Bored of It
paulrobertlloyd.com573 points by NotInOurNames 7 days ago
573 points by NotInOurNames 7 days ago
> The best minds of my generation
I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
On that specific quote -
I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."
Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.
The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?
0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.
Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.
I think that'd be far less prolific than third party advertising currently is. And it'd be worth it to get rid of the big pile of perverse incentives, manipulation, and surveillance that is the current ad industry.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you.
I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect food product induces constant cravings.
There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.
This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!
Yea but "we waste the greatest minds of our generation on global economic information symmetry" just doesn't scratch the same itch
Except when a company buys an ad it's to sell Their product , not just A product.
Sure. But there are different ways of selling. I've been lucky to avoid sales, but…
I think I could tolerate selling a product I truly believed was useful, and would improve the situation of those buying it, and where I felt free to recommend alternatives in situations where my product was a bad fit.
I couldn't tolerate selling a product where I had to trick people into buying it, knowing that there was a better alternative and a good chance they would regret the choice.
Running an ad to entice or trick people into buying your product in a massive avalanche of sales that ultimately leaves a bad taste is a strategy. Running an ad to accurately target people who would genuinely benefit from your product, and attempting to build credibility and trust over years is also a strategy. Of course, it's always somewhere between the two, but it's not clear which end the 100% spherical cow lives on :-)
100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.
That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.
I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
In the past few decades, hedge funds have had a significantly negative impact upon the following industries:
- Manufacturing - Retail - Local Journalism/Media - Private Prisons & Detention - For-Profit Education - Healthcare Services - Veterinary/Pet grooming Clinics - Mortuary/Funeral Homes - Pharmaceuticals - Housing/Real Estate, - Toll Roads - Hospitality - Restaurants - Addiction Treatment Centers - Daycares - Hospice
What's next?
Doh, I keep forgetting that this site doesn't do markdown.
I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-
But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.
In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
> Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner
Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.
I think the motivation is important. Many FOSS projects are sharing something the author considers useful to the world, as a way of making it better in a way that they know how. Its a lovely gift and I'm happy to know about it.
Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.
All corporate ads ate the second kind.
> I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
Unfortunately, it's a useful thing that people have used to prey on our inquisitive simian brains.
Personally, I'm in favor of doing things like banning billboards &c, but it's hard to draw a line on banning advertising in general.
I think I'd be willing to extend it to all forms paid advertising that you are forced to see in the course of doing something else.
Marketing is so rarely for a "novel" thing. The biggest spender is CocaCola, how much do we still need to know about them?
Did you know the invented modern santa branding? Prior to that he was more a vagabond/homeless type and much much less jolly.
I wasn't trying to say the contents of the ads aren't novel- just that what they're selling very often isn't.
Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'
I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
Rarely by dollar amount or by volume? Because I assume, by volume, it must be mostly novel things.
Volume of ads I see, or companies buying ads?
Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.
Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.
The difference is all those other things you listed - food, drugs, etc provide value. An ad provides none.
I’m in a group chat for a language I am studying. It gets targeted for event flyers due to the group’s subject. These sorts of flyers are allowed where other advertising is not because they add value to the group, even though most of them are for-profit.
Ads provide information. An event you might be interested in is happening. A food you might like is available. A thing that will totally improve your life can be yours. etc
The information in most ads is things like: "Skinny beautiful people are worthy of love and use this brand of makeup". Or "good parents who love their children go to Disney World". Or "it's a rugged and cool type of person that buys a Jeep".
The type of ads that do what you're taking about are sought out. People willingly watch Nintendo Directs.
If that is all they were they wouldn't be a problem but this is obviously an over simplification.
> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..
The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
> The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
Or, it's an invitation to plug us into the Entertainment-Marketting-Hyperstimulus-Feed that is eminently personalized and replace all our human culture with persuasive slop, until we cease to be of use, bankrupt husks with no friends and no avocations other than those that provide a reliable revenue return. Quite possibly with individualized radical ideologies because whatever hits your dopamine button, the Algorithm pumps more into you (See Neal Stephenson's "Dodge").
Yea, I think this is more likely the case for AI as we have it now or will have it, imo.
If somehow AI is better than all humans at everything idk if we get communism or what but I don't think I can really think about it but it sounds meaningless and bad and not going to happen anyways.
I'm willing to go along with this hypothesis. So first step is to end capitalism, then we can see if we still hate ads?
You don't need to "First, we end capitalism" to recognize a problem that has already gone out of bounds and promises to go further.
Hawaii bans billboards, and has, since 1927. Look into that. They manage to do so without some kind of slippery slope that ends in authoritarian oppression, or some kind of guillotine wielding anti-corporate mob. There are lots of ways to limit the harm without trying to completely erase our political economy.
