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asdf32 posted:Hmm the anime marxist revolution is at hand. LONG LIVE THE MAOIST PEOPLE'S WAR (and also my literal gooncave full of video games) ~farrrrrrrrrrt Cultural Imperial posted:Haha I just clued in she's a dude.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:37
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A lot of people that are successful (not all) like to build up "Self Made" narratives about themselves so of course they naturally would gravitate toward a philosophy that encourages that kind of thinking. Even if they don't build up that narrative for themselves sometimes other people frame them in that light because the completely self made man is something a lot of people want to believe in. I suggest watching a movie about any successful person and then read about their early life on Wikipedia. Typically, the movie will exclude the parts where they receive help from other people. Anyway, the self made man narrative has always bothered me because there really isn't such a thing. I consider myself successful and I do give myself some of the credit but I know I wouldn't be where I am today if I was born in third world country, had poo poo parents that didn't see my strengths and spend a lot of money to nurture those strengths. Sephiroth_IRA fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 13:39
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With computers, logic works. Not so much when you are facing reality. Also, I'm a CS major and I'm a socialdemocrat. The cliched tech-libertarian(-man/womanchild) exists, though.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:51
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I think it's a combination of them being (generally) young people rewarded well for working hard, dunning-kruger effect, and normally having their hobby be the same as their work life so they find it harder to separate the two. There's also the desire to just get in there and fiddle with things that gets applied to something like government where that's just not practical. I'm a software dev and I've noticed it on the internet, but not really in person, and definitely not in my workplace (UK). The heavy venture capitalist tone of ycombinator make it a bit of an outlier though, I wouldn't generalise the kind of people there to be all developers.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:54
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shrike82 posted:To flip the question on its head, is there a field of work that pays well and doesn't attract douches? It's almost as if people with lots of money are more likely to have FYGM attitudes than people who don't. Smaller scale construction might be a little different, there are a lot of self-made millionaires (especially in concrete) who legitimately busted their asses for decades to succeed who are a little more grounded because they know much of their success was because of a combination of luck, developing the right connections and the hard work of others. Many successful careers rely on the "do well in school -> go to good college -> get a degree in the right subject -> get high paying job" model, and people in those careers often fault others for not working hard enough in school as the reason for their lower economic status, whereas there isn't a collegiate pipeline for success in most fields of construction.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:08
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My belief has always been that most people of average intelligence have the potential to become experts at probably anything as long as they're nurtured. This kind of thinking really pisses people off that think they were born smart/special and that their upbringing had absolutely nothing to do with their outcome. Anyway, I know it's from Cracked but apparently someone tested this theory with his own children. quote:Laszlo Polgar, an educational psychologist from Hungary, fully believed in the idea that genius is something people learn rather than a trait they are born with, a radical viewpoint hotly contested by the docudrama Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. Laszlo decided he would test his theory on his own children by seeing if he could hone them into brilliant chess players simply by exposing them to the game at a young age and having them train constantly throughout their adolescence. Makes sense. The problem was, he didn't actually have any children. Laszlo had devised an experiment wholly dependent on a group of test subjects that didn't exist.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:16
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mastervj posted:With computers, logic works. Not so much when you are facing reality. Hey logic tends to work in real life too. It's just more complicated and shallow people give up on trying to understand it. The justifications for a welfare state are very logical and evidence-based and arguments against it tend to be simplistic and based on hosed-up moralizing.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:24
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Don't you understand? If someone makes more money than you, they are beyond criticism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF8wLg5Asgo Especially true when said person is just assuming they are better paid.
