The implication here is that everyone has one best place, but in reality there are many local maximums. The opportunity cost of traversing a valley for a slightly higher maximum may not be worth it.
The post also conflates employment with happiness. Not having a paying job is a valid life choice. Stay at home parent is a completely valid niche.
Picking a job or career based on the free time it allows to pursue hobbies is also valid.
None of this is easy and the post doesn’t seem to provide any insight into finding a good fit.
The idea that we have one “best” fit is the self-help equivalent of “perfect is the enemy of good”.
Oh it does:
> So it’s not that the world magically offers the lock to fit everyone’s key. It’s that everyone’s key has a bit of give, enough to fit the locks available. We screw this up when we assume that our keys are made out of Play-Doh and they can fit anywhere, or when we assume they’re made out of obsidian and they’ll shatter if you try to stick ‘em in the wrong place.
It actually warns about having unrealistic expectations what fitting in means and encourages to have some flexibility but also not too much flexibility. I think that is a good approach
> The post also conflates employment with happiness.
The article doesn't talk solely about traditional employment but has a broader definition of niche.
> And that’s just thinking of niches in the dumbest sense possible, which is “things you can do in exchange for money.”
Later:
> When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.
You comment could be more insightful if you had read the article.
Indeed for some percentage of people, employment is not fulfilling or satisfying. They turn to other activities to create significance in their lives. (Open Source software is pretty much built on this concept.)
That said, I suspect the basic premise (everyone has a unique niche) is flawed. It's more likely that everyone has the opportunity to add value to society, and that value comes in various ever-creative forms. Many choose not to take that opportunity, and hypothetically we're worse off for that, but life pretty much still goes on.
Not to mention the small fraction of adults that suffer serious brain damage and turn into vegetables.
Underwater pizza delivery? Sounds great and fun, but is it actually profitable once everything is taken into account, including assets, depreciation, insurance, saving for retirement, job security etc.
Pretty much anybody can do something they are more apt at and like better if they are willing to risk their financial security.
No, just a place. There could be more than one, and they might not even be comparable in a way that would let you say one is better or worse than the other. The article talks about this when it says people's keys have some give, they don't have to fit just one lock.
This is even better than what the article argues and thus not an antithesis. The author tries to convince us that there exists atleast a place for everyone, not that there aren't many.
> The idea that we have one “best” fit is the self-help equivalent of “perfect is the enemy of good”.
Again, it's not that there is one "best". The idea is everyone can be valuable through atleast one means. I don't see how that is related to perfectionism.
> Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand.
That's certainly true (imo), but the author seems to implicitly expect the supply and demand to match up and I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that they do not.
Thinking narrowly about jobs, there are a lot more people that want to be artists than people that want to buy art, causing art to be a pretty hard industry to make a living in. This is equally true of any other niche where there are X people wanting it and Y people providing it: there's no reason to expect those to be equal and, as it turns out, they rarely are.
The article does not say that your place has to be your job. Indeed, it gives examples to the contrary, such as the Breakup Whisperer.
My guess is that many people (myself included) don’t know how to find a market, align themselves to the market and advertise. There are also a lot of people who ‘want to do their own thing’ and focus on making art that no one else wants.
There are a lot of people in the world with very specific interests and lots of disposable income.
There is a lake in the U.S. that crosses the borders of Idaho and Utah. On summer weekends, you'll see the Bear Lake Burger Boat trolling the waters. Swim or float up to it, and they'll give you a delicious hamburger.
I'm glad whoever runs it has found a fit in this world. I'm sure it's not what most of us on Hacker News would choose to do, but I am glad someone does.
Surprising considering that almost none of these terms even existed 20 years ago.
It be much nicer to start this statement from the reverse. Instead of justifying everyone has a purpose for a society, how about a society justifying itself based on the premise that every person has a purpose (could just be consumerism for all I know but hey).
It's hard to take the piece seriously after that. Obviously a mischaracterization of the group he refers to as "Team Overboard".
A steelman would look something like: "On the other team, they are indifferent as to whether people they don't know find a place for themselves. They are confident that all people they would want to potentially know will find places for themselves."
Because that actually matches some commonly espoused philosophies. On the other hand, I've never heard anyone seriously call for a purge of undesirables, which is what the author claims.
“I’m so glad you’re here! I don’t know if they told you in there, but we’re all trying to do something crazy here, which is to build a place where we believe there’s somewhere for everyone. We have never once in our history even come close to doing this. We’re not close now. But the fact that you’re here means we haven’t failed completely, and maybe with your help we’ll succeed.”
>As far back as the 1950s, it was known that garlic reduced reaction time by two to three times when consumed by pilots taking flight tests.
Does ANYONE know of reference for this? It seemed so bizarre I had to look it up but couldn't see anything obvious.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/as-far-back-as-the-1950s-it... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNlf-Ar5oA
But I didn't find any of that.
For me it's a vague, meaningless word that people like to use without ever defining it. And it's meaning ehen5rhere is one. Is completly diffeent9from person to person...
So for me utterly useless.
Can you see the difference in meaning of this two words ? One talks about ethereal things without boundaries but the other bounds you to something…
To answer your point, spirituality is broadly speaking your relationship with the invisible world. Is life to you purely material, explored only through the senses or is there more ?