We used to ban gambling. Gambling was regarded as slightly harmful. Now we have legalized gambling, and we've plugged it into modern marketting, and the harm has expanded to the point that some of us regret the entire idea; The gambling industry is in the process of consuming all of sports entertainment. "Decriminalization" of small gambling concerns and an almost total ban on paid advertising is probably, it turns out, a better outcome.
I agree we should do all that right now- but I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.
> I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
I totally agree. I would prefer harnessing capitalism for our means and regulating it heavily, but I understand if you don't think our democracy could survive the conflict (or if you think that it isn't surviving the conflict already). I'm just very aware of all of the ways solutions to this problem have gone wrong in the past.
I disagree. The spherical cow of marketing is a system that connects consumers with EXACTLY what they are looking for. What you are describing is the capitalist spherical cow.
Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.
How many marketing professionals do you know that work for non-profit providers of goods and services? I'm sure they exist, but I imagine not many.
Marketing isn't just about connecting consumers to products, it's also about creating demand.
Along these lines, "it" most fundamentally refers to unrestrained capitalism.
(Or perhaps computing.)
Won’t argue with it being overdone, but it’s in reference to Ginsberg. Not necessarily complimentary. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
Gingsberg stole it from Yeats — “the best lack all conviction…” / “the best minds of my generation…” — many similar verses, e.g., “what rough beast…” / “what sphinx of cement…”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).
The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.
vs
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, // dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
How is this stealing in any form?
Having been in IT for close to 15 years now, a lot of good minds work in IT a lot of good minds don't.
But I've encountered a lot of stupid (for lack of a better word) people in IT who were convinced they are good at _everything_ just because they grokked algorithms and data structures. Not sure it's a phenomenon unique to IT, but what DOGE is doing is exactly what I mean.
Can confirm, this isn't just an IT thing. Physicians are a prime example—people tend to put doctors on a pedestal, and some doctors start believing they know everything about everything, even when it's clearly outside their wheelhouse. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in another, but it’s easy for everyone involved to forget that.
I’m a CFO that used to work in healthcare. Have had many cases where a doctor tries to explain to me how accounting “should work” and I have to tell them we have this little thing call revenue recognition or GAAP or how accruals work, etc. basically the stuff covered in accounting 101.
I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.
I like it when they explain to you how hard they work and how it’s unlike how anyone else works and they are super special because of it.
> how accruals work
Slightly off-topic but I worked at a UK research organisation that was a privatised entity recently spun-off from a civil-service organisation. The new CEO (who came from a finance background) got a tour of each department. He apparently listened to all of the tech evangelism from the department directors and then asked them how their department's accruals were doing. Those department directors who asked him to clarify what he meant by accruals didn't stay in post very long. Allegedly.
Us lowly engineers just kept our heads down.
This is a bit extreme. I've worked in many industries where the word 'accrual' is kind of internal to the finance/accounting department. I'd estimate over 70% of very good functional department heads I've worked with in the past would ask for clarification too. If they were still confused after further clarification or weren't able to comeback with an answer, then there is a bigger problem potentially with their ability to own a budget/manage spend.
This is kind of like punishing someone for not knowing your preferred buzzword. I've seen dozens of times that when a new high ranking person joins, their language quickly starts to become the defacto language of the org. If they like the "headwind" "tailwind" terminology, then it becomes what people everywhere start writing in the slides and how they discuss items of risk. You shouldn't be punishing people for asking for clarification (and there certainly a whole group of people that like to ask versus sitting silently then looking it up later). Hopefully there was more too it.
Oh nice. A culture where asking questions is punished. If this was a problem don't fire people. Train them. Make sure everyone does required training. If they refuse then you may have a case for PIP.
Otherwise it is just landmine driven performance
Rant not at comment! But the situation of the comment. Hope it worked out for you!
I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist; you are correct about this illusion that physicians often labor under. But it's worth noting that when medical topics are posted here, the responses from non-physicians are sometimes so nonsensical that I for one laugh out loud reading them. In fact, I look forward to these discussions for this very reason.
The worst thing is, most doctors aren't even smart in their own domain. They are nothing more but trained monkeys who follow a flow chart that has drug sales at the end.
This is called "engineer's disease".
You can regularly find it on this very site :)
I mean, there are probably only a few places on the internet with more people who believe their insights into other disciplines are profound simply because they understand how computers work than the HN comment section. So we should all be able to relate.
> I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
It's the other way around. It's not just, or primarily, about run of the mill software devs. It's also about the would-be top mathematicians and physicists and psychologists and others - best minds in various domains, that in a better world would be busy solving real problems, but due to quirk of the economy end up working on ruining lives of other people, at scale, because adtech pays well while almost all useful work pays a pittance.
