The other day I was talking to a psychologist about [difficult personal situation which I am unable to discuss publicly] and she said to me “This must be really damaging to your self-worth.” And, my honest internal reaction to her statement (although I didn’t say it out loud to her) was “Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any? I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything. It is just that in my mind “self” and “worth” are concepts which do not intersect. Maybe that’s an autistic trait.
The flip side of detaching self-esteem from technical competency is that you can make very strong assertions without being arrogant.
People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.
People with a strong drive not attached to financial gain are often termed unambitious.
Your perceived worth really depends on values of society, so if you remove yourself from the equation, you only have no worth to others, not to yourself. Sequestered from others the sense of self has no meaning, so naturally you have no self-worth. Not because you are worthless, but because you have no self and place no importance on your perceived worth.
Or more strongly phrased, what's the point of self-worth if you can do everything you put your mind to?
I'd you can't but think you can, then that's a harmful psychological schism. Since no one person can achieve everything, self-worth is only meaningful in areas for which you lack competency
For example - and this deals not with self-worth but with stress - I'm pretty inflexible in my goals. When I can't meet my goals I tend to shut down. I'm often asked if I'm stressed, to which I can only respond, "Stress - what's that?". And yet clearly I've suffered a harmful schism between my perception of self and reality, as indicated by my lack of stress response.
> People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.
That's because utilitarianism [1] is just one of the three major recognized moral systems -- virtue ethics [2] and deontology [3] being the other two.
In real life, we tend to balance the three. Anyone who adhered strictly to one while ignoring the other two would rightly be labeled a kind of amoral monster.
And utilitarianism is generally applied more at the governmental/societal level than at the individual level. At the society level, you want the greatest good for the greatest number. While at the individual level, you want to give a vastly greater good to your young children, and your spouse, rather than treating your children and strangers' children as equals, or your spouse and other adults.
Someone who, in their personal life, uses utilitarianism as their primary guide is going to rightly be called amoral and unemotional. They'd be a monster, truly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
My partner considers my deliberateness as lazy. They won’t discuss things with me because they already know all about me.
My willingness to share their perception of me being ineffective was quite damaging to my self esteem. I never felt successful due to lack of acknowledgment of my achievements.
They asked me to leave the house about a year ago. Once I met new people and they saw me as successful and fun my self worth improved.
Yes, that's why I qualified self-worth by field of competency. I really try to view the world objectively, ignoring the opinions of others, but after N fizzled relationships... is it me or is it you?
But just because you are detached from societal values doesn't imply you should be detached from people. I can't enumerate the intangibles I get by surrounding myself with others. I perform better, I have better ideas, I feel more alert. I've never been able to understand why as I never gain any objective aid. Does unexpected input promote flexible thinking? Am I inspired by differing worldviews to think outside the box. Or is it simple happiness? No idea.
The closest conclusion is that some people are flexible and looking forward and others are rigid and looking for reasons to be dissatisfied.
This was a very interesting discussion, and I just wanted to note that both of you are extremely articulate and I quite enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.
- random stranger
I was reflecting on this conversation and since a random stranger seems to be interested….
I wish I had been kinder with my description of the less flexible. A better description I think is rigid and relates to others through dissatisfaction.
> People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.
Utilitarianism is a moral concept. I think you just mean analytical.
Maybe, but some people think it’s weird when you say “of course I’d divert the train over that grandpa”
I think it's interesting that the trolley problem is so useless you could interpret this as a statement for or against virtually any ideology or moral framework. Hence my rejection of any moral implication to bare analysis.
A related observation I've gotten from interacting with normies including my wife:
Most people assume there is such thing as a "self" and that it is okay, natural, and desirable to preference yourself when interacting with other people. Indeed, for most normies, there is only various people and their selves interacting. My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world, various roles that people happen to occupy, and here are my options for where I can slot into it, might as well choose the best one, but it never occurred to me that the other people in the system could be individually influenced or that you could preference your self over others. At least, until I interacted with others enough to realize that that was all they were doing.
Relatedly, most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda. As a result, the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance, as preferencing themselves and their worldview over everybody else. But to an aspie, there is no such thing as arrogance, because arrogance implies that one preferences their self-worth over others, and there is no such thing as "self" or "worth", and it is nonsensical to talk about self-importance.
Well that's an interesting theory. However, on reading it, my leading hypotheses are that people who express such disbelief in the possibility of their being selfish, either lack self-insight, or are lying. Your theory I would give a subjective probability rather lower than these.
Of course, this might be my lack of insight into the aspie mind. But self-interest is highly evolutionarily favourable, and is built into our brains from very early in our evolutionary history - from the first organisms that had brains.
Selfless people do not exist for biological and evolutionary reasons (self-preservation and such). But then... you are responding to someone who calls other people "normies".
Yeah it's your lack of insight and your projection of your own psychology onto others
The problem with that is: while it's true that one can't treat neurodivergent people fairly without taking heed of their testimony of how their mind works, selfishness is a behavior that has to be evaluated from an external perspective - for everyone, not just the neurodivergent. Because everyone who is ever selfish denies it, and has a story about why they're not being selfish. So it's always evaluated by POSIWID.
> Because everyone who is ever selfish denies it, and has a story about why they're not being selfish
Ayn Rand wrote a book The Virtue of Selfishness - of course, if she views selfishness as virtuous, she is going to claim that virtue for herself
Back to the realm of the more mainstream: a lot of people will admit they act selfishly sometimes - including me. I think you got to look after yourself, but you also should look out for other people - but if you go overboard on being selfless, you can start to be drained, and need to allow yourself a bit of selfishness to recharge.
I think what we really need is a healthy balance between selflessness and selfishness. And that’s the ideal I am for. But do I always get the balance right? I’m sure I don’t, sometimes I go a bit too far in one direction, other times a bit too far in the other.
I think what I’m saying here is pretty prosaic. Not everyone is going to agree, but heaps of people will.
This is a fascinating comment that really made me think.
And I'd like to present you with a different perspective.
You write that "My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world".
But it's important to realize that the "system of the world" you've developed is from your perspective exclusively. You are modeling everybody in your system, and you may be doing your best to be 100% objective and not push your own agenda.
However, your model is lacking because you can model your own "role" far better than anybody elses "role" -- you know your own preferences and desires with great accuracy, but not other people's. And you'll likely unconsciously assume that other people's preferences and desires as the same as yours, until proven otherwise.
You write "the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance". But what if it has nothing to do with broad sweeping systems, but the fact that your observations are extrapolating too much from your own preferences/desires that you are projecting onto others without realizing it?
So the perceived "arrogance" may not be what you describe as an inappropriate reaction that you are bringing an agenda to things. But may actually be an appropriate reaction to the fact that you're making too many assumptions in your "observations about broad sweeping systems" that the systems in your head are reality, when they are not.