> That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.
Some interesting implications of this:
1. Any children you have, would be fulfilling a purpose in the world
2. If you decide not to have that child, you are depriving the world and everyone else of a person who would otherwise fulfill that purpose
3. Recall that no one is superfluous or redundant. So by depriving the world of a person who can fulfill that purpose, you are guaranteeing that the purpose will never be adequately fulfilled
4. The above applies no matter how many children you've already had. Already had 10 children and decided not to have a 11th? Man, you just created a Nicky-sized hole in the ecosystem. Now the whole world will be off-balance because of your tragic decision
5. So yeah, if you don't want the world to be off-balance, you better get out there and have as many kids as humanly possible
By having more children, you contribute to more people fulfilling their purposes in the future, but this is true only to the point where resources would become too scarce when divided between the niches.
I would guess that in the future, the Earth could sustain maybe double its current population, due to much more efficient resource utilisation and extraction, relieving the demand on these resources, and the large number of people who would prefer to live in cities, reducing the demand on land. But the Earth could not sustain such a growth of its population immediately; we need time to let society and technology improve and adapt.
Not really. The article only says persons who exist have a purpose. It does not say that persons who do not yet exist must be created because there is a purpose waiting for them.
There's some boundary where you can't abort or your child is born and then they definitely have a purpose, even though 5 minutes before reaching that boundary, they didn't
If someone doesn't fulfill their niche they tend to take more than they give creating imbalance.
So your implications don't really follow strictly from the stated axioms. Though yeah, generally, yes, more people are a good thing as it means more people that can help drive humanity forward. (Obviously there are factors why having as many children as humanly possible is not always a good idea though.) Also some religions strongly encourage people to have as many children as possible so it is not a super uncommon view.
This seems like harmful thinking. Should I feel guilty about being depressed? What about victims of circumstance? Do they owe society an apology for their trauma?
A less rigorous explanation, but probably more to the author's point, is that people who end up filling the wrong niche add more negativity to the world than those who find their place. This is a worse state of affairs than leaving some niches unfilled.
The evolutionary process is pretty adept at rigorously excluding most personality and physical variants out of all the available options. Pretending otherwise is naive ahistorical nonsense.
(I suggest reading the piece – the author deals with whether or not the underlying hypothesis is true versus useful early on.)
Our society is certainly not infinite economically or as a matter of what is acceptable socially, and while different cultures have varying degrees of acceptability in terms of plausible occupations and behaviour, they are still obviously bounded.
The hypothesis is neither useful not true, which makes the article uninteresting at best.
Or specifically, I wouldn't mind the good parts of having one or two children, but I could not bear the responsibility
Nice sentiment but wishful thinking lmao. At the very least there are some people for whom nowhere is a perfect fit, and there are people who would fit better in any place they could fit in. I.e. some people are not locally optimal anywhere.
Another issue is we read this and imagine the happy smart consciousness people in our friend groups. What about the psycopaths? Serial killers? Do they deserve a place too? Any environment they would thrive in would be damaging to the general welfare of polite society. Is the point then that anyone can be molded to an ideal?
While psychopathy is relatively hard to treat it is worth noting that not all psychopaths are actively harming other people. They can also be functional and productive members of certain groups under the right circumstances. You might want to be more careful with stigmatizing a whole group of people.
In fact go to any large, long running, stable, 3rd place and there will be some non violent psychopaths and narcissist in the community.
Serial killers usually won't kill people within their own community. The BTK killer was president of his church council.
Deserve really doesn't really enter into the equation. A serial killer might know a lot about webrtc or building operating systems and may be on this thread contributing niche info right now!
Society isn't a friend group. A co-working, community or church space isn't a friend group. One of my most rewarding experiences was in a space where >20% of people were bidirectionally incompatible for personal friendship.
This article isn't about the "whole self", it's actually the opposite in some ways, it's about how in a big world there is value in finding how a distinct and "flavourful" part of your interests has unexpected value.
Soviet Labor Committee has a place for you and all others! In fact we need 10,000 laborers to construct a new datacenter. Please report with a set of warm clothes.
/s
im sick of these blue pills
As a vegan who additionally hates eating and hates being around others when they eat, it's very hard to get along with anyone.
Imagine a world where nearly everyone is a hypocrite and a murderer, and their hobby of murder is offensive to you, disgusting to you, and also seemingly the number one way for everyone but you to form social bonds of any sort.
"Neo!! You have to wake up, Neo! Come live in a filthy cave and eat slop with us, Neo!"
I really wonder if the Matrix gave my generation brain poisoning.
Why do I greatly prefer to feel correct than to feel happy? Why does it seem impossible to accept other people and this alternate reality most of the world subscribes to?
I think I would take the blue pill.
The steak Cipher eats is vegan, it's made from ethically sourced human meat, the humans were not raised to be food like cattle are.
The world inside the Matrix is not perfect, it's missing many things I'd like, but in that pre 9/11 dream world I could eat dairy cheese and maybe enjoy an easy life. Maybe in that dream I would be cis, even.
If I take the blue pill, am I responsible for the machines killing runners?
If I pay taxes, am I responsible for my countrymen voting in weird losers?
The red pill is no longer a slam dunk for me. I wonder when my mind changed.
