[HN Gopher] Cash Cows
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Cash Cows
Author : abscond
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-11-24 21:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ageofinvention.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ageofinvention.xyz)
| ac2u wrote:
| Good read. Goes to show that empirical experimenting can have
| great results over theorising without practice
| Avicebron wrote:
| > "caught the improving mentality, or attitude -- the one thing
| all inventors, both then and now, have in common -- which had him
| viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for
| betterment."
|
| As much as I resonate with this sentiment personally, I've
| recently been reading the works of Byung-Chul Han, specifically
| "The Burnout Society", which has made me really think about how
| this mentality can be pretty insidious.
|
| EDIT: not that I think this detracts from the thesis of the
| article itself, I just find it interesting how the author of tfa
| bolstered their thesis with this right away.
| ITB wrote:
| I find this article incredibly inspiring, and my interpretation
| is that the main character was fulfilled by these
| accomplishments. The person interpreting the journal uses the
| word "obsessed", not as a direct observation, but to put it in
| contemporary terms. But we have no evidence this person was
| burnt out.
|
| My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and
| are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own
| burn out, but for that of society's as a whole. I don't find it
| constructive. It seems like another flavor of doomerism.
| Capitalism is not evil-- it's incredibly ingenious and
| productive. We all live much better for it.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| A couple of points By reading HN, we tend to get exposed to
| world class achievements and improvements leading to a high
| bar to measure our performance. This can lead to stress,
| anxiety and feelings of burnout.
|
| The other point is while capitalism has numerous advantages
| and benefits, I do think it may miss some uncosted
| externalities (Modern western societies have a tremendous
| impact on the planet which is hidden from market pressures as
| exploits different resources). Other examples are the
| cigarette companies hiding evidence about lung cancer and oil
| companies hiding research into climate change. If you purely
| select for profit and no other criteria, it can tend to nasty
| effects for others
| eszed wrote:
| I think burn out has a lot to do with incentives. When I'm
| working on a project in which I have a direct interest
| (intrinsic or financial), or from which I derive a direct
| benefit (personal, financial, or even intangible), I can work
| long, _long_ hours without burning out. I 'll get tired, and
| sometimes have to take a break to re-kindle my enthusiasm,
| but that feels different than burn out.
|
| When, by contrast, I'm working (perhaps against my
| recommendation) on something (perhaps useless) assigned to me
| (perhaps sub-optimally) for the (perhaps hypothetical)
| benefit of (perhaps faceless) others, where my motivation is
| entirely _negative_ - do this, or maybe lose my job - well...
| Then I feel burnt out before I even start.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, self-determination is a really really big deal.
|
| But figuring out how to incentivize people to self-
| determine their way into doing 100% of the things an
| organization needs to do is a real trick! Some work that
| still needs to be done just isn't great.
|
| The typical approach is to use a combination of money and
| "skin in the game" (ownership) to cover those cases. And I
| think that's essentially the right approach, but this
| simply won't work for everyone.
|
| And the thing is that it's super tough to separate out less
| fulfilling work into a distinct job role that can be more
| highly compensated and done by people who find that more
| motivating.
|
| I think the best I've seen it work is for managers, who
| people already expect to be more financially compensated,
| to fill in these kinds of cracks. If there's something
| their team needs to do that just isn't getting done without
| them _directing_ one of their reports to do it, can they do
| it themselves instead? (And maybe while they 're doing it,
| they can be thinking about whether there is a way someone
| could build a tool to make it trivial to do the next time
| it comes up, and then they can probably get their team more
| excited about building that tool.)
| eszed wrote:
| I agree with everything you say.
|
| Implied, but not directly stated: managers should be
| technically-capable. I also agree, but how do we
| incentivize that, against all of the headwinds of our
| industry?
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out,
| and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their
| own burn out, but for that of society's as a whole.
|
| Not just HN. There is a significant correlation between
| social media use and job burnout
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7710858/
| vkou wrote:
| Capitalism 'just' creates strong incentives for participation
| in zero-sum, or negative-sum games, without any in-system
| ability to check it. It 'just' creates strong incentives and
| imperatives for consolidation of wealth and power. It 'just'
| trends towards winners winning more.
|
| Under it, a dollar is a dollar, regardless of whether earning
| it improved the world, left it about the same, or made it
| worse. Unless you make your dollars have colour[1], it falls
| into the traps described above.
|
| Fortunately, all capitalist societies, to some extent, assign
| their dollars colour, through the process called
| 'regulation'. Unfortunately, the process through which it is
| produced is called politics, for which we have no good
| solutions for, and a slew of bad ones.
|
| [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Capitalism is based on the notion trade and commerce is not
| Zero-sum, as compared to mercantilism which it replaced.
| Wealth of Nations is the explanation of why zero-sum
| thinking is wrong and that the wealth is not gold but
| economic capacity.
|
| When coupled with the realization that "now" is more
| valuable than "later", you can put a price on now
| (interest). This leads to the finance industry, and using a
| small sum as leverage to borrow and invest a larger sum.
| Capital has value, because you can trade some capital now
| for more capital in the future.
|
| While I agree rent seeking exists, it's hard to imagine the
| world without lending and commerce. Capitalism is the
| natural result of private property.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Capitalism is not evil-- it's incredibly ingenious and
| productive. We all live much better for it.
|
| Well regulated capitalism is the least worst of all. Even
| Adam Smith himself didn't imagine "the invisible hand" as
| some silver bullet.
|
| Unbridled capitalism, much as the US has had since the 70s,
| is just the transitional period leading to feudalism.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| He relates a case where workers paid by the piece worked
| themselves into the ground.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The successful entrepreneurs I've known have all been the type
| of people who are energized by this type of thinking, not
| drained by it. Similar to how some people are energized by
| social situations and others are drained by them.
|
| Everyone can get burned out under the right (wrong) conditions
| but I think the mismatch between personality and
| entrepreneurial ambitions is a bigger problem than we like to
| acknowledge. There are a lot of people out there who want to be
| entrepreneurs but when it comes down to it they either don't
| want to do the work required or they aren't the type of person
| who can handle it.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Interesting take. _Compulsive_ perfectionism or meaningful
| quest? Compulsion seems intrinsically unhealthy; yet meaning
| is also compelling.
|
| Of course something can both energize and eventually cause
| burnout.
|
| Perhaps moderation by scope and one's ability and agency is
| an answer? Scope: never being happy with _anything_ seems
| miserable; but being unhappy with _one_ thing is maybe good.
| Ability: demanding performance beyond your abilities seems
| discouraging, but realistic subgoals that you can make
| progress on is encouraging (of course, for the unknown, we
| can 't know if it's possible or not). Agency: insisting on
| the actually impossible is frustrating; but again, acting
| within your agency is self-affirming.
|
| i.e. just match difficulty to ability - accounting for the
| fact that we can know neither.
|
| PS "successful" entrepreneurs is a small subset. Those who
| win a grueling competition are often, though not always,
| happy about it.
| hristov wrote:
| Despite the optimistic tone this is rather depressing reading.
| This is the beginning of the industrial farming trend that has
| made all meat products rather tasteless.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I kept thinking each "improvements" is likely making the animal
| miserable. e.g. making the cow extremely top heavy couldn't
| have been comfortable.
| msrenee wrote:
| The continuation of this style of "improvement" of livestock
| brought us the meat chicken that quickly grows to a point
| where its legs won't support it. It's inhumane to keep them
| around for too long past slaughtering age (8-10 weeks) as
| they just suffer. You see people trying to "rescue" them in
| the backyard chicken groups and there just isn't a way to
| give them an acceptable quality of life.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, the reason many meat products are "rather tasteless" is due
| to the low-fat movement of the 1970's, when animals started
| being bred for more muscle and less fat -- particularly
| chickens (absurdly large chicken breasts) and pigs (pork chops
| used to be fatty and marbled like a ribeye, now they're dry and
| flavorless).
|
| You can still get a fantastically flavorful pork chop anywhere
| in Japan, for example, where they didn't adopt the low-fat pig
| breeds. Chicken is far juicier as well. It's still just as
| industrialized, though.
|
| Meat in the wild is generally _gamier_ , which isn't what most
| people usually mean when they say more flavorful -- gamy
| flavors can be off-puttingly strong to a lot of people. I
| personally love those flavors _occasionally_ , but not as an
| everyday thing. (Sometimes the "flavor" doesn't leave your
| breath/body for hours/days, it's so strong.)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. Speaking of "gamy": I found the halal
| market near me actually sells mutton, in sandwiches, kebabs,
| etc. I never saw it in the meat case so I didn't think they
| had it. Gotta try that.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > gamy
|
| I think it might be 'gamey'?