When I have conversations with really smart people who come across as arrogant, it's not usually because they are being overly objective. It's because while their logic and deductions may be 100% correct, it's their starting assumptions that are wrong, which usually assume that other people have the same preferences/desires as themselves. But sometimes it's really hard to understand just how different people can be.
This reminds me of a quote from somewhere: All models are useful, none are correct. I (not OP) make a strong effort to be objective in my modeling of the world (even when it hurts), as it’s the only tool I have to understand and predict behavior and behavioral expectations. I wish we had access to predefined objective mental models, or could share them with each other (copy program structure and state across minds).
> All models are useful, none are correct.
I have generally heard this as "All models are wrong, but some are useful" which is attributed to the statistician George E. P. Box.
> or could share them with each other
Honestly, I'd say literature and fictional works generally come the closest to that. Sitting down with a novel written by someone from a vastly different background from yours is kind of the closest you can get to seeing the world through someone else's eyes.
Obviously not spy thrillers and the like, but novels that are more about real life.
Another really interesting resource is some of the podcasts that do ~hour-long interviews with famous people and really dig into their childhood, motivations, etc. Dax Shephard is particularly good at this. Discovering how vastly different people's backgrounds are, the big choices they made in life, and the unexpected factors that contributed to those choices.
> most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda.
I have a theory (not claiming to have invented it, just something I often think about) that most people have a strong tendency to assume that other people think the same way they do.
I feel the same.
One thing that I have struggled with in relationships is that others need to feel validated, that their decisions are rational and that other people believe that they are rational. Stimulus from the outside to satisfy the inside.
What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve. I think this ties into self worth which seems to be related to people’s perception of their actions and the approval they see from others. If you do not need external validation then you are not concerned about peoples perception of you and therefore self worth is a foreign concept.
> What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve.
I think you are conflating a lack of need for validation and the ability to self-validate.
It’s not that you don’t need any validation, it’s that you have the ability to provide yourself with the validation you need.
Don’t take that for granted. It’s both something to be proud of and a reminder that you aren’t so different from others.
You may not need anyone else to approve, but doesn’t it still cause issues when they don’t?
Yes, but that's a different problem.
Although it's also tangential to the essay, which is about the mechanisation of self-image - not just sell-worth, but identity in general.
Which has always been socially imposed (even on those who are sure they're different). But now it can be directed algorithmically by a very small number of actors, who have the power to apply behaviour and value modification tools that can be individually tailored for everyone in a demographic - in ways which most people aren't even aware of.
"Low self-esteem" is just one the effects.
Sure, those issues come just as a storm comes for a sailor. You cannot control what comes your way but only how you react. I’m not a psychopath, I understand social norms and I do take into consideration how my actions will affect others, but I try my best to live a fair life and deal with whatever comes my way instead of focusing on what-if’s or how people perceive me.
Is the total lack of care about what others think of me a sign or symptom of autism?
I had it from childhood to a much larger extent than any of my peers, even though it diminished as I grew older.
I didn’t care in my teens and 20s and then suddenly in the last few years (in 35), i realized I cared tremendously.
Part of it I think is blows to my self-confidence, part is that when you have casual light social connections (school, the in-person workplace, I now wfh) you get this sense of people pseudo-caring about you.
But once that wanes (age and wfh) and you have you put effort into getting even the smallest amount of care from others. Which, in turn requires vulnerability.
I think there are two ways you can look at it.
One is what I think of as the neurotypical way. They spend a lot of energy on social modeling, on fitting people into hierarchies of privilege. (E.g., "respecting your elders", older sibling vs younger, teachers vs students, the popular kids, and so many other things.) Then in the same way they're judging the worth of others, they fit themselves into the same primate status model.
I think that's what the psychologist is talking about. Personally, I find that way not super useful.
But another way is sort of reverse engineering. From how person X treats themself, what can we learn about how much they value their own self? Like you, I didn't have much of a concept of self-worth in the sense of "where do I place myself in the many hierarchies most people around me are constantly aware of." But a therapist eventually got me to see that I did not treat myself as worth the same as the people around me. Paying attention to that has improved my life a lot.
The big question for me is to what extent the latter thing is influenced by the former. For neurotypical people I gather the link is pretty strong. For me it's definitely a weaker link, but it's hard to tell the difference between "there is no link" and "I don't notice the link".
Not a psychologist but I am friends with more than a few. I don't know why you assume the psychologist meant the first because they did not. Self-worth has nothing to do with social hierarchy. It is how you treat yourself and a core thing therapist work on is helping you treat yourself the way you would treat others, with compassion and respect.
I thought maybe I was using the phrase wrong, but the first two definitions I find are "the internal sense of being good enough and worthy of love and belonging from others" and "a feeling that you are a good person who deserves to be treated with respect". You'll note that those are both inherently social. And both "good enough" and "with respect" are about one's position in the caste/hierarchy structure.
The reason I assume what the psychologist meant is that most of them are neurotypical, and neurotypical people are deeply invested in social primate dynamics. I understand that this is hard for neurotypical people to see, but you might read things like DeWaal's "Chimpanzee Politics" or Johnson's "Impro" [1]. Plus there's my personal experience, where psychologists are very inclined to talk about self-worth in the social sense. And I think that's fine; I'm sure it works well for their neurotypical patients.
[1] particularly the section on status transactions, which are vital for authentic theater performances, but are rarely articulated because it's so natural to neurotypical people
I think what they simply meant is that neurotypical people are a lot busy with making models of hierarchies between people and finding out their own position within that hierarchy, and mostly automatically or unconsciously derive self worth from that.
While some types of non neurotypical people don't automatically spend their mental energy on such thoughts and analysis. That is maybe why 'self worth' feels a strange term to them. They simply are who they are and will not try to come across as this or that type of person (helping, smart, empathetic, strong character etc) . Neurotypical people hence find the way they come across weird.
Are you suggesting that self-worth can only be defined as the sum of your perceived worth to others? That makes the 'self' in worth an oxymoron, no?
To you, it seems the best way to achieve self-improvement is to maximize your value to others, i.e. by moving up the social hierarchy. But that doesn't imply that those who don't play the game have no worth, does it?
I think you are conflating a sense of happiness with a sense of worth. They are not necessarily the same.
For example I occasionally find myself in conflict with an acquaintance over a miscommunication. If after explaining the underlying conditions the other individual refuses to adjust their perception of me, I couldn't care less. That's their problem, not mine, even if they continue to spread their (possibly vile) misperceptions.
Now if I had sucked up to them perhaps, yes, I would have improved my life. But what I did not do was reduce my self-worth.
I just described two different ways of thinking about self-worth, so I am not suggesting it "can only be defined" as anything.
I take comfort in seeing my experience described by others. I’m waiting on a neurological evaluation to see where on a spectrum I exist. I have been evaluated for a personality disorder of which none was found.
