Of course the first HN comment has to be something negative, derisive and lacking in compassion. When there's blood in the water the sharks come, but when people are being vulnerable and exposing themselves (by saying something that's easily ridicul-able) like this, there's no need to be cruel. Not saying you're wrong just like, why not...look for the good, and why not that be the first HN comment. This place...Maybe everyone's just so scared of vulnerability..."innocence cannot exist underground, it needs to be stamped out." -- Prisoner in Bane's prison, Dark Knight Rises. Man it would be great to come here and be surprised. "Hackers" are commonly so intellectually arrogant, it's funny they attack anyone who's doing it in a vulnerable way...sigh sad.
People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji
I don't see the vulnerability you speak of. It sounds more like arrogance. Claiming to be a misunderstood genius is not presenting yourself as vulnerable, it's a shield to defend yourself against criticism or the lack of praise, to enable you to continue to see yourself as the genius that nobody else recognises in you.
I don't know, in just the previous blog linked on top "am I a genius?" he says "I am reluctant; I hate having to depend upon anybody else for anything. I don’t want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet." I don't think it does him any good to encourage the bitterness that leads people to post things like that.
OA is being narcissistic not vulnerable. There is a big difference. Instead of proving his theories by developing new games and showing the world how to do it, he gets upset that nobody recognises him as a genius, based on him doing a few somewhat successful games many years ago.
Companies have no business telling me how much they think my life should cost nor how I should spend my money. If they're paying "lifestyle" choices, based on bullshit cost of living make believe metrics, they should reward my lifestyle choice to travel constantly and pay that cost of living accordingly.
I'm not surprised tho, remote work is still an embryo, I'm gonna keep pushing for what I want but we can't expect too much.
When I'm rich and successful I'm gonna pay a standard global rate for the each role. No bullshit country adjustments. The market will just have to eat it
I hope you are irreplaceable then because they are paying you based on a) how many people are competing for your job and b) how many other companies are competing for your skill set. If you are fully remote then you are competing with at least as many skilled people as are in your time zone and at most the number of skilled people in the world that speak the same language both of which are a huge increase over the number of skilled people in your metro area. The number of companies competing to hire you will also have gone up but I doubt it is on the same scale.
Markets are two-sided. If you pay a single, global rate, you may find yourself setting that rate such that you’re priced out of certain markets and lack access to money-motivated talent there.
> Markets are two-sided. If you pay a single, global rate, you may find yourself setting that rate such that you’re priced out of certain markets and lack access to money-motivated talent there.
Except for differences imposed by differential transaction costs, freely competitive markets have one price for a given good. If there's not a single, global rate for a nondifferentiated good, it means it's not a competitive market and a cartel or monopolist is imposing segmentation.
If there's some places where the supply (in the economic sense of the function relating price and quantity delivered) is restricted so nothing is delivered at the global market clearing rate, then that place just isn't a source of the good.
The benefit of segmentation for buyers isn't that they get to avoid being priced out of markets where you pay more for the same service, it's that imposing segmentation lets you reduce the price you pay to suppliers in low-cost regions to a level below the global market clearing price.
> If there's not a single, global rate for a nondifferentiated good, it means it's not a competitive market and a cartel or monopolist is imposing segmentation.
Much of the work of product development and marketing is creating differentiation (real and perceived). Is a Mercedes E-class different from Toyota Camry? Is 90% lean ground beef from Whole Foods different from 90% at Trader Joe’s?
Is economy class 21-day advance, Saturday night stay required travel different from a walk-up ticket out Tuesday back the same Thursday?
> Much of the work of product development and marketing is creating differentiation
Sure, and that's definitely an important phenomenon, but it is not really germane to hiring for a role and paying differently for the exact same role depending on where the successful applicant lives.
> Is a Mercedes E-class different from Toyota Camry?
For this example, obviously they are different. The job of marketing is to justify the difference in price for whatever differences the Mercedes offers.
> Is economy class 21-day advance, Saturday night stay required travel different from a walk-up ticket out Tuesday back the same Thursday?
Yes, for the seller, guaranteed payment 21 days before is different than a volatile payment minutes before the goods expire.