I remember this quote not as judging or categorizing people by smartness, but as lamenting a world which mismanages humanity's potential so badly, by literally directing our best problem solvers to work on creating problems for everyone.
I think the argument is more about whether someone involved in hostile behavior deserves to be called a "best mind" compared to someone worse at math but better at empathy.
Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it
I'd say it's something like "a squandering of potential"
I think it’s more nuances, it’s saying that our definition of potential, best, etc, doesn’t weigh empathy for our fellow humans heavily enough. It’s an argument to flip that instead of our brightest minds being spent on ads, to instead say we are not rewarding our brightest minds at all but our most mercenary ones.
I read it as: best in terms of problem-solving power. On the ethical and empathic side, whether they're good/best or worst depends on whether you put more blame on systemic pressures (here mostly economic) vs. on individual agency.
Yeah, that's what the original quote means, and I agree with it. The comment tho is trying to argue that unqualified 'best' should not implicitly mean 'best at problem solving' which is a kinda interesting social/linguistic take.
From context, we can infer that "best minds" means "smart people who make new things." I feel it's fair to lament that, while these people could put their intelligence towards the betterment of everybody, they are often instead working on shit like ad tech.
Probably ‘capable’ should be used instead of ‘best’. The latter might lead the reader astray with notions of ethics.
The best tech stack I have ever worked on was in an adtech company. The code was beautiful and the utility functions to interface with various AWS services were really really neat. I built a near real time estimator using Theta Sketches.
While job searching, I have tried to use techs like Sketches in my filters but it mostly draws up a blank. Would love to work on genuinely interesting stuff like that again.
It honestly did leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I thought what the end goal of it all was.
I think it's a reference to Allen Ginsberg's the Howl, which chronicles Ginsberg watching brilliant people of his generation die in war or become drug casualties, their potential squandered either by evil men or navel-gazing.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"
I'm not sure what Ginsberg meant when he used the term but I imagine it wasn't the same type of mind.
I think "best" in this case stands for highest performance and not necessarily moral values - with this definition, unfortunately, making a computer go brrr does qualify for a best mind, if the brrr is especially impressive.
This reminds me of Bret Devereaux's series on Alexander III of Macedon and the meaning of "greatness" [0]:
> Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?
"Great" and "best" are both just words, words whose definition is defined by us who use them.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2024/05/17/collections-on-the-reign-of-al...
It is curious to me that so many revered as “great” by culture often end up treating those close to them in abhorrent ways. Many worship Moloch not overtly but in the lack of accountability they require of high status individuals. It seems that once someone gets past a certain thermocline of status then accusations of character become less likely to stick. I’ve come to believe this is seen as a feature and not a bug by many people. Not everyone, but many.
Ultimately we get what we incentivize and reward as a society. Recent events are a painful reminder of that.
I treat this expression as Ayenbite of Inwit. When I use it (because I'm super pretentious) I don't mean the book itself or the saner English version of the title "Remorse of Conscience". I mean it as a parody of the later. Like, when someone comes up with a contrived blame for wrongdoing that either didn't happen or was so minor that it doesn't warrant the discussion.
I don't think author means "best minds" literally. I think they mean it ironically, more like "those who are most eager to perform the task assigned to them".
But maybe I'm saying the obvious. Irony is admittedly hard to translate into writing.
I've always considered references to "the best minds" to mean those glorified because they make others large sums of money. "The best minds" are never the ones profiting from their ideas.
"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."
I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.
We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
Except our superior ability to collaborate is arguably our strongest asset.
Of course! Nothing I said precludes this. Lots of collaboration is used for selfish means.
I don't think that's how it's meant to be read, if you consider it in the context of the original quote, it's about good and empathetic minds going to waste because of the demands of society. We put so much social and economic capital into tech that it's better to push five lines of code for Facebook than be a doctor, which are the "good minds going to waste".
You reminded me of one of my favorite piece of media in gaming (HZD). It feels especially relevant in the current times, with how war and AI is progressing in tandem with geopolitical unrest.
Its an old recording that the main character listens to in the end cutscene while visiting Elisabet's grave, and (spoilers) the main character was created as a clone of Elisabet. It's very hard hitting after the whole experience.
> GAIA: Query: What did she say?
Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, "Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don't make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death."
GAIA: You often tell stories of your mother. But you are childless.
Elisabet Sobeck: I never had time. I guess it was for the best.
GAIA: If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for him or her?
Elisabet Sobeck: I guess... I would have wanted her to be... curious. And willful - unstoppable, even... but with enough compassion to... heal the world... just a little bit.
> I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
A person may be all of those things, but they still need to pay bills and eat. That requires a job, and jobs depend on the bourgeoise, that's none of those things.