Hey, I'm glad to hear that. Some years back I came across a great online test, one created by autistic people. I can't find it now, but I strongly remember the graph, which showed a bimodal distribution and marked my place on it. [1] In the years following it was such a help, in that I could without judgement see how I and others related. It let me stop worrying so much about trying to be "right" and focus on being right for me.
As long as I'm mentioning things that helped, I'll recommend this online alexithymia test: https://www.alexithymia.us/test-alexithymia
It looks at ability to perceive one's own feelings. Once I realized that I was relatively bad at it, it was such a relief. And in the years since I've gotten a lot better, because I knew I needed to work harder at it than the average person.
[1] If that rings a bell for anybody, I'd love to know!
I am a Christian. Something I have found within my faith tradition (and something I find is lacking in the culture around me) is a sense that I am in possession of an infinitely durable source of dignity and worthiness that is not tethered to who I am or what I have done. I have found this conceit enormously consoling.
I'm envious of that intrinsic sense of self worth, but I don't follow how that's a consequence of being Christian. I carry guilt and shame from sins that can't be rectified, knowing that Jesus loves me doesn't help me love myself.
Well, for some people I imagine it helps to know that there is someone that loves them.
Christian mythology is powerful because of the idea that God loves you so much he will give you infinite chances to repent and turn away from sin for as long as you live. Carrying guilt and shame for your sins won't fix them, but being sorry for them and working to sin no more will fix your future.
It was even more powerful in an era when the gods were vengeful in their retribution and/or capricious in their favor. I'm not saying I like it or agree with it, but it does really bring some form of comfort to people, which is why it spread so far and lasted for so long.
It's pretty funny when you consider that a huge part of Christian evangelism is the attempt to convince normal people that they aren't worth dirt and are condemned to eternal torture unless they believe in somebody that the religious can't prove exists for a feat that they can't prove ever happened.
Religion has to sell itself or else it will eventually cease to exist. Christianity still exists.
That said, my personal feeling is that Christians (at least where I live) these days mostly focus on what to do right themselves (to be a self worthy God loved person) rather than saying what others are not doing right.
Yes, that is one manifestation of Christian evangelism. Modern Christianity is plagued by literalism and ignorance. Most self identifying Christians (and I would posit most skeptical rationalists) have not deeply engaged with the texts and often when they do get hung up on an overly literal interpretation. If one looks beyond the surface, there is tremendous wisdom that helps everyone live better today -- not just in some hypothetical afterlife. Indeed, I believe that if you try to follow the teachings of Jesus, your interactions with others and your life writ large will be better. That has been my personal experience and I had to be called back kicking and screaming as a committed non-believer.
Of course, having said all that, I am personally dismayed by the state of Christianity in our world. Institutional Christianity has done and continues to do tremendous harm in the world so I am sympathetic to your perspective. Indeed, I am most upset because I find the way that many nominally Christian institutions behave to be directly contrary to the their own sacred texts. The hypocrisy is almost unbearable. But I would encourage everyone reading this to withhold judgment of other's faith practices and/or self-identification until you understand where they are coming from rather than lumping them in with the worst exemplars of their nominal affiliates.
That's a rather reductive take. Telling people "they aren't worth dirt" is a hard sell, for one thing.
Not when you're also trying to sell them your solution.
"You are a worthless sinner, a transient cloud of mortal dust, with a soul that is in danger of an eternity of torment. Unless you - you know - do what we tell you."
As marketing pitches go, it seems pretty straightforward.
It's not reductive at all. Telling someone that they are only worthy of torture or destruction for not believing in an unprovable entity is actually worse than that.
Allistic people tend to feel a need to believe in something, even (especially) if they cannot produce evidence for it. This is called "faith" and widely regarded as a virtue because it gives structure and purpose to an existence that largely came about by accident. Jesus is fairly middle of the road in terms of horribleness of things to have faith in.
Fascinating. Would you elaborate on the mechanics behind the dignity/worthiness?
I think the idea is that "people" tend to be attracted towards things that they think will increase their self worth and avoid things that decreases their self worth.
Though from a stoic perspective the only thing that can affect your self worth are your own actions, not external events which you have no control over.
And of course from a Buddhist perspective the self is an illusion, making all this 'self-worth' chasing akin to tilting at windmills.
I don’t think the notion of self-worth is rejected by Buddha. I think the expectation of achieving it through actions is rejected. The expected results are the problem not self-worth or actions.
True, but it’s harder to run around with a begging bowl in Western cultures. Even though self worth is an illusion, right livelihood is part of the Noble Eightfold Path.
I was very unBuddha while pursuing what currently enables my lack of expectations. I’m just discovering acting on the world with no expectations of what is next.
I think stoic ideas are from an era where their circumstances made them have those principles. We don't live in that era. It is possible to affect others and the associated cascading effect that can bring about a change in others action which were affecting you negatively. If Naval's idea of "individuals having leverage holds water" directly implies that you can change others, albiet slowly. If your reach becomes big enough that it becomes a threat that "other actors" need to curtail that reach through "algorithms" is another evidence that you were indeed having effects that they didn't like.
You think Marcus Aurelius was unable to affect other peoples' actions? That's not the idea. The point is that you can't directly make someone else think or feel a certain way, only act on them externally.
If causality holds, acting externally will have changes to internal assessments assuming good faith dialogue. Plus Marcus Aurelius was helpless in that it would take him lot of time and energy to give personal attention to each individual and clarify their doubts. He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.
> He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.
He did and we’re still reading them to this day.
I could be wrong in this. But wasn't his writings only for himself and was published only later. How many people really referred to his writings? When was printing press invented? How popular was it compared to Bible? Was it possible for people to consume his writings in multimedia formats like video, audio? Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds? Did he have debate with others to defend his ideas watched by many, how would he respond to those counter-arguments? Would your mind change considering if his responses weren't that strong or on filmsy grounds?
> Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds?
I honestly cannot tell whether this is satire or if I just don’t want to be on this planet anymore.
Meme-pages are today's "brevity is the soul of wit". They really distill experience and wisdom in nice consumable package.
I hope it's satire. It would be quite limiting to believe that people can only learn things from short format video
Marcus Aurelis wrote in short snippets format. They were notes to himself which were latter organized into flowing organized essays by historians and writers.
I think most people use other people as a kind of mirror, to try to see who they are and how they fit. (Autists may do it less than others, or even none at all.)
If everybody thinks well of me, then I should probably think well of myself. If everyone thinks badly of me, then I'm probably not worth very much. So goes the logic.
So social media is tearing up peoples' self image, not just because of put-downs and deliberate trolling, but mostly because everyone is putting forward the best version of themself that they can, and we compare that, not to the version of ourselves that we put forward, but to the reality of ourselves, and we lose in comparison.
And that's the problem with self-worth-by-comparison. There's always someone against whom you lose, in some aspects. Richest man in the world? Yeah, but that other guy has a bigger yacht, and we use yachts as measuring sticks.