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Jul 23, 2014 15:39
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Narcissism and solipsism is pretty close, but I think there might be something to add to that. They're pretty much taught to think that way by virtue of the subject matter they learn at college. Its about an adherence to binary absolutes and a reduced ability to understand that things in the real world are "fuzzy". The systems they work with are generally discrete, and all inputs and outputs are defined because they dont really exist in the concrete sense. There is no room for conflicting truths, because either a system works or it doesn't. This leads to a tendency to think in absolutes, because they dont really measure anything or interact with any tools that may have any defined acceptable error. Its sort of like projected solopsism. Only instead of saying "I cant 100% trust my senses so I can only truly know my thought exist", and being humble and accepting that you might be wrong about some assumptions, you arent even aware assumptions even exist and you think you can logic your way out of any problem because logic is the only real truth. Libertarianism (and phraxology, or whatever its called) is pretty much the inability to understand that just because you're being logical, doesn't mean you're correct. Kristov fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 16:25
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Kristov posted:Narcissism and solipsism is pretty close, but I think there might be something to add to that. They're pretty much taught to think that way by virtue of the subject matter they learn at college. Its about an adherence to binary absolutes and a reduced ability to understand that things in the real world are "fuzzy". The systems they work with are generally discrete, and all inputs and outputs are defined because they dont really exist in the concrete sense. It's not like absolutes are unique to libertarianism. Variants of socialism have a faith in collective democratic processes that rivals a libertarian's faith in markets. Not to meantion extreme racial/religious etc movements in the past.
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Jul 23, 2014 16:51
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This is an issue that has come to the forefront of my career recently. I'm an electrician turned tech worker, so I've worked with the IBEW, and I still work with many firms that are union related, I've been talking with the Theatre Stage folks about this as well. Bridges must be built with the existing unions before the tech industry can even think about unionizing. I'd love to have a union have my back when doing any sort of salary negotiations. No one should be payed under 15$/hr, even neck beards with aspergers. Does anyone else have any sort of shared experience working with both sides of the coin? All-in-all its a futile effort but the work must be done to bring the skills to those that need it not just those that can afford to throw away money on the risk bad tech workers. Certifications are poor excuse for a trade related system built on social trust of an industry. The reason you apprentice is so you can learn from those with experience, and to learn to socialize among your co-workers; effectively. Most tech workers are siloed into there specialties, this model allows managers to work their people to death without the broad skill sharing that exists in other industries to get backup when you need it. All electricians must know how to use a multimeter and the basics of electrical theory, I believe computer techs must know much the same things. You can't design a datacenter no matter how small, without the basic knowledge of electrical theory/code. It's scary to see what Tech guys do when they need power and their masters are too cheap to bring in an electrician.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:33
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Really, the hostility that you can see in many cases from software people towards unions is irritating and somewhat confusing. There's this belief that unions, if they're accepted at all, are only for low-paying manual labor jobs that have dangerous working conditions. It isn't uncommon at all for employers to expect 50+ hours a week in the office, plus continuing work at home and on the weekends, from devs. The vast majority of full-time positions are salaried and don't offer overtime and it can look bad on your reviews if you are only working 40 hours a week. There are also those people that just write code constantly and have no problem working like this, since they make their work into their hobby of sorts, so employers expect everybody to be like that. You'll see people complain about working hours but few people try to do anything about it, it's just an accepted practice at this point. I've talked with coworkers about the Google/Apple wage fixing issue and a common response was "well we're still paid really well" which is true, but the issue isn't with the amount being paid so much as the tactics used to keep the amount where it is.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:55