Hahaha thanks. I'm not smart enough to consider second order effects at this point. It's more of a personal crusade that I know is right so I'll just have to do it see what happens .
What will happen, unless your product is unique, in high demand, and has a large moat, is your customers will purchase from a competitor selling goods at a cheaper price. See what happened to US textile and manufacturing industry.
I suppose I'm idealistic to think that paying people more (what I think of as) fairly will better motivate them retain them and lead to better productivity. And also we'll be able to attract better people everywhere to produce better product. I could be wrong. Sad if so, but it's worth a try
Motivation is a complex topic to be sure. An argument that has always resonated with me (and I bring up mostly to see if we can find a good rebuttal here) is that if I’m paying someone wildly more than their second-best alternative, they are in part motivated (to keep the gravy train rolling) and in part trapped (“I better learn to deal with this, because I can’t go anywhere else without massive sacrifice for my family”).
The latter can lead to “I’ll quit mentally but not actually” which is horrible for all parties. (I’m not saying that’s an excuse to underpay people “for their own good”, but I think anchoring pay to an employee’s actual market makes some non-zero amount of sense.)
> An argument that has always resonated with me (and I bring up mostly to see if we can find a good rebuttal here) is that if I’m paying someone wildly more than their second-best alternative, they are in part motivated (to keep the gravy train rolling) and in part trapped (“I better learn to deal with this, because I can’t go anywhere else without massive sacrifice for my family”).
The rebuttal to this argument is that if you’re selling a commodity product, then you’re going to get steamrolled when Walmart/Amazon/Aliexpress/Multinational company comes rolling through and offers a comparable option to your product at 50% less by arbitraging labor costs.
I agree with that observation. I don’t understand how that rebuts the presumption that I should pay market wages to avoid trapping overpaid employees in jobs they don’t find fulfilling.
It probably depends on what their intrinsic motivation related to the job is. Do they find it fun, mentally challenging (in a good way), etc,? If they're motivated in that way, the extrinsic motivation of above-market pay is probably a good thing. But if that's their only motivation and they'd rather be anywhere else if it weren't for the money, that's a negative.
100% agreed. My hypothesis (previously unstated) is that some slice of people who start out in the first bucket inevitably turn into the second bucket. (They get bored of "doing the same old thing" or they "just want a change".)
All of the things you posit do occur. Costco employees are better, and better paid, than Walmart employees. That doesn’t mean both firms can’t exist in something close to the same market niche. And Costco’s strategy is not infinitely scalable. Paying more gets you better employees. It doesn’t automatically get you more profit.
There's a few segments of the customer market that will pay varying premiums for more customer service/quality, but only so much. Costco exists only in areas with above median wage shoppers, and can afford to exist by offering a limited selection of items sold in bulk. Similarly, a handful of retailers can afford to exist in this market, such as Trader Joes/Nordstrom/Apple/REI/etc, but most consumers are fairly price conscious and won't hesitate to shop elsewhere that offers lower prices. Or they can't afford the premiums for these places in the first place.
- you're making this up, and have no conception of what you'd do
- you won't be able to hire people from places where the cost of living is high, as your global rate will be lower than competitive salaries there
- you won't survive, as your competitors who do location-based salaries will be able to offer your customers more value for the same price, or same value for less price
Even across the US, it's hard. Basecamp is an outlier.
Now, in practice, a fair number of companies probably don't have large systematic salary adjustments by US location, including remote generally. But they mostly do it by just not paying market rates in the highest paying markets like the Bay Area and, especially, not going toe-to-toe with the likes of Google and Facebook.
you can do it, my current single contract pays 325k, and i'm just doing jquery(much to my dismay) and C# for it, all remote... been doin it for almost 3 years now. I live in a not very popoulated area . I've learned that there are plenty of very high paying jobs with a low bar..the things people go through to work for these big companies for such little pay and having to live in cities blows my mind. The best part is my current job leaves me lots of time for sidework to and to get experience in technologies i prefer to use.
