^ this picture is also notable to me because it feels like >50% of my friends use slack daily but apparently <0.2% of the world does. Scott Alexander has a great essay about this: Different Worlds.
^ has always been true for artists and activists. How else are you going to afford being one? Marx’s relatives were rabbis, lawyers, and businesspeople; Lenin was a hereditary noble, etc. etc. Also reminds me of:
Over the years he complained repeatedly that his mother did not want to help him out of his financial distress, and openly hoped for her demise in order to hasten receipt of his inheritance.[f] Henriette's view was that he should do more to earn money, she commenting "if only Karl had made Capital, instead of just writing about it".
Relatedly, most of us have a pretty poor sense, I suspect, of what brings us pleasure and suffering. Do you really enjoy Christmas? Do you really feel bad while doing the dishes? Are you happier weeding or going to a restaurant with your family? Few people make a serious study of this aspect of their lives, despite the lip service we generally pay to the importance of “happiness.” Most people feel bad a substantial proportion of the time, it seems to me.9 We are remarkably poor stewards of our emotional experience. We may say we’re happy—overwhelmingly we do but we have little idea what we’re talking about.10 …
Or consider this: My wife mentions that I seem to be angry about being stuck with the dishes again (despite the fact that doing the dishes makes me happy?). I deny it. I reflect; I sincerely attempt to discover whether I’m angry—I don’t just reflexively defend myself but try to be the good self-psychologist my wife would like me to be—and still I don’t see it. I don’t think I’m angry. But I’m wrong, of course, as I usually am in such situations: My wife reads my face better than I introspect. Maybe I’m not quite boiling inside, but there’s plenty of angry phenomenology to be discovered if I knew better how to look. Or do you think that every time we’re wrong about our emotions, those emotions must be nonconscious, dispositional, not genuinely felt? Or felt and perfectly apprehended phenomenologically but somehow nonetheless mislabeled? Can’t I also err more directly?
^ “Knowledge work has a built-in agency conflict: output is a function of skill and focus, skill comes from legitimate interest in a field, and that legitimate interest means that spending your entire workday on an Internet-connected device is incredibly distracting. It happens in finance: give someone who loves investing access to a Bloomberg terminal, and they can spend all day researching some esoteric microcap stock or weird macro hypothesis instead of doing their day job, which involves getting this quarter’s EBITDA estimate from +/- 2% down to +/- 1.5%.“
Correction to last week’s tweet about CEO-to-Worker compensation ratio
Simon Morris writes:
1/ It really doesn't (in the data he linked to, it changed from 90% to 70% between '63 and '65 well before things took off in the '90s). (Although perhaps we're talking past each other was to what "this period" means. To me it means the 90s when CEO pay really started moving). 2/ If we're talking about a fall in marginal tax rates of say 90% to 30%, then perks become 7x more valuable, CEO/work pay ratio is going up by considerably more than that. I think the CEO/worker pay chart is much better explained by plotting CEO pay vs stock prices. I do believe that marginal tax rates changing had something to do with corporate perks changing, but it don't think it explains what this chart is showing.
I used to cheat at online games. I liked it for a short period of time, when I was idk 13 years old. But I enjoyed the process of researching and hacking way more than actually getting some kind of in-game privileges. Then, when I was a little older, I used to cheat to see "fair gamers" cry about how cool they are and how pathetic I am. It was fun as fuck. This is where I "resonated" with the article: thinking someone is worse, because what, they cheat in online games? Come on, isn't allocation of ones precious resources (time, mainly) to some virtual testosterone- and dopamine-driven hamster wheel better? Now that I think about it, I could go even as far as saying I am grateful for those times, I learned something about how some people love complying for whatever reason.
What that article could be, is not about cheating in games, but about hoping to earn millions on some crypto trading, carding etc. If you make that substitution, everything really falls in its place. Better than jumping on kids :)
Best newsletter ever
I used to cheat at online games. I liked it for a short period of time, when I was idk 13 years old. But I enjoyed the process of researching and hacking way more than actually getting some kind of in-game privileges. Then, when I was a little older, I used to cheat to see "fair gamers" cry about how cool they are and how pathetic I am. It was fun as fuck. This is where I "resonated" with the article: thinking someone is worse, because what, they cheat in online games? Come on, isn't allocation of ones precious resources (time, mainly) to some virtual testosterone- and dopamine-driven hamster wheel better? Now that I think about it, I could go even as far as saying I am grateful for those times, I learned something about how some people love complying for whatever reason.
What that article could be, is not about cheating in games, but about hoping to earn millions on some crypto trading, carding etc. If you make that substitution, everything really falls in its place. Better than jumping on kids :)