That's true of all of life, but social media amplifies it. We can see more people faster to compare ourselves to, and they can present a fake image more convincingly.
And marketers play on this status anxiety. Just look at pretty much any car ad. The best way to innoculate yourself against this (to an extent anyway) is to learn a bit about marketing and do some marketing. Once you have seen how the sausage is made, it has less power.
I think social media broke my partner’s self-worth. I’m not on social media beyond HN and found no way to communicate with someone so engaged in remote relationships.
>> "Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any?
This almost made me laugh. I know where you're at. You got a long road ahead so get started! Tell your psychologist when these things pop in your head. Have a laugh, but then reflect on it or whatever.
Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder). There are many things, but it's not super important to define it, lest you let it define you.
> Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder).
You are right, except in my case I’m pretty sure it is more autistic than any of those - our children do X/Y/Z and professionals tell us “those are signs of autism” (one child diagnosed, the other not yet formally but the paediatrician is convinced she has it and on the waiting list for an assessment) and (for many but not all of them) I’m thinking “what do you mean that’s a sign of autism? I was like that when I was a kid too, some of them I am even still like that”
One way of looking at it is how you assess yourself in things and take pride in or feel regret about that.
For example, you wrote this comment. It is a well written comment. You likely have some belief roughly along the lines of "I write reasonably well". You have probably received feedback along those lines throughout life, and that reinforces that belief. This is perhaps mildly pleasing or at least seems correct.
Now suppose instead that whenever you wrote things people replied:
"Huh?"
"What? This makes no sense"
"Good god what led you to think that? That's so stupid!"
And so on. And you even reread some of your own writings that you thought were good and they seem to strike you as not good. The view that your writing is not good comes to strike you as correct. You aim to improve but continue to receive negative feedback. The view that you are genuinely not good at writing seems to be correct and you come to believe you cannot ever be good at writing.
That would be negative self worth. Does this example line up at all with any internal thought processed you have? Are you pleased by praise or hurt by criticism? Even to the level of thinking the judgements are correct or incorrect.
(To be clear you are good at writing)
This begs the question because it starts with "how you assess yourself". Why assess yourself, the self, the whole person, at all? So, you're not good at writing. Perhaps you're not good at anything. In that case, you probably shouldn't attempt things except as practice. But why give yourself an overall score as a person, what are you even supposed to do with that information? You can't be anybody else, so it's useless. Work with what you've got, fuck 'em.
My theory based on nothing but internal reflections
A lot of people's minds are raised from a young age to make judgements and comparisons with others. Their minds are told that one must be useful to be valuable, and that simply _being_ isn't enough.
Over time those bad habits of the mind are so ingrained and automatic that we assume them to be part of "me". "My" thoughts, "my" ideas and so we don't question their assumptions or where they came from.
It takes conscious effort to be able to change those habits into something more positive, or to be able to center your mind to a point where those habits seen as just other thoughts and don't have the same "weight" behind them.
We're an ever changing process and being able to judge and adjust is a useful skill. It's just that doing that doesn't require all of the crap we put ourselves through due to unchecked assumptions.
I write imprecisely but I wad actually referring to assessing how you are at specific things. How you feel you are at specifics bleeds somehow into a general sense of self esteem. I definitely agree on not tying your sense of self worth to the opinion of others, though we are none os us totally immune.
Even diogenes the cynic who scorned society reproached himself when shown he was not meeting his own standard as well as he could. He lived simply and had but a cup to drink from. Then he saw a child drinking from a stream and smashed his cup in frustration at not having thought of the child's simpler approach.
Anyway my comment was aiming at illustration what high self worth or lack thereof may feel like, rather than what one should do.
How about integrity? Do you find that relevant? Usually people with integrity have high self-esteem because they adhere to a certain set of ethics. I'm not trying in any way to pass judgement, just to give you a different perspective.
> How about integrity? Do you find that relevant?
I feel a very strong ethical obligation to our children. I often worry about whether I've met that ethical obligation to them.
But when I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about our kids, and what I have done and failed to do – I'm not thinking about "self worth". I feel guilty about some things – whether I should or I shouldn't – but my mind doesn't associate those feelings with the phrase "self worth".
my understanding of integrity means that you do things that are guided by a shared moral compass - keep your word, avoid cheating, etc. Those signals seem to be all external (you do them because you don't want to violate your contract with another person, etc). I don't think that's in any way related to self-worth (which is a measurement of value to yourself, independent of others)?
It doesnt have to be a shared moral compass, but simply your own. That is to say, you can practice integrity in isolation from other people.
A simple mundane example would being going to the gym if you tell yourself you will.
A more complex example would be acting in accordance with the values you believe in or not. If you think people that kick dogs are terrible, but you yourself go around kicking dogs, this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance and low self worth. If you promise yourself to stop, but keep breaking that promise, you realize you cant be trusted, which also impacts self worth.
This definitely touches on one important aspect of difficulty in enduring an addiction one is trying to cease. A promise broken thousands of times, and yet still made again.
However if it is the very cycle itself that increases the effort necessary for breaking out of it, how tied to self-worth is it for different people? When one is the subject and the researcher or the judge, defendant, and prosecutor simultaneously - it can be much more challenging to locate the anchor to which self-worth is tied.
Huge topic, but I totally agree. There's a massive feedback between self control and self-worth
It is definitely related to self-worth, because the contract you make is not with another person, it's with yourself. And when you respect it, it increases your self respect and worth.
I don't see how that's the case at all. A sense of obligation (how much you value someone else) has nothing to do with self worth (how much you value yourself). If this was the case at all, a great treatment for low self esteem would be to commit to stuff for others, since that'd automatically make you valuate your own self more
>If this was the case at all, a great treatment for low self esteem would be to commit to stuff for others, since that'd automatically make you valuate your own self more
How do you know this is not true?
If your sense of obligation is seen as a value function for people, it follows that your self-worth is the value when you plug-in "self". Helping others and volunteering is indeed something that brings satisfaction and could help heal your sense of self-worth. If you value another person higher than yourself, by helping them you would establish a connection between their worth and your own. You potentially went from lacking any evidence of positive self-worth to having concrete first-hand evidence that you are worth something to someone.
> How do you know this is not true?
years of therapy :-)
the opposite is also demonstrably false - there's people with huge self-esteem who are known for their complete disdain for others or their opinions.
I can see that. And your counterexample is also pretty apt.
I guess universally it may not be true, but I suspect for some it very well could be. Just depends on the value function you ascribe to (knowingly or unknowingly).
It should also be said that this topic is more complex than these simple models. I've heard it described that Narcissists essentially refute the evidence rather than allow it to poke a hole in their bubble of self-worth; All of that to say, there are many moving pieces beyond just how you value things that add up to your self-worth.