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There has been a small bit of research on the psychology of libertarians that this thread might find interesting. This is all based on survey data, and their three samples differed in composition quite a bit (probably why it ended up in PLoS ONE). Also they pasted SPSS output graphs right into their paper which is kind of ugly and dumb. What do they like?  quote:Our results suggest why libertarians do not feel fully at home in either of the major American political parties. Consistent with our prediction, libertarians were relatively low on all five foundations. Libertarians share with liberals, a distaste for the morality of ingroup, authority, and purity, characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right [43]. Like liberals, libertarians can be said to have a two-foundation morality, prioritizing harm and fairness above the other three foundations. But libertarians share with conservatives their moderate scores on these two foundations. They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly. Libertarianism is clearly not just a point on the liberal-conservative continuum; libertarians have a unique pattern of moral concerns, with relatively low reliance on all five foundations. quote:Once again, we see that libertarians look somewhat like liberals, but assign lower importance to values related to the welfare or suffering of others–the benevolence value (which Schwartz defines as: “Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact”) and universalism (defined as “Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature”). That sounds like Conservatives. Are they Conservatives?  Not really. They don't really care about Conservative values (“I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural”), but, like Conservatives, they honestly don't care about other people (“When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent do you consider whether or not someone suffered emotionally?”). Are they loners?  quote:As predicted, libertarians in our sample appeared to be strongly individualistic. Compared to liberals and conservatives, they report feeling a weaker sense of connection to their family members, romantic partners, friends, communities, and nations, as well as to humanity at large. While liberals exhibit a horizontal collectivistic orientation and conservatives a vertical collectivistic orientation, libertarians exhibit neither type of collectivism, instead displaying a distinctly individualistic orientation. This relative preference for individualism may have been moralized [10] into the value orientation found in Study 1. quote:Table 4 shows that libertarians showed the lowest levels of loving feelings toward others, across all four categories (although the difference with conservatives on love for friends was not significant).  The authors tried to guess at how libertarians become attracted to libertarian ideals via their personality characteristics: quote:The current research not only describes an important ideological group, but also tells a coherent story about how and why some people become libertarians while others become liberals or conservatives. While we cannot establish causality with our correlational data, we can see several cross-level links of the sort described by McAdams and Pals [35] and modeled by Lewis and Bates [9]. People who are dispositionally more (at level 1) open to new experiences and reactant are more likely to find themselves drawn to some classically liberal philosophers (such as John Stuart Mill) and classically liberal values and ideals (such as the superordinate value of individual liberty, at level 2). But if these same people are also highly individualistic and low on empathic concern — if they simply feel the suffering of other people less — then they might feel little emotional attraction to modern liberalism's emphasis on altruism and positive liberty, and turned off by its willingness to compel some citizens to help other citizens (through redistributive tax policies). When they first encounter libertarian philosophy (or read an Ayn Rand novel or hear a Ron Paul speech), they find an ideological narrative (level 3) that resonates with their values and their emerging political likes and dislikes (level 2). They begin identifying themselves as libertarians, which reinforces their moral beliefs. They find it easier to reject statements endorsing altruism (or group loyalty or respect for authority) than they would have before having discovered libertarianism and its rationalist, individualist ethos. It's a big-rear end paper, but unfortunately doesn't address the developmental trajectory stuff more directly, since that seems to be what people are interested in this thread the most (i.e., how do libertarians become so?)
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Jul 23, 2014 18:08
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Maybe move this thread to GBS?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:09
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Baronjutter posted:Maybe move this thread to GBS? So it can have three pages of people spewing racial epithets and then fall into obscurity in about an hour?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:17
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Rime posted:So it can have three pages of people spewing racial epithets and then fall into obscurity in about an hour? Seems more or less consistent with your slur against an entire industry and its employees, based on a single tweet produced by a known retard.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:20
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PT6A posted:Seems more or less consistent with your slur against an entire industry and its employees, based on a single tweet produced by a known retard. heh
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Jul 23, 2014 18:21
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PT6A posted:Seems more or less consistent with your slur against an entire industry and its employees, based on a single tweet produced by a known retard. Not endearing people to your cause there rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:37
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Rime posted:So it can have three pages of people spewing racial epithets and then fall into obscurity in about an hour? It certainly hasn't gone much better here. But you started with "why are (group) almost unanimously (x)" based on your gut feeling rather than data, which was never going to go well.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:38
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SolTerrasa posted:It certainly hasn't gone much better here. But you started with "why are (group) almost unanimously (x)" based on your gut feeling rather than data, which was never going to go well. I was hoping to bait more than known forums shitposter PT6A. 