The best song that starts off with that quote: https://youtu.be/UryTypo2qeU?si=CdTPe0ufnktLB_6i “ I Should Be Allowed to Think” by They Might Be Giants Change a couple words here and there and it’s talking about social media
I think the point is that people with the capacity to be both smart and empathetic have lost their way.
The more subtle point is that many empathetic people have bullshit jobs: they too work in service of it for simply their livelihood.
The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.
That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.
I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?
I don't think best minds ever implied empathy or even should.
Best, to me, means people who are the top of their specialty, whether it be mathematics, astrophysics, rocketry, economics, business, politics, pedagogy, archeology, etc. People with unnerving dedication and pursuit of knowledge to advance whatever their specialty is. It could be the marketing most of us loathe but it can also be any of the above and more and only a few pursuits only tangentially imply empathy.
Probably we should keep the distinction between "best hearts" and "best minds" but otherwise agreed, a good heart is preferable to a good mind.
There is one trait common to nearly everyone participating in the computing industry: overweening pride in one's own intelligence.
People in the industry like to reduce 'intelligence' to a single dimension. You can see this phenomenon directly in the current AI wave in which "intelligence" has been reduced to "does well at 'knowledge worker' tasks and passes arbitrary benchmarks we have defined".
Compared to the population at large, how does their definition do? Compared to philosophers and neuroscientists, it is lacking, no doubt. But that's the top 1% of the population in being able to define intelligence. So where does this view of intelligence rank compared on a more global sense? It seems better than those who just go with a "I know it when I see it" gut check (especially given how often that gut check is now letting newer models pass as long as they don't know it is an AI model). Or the "humans, because humans are clearly better" view that assigns mythical status to the human brain. Is it in the top 5%? Top 2%?
For a group to come up with a good enough definition that still ranks among the top and which is suited for the specific tasks at hand, seems like a show of intelligence. It isn't perfect, but to what extent is that avoiding premature optimization? Once the definition has issues, it'll be refined more. No need to waste time refining it if we never build tools that hit the limits of the current definition.
I had always supposed that one was supposed to recognize a borrowing from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
(Not that I'd automatically accept Ginsberg's evaluation of best minds.)
I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general.
Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.
It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.
A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.
Thank you, it’s unfortunate that the average person doesn’t seem to understand this.
Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.
Agree - but don't think there is a "best mind(s)". We're creatures of repetition and thus specialization, and so our minds can get really good at very specific things, but ultimately we're all dumb apes trying to survive as best we can.
Case in point: how many of the best minds left OpenAI when it restructured?
The fact that your tired of that line is the point here. We're tired of it. It does this, copies common content and style.
Im tired of the line "computer go brr". Is that the best you can explain yourself?
Why is being empathetic a trait of a "great mind"? Wouldn't it also be possible that "great minds" don't consider things like empathy as useful? Looking back at human history, its usually people that aren't empathetic who end up being successful. At least in a way that people consider "successful". Humanity has long outlived the usefulness of empathy.
How do you go from "successful" to "useful"?
There seems to be no logical connection from "shitty people are successful" to "empathy is not useful to society."
Because empathy isn't useful to society. One only lives once so you better make sure you'll be successful. Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
> empathy isn't useful to society ... Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
Even if I accepted the second statement (which to be clear, I absolutely do not), it doesn't follow that empathy isn't useful to society. Society is not benefited by everyone running about chasing their own personal success to the exclusion of all others: that kind of world isn't even called a society. We have other names for that and they're less positive.
I am aware people have trouble building this mental model of an unempathetic society. I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation. There is no reason to have empathy.
> building this mental model of an unempathetic society
No, it's not about mental models, it's that what you're describing is, at the limit, no longer a society at all. You need a different word for the kind of Randian endgame you're advocating for. Using "society" for it is just confusing things for everyone involved.
You think that's what you've witnessed, but perhaps you're confirming a distorted prejudice and not a reality - because that's exactly what someone who lacks empathy would see.
People who can't see green are evidence of a genetic defect, not evidence that green doesn't exist.
>I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation
Old people can be wrong, and in this case, they are.
>There is no reason to have empathy.
This is a category mistake. You reason that empathy is superfluous if people are the cause of their misfortune. However, whether people are the cause of their misfortunes is utterly irrelevant to whether there is a reason to have empathy.
So far, none of your arguments have had any discernible logic behind them. If you are so convinced that empathy is needless, why can you not articulate a coherent argument for your position?
You not seeing arguments doesn't invalidate them. You arent the judge on this.
Do you think this response will convince anyone that you are correct? You still fail to provide an argument; you're just being unpleasant. To what end?
Is that what not having empathy in a society feels like? People just talking at each other without any particular goal in mind other than being unpleasant to each other?