I spent 56 years with that thought. Looking back for me it was family identity and trying to achieve standards of someone that died a decade before I was born.
I now understand self-worth in a new way. I had to realize that there was plenty of time to slow down and be deliberate. I had to get to point where I could take the time I needed to do a task.
I have no idea how others can find self worth but for me I describe it as being comfortable.
I feel this. As to why, my answer is simply that it’s a waste of time to worry about it, so why bother?
I was confused by this part of the article: For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”
What's wrong with basing your worth on something like value provided professionally plus value provided personally, to myself and others?
Are we supposed to think that we are valuable (worth something) just because we exist?
It might be fine if you’re a successful professional or entrepreneur and have a good salary or business.
Of course if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker or a burger flipper, and your labor is completely fungible and provides low monetary remuneration, then you would judge yourself as low(er) value in comparison. So determining your self-worth via other properties makes a lot more sense huh?
We can create value through more things than what we do for a job. It’s true!
Completely agree with your point, and it feels like a personal preference/trait. Do you think this tendency is related to an autistic trait because of a focus on facts over social norms?
I'm the same way. I could dispassionately talk about either my strengths or my weaknesses. But I don't see the world as measuring myself in an overall way, nor other people. We all have so many dimensions that are always in so much flux, how could you ever reduce that to something meaningfully quantifiable?
Interesting! If I said you were bad at your job and an ugly, inattentive partner, would your primary reaction be one of hurt or just one of calculating self-preservation? I would personally feel very emotional if I heard those things from someone in real life, so it’s an honest question.
What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday? I wish I could say I was driven by rational assessments of my needs as a Homo Sapiens and my moral responsibilities therein, but I think I’d be lying to myself. Or, at least, it’s an eternal struggle to minimize the importance of self-worth.
Absolutely I can have negative emotional reactions to criticism-although it all depends on what the criticism is, who is making it, whether I agree with it. But I don’t mentally link those feelings to a concept called “self-worth”. To the extent I have a “self”, it is a bucket whose contents varies over time, and varying thoughts and feelings go in that bucket-sometimes those feelings can get quite dark, but even then I still don’t think of myself as having a “worth”
What motivates me? Certainly part of me likes it when people say I’ve done a good job. Again I don’t mentally link that feeling with a concept called “self-worth”. But often also I get motivated by the pleasure of the work in itself - when I really get hooked on a program, I find improving it is something I enjoy as an end-in-itself
Not the person you're replying to but
"What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday?"
It's fun and it makes me happy. People in my life are smart people but they're just as flawed as I am, what they think of me also changes over time. Why would I build the foundation of my life and career on such shaky ground?
That sounds like a question for your psychologist, not randoms on the internet.
To interact a little more with the substance. I don't think I understand what you're saying. You're clearly using the concept when you write
>I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything
That's what negative self-worth is. You seem to understand it fine. self-worth is your subjective assessment of how much you are worth. The self's assessment of the "worth" (whatever you choose to load into that term) of the self.
You missed the distinction between "I don't feel I have any worth" and "I don't see the world in terms of quantifying worth."
A few things that inspire me in the Digital age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic
Call me unempathetic, but how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller, IE: lets say a small locale or village). But you could have easily said the same thing in a non-digital age, with just more rudimentary metrics and a market that is a community that either values or doesn’t value your work. Much like the proverbial school playground (which could also be analogous to a market).
It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
> with just more rudimentary metrics
I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.
The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.
Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.
You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.
That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.
> how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller
you answered it yourself.
What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?
_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)
> What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet?
>> When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours [...] One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating [...] Soon after, I stopped skating.
Seems like the author struggled with comparison before the internet, like the grandfather comment said.
This is a great point.
In one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, he talks about the emotional impact of looking at one's portfolio performance. If you do it rarely, like quarterly or annually, it'll generally be a positive experience. If you do it day by day, you'll have quite a lot of negative experiences. Because we're wired for loss aversion, we'll weight those negative experiences more highly. The same facts, presented differently, have very different impacts.
If I'm doing my own thing, like the author was with roller skating, my basis for comparison is me. There will be ups and downs, but more of the former, because we can't help but learn. But as you say, the bigger group I rank myself against, the more those experiences will be negative. I also think the bigger groups discourage camaraderie, because the declining chance of future interaction means smaller rewards for collaboration and support.
I think your notion of "the truth" is heavily influenced by exactly the context she's pointing at. Google and Meta's algorithmic rankings aren't "the truth", and "the truth" doesn't change on each regular parameter rebalancing. Those algorithms were built by a relatively small number of people from a narrow set of backgrounds who were focused on maximizing usage and revenue, and the bulk of "the truth" they contain is about that.
One thing importantly different about our age is context collapse. With communication costs and marginal costs near zero, a global service is easier and cheaper to build than local ones with equivalent coverage. It's as if we've taken every ecosystem in the world and dumped it onto the San Francisco peninsula to fight it out to discover "the truth" about what plants and animals are "best".
What's different about those small locales and villages is that each one of them naturally had its own values. Skills and tastes co-evolved. Schools of thought were born and elaborated. Communication and movement between locales gave useful exchange and inspiration, but generally weren't enough to swamp variation.
In the pre-web era, the question of, say, whether Irish music was better than Spanish music would be seen as kind of a dumb question to take any more seriously than for an entertaining argument. But having put everything in Meta's global blender and reduced it to counting updoots, the ever-present metrics purport to provide "the truth" to questions like that.
They don't, of course. But they do place a much larger burden on us to recognize that not everything that goes up and to the right is an unalloyed good.
> how would this be any different in a non-digital era
I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.
While I agree with the main point you're making, I have to note that likening school playgrounds to markets is a questionable analogy. Schools are far closer to prisons than markets - in fact, I can't come up with a single way that school playgrounds are similar to markets other than the fact that they both involve humans.
how are schools any close to prisons, other than both involving humans?
A chapter in Chemerinsky's casebook on Constitutional law is titled "Speech in Authoritarian Environments: Military, Prisons, and Schools."
Involuntary confinenent?
schools imprison kids now? really?
Kids can't just leave schools in the middle of the day, so basically yes.
You can’t leave your job in the middle of the day, so basically you’re a felon too?
This kind of meme nonsense belongs to reddit, not here
Maybe this varies by location but at least in the UK, adults can usually leave the grounds of their place of work during a lunch break. Not true for school kids. And the difference in population density between schools and offices is usually stark.
You can leave your job. You may not be allowed to return to it, but you can walk away.
You can switch your job as desired. Kids can’t switch their school.
You can not have a job (economic consequences aside). You can’t not be in school.
They didn’t choose to be there and if they hate it, the main way out is waiting.
Kids can’t switch their own school because they’re not their own legal guardians until they’re 18. You can’t switch nationalities just because you want to. That doesn’t make your country a penal colony.