| crazygringo wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamy
|
| gamy: adjective
|
| variants: or gamey
| golergka wrote:
| Industrial farming is how humanity managed to avoid its
| constant companion -- hunger. I would rather eat tasteless meat
| everyday than use bodies of my diseased children to feed
| surviving ones.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Industrial farming of meat has little to do with that, but
| instead sating the appetites of a minority of consumers in
| the US:
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-
| usd...
|
| Other forms of industrial agriculture, sure, meat, not so
| much.
| iw2rmb wrote:
| 40% of the food in the US is thrown away every year and yet
| millennials suffer from obesity.
|
| It's time to stop thinking like you're in a wasteland because
| it's the very way to make it so.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| You really threw me for a loop with the conclusion that
| industrial farming is bad because it made meat bland, rather
| than because of its profound environmental and humanitarian
| costs.
| vinniepukh wrote:
| Off-topic: I'm looking to read more old books and the genre of
| travel diaries from the eighteenth century that the author
| mentioned seems very interesting.
|
| Does anyone have recommendations for those kinds of books?
| loufe wrote:
| The naturalist in Nicaragua by Thomas Belt was pretty good. I
| really enjoy learning about ant colonies which drove me to it
| orginally.
|
| Darwin himself liked it (as they advertise with the book) "The
| best of all natural history journals which have ever been
| published."--Charles Darwin
| swalling wrote:
| One interesting fact is that Darwin directly referred to Bakewell
| in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species:
|
| "a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which
| results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best
| individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends
| keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can,
| and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish
| or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I
| cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would
| improve and modify any breed, in the same way as Bakewell,
| Collins, &c., by this very same process, only carried on more
| methodically, did greatly modify, even during their own
| lifetimes, the forms and qualities of their cattle."
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Selective breeding always struck me as interesting for the sheer
| amount of time required for experimentation. Pick your pairs, and
| then wait 2-5 years before you can repeat the cycle again.
|
| Amazing that a single lifetime was able to yield measurable
| results.
|
| Also reminded of the fox domestication program[0] where they were
| able to go from wild foxes to a dog-like domesticated breed
| within a decade.
|
| >Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to
| the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less
| than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and
| curly tails (Fig. 2). Their stress hormone levels by generation
| 15 were about half the stress hormone (glucocorticoid) levels of
| wild foxes. Over generations, their adrenal gland became smaller
| and smaller. Serotonin levels also increased, producing "happier"
| animals. Over the course of the experiment, researchers also
| found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled "mutt-like" fur
| patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter,
| rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather
| than gracile limbs)
|
| [0] https://evolution-
| outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
| vernon99 wrote:
| Wow, this is super interesting, thanks for sharing. A bit
| unclear from the articlr overview if they managed to do 6
| reproduction cycles in just 6 years total and got to
| significant results. Or if it was 6x6. In any case, now my
| dream of breeding a fully domesticated group of raccoons seems
| more feasible!
| argiopetech wrote:
| Think in scale. If you don't breed your cows, the neighbor's
| bull will come over the fence and do it for you, so you're
| incentivized to keep your cows bred. One bull will handle a
| large number of cows, so picking desirable bulls and a variety
| of interesting cows gives (roughly) $nCows potential picks for
| the next generation per herd (and Bakewell had many). Cows
| gestate for 8 months and results are frequently apparent in
| very young calves. Sexual maturity hits at 12-15 months
| (though, traditionally, first calf heifers were bred closer to
| 2 years), so 4 generations per decade in direct lineage isn't
| impossible.
|
| It's not particularly difficult to select for specific traits
| when you consider inbreeding (which Bakewell did) and
| linebreeding (same idea, but avoiding excessive coefficient of
| inbreeding). Arguably, changing the muscle distribution on a
| domestic cow given a plethora of similar domestic breeds with
| different muscle distribution is easier than shrinking the
| adrenal gland in a wild fox given only wild stock.
|
| Not to diminish in any way Bakewell's accomplishments. He
| revolutionized the field of animal husbandry.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| This reminds me of a common conflict in my life (and probably
| much of society): the tension between compulsive improvers and
| others who are more content or complacent.
|
| (For example, it is common for people take offense when some
| member of their group proposes an improvement.)
|
| This contradiction was recently resolved for me by Suzuki Roshi's
| statement: "You are perfect the way you are. And you could use
| some improvement."
|
| (Note: That's a rough paraphrase. I recommend reading Suzuki
| Roshi's compiled teachings - they're very good.)
| GypsyKing716 wrote:
| Dead link. things actually can get DoS'd in 2023 by HackerNews
| traffic? :-D
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