What to Do

I'm one of those people that doesn't think we should try to "take care of the world". I prefer the older, time tested answer of what to do:

> You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest

As noted in the essay, this idea of "taking care of the world" is relatively new. PG claims it's because only now we can take care of the world, but I think it's just a naive idea that doesn't stand the test of time. I'm sure its not novel idea, and many others had thought of it and tried to implement some version of it in their society. But because it hasn't become cannon in any group or culture, it's a bad idea in that it doesn't produce human flourishing. Whereas ideas around wisdom, bravery, honesty, etc have replicated throughout cultures and led to everything we cherish

The idea is that you cannot take care of the world if you can't take care of yourself. So at first you must be these things. Ironically the most empathetic people I have met that purport to care most about "the world" are often the most dysfunctional people - substance abuse, medications, no strong family ties, anxiety, neuroticism, etc. These aren't people we should try to emulate.

Only when you have your house in order can you attempt to help others. Start with the people immediately around you. People you know and love and that know and love you. If you've ever dealt with a family member with a serious problem, you'll see how difficult for you to help them. Now imagine helping a friend, then casual acquaintance, then stranger finally a stranger on the other side of the world.

We should have humility as to what kind of impact we can have on the world and look inward to those around us where we can have the most impact. Otherwise you might as well wipe out hundreds of thousands of people and spend trillions of dollars spreading democracy in the middle east.

True! If you need help, go to the poor.

People who have everything they need will make up a story where you deserve your troubles to avoid facing their own vulnerability.

«I have seen people without a pot to piss in, treat others -even complete strangers- with respect, love, caring, and patience, and folks with a lot of money, treat others most barbarously; especially when they consider those "others," to be folks that don't have the capability to hit back or stand up for themselves.»

It's easy to assign what you just described to character traits that the given people happen to have regardless of their economical stance. Yet, thinking about it a bit, being nice when poor is just a life strategy that makes sense. Not only that one's precarious situation (of any kind) attracts a lot of vulnerability, it also attracts a lot of dependency on pretty much everyone's good grace. Being anything but nice by default means undermining one's success. There is not much to gain by being hostile when poor. When one gets to be rich (in relation to others) however, the game changes. People want things and it makes sense to direct their attention and energy on other people that (ideally) do have what they want or (at least) may assist them with getting what they want. And, many people would like to cut corners and resort to dirty tricks in doing so. It's not that hard to imagine what that rich folk has to face in relation with other ambitious and not so scrupulous individuals, what a winning strategy in this case would look like, and why it makes sense to become the default behavior.

One of the most unpleasant things one can experience is being in a fine restaurant or at a high-end hotel, and observe a guest being rude or outright cruel to a waiter for no reason other than that "I can get away with doing this". Often to a very excellent waiter providing top-notch service.

It’s not just that people disagree on whether or not to do these things, it’s also that they disagree on what helps people/the world.

An evangelical and an atheist will probably disagree about the helpfulness of spreading the gospel, for example.

I do believe that personal narrative place a huge role here. I know of a poll, in which over 80% of the people believed they’re going to end up in heaven.

most people believe they do good and care about other people.

I am really curious about your ethos here. It seems to me there's nothing for you in it. either psychologal, social, or financially.

Is it more like a calling? a spiritual consolation?

>I have seen people without a pot to piss in, treat others -even complete strangers- with respect, love, caring, and patience, and folks with a lot of money, treat others most barbarously; especially when they consider those "others," to be folks that don't have the capability to hit back or stand up for themselves.

This is a thousands years old apparent dichotomy between rich evil people and good poor people.

But the reality is not like that. Rich can be good and poor can be evil. The same person can be good in some moments and evil in others.

Depicting the world in only two colors, black and white, paints a false image of the reality.

I know people hate complexity, but we shouldn't try to oversimplify things.

Things can be good or bad when put in a value system context. There is tremendous overlap between everyone's value system, it just doesn't feel this way because the majority of most people's attention is on where they don't overlap.

A loaf of bread is good for a person who is starving, but less good to someone with celiac disease. A bowl or rice is more good to a starving person with celiac than a loaf of bread, etc.

a dish from made bad food is bad food. a program that deletes your important data is a bad program.

so no: things relate to each other and in this relation, they can be objectively bad (bad to the object subjected to its effects). Things don't exist without the effects their existence exerts. Rephrased: the question of their goodness is, commonly, a question of fitness.

I think it’s good in the sense of things that are positively affecting others’ lives.

> There's too many things already

In what sense?

History hasn't finished. There's more things today than there were yesterday, and there will be more things tomorrow than there are today.

If you stop making new things because you think there's already enough things, you're just confining yourself to the world as it exists today. Do you think the world has finished? Do you think it can't be improved?

If you want to build the world of tomorrow you're going to have to make some of the things that exist tomorrow that don't exist today.

And once you've accepted that you need to make new things, I don't think it's much of a leap to accept that it's good to make good new things.

If something is difficult/impossible to apply for political reasons, maybe something new can make it easier/possible.

It might be a new philosophy, message, movement, technology, space, gathering, poem, or otherwise.

If something is so hard to do, for political reasons, it might be time to try something new. The goal might be the same, but maybe a new approach will yield better results.

Not everyone can create new things, or create new things all the time. The rest of the time they can make better use of existing things

Political problems can be solved with technical solutions. Take the problem of food insecurity in third-world countries as an example. It's a hard problem to solve because transporting food overland via unpaved roads through politically unstable areas is expensive and dangerous. Long-term, using highly-productive first-world agribusiness to feed the third-world will fail, because no matter how cheaply agribusiness can produce food the transportation costs will make the whole enterprise cost prohibitive. This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution. If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness. GMO crops crafted for nutritional value and hardiness, easily accessible guides on farming best practices, weather forecasting, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, financial markets to hedge against risk, cheap tools and machinery; these are all unsolved or partially solved problems. Whenever someone comes up with a "good new thing" that improves the SOTA in terms of value per dollar in one of these areas, we get closer to solving the political problem of global food security.

If political realities prevent us from solving problems, then we can either change the political realities or create new solutions. Individuals generally can't change political realities, but they can create good new things that work around them. So it is good advice.

pg doesn't want to be known for his wealth or business acumen. He wants to be known as a serious thinker. He wants to write essays that stand the test of time. Just like he wanted to create the "100 year programming language" (it turned out his vision was lisp with shorter function names).

He's not doing this for clout or internet points. He's not just writing whatever. pg works very hard on his writing and some of his earlier stuff is excellent. Maybe his next essay will be a banger. Or maybe pg doesn't have any good essays in him anymore. In any case, I respect his willingness to keep at it despite how widely his essays get mocked. It's not easy to put yourself out there.

Years ago, I was lying in the grass, having a conversation with a fellow founder, when he noted how, on most days, he would forget to eat lunch because he was so engrossed with his work. I thought to myself, That's ridiculous. Everyone notices when they're hungry. This was just a thinly veiled brag about his work ethic.

Nowadays, I find myself skipping lunch every other day - out of forgetfulness.

I agree with you. Not entirely sure what value this post brings of his brings.

“Create something new”… ok great insight, thanks PG, I guess this is some big strategic plan to increase the number YC applicants?

It really reads like some abstract art form that one is staring at and has to figure out the “deeper” meaning of. The problem is, there is no deep meaning there.

My impression (as an observer since before YC started) is that some of PG's early writings were very influential on the startup scene -- separate from his obviously very influential doings through YC over the years.

Nowadays, I skim PG articles when they hit HN, for maybe roughly 3 reasons:

1. To see if there's anything interesting to me.

2. Curiosity about what the writing says about him, or what he might be doing. (Why did he choose this topic, how is he thinking, what messages is he trying to send, why, does this hint at some other actions he's taking with his influence and resources, etc.)

3. As background for skimming HN comments. (Mainly, what's the gist of the sentiment of various HN demographics, when prompted by the PG post. Lately, I think my intent is mostly hopeful or curious, not seeking out something to be angry about.)

> Who reads his blog posts like these?

I skim them to figure out which direction the wind is blowing for our technocrat overlords. The last article of his I read a few weeks ago was completely mask-off, also around the same time as the Zuckerberg "bring back masculine energy" interview. This essay feels softened, almost hedging in the same vein as the "How do you do, fellow kids?" meme.

Billionaires are interesting people, and I can't help but wonder how the next decade will be for them and the countries where they hold the bulk of their wealth.

Give an example of a great post that got too little notice, please.

This is a great inspiring story and wonderful books. Thank you! Trying to find them now.

At the beginning of the 1800s, half of people's children died. We literally beat fucking Thanos for children. That's not a 'romantic thought'.

The issue is not technology but how and where it is applied.

Tens and tens of billions are spent to generate cute pics instead of same tech applied to radiology, diseases cure, etc.

The wheel is technology, metallurgy is technology, irrigation is technology.

Technology is vital to a functioning society.

There's certainly more debate to be had whether various bits of modern technology are net positive or net negative, but even still I personally believe modern technology is mostly neutral to very good for humanity in a vacuum and it is other forces like modern capitalism that bend it toward being harmful.

eg. Social media is very clearly having a net negative impact on modern society, but I don't believe that would still be true if it wasn't driven by algorithms created to maximize ad revenue above all other concerns.

And obviously there is some inherent coupling of modern technology and capitalism that isn't avoidable, but I don't think capitalism on its own is wholly bad, its the slavish cult-like worship of it as the only way to do things that causes it to be so destructive.

Ok, but don’t make an algorithm for a sports gambling app that notices when people are struggling to quit and targets them with promotions.

You will make nothing so grand as a platform used by billions so that's all irrelevant.

If you make, say, an ovulation app designed to feed user data to companies so they can fire pregnant workers before the company is required to give leave or other benefits, that's bad. Get it? You are not so incapable of distinguishing these things as you feign here. Pretending that everything is a neutral tool that might be misused for bad is child-like. Stop doing that.

It's a hard question to answer but not impossible.

Here's a bit of an oversimplification: - is what you made useful to anyone? If it's not, no one will use it so it doesn't matter. - does what you made help people be more productive or less productive? - does it help improve people's health or degrade it? - does it give people what they want in the short term at the cost of harming them in the long term? - does it help some people while actively harming others? - does it help people but harm the environment or other creatures?

Etc.

Most failure comes from not getting past the first question. These are easy questions to ask but very hard to answer. Most startup founders make up answers and then go nowhere and waste a bunch of time/money. Even smart people doing their best fall into this trap. Our system isn't good at developing people to be good at empathizing at scale. When people try to empathize at scale they over-generalize to the point of near meaninglessness.

I had completely the same thought. No everyone is a creator, and we don't want to bias the world into everyone being a creator, or a scientist, or an engineer.

Today, I feel we have far too much of a focus on "business" and all my nieces and nephew are studying some sort of business focus in their university degrees. I feel it such a waste. If everyone in the world learns to only make businesses (ignoring that a degree is not required for that), who is going to build. If everyone becomes a maker, who is going to support all the non-maker roles.

There are many people for whom their job is not their craft. They're focus - much as PGs now is, is the raising of their family, guiding their children to become good people, showing love, etc etc.

Some may argue this is "making", but that's maybe a different argument.

Your last thought is an interesting one, I hadn't heard the quote before.

> I'm more of a builder and if wager pg considers himself one, and I assume the majority of authentic HN users are builders. However I suspect the majority of people are maintainers.

A dichotomy like "builder"/"maintainer" just doesn't make sense to me anymore.

Let's take software as example:

- Is someone that pushes their project from version 1.2.1 to 1.4.7 a "builder"?

- Are Linux contributors "builders"?

- Is someone porting CLI Y to rust a "builder"?

- Is someone that wraps a GenAI LLM into a web app a "builder"?

- Is someone in offensive security a "builder" of something?

...or let's ask it differently:

- Is performance optimization "maintenance"?

- Is the fix that prevents a user of your software from accomplishing their task "maintenance"?

- Is the work on a solid infrastructure, one that brings your time to resolution (TTR) closer to zero, the work of a "maintainer"?

- Is a dependency upgrade in your project the work of a "maintainer"?

Everybody builds and maintains all the time, and every artifact once built is in need of maintenance. Technological advancements will always be a collective effort through some form of feedback. Whether you're (re-)building something frequently [0] or advancing through maintenance [1], both are just categories of equal practice.

[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/how-japan-makes-houses...

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/

("making things rather than, say, making critical observations about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated")

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/07/20

"thoughts by a billionaire. self-praising. spiritually enriching. sophisticated. 'high' value"

"thoughts by a commoner. critical. base. self-deluding juvenile hack work. 'low' value"

"thoughts by a billionaire about how critics are delusional and self-important. Sophisticated irony. philosophically challenging. 'high' value"

"suppose I say the author is giving himself a pass for the companies he funds?"

"sophomoric. intellectually sterile. 'low' value"

I read it more like he's considering what to throw his money at, and it sounds like he wants to throw his money at companies that make good new things.

This maybe a little reductionist. To bring the jet engine and/or microprocessor to a point where it could uplift all boats took probably millions of people. You can choose to be one of those people and you'd be working on something amazing. You don't have to be the originator, the follow-on supporters are just as important.

The jet engine is now a big contributor to the climate catastrophe[1] and one that lacks a low carbon replacement in the needed timeframe. In 100 years I'd wager it's seen more like a villain in history.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

Yeah , the missing ingredient here is “SERVE PEOPLE”. That needs a market familiarity .

> "but won't there be a model in the next 6 months that can just do this itself?"

Then you've got 6 months to cement your place in history as one of the last humans ever to have accomplished that thing before AI could do it. Hurry!

(More generally, even if you don't care about AI: if you think you might want to do something, then depending on your age you've got maybe 50 years to do it before you've squandered your opportunity. Hurry!)

Could bankrolling cryptocoin and AI businesses ever cause people to lose their freedom?

Asking for a friend