> If they're paying "lifestyle" choices, based on bullshit cost of living make believe metrics, they should reward my lifestyle choice to travel constantly and pay that cost of living accordingly.
Why not ask them to? Companies pay for people to get things like masters degrees all the time.
I mean if you have a strong network in multiple cities that you're letting them access then they should absolutely pay for that. Or if you're traveling around and using the stuff you learn to improve your design skills or whatever.
Ignoring conflict evidence, ie, confirmation bias, sounds like just about every human I've ever seen. Especially scientists with their pet theories. I suppose it comes down to how people weight the evidence, they're definitely biased toward weightings that support their favorite theory.
Just as I'm sure you are with your Hancock's BS theory.
Is it really true that he's only been peddling unsubstantiated stuff tho?
Didn't he propose that the younger dryas ice age was caused by an impact, a claim later supported by more evidence, including nanodiamonds? I know the
cause remains unsettled, but even if you read Wikipedia, which starts out saying the evidence for that is misinterpreted, it goes on to detail a bunch of solid sounding evidence. That's there's contention and ambiguity is not unusual for science, particularly such a speculative science as archaeology. But his proposal, at least, sounds neither crazy, nor appears to be unsubstantiated, as you claim.
He definitely does engage in legitimate debate about reasonable theories and weighing plausible evidence. On issues like that he can be a reasonable contributor to the public debate. That's fine. The question is to what extent is that cover to get himself a seat at the public debate table, to lend credibility to the woo woo stuff which is what sells his books?
He doesn't make money from suggesting there might have been an asteroid impact that affected the climate at a given point in history. He gets paid for writing books about "Meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind".
Just because someone has some highly imaginative hopes and theories that you may personally find distasteful, does not a crank make, nor does it tarnish other stuff they've done, of course.
Unless you're comfortable with Newton being a crank for his alchemy, Oppenheimer being a crank for his mysticism, Turing being a crank for his desires, Galileo for his solar centrism, Harvard's Avi Loeb for his derelict alien ship, Chinese being cranks for TCM, and so many others.
It's funny how rational skepticism and "crank calling" (shaming?) rubs shoulders so closely with bigotry they're almost indistinguishable. But i suppose our beloved skeptics are apt to ignore that inconvenient interpretation. I just think that the propensity to think outside the box, and courageously push against the boundaries of (sometimes merely culturally normative, as in the case of TCM) orthodoxy, while also keeping connected to truth, is possibly one of the foundations of scientific genius, and seems to be something to be encouraged. At the very least, it's benign. I'm not quite sure why people seem to be so terrified of scientists who dare stand outside the herd, and propose new ideas.
Don't we have enough groupthink everywhere else (politics, think tanks, political science, education, religion), can't we have one place to celebrate dangerous ideas? Why wouldn't science be the perfect place for that?
I think it's possible your Hancockyness is a little overblown. Perhaps he's not quite the crank you think, tho he may be the crank you need.
Newton was a crank w/r/t to his alchemy. Likewise, Pauling with his Vitamin C. Doesn't invalidate any of their other work, but it does mean we shouldn't just take their authority as relevant in areas outside their core competencies.
W/r/t Turing, a person's sexual preferences aren't even in the same universe as someone's unsubstantiated personal beliefs about how the world works. Perhaps you would want to retract that piece? While I don't agree with you overall, I think your argument would be stronger if you excluded his example.
I think you're looking at the "crank / non-crank" evaluation as an attribute of a person. I'm suggesting it's more relevant to use a person/field-of-study grain to apply the label. (It probably also makes sense to break it down further, but at some point, the complexity outweighs the benefit.)
no. I think the turing thing is very important. Because just like Galileo it's a culturally normative thing to hate on gay sex back then just like hating on solar centrism was. And I think a lot of the other prejudices against far out ideas are going to be these bullshit culturally normative bigoted biases that turn out to be incorrect. Just like the blanket Western cultural bias against tcm. almost just like the marijuana thing...you know "marijuana turns you into the devil and makes you crazy"... "gay sex is morally wrong." All of this bullshit kind of was eventually overturned in the tide of public opinion but at the time people were so certain (just like witchcraft) you know that there was a reality to their demonization.
