job was how you made money, but not where you tried to fulfill your soul - that was what civic organizations, religion, and charities were for.
So my point is that I think it's much better for society to inherently view all companies and profit-driven enterprises with suspicion, again not because people involved are inherently bad, but because that is simply the nature of capitalism.
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