You can OBVIOUSLY it be in school. No country on earth forces kids to join any school (let alone to attend it).
Most people didn’t choose to be at their jobs and hate it, the main way out is waiting for retirement.
Technology amplifies this, greatly. In a non-digital era our field of view was narrow, expanding either to our immediate physical surroundings or, when we went beyond them, limited by what we could read in a newspaper or see on TV. When I was little, I didn't know who was the most skilled person at my hobby or how popular it was or whether beautiful people online also happened to excel at it, while my teenage hormones wreaked havoc on both my personality and looks. Every single child in the civilized world nowadays is subjected to exactly that. You may be an aspiring dancer and there will be a million like you right there on your phone. It's hard for them to formulate self-worth when that is the case.
Does that mean the internet and digital advances are bad? No, it just means we were unprepared for them in a very meaningful way.
How did the child of a random peasant family 300 years ago 'formulate self-worth'?
I don't see how digital technology diminishes that in relative comparison.
A random child peasant might be the best at sewing, strongest, wisest, or most handy in their village of 40.
When compared with a pool of 40 million, that doesn't seem like much to be proud of.
Because...? Of what underlying reasons?
There is no fundamental force of the universal that makes it so, if that's what you're asking. There is however a tremendous amount of psychology that predisposes people to seeking the admiration and respect of others. If you want a deeper reason, it is likely due to a cultural understanding that these things are actually advantageous, and some amount of deeper evolutionary biology
That is understood… but why do you think such a child would have received more ‘admiration and respect of others’ 300 years ago in some tiny peasant village?
> She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".
It's not different, it's just worse. Online there are more people, interacting more shallowly (and therefore judging more superficially and less empathetically), and presenting a more fake version of their own self for you to compare yourself to, and we spend more time wading in it.
It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.
If you can convince yourself that your problems are caused by modern novelties, then you don’t need to address the tricky problem of what’s actually causing them (it’s probably yourself). Any sort of scapegoating like this is going to have a lot of popular appeal.
I agree, it’s also the argument that “nothing will change the big picture anyway” when you don’t go to a business with shady business practices.
Or when changing eating habits in general like eating less meat or consuming less dairy.
It’s not entirely about changing the industry, a part of it is just integrity.
Every user on HN has a score (up votes vs down votes) based on reactions to comments and submissions.
How many of us will not be our authentic selves in a comment because of fear of how others might react? I know that I have done this.
Of course. I feel more comfortable speaking my mind under a more anonymous account. Even then I'm pretty measured, I just don't want to deal with potential headaches in my professional career.
I don't owe the world my true self
How one views karma is funny. I take comfort in my aggregate score due to implied comradely. I noticed down votes happen no matter what is stated.
Not really the ideal way to approach HN, although understandable.
If you're considering HN from a forum perspective, the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason). Reddit is the same. You rack up 'karma' so that you can afford to take some downvotes for speaking your mind.
Now, the other dynamic is that some people here expect to see and work with other HN folks in the real world. THAT is more chilling, and I don't think one could be one's 'authentic self' in that instance unless you're already a 'name' who doesn't need to give a rip about others' opinions.
> the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason).
That's not really correct; downvotes on HN hide your comment and it eventually becomes dead (it can also become dead if super-users flag it); then it will only be visible for users who are logged in and have explicitly opt-in in seeing dead comments.
So no, you can't use your karma to go against the hive mind on HN, your comment will just be flagged and hidden completely.
I tend to wonder what the heck I said that caused an unexpected downvote.
I tend to get grumpy when an expected one happens, there are many unwritten rules on HN.
I tend to defend against imagined arguments with my statements, and against corner cases far, FAR too much. Getting those imagined arguments wrong doesn't help either.
I do notice that things that are inconvenient but true tend to take a hit, then rise back over time, so that's a good thing.
I genuinely don't care. I've questioned downvotes I've received before, but usually it's just because I want to know why I might have had a bad take or how I might be looking at things wrong.
Respectfully, I know nobody here and you all mean nothing to my life, which is much broader than what I post here, so what do your judgements matter to me? What do these points actually mean that I should choose not to be myself because of them? The answer, to both, is nothing.
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I have a career, nice coworkers, have few hobbys and have good friends. The only thing fucking up my selfworth honestly is the dating landscape with all this social media artificial bullshit were nobody wants to commit anymore and everything is fake. It is not worth engaging in it currently and you rather focus on yourself and education/career more it gets you further. If by chance you meet a unicorn take the chance but else just don't bother it only fucks with your selfworth.
Funny, I have career issues and dating is easy but that’s only because I was willing to stake my whole life on it and use everything in my power to change it (except changing my looks - I look mediocre).
Happily married right now. Feel free to email me to exchange some career advice for dating advice.
> I was willing to stake my whole life on it and use everything in my power to change it
You made dating easy by fully revolving your life around it for some period? That sounds very interesting - mind sharing the bullet points with everyone?
Sure, very opinionated but here we go: dating, it’s about matching personality. Do the hexaco.org test, figure out how to identify the extreme dimensions on your profile that you identify with (openness in my case). Learn to find those women. Now be prepared to talk to 10000 women by cold approaching or through online dating. It usually takes more like 200 for a GF but you will be doing socially uncomfortable things, so having a hardcore mindset helps.
Cold approaching respectfully is a small course on its own, especially since I deviate from standard advice because I test what works for me. TL;DR: approach respectfully (safe and it’s nice) yet playfully or curiously (fun and not boring).
Online dating: enhance your pictures with AI as if it is the best picture of you ever taken. Test this with a few throwaway dates by telling them that your pictures were edited. Bonus points if they aren’t deterred by it (it means they can take candor). If they are, well it was a throwaway date anyway. Have throwaway dates in general. These are dates with women you genuinely like but you test certain things. All the things you test should have a screening effect (aka if they like it, it means they match you better), that’s how you make testing things ethical. Also, use an autoswiper and don’t get caught doing it.
What helps: meditation, social courage (better than confidence as my confidence is quite low but my courage is crazy high), studying charisma (as it pertains to your personality).
That’s a very short tl;dr. I am probably missing things. Feel free to email to chat about it. I desperately need career advice for in the EU.
Thank you, very interesting. Can you talk more about cold approaching respectfully? How did you overcome that feeling of being a creep in the beginning when you’re not calibrated yet on what works for you?
Creepiness is a judgment from others and their problem. You can do your best to improve on lessening it (aka always approach from the front because it’s best to be in view, at least 5m distance and a loud enough “excuse me” to draw their attention and to let them know you are about to say something. If they show any sign of having no time, disengage and quickly wish them a good day). All you need to do is: your best and be as respectful as possible. If you do that and you know you have strived to the utmost to be the best version of yourself then others have no moral ground to stand on IMO. Freedom of speech is what ultimately makes us all approachable, yes, you too
My email is in my profile
> a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers
Does this really happen? Or maybe just in the USA?
Why would I, as a customer, care about server's follower count? Is it somehow correlated with their performance?
Not exactly the same, but some friends and I have a tradition of going to a local equivalent to Hooters on Mother's Day since it's the only place that you don't need a reservation. The last time we went the server gave us all an official card with her name on it where we could go to leave feedback for her.
Businesses live and die by Google Maps reviews and social now. I am familiar with a Kentucky pizza chain that gave instructions that if each server did not meet their Google review quota, they would be let go or moved to hosting.
I've never heard of anything remotely like that occurring in the restaurant industry and servers - but there are industries where the reach of someone would be important for hiring or booking them for a gig. In today's world, social media followers is one of those proxies we tend to default to for reach.
But a similar thing has been part of the service industry for a long time - attractive and charismatic people will often get the best shifts, even if they're not necessarily the hardest working or best at the other aspects of the job. I suspect if such a thing around the followers is happening now, it's just the a new manifestation of the same underlying cause.
Possibly more followers relates to more customers coming by especially for her/him
I sometimes get hand written note to review and mention the name of the person who made my food on food delivery app.
It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'.
It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example.
It's absolute brain rot.
The main hack these commodification entities makes seems to be to disrupt the traditional flow of information and valuation, then create a new marketplace it controls. For books, I imagine many centuries ago the literary class wrote and read books largely from the social and intellectual forces at the time. The smallest unit of these interactions would be a member reading a book, liking it and recommending it to his friends. The net aggregation of such would slowly produce a trend, communicating to writers that there was a higher chance of being read if you followed it. Now such exchanges have been consumed by digital marketplaces. The sheer size means writers have to make a Faustian bargain to bend to it's needs, while readers have a curated list of books for them. Any well reading writer and reader have an impossible time communicating because the main flow of information has been hijacked.
But that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour. It’s nigh impossible to sell literary prose at any significant volume unless you have a sizeable social media following. The only exceptions are people who have a sizeable traditional media following and a specific personal reason for not being on social media.
"that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour" feels hand-washy.
chicken/egg of course, but the question people – especially technologists – should be asking is: is that really helping society progress? I would argue, like this article does, that it isn't and is indeed harming society by atomizing and attempting to quantify behavior in the name of 'choice' which of course is a non-sequitur. The commercial engines should be in service of humanity and enrichment, not the other way around. A brilliant writer isn't a social media maven, nor should they be.
I think my self-worth was overly tied to technical skills. Now I see that it's more about impedance matching things... explaining how complex things work, using simple words, forcing technology to bend to my will, and other ways I can make reality match what I, and others want.
One thing worth noting is that the metrics the author mentions (sales, likes etc) are clearly, as everyone would readily admit, not a true measure of value. At best, they're a proxy for what actually matters. And we know from Goodhart's law and reward hacking that optimizing a proxy is, at some point, either useless or actively counterproductive. This thought can be a real source of peace of mind.
>And we know from Goodhart's law and reward hacking that optimizing a proxy is, at some point, either useless or actively counterproductive.
I don't think that's accurate. It might be useless from the perspective of the system, but hugely advantageous from the perspective of the individual. When a co-worker hacks the metrics and gets the promotion, that might be bad for the company but it is great for them, and perhaps bad for you.
The same is true for sales, search engines, and social interactions.
I agree with your first point that the proxies are not true reflections, but don't see where this is peace of mind when someone loses out because of them. If anything, I think it would Foster anger that the system is rigged, basically the opposite of Peace of mind
I think self-worth is not a very useful concept. In my mind people with high “self-worth” demand or force others to do things for them - and that’s the definition of anger not “self-worth”. If you are willing to ask others to do things for you and are willing to get a no - that’s the only humane way to behave even thought some may consider it “low self-worth”
>Yet the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale.
working, object and sale have nothing to do with art even if these terms are the endpoint of looking at the world for so many people.
I guess i am orthogonal to this article because:
(A) i don't visit sites that have "Followers"
which i can probably afford to do because:
(B) unlike writing or waitservice, where one's market is huge numbers of people who each are only willing to pay a little, my skills interest few, but those few are willing to pay a lot.
> my skills interest few, but those few are willing to pay a lot.
We share this privilege. My wife doesn't, though, and she and I have fundamentally different interactions with social media.
For her, it's a necessary evil to some extent - the nature of her profession demands that she's tuned into hot trends. That's a visible connection between her profession and her social media relationships. The invisible connections are much harder to identify, and you bring up an interesting point. I can't conceive of a company looking up your instagram account just to see how many followers you have, but maybe that's a thing. I wouldn't know.
This is an odd thing to say on a site that depends so heavily on the upvote.
It only depends heavily on the up vote if you depend on the up vote. Sometimes it's nice just to formulate thoughts in writing. If others see it, great. If not, no big deal.
Because upvotes control visibility, you are still describing a reward function that depends on the upvote.
I think they explicitly said the opposite. That the writing is their reward, and comments are always visible to the author. Visibility to other humans is incidental, or at least a secondary concern.
They explicitly said, "If others see it, great. If not, no big deal."
So I agree they get some reward from the writing. (Like all writers do, and like we can all do just as well with a journal.) But the part I just quoted is clearly part of the reward function, and just as clearly the total reward increases with others seeing it. Which on HN is controlled by upvotes.
They also said "Sometimes it's nice just to formulate thoughts in writing". "Just" implies sufficient reward. Visibility is a part of the reward function, but it is not dependent on it.
You're using a meaning of "depends on" which I'm unfamiliar with. Where are you getting it from?
Fair question. I think 'depends' has different connotations if you are talking about a binary outcome or function.
If I were to say something like "life depends on water", the connotation is that water is a necessary condition. You wouldn't use depends if the dependency is situational e.g. "life depends on shoes". Shoes might be the difference between life and death in some situations, but irrelevant in others.
That is to say, if a factor is a poor predictor of the outcome, but perhaps correlated, depends seems misleading.
Got it. I am talking about a function, and particularly the expected reward function for a behavior. If some factor has no influence on the score, the function does not depend on that factor. If it does, it does.
Even in your sense of the term, I think I was correct to say that HN "depends so heavily on the upvote". It's a fundamental constituent of how this place works.
But I'd also argue that even in the person I'm replying to later in the chain, it's a reasonable thing to say "describing a reward function that depends on the upvote" with your sense as well. If a person just wants to write, they can write in their journal or type in the reply box and then just close the tab. I do that sometimes here. If they actually click reply, then it's pretty clear their expected value for that involves somebody seeing the text. And the amount of that visibility is strongly determined by the upvote.
Upvotes have more to do with placement than visibility.
Add to that narrative collapse where a ton of past narratives just are refuted by reported facts and thus all romantic ideas just self destruct. The weak are not nobled by suffering . The anti imperialists are just wannabe empires. The centre does not hold.