So no, won't rewrite nor retract. Is important to keep it in to reinforce how relative alot of this is.
I think you probably got upset by assuming I was associating gay sex with some sort of absolute measurable moral position. Hopefully what I said has reassed you that's not the case and let you feel better about it.
Btw good point about crank aspects not tainting the whole. Maybe sometimes what we think of as crank is simply undiscovered science. Maybe Newton would have had a better theory if he knew something more about nuclear transmutation.
I think there's a spectrum of these crank things though some stuff like flat Earth come on that has to be false.
But i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.
Please let me reassure you that I was not upset by your statement - merely providing feedback for how to strengthen your point and avoid a distracting and loaded sidebar.
I'm still not clear what the broader point is. That sometimes norms change, and have non-linear impact?
Most of the time, a crank is just a crank. That's why we know about the outliers.
how can you provide feedback on how to make the point clearer if you don't understand what the point is? So I think you probably do understand it. There's no need to pretend you don't just because you disagree and you're not sure how to state your ddisagreements.
Sorry, (very) freudian slip there (i guess), i meant ressaured not re-assed haha
is that really true though that a crank is just a crank most of the time? I don't think that's true. I think the skill is looking for the sincerity and the truth in what they're saying aside from any noise that might be there as well. Just like you're trying to make the point of reducing distractions. And just like I think it's important in data analysis you know you want to increase the signal reduce the noise and that's something you as a reader can do. So I don't think it's true that a crank is just a crank it's too much of an easy dismissal. it's important to have these alternative hypothesis generators and to listen and not get distracted by the other stuff. If everyone was obsessed that Newton or Turing or Galileo had culturally normative crank ideas they would have missed the good stuff. And maybe there is good stuff in some of those culturally normative crank ideas. And maybe we did as a society miss out on some of the good stuff because we wanted to say oh cranks are just cranks. so I don't think we should do that and I think you should probably stop doing that if you want to support this idea of you know scientific inquiry and the expansion of knowledge. Just a pointer ;) :p
So, I see you making your points there and I've already made my points so I don't see anything more to add. I'm comfortable that we have different views on it.
Too many people who have genuine major contributions to fields make the mistake of thinking that because they’re an expert in one then they’re automatically qualified in others, or that because they nailed one thing their beliefs about something else must also be true (ie Pauling and vitamin C).
I see this all the time in medicine. One of the best neurosurgeons in my country and someone I consider a friend still tells me that I need to keep the microwave door shut for 3 seconds after it’s done or else the waves will escape and give me cancer. That defies the laws of electromagnetism on several levels.
We absolutely need alternative hypothesis generators, but the widespread acceptance of every crank idea that comes along even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is not only infuriating but actually serves to damage the scientific method, when the lady down at the mothers group claims that the vaccine gave her son autism and there is a global conspiracy led by bill gates to implant microchips in everyone.
At the end of the day, in my belief, it boils down to a sad lack of trust in experts - some of it warranted from the abuses and oversteps of the past, and some of it actively facilitated by people who have ideological reasons to oppose what the scientific truths are presenting (ie climate science denial).
Hard to disagree with that. Where does that term crank even come from?
I think science theories wrt to public belief have both high false positive and negative rates. A lot of people believe stuff to be true that isn't (that climate changes are only due to us, are terrible, and that there's something we can do about it that will help), and don't believe true stuff that is (flat earthers... I'm pretty open minded but also quite sure we live on a fucking ball).
The obvious caveat is nobody fucking knows anything we're all just fumbling around in the dark but consensus and a sense of certainty certainly does help. It's surprising how shit a lot of the data that we have (even in this scientific age) is. And how easily manipulated the narratives can be.
So i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.
Wanted to add another comment after learning what TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) meant. This is a really interesting grey area. There appears to be validity to some of it, some of it is supernatural fluff. Out of the evidence-led examples, it's possible some of the effect is placebo.
There are many layers, some full of cranks and some not. Maybe this is a field where generalization just isn't useful? I dunno, but wanted to think out loud and thank you for making me think a bit more than planned today :).
People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji