All I have to do is read the tablets of your financial gods, cited daily here, to understand how utterly lost you all really are. It's an honest shame that so many brilliant, educated people with bright and positive outlooks have been so thoughtlessly coopted, with their own consent, into routine and pointless profit-seeking under the guise of "changing the world." Let's be clear: SV "startups" are pointless capital ventures that reasonable conscientious people would never support or pursue except for the sole purpose of personal profit-seeking. As you get older, I think you'll see, as a smart person, the curtain will pull back and the difference between substantive pursuits and what you're all doing will be truly revealed.

I don't say this to be mean or for any gain whatsoever. I am truly sad about the second internet boom, having seen a bit of the first one. I am just a lamenting academic with no horses in your race. I would only like to see the world truly changed, and I wish all our society's best education were put to use actually doing it.

You obviously have some nuanced views on this, which I don't object to (and probably agree with more than you'd expect). The problem is that when you present them in a polarized and polarizing format, you move the discussion towards a clash of enemies instead of a conversation of colleagues. That's a big deal.

It's hard to notice what a big deal it is because when we post such things it always feels like we're brave and tiny David against big ugly Goliath. But that's a cognitive bias.

The solution is to remove or at least de-escalate the pejoratives, and roll back one's grand claims to partial ones. If you consciously leave room for other options, people will become curious to engage with your point of view. Then we get interesting discussion, which is really all we care about here.

I spend countless hours reading these comments and have gradually gotten more inured to their sharpness than most readers can be expected to, yet when I read things like "your gods" and "how utterly lost you all are" my spine stiffens and my fur stands on end. Such comments only evoke tribal identification: for or against, depending on where one's pre-existing sympathy lies. Once tribal identification kicks in, we get reflexive responses rather than reflective ones, and that is the root of everything we're trying to avoid.

I don't really understand if you're chastising me or if you're seriously engaging in discussion. If your sole objection is to the tone and word choice of my response, I'll happily concede the point. You dismissed my perception of HN's worldview ("if there is such a thing") as imaginary and due to my susceptibility to unnamed sources of information. I replied contrarily in a purposefully absolutist manner based solely on the original post.

I recognize the zeitgeist is to "leave room for other options" for discursive comfort, but there is a fine line between that and self-defeatism, as much as I might agree that it could have rhetorical advantages to do so. I do not really seek those advantages, since I don't truly seek any gain. The "other options," in this case, might be that some of you are not worshiping Golden Calves and that some of you might be willing to agree that an algorithmic enumeration of bloggers, financiers, and self-promoters could be an anti-intellectual listing of false idols. I accept this could indeed be true for some of you, but it's not incumbent upon me to make your points for you in every rejoinder so as to parry your bristling.

lvs strikes a chord with me as well. I'm also an academic (well, staff in implementation of MS Cloud technologies at a 150k user university). Coming from a very liberal campus has exposed me to a great deal of people, from Anarcho-capitalists to Communists, and everything in between.

I get the idea that simply "doing work to make money" doesn't change the world in meaningful ways. I think of it akin to the idea of "Rent" or lock-in. Both of those ways can be used, and quite effectively, to extract more money. Yet neither of those can be used to further science, arts, technology, engineering, philosophy, or other more academic pursuits directly. Making a new DRM technology to retard sharing of media isn't innovative: it's built on a broken premise that will turn into a time and money sink for all those whom are involved.

Now, money can be used to fund those areas. YC is doing just that with the UBI research (linked elsewhere in this thread). But the money can also be stockpiled, sent in investments, or other non humanity-furthering ways.

But, I think the crux of his argument is that this 'gravitational' force of money sucks innovative peoples, scientists, and similar into what amounts to a tar pit. There's only a limited amount of these types of people, and the claim is SV and similar cultures around the world is sucking the air out from more pressing pursuits.

Now, the bad side: Academia is also just as poisonous... Just in not the ways SV is. Instead, at least in the US, I'm sure you know of the repercussions students have, are, and will go through for the loan crisis. My own job, as with most around me, are paid nearly all by exorbitant student loans. And it's a cyclical money-suck.

Faculty also deal with nasty issues. Three of my friends are PhDs in various STEM areas. All 3 of them are adjunct faculty. In other words, cheaply paid contract labor. This is similar to the Uber-ification of teaching staff.

I'm a relative outsider to that of business and that of academia (being IT staff). I see the value of both, and also its poisons. The more I think on it, it seems the underlying issue is money. Or better yet, it's the idea that one has to "grow or perish". The idea is the same in both spheres.

I agree with you.

But it's a systemic problem, so grandiose denunciations of one segment of the system (in lvs's case, Silicon Valley) take us further from understanding it in a bunch of ways. The way that concerns me is that it interrupts the dynamic of thoughtful discussion and replaces it with yelling and chest-beating. No matter how sophisticated the rhetoric, that is what it is at bottom.

In this case it's also ignorant, since the more intelligent people in SV are aware of and worried about these issues.