I sometimes feel we are in a similar time to the "let a hundred flowers bloom" period in Mao's China, where dissent was tolerated for a while.
What I love about these types of articles is it reminds me how fortunate I am to live in the wealthiest and most comfortable time Earth has ever seen and it’s very likely to get better. These types of existential panics aren’t possible when you’re sustenance farming as nearly every human that has existed was forced by nature to endure until a painful, horrifying death from disease or illness perished them.
In order to access our hyper modern comfort you’re only asked to contribute something frivolous like clocking in at a record store or writing something that will entertain some people as they enjoy their morning tea. That we increasingly measure contribution, although terrifying in many ways, is also a more just way to compensate contributions. This article seems to yearn for a more political system that would allow her to indulge her creative passion at her whimsy without accountability to the reality of if anyone wants those outputs. A very self serving system indeed.
But again what great fortune to be alive today in a wealthy western political zone. To be able to entertain this fantasy.
Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stress etc are all getting worse. Our children will live longer and be more well fed (they're very likely to be overweight), but by every upper metric they are predicted to suffer.
The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.
Im more positive on the topic, and think what we are seeing is growing pains, and they are not equally distributed.
Almost all of our historic writings wrestling with the higher levels of the pyramid came from social elites, and now vast swaths of humanity are able (or forced) to wrestle with these tough questions.
Many people seem to be avoidant and running from these tough questions to their own detriment, but culture takes time to adjust.
I think your points about levels of self fulfillment and satisfaction are strong evidence that the destination state of Brave New World is unstable equilibrium at best. Most people being miserable from their own existential angst is not long sustainable in an environment where the cognitive tools to overcome it exist and are available.
I think culture will adapt because I think there is a lot of selection pressure favoring being well adapted. People will look at those with fulfillment and satisfaction and emulate them. Thats what I try to do. Right now just happens be a tough time for a lot of people to identify that because we are in a period of transition.
I think people will have a much better sense of which one of us is correct 5 generations from now.
I wonder what would be the optimal balance of material comfort vs self fulfillment. I picture a typical Pareto frontier. Did we push too far to one end? Did we actually pass optimality a few decades ago? Is there a bulge in the middle of the curve where we can still regain some additional self fulfillment while maintaining our standard of living? If we just regulate away all social media for example, do we still get the benefits of technology without the burden of perfect knowledge of our own extrinsic worth? Or is the desire for perfect knowledge simply too fundamental to human nature, even if it causes us self-destructive mental anguish?
People due by the thousands every year to try and reach a Western country they can resettle in mainly because of the wealth of material comforts available.
People want to first get fat and happy and for many that’s good enough. All the self actualization stuff comes far later.
> The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated.
I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades.
E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1]
As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed."
> Depends on what you mean by good.
This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?)
Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it.
Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.)
All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after.
[1] core transformation process https://www.coretransformation.org/
s/Direct/Directed/
(how embarrassing)
We simply do a terrible job at educating people about how much the past sucked and instead do the opposite with ridiculous Goethe like romanticism of the past.
Never mind that Goethe was the eldest of 7 children with only one sibling not dead as a child. Then going on to have have 5 children of his own. 4 that also happened to die as young children.
Modern people are so clueless we literally take the lack of dead children completely granted.
The type of person who writes this cultural word salad slop I suspect has an IQ of 100, thinks it is 140 and can't figure out what is wrong with the modern world that they are not above average in their output.
I agree generally, but I feel like we're slowly coming to realize that maximal leisure and safety might not necessarily be the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life.
By certain angles it is even less important than spiritual, community and philosophical purpose. It's not something that you can measure directly but by many possible proxies (Amish levels of depression, the Roseto effect, various studies on happiness of underdeveloped countries), people need very few material things to be happy. Perhaps it is a kind of mass delusion or confirmation bias that happiness must correlate linearly, or even logarithmically, with disposable income.
This is more or less the point of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Technology is essentially evil as it replaces the things that truly connect man to his nature. That technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Most everything we do now is a “surrogate” activity” to try and get control/power over ourselves and find meaning, which has been vaporized by technological progress.
In particular the Industrial Revolution but he himself sees an ideal world basically void of technology. That the revolution should strive to destabilize industrial society enough to force its collapse.
I think he has many interesting observations that are really worth exploring. He also predicted a lot of things more or less. But end of the day life is what you make of it. You don’t really have to participate in modern society. And people have always had existential problems and a desire to find meaning, even if they had less time to ponder it (and possibly be antagonized by it) because they were tending a field, etc. They probably had a long time to think about it as an infection slowly ate its way through their body causing immeasurable pain over days or weeks.
This article was a really interesting read! Probably about a 9 out of 10.
This is the same core observation as Scott Alexander's famous article, Meditations on Moloch.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
IMO the least known, yet most powerful, driver to understand the world in the next century. The commodification of everything - including deeply personal and abstract things like attention and love - have been commoditised. Not in the abstract, rhetorical sense that Marx and other such people mean, but in the engineering sense where liquid exchanges with sub millisecond latency are trading such commodities. Everyone is constantly playing a game against a quasi omniscient, unblinking entity, trading everything from fragments of attention to romance. And humans are hopelessly outmatched as the entity has orders of magnitude more information, computational power and vast ability to restructure the market to it's advantage.
I sometimes think "algorithms" understand me more than other people. Through my actions, they can diagnose me better than any doctor. e.g. meme therapy pages on facebook and tiktoks. I believe a constant stream of "best matched tiktoks/reels" to my situation" would be equivalent in value to going to a 3-star michelin restaurant and having their best dishes. It is available to everyone.
> The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
>There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
I haven’t read the article yet but I’m hoping to read one that attempts to elucidate a possible connection between the plummeting of self-worth of women (and the whiplash effect of their behaviour thereafter) and their exposure to social media that shows them every day, and I’ll put this in a shrewd way, the lives of other women that they will never have. A non-stop daily mental torture session for a good deal of the human race. I want to read such an article because I want someone, and someone with writing flair at that, to go for the jugular of the sick and twisted human nature that we pretend does not exist.
“You’re just an LLM”…
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Just a hint for the brave ones: The collapse of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is the goal. A global regime aimed at citizens obedience, control over movement, food, and resources is planned and in motion. There is no conspiracy or delusion in this. Seeing this requires just a drop of critical thinking.
If your perception of yourself is firmly attached to the collective projections imposed by governments, ideology, religion, or any form of group thinking, you are cooked.
In times like this, one must find the connection with nature and take action. Get out from the cities. Search places with enough water and option of growing your food locally. Be prepared for this activity to be outlawed under the Global Climate Emergency act, which the UN is ready to activate under the command of elite families and their servants in governments, military, and science institutions.
In essence, when your money is truly worth nothing and your life is driven by debt, you are a slave for life.
10$ says AI was used to partially write this.