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Jul 23, 2014 18:40
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I've never met a single coworker in my career who was a slavish devotee of Ayn Rand. They are all milquetoast liberals.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:43
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PT6A posted:Seems more or less consistent with your slur against an entire industry and its employees, based on a single tweet produced by a known retard. Whoa rime, what did you do to piss off this tough bulldogger
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Jul 23, 2014 18:43
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The office I work in used to have a fair number of Ron Pauls until others actually engaged them in discussion. They've mostly all changed their views over the last year or so or left the company(for unrelated reasons) so now we've just got a few old Republican guys left who generally keep to themselves.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:51
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Cross posting this from the Libertarians thread http://www.salon.com/2014/07/23/the_extreme_right_wing_is_using_the_tech_industry_to_rebrand_the_gop_partner/
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Jul 23, 2014 19:35
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Voted 5 for this thread's effect on all the insecure programmers indignant at being tarred with the heinous slur 'libertarian'. In my experience there aren't that many hardcore libertarians in programming but I'm in a little corner of the industry far removed from SV so yeah. Though a friend's company is riddled with them.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:51
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:Really, the hostility that you can see in many cases from software people towards unions is irritating and somewhat confusing. There's this belief that unions, if they're accepted at all, are only for low-paying manual labor jobs that have dangerous working conditions. Personally, I don't really have strong opinions about unionising devs and feel like currently it's not really a priority, though I do agree it'd be useful. Once you have more people valuing their position more you'll probably start to see more sympathy for the idea.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:07
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Xandu posted:I'm not convinced most tech workers consider themselves libertarian, but they are overwhelmingly privileged, male, and white, and like most highly privileged people, few consider themselves to have risen based on anything other than their own merit. 2/3, tech workers aren't "overwhelmingly white".
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Jul 23, 2014 20:55
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b0lt posted:2/3, tech workers aren't "overwhelmingly white". A large part of them doesn't even earn well. Where I live, there is plenty of "Tesco for programmers" - businesses which hire mostly young programmers, pay them lovely wages barely above minimum and force unpaid overtime on them.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:03
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My single anecdotal experience with this culture is a very close friend of mine who went to Stanford for both undergrad and grad school. Upon receiving his masters and getting a job through one of his professors came back with the opinion that "college is worthless." I get that the college is system is far from perfect, but for someone who has everything they have because of it to then turn around and poo poo on it is insane to me, especially since I don't have a college degree. He's a white, middle-class male. I think its just a combination of a) making a lot of money (societal approval). b) being in a booming industry (a seeming abundance of jobs/work/anyone can do this). c) experiencing the radical changes IT has brought us (changing the world/pioneer). d) being "a part of that" and constantly being in a culture that tells them "you are the best loving thing in the world right now. everything you do is right." (carefully managed ego stroking). They are successful and the human brain wants to believe that too/justify it as them being better than everyone else.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:36
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More importantly, he went to Stanford. You can pretty much graduate last in your class there and be constantly bombarded by job offers.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:45
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Yeah just having Stanford on your diploma is going to get you a lot more attention than some random state school. Especially their CS department.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:47
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No, no, no, you see he could have just done one of those boot camps in SF that "guarantees you a job" after 1 month of training and been in exactly the same position! He could have just used the money he spent on school and locked himself in an apartment for 1-2 years learning to code himself! He totally didn't need any of the resources, teachers, nor the paced academic experience! He would have just met his professor on the street randomly and been offered the same job. I'm sure of it.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:50
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rrrrrrrrrrrt posted:I've never met a single coworker in my career who was a slavish devotee of Ayn Rand. They are all milquetoast liberals. Wouldn't be surprised as it's mostly the the old guard. tsa posted:Specifically, Love and Power Seriously everyone should just watch this because it's way better than anything idiots are going to talk about in this dumb thread.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:52
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I think the issue with college is that too many people were told (when I was growing up in the nineties and early 2000s) by their school, parents and every TV dad that a four year college degree in literally any field you're interested in would guarantee you a $100k desk job doing something you love. The truth is college is extremely useful but people's expectations were built way too high.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:57
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:I think the issue with college is that too many people were told (when I was growing up in the nineties and early 2000s) by their school, parents and every TV dad that a four year college degree in literally any field your interested in would guarantee you a $100k desk job doing something you love. Replace "$100k desk job" with "middle class existence" and that's basically true.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:59
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:I think the issue with college is that too many people were told (when I was growing up in the nineties and early 2000s) by their school, parents and every TV dad that a four year college degree in literally any field you're interested in would guarantee you a $100k desk job doing something you love. Remember seeing this one in school? Although it always struck me as weird that a teacher would post this... 
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Jul 23, 2014 22:13
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Aside from the obvious and done-to-death class-based and race-based factors, there's also an age-based factor. Aside from the ages of tech workers themselves, many people see tech and the internet as a young people's industry that anyone past a certain age can't really understand, and these same people often see the government as an organization of senile, befuddled old men who barely understand how to operate a lightbulb and are too thoroughly in the pocket of ancient moneyed interests to regulate the tech industry in a sane way. They also tend to see themselves as liberal, just fine with gay marriage and weed and atheism, and thus imagine that government's obsession with religion and the war on drugs are just because they're old jerks who need to die off already so the socially progressive young people can come into power and deregulate weed and fart apps. This is far more prevalent in the SV bubble where "young people are just smarter" is taken as gospel, but even regular non-SV techies can't help but cringe when legislators start talking about cracking down on file sharing and copyright infringement on the "series of tubes". Combine that general distaste for our government composed of older people with the level of hero worship SV types have for big-name CEOs like Zuckerberg and Jobs, and it's not surprising one bit to hear calls like Tunney's. A similar thread of ageism is also pretty common in anti-union rhetoric, which is all about how the plucky young hard worker fresh out of college and ready to bust their rear end is being held back and robbed by an organization dedicated to protecting the lazy middle-aged slacker just coasting until his early retirement with fabulous benefits that are no longer available to the new worker.
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Jul 23, 2014 23:25
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How the gently caress is Unionism at odds with the unfettered free market? It's perfectly possible for collective bargaining to exist in a 100% laissez-faire stateless society. You know what couldn't? A corporation. They require acts of law to even exist.
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Jul 23, 2014 23:32
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Smudgie Buggler posted:How the gently caress is Unionism at odds with the unfettered free market? It's perfectly possible for collective bargaining to exist in a 100% laissez-faire stateless society. You know what couldn't? A corporation. They require acts of law to even exist. I've tried explaining this and it usually gets rebuffed with bullshit about "holding employers hostage" or "double taxing employees". I regret useing that Tunny image, it was just the fastest thing I could find to use as an example.
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Jul 23, 2014 23:56
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Main Paineframe posted:This is far more prevalent in the SV bubble where "young people are just smarter" is taken as gospel, but even regular non-SV techies can't help but cringe when legislators start talking about cracking down on file sharing and copyright infringement on the "series of tubes". Combine that general distaste for our government composed of older people with the level of hero worship SV types have for big-name CEOs like Zuckerberg and Jobs, and it's not surprising one bit to hear calls like Tunney's. It's not as simple as "young people disdain the old". They have some good reasons to do so: 1. Politicians frequently don't know anything about the issues they are supposed to vote about, especially the ones techies tend to care about. This leads to somewhat hilarious situations like the one in Greece, where the government accidentally banned all video games while trying to curb illegal gambling. 2. There is currently a lot of resentment towards the older generations, mostly because they got what they children will never have. Take the pensions in Europe for example, which were not only silently slashed but the retirement age has been raised as well. A lot of millenials are simply pissed they have to finance generous pensions for the currently retired with zero guarantee they are going to receive theirs at all.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:05
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