Has there been a time on HN when a nytimes article hasn't been spammed to the frontpage? Without fail there is a nytimes article on the frontpage every time I visit HN.
I think it's worth addressing this head-on even though you're getting downvoted presumably for being off-topic.
In terms of US-based journalism, the industry has been gutted by ours truly. My observation is that there's hardly any traditional newsmedia content worthy of the HN front page and that the NYT is one of the very last daily papers worth reading along with the WSJ and Washington Post. The NYT has real journalists given the budget to do long form and investigative reporting and cultural commentary. That they would be one of the few general news outlets consistently producing content relevant to SV and tech should be no surprise.
If you'll forgive me for reading between the lines, you dislike that the NYT's particular bias is being over represented on HN. But all media has always been biased and the only treatment is a diversity of sources. Unfortunately there's no longer much diversity when it comes to high-quality reporting, so even if HN's audience would want to upvote a different viewpoint, the papers that used to publish those viewpoints have long since turned to clickbait.
What are unpaid journalists? Do they have editors and publishers to answer to? Do they have journalistic standards to uphold? Do they answer to anything other than advertising revenue? I don't understand what you're actually contrasting professional journalism with.
You described them as "paid". The opposite of _that_ would be unpaid.
But the larger issue is that I don't really know what you're comparing professional journalism to. Is there actual volunteer journalism that attempts to enforce editorial standards and faces consequences when they fail?
They're not constrasting paid journalists with unpaid journalists, they're pointing out that NYT's journalists being paid doesn't necessarily make them "real".
It doesn't seem that complicated to me... Someone described the NYT's journalists as "real" journalists and return0 took issue with that, saying that they're (just) "paid" journalists. The suggestion is that whether what they do is "real journalism" or not (and whether, in return0's words, they should be considered "arbiters of truth") is determined by factors beyond simply having a budget.[1]
Ie. Being paid for it is an insufficient condition for "real journalism", though it may or may not be a necessary one.
[1]. And I suppose it is implied that the NYT doesn't (always?) meet those factors.
This reads like an explanation to a sample question on a standardized test. This isn't a formal debate and no one gets points for logically correct but empty observations.
I still don't know what the specific alternative to "paid journalists" is. I don't need a random HN commenter to tell me that there are humans in newsrooms and sometimes they display bias, make mistakes, or even lie on purpose. But injecting comments like the original don't actually add anything to the conversation other than a generalized paranoia. If return0 has specific complaints, they should articulate them.
I feel the point you're making. The title is clearly linkbait, almost none of the comments I've read here are positive or feel the article is making a clear and well-evidenced point.
Yet it's on front-page as though it's relevant, when it appears the majority are balking at the article.
Meh, the bar has to be higher than that. If you call a hoard of people speaking up to reject the article's validity successful because it "promotes discussion" then I don't know what to tell you.
Comments seldom represent the majority in any venue, and for that matter "votes" don't necessarily either. However it's a general observational piece about a philosophy some prescribe to. Seems pretty interesting and worthy of conversation to me.
On HN, what matters is not the site but the article. If it's a bad article that shouldn't be on HN, flag it. Many users did in this case. (There's a small karma threshold of 30 before an account is able to flag.) Please don't post off topic complaints like this, which add nothing of value.
Like many other sites, the NYT publishes both articles that make good HN submissions and articles that make bad HN submissions. We want the good ones.
Uh... Rome did not conquer Europe by being gathering a lot of Facebook Likes. It did it by defeating the surrounding tribes, kingdoms, and rival empires. The Legions imposed Roman law and encouraged the adoption of Roman culture and ethics. Popularity did not have all that much to do with it.
NYT reading level keeps plummeting every year to new bottoms.
The claim is not that Roman ethics was spread through popularity with the rich. The claim is that one particular strand of ethics within Roman culture did so.
That said, I am not sure that Stoicism was particularly rich-friendly, nor that it was necessarily more successful than its competitors.
And one of the most famous texts espousing Stoicism, the Enchiridion [1], compiles the teachings of Epictetus, a crippled former slave who "lived a life of great simplicity, with few possessions" [2]. Not exactly the rich and powerful.
The quoted Dr. Palmer’s novels caricature a far future SV ethos well. Start with Too Like the Lightning and believe the narrator when he tells you he’s a bad dude.
[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
[33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse.
I've literally been downvoted on HN for saying this before, but I always thought "dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit" is a great turn of phrase. The use of the subjunctive, the short repetitive words, says a lot without saying much.
It's not an interpretation of stoicism, it's an observation about the convenience of stoicism to a certain kind of self-interest--much like Reddit's supposed commitment to freedom of speech also happens to be a much cheaper option than thorough and effective site-wide moderation.
Except stoicism doesn't say what the article claims it does, so maybe it's about the convenience of a corruption of stoicism.
Kind of how the "prosperity gospel" is a very convenient form of Christianity to have if you're wealthy, even though it seems in opposition to the general interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. You can't blame Jesus for people thinking their wealth is sanctioned by God just because people adhere to the prosperity gospel.
Given that they've always had lifestyle, arts, food, fashion and other writings under their umbrella, I'm going to guess that you're not a patron and your spurious opinion isn't relevant to them.
it's in the Style section, which has basically always been writing articles about weird trends among a small number of rich people. readers have been complaining about this nonstop since it got started almost 30 years ago.
generally when I find myself on the NYT website getting a sense of general annoyance, I look up and see that I'm reading a Style article, and then just relax and don't take it too seriously.
maybe because if they were epicureans they wouldn't be successful in a competitive environment. and its not like stoicism makes suffering a virtue (but maybe makes pleasure a guilt)
Everytime stoicism comes up, im reminded of the seneca reading cyborg in the "Last of his kind" from andreas eschbach. Its a fantastic view on the space age dream crippling a human beeing and the recovering of its dignity and will to live through stoicism.
Stoicism- is to have the dignity of not beeing a slave of ones own emotions, in happiness as in suffering.
The book by Irvine mentioned in the article is also pretty good, but it's pretty clear the author didn't read it since it then proceeds with a complete mischaracterization of what Stoicism is about.
"The Cicero Institute promises to fight for the business opportunities of entrepreneurs by focusing on deregulation, with special attention paid to making it easier to build start-ups around prisons, health care and education. Mr. Lonsdale proposes that “private prison contracts tie financial incentives to performance measures,” for instance."
It is worth noting that the Stoics in general were opposed to innovations in technology. From Seneca, Letter 90: "Reason did indeed devise all these things, but it was not right reason. It was man, but not the wise man, that discovered them."
The early Stoics also opposed wealth inequality: they held that we should be "like a flock feeding together with equal right in one common pasture."
Would you take it if you only had 10 minutes to live unless you got to a hospital? Or what if your wife is about to give birth. Or if you were late to work?
If you have 8h of time to do work including commute, like most parents with kids in daycare, then taking long walks is a pretty big luxury. Unless you can do work (calls etc) during the walk of course.
A leisurely walking pace is 4-5mph, so that's about an hour commute. Less after you've done it a few times. If she wanted to use a bike that could be reduced to 20-30 minutes, which is totally reasonable.
Is 4-5mph really considered leisurely? I thought the average was around 3mph, I know I feel like I've done proper exercise if I keep 3.5-4mph up for over 30 minutes.
That's really inaccurate. 3 mph is fairly brisk (20 minute miles). 5 mph is a 12 minute mile, which is, for many people, a running pace. Were you thinking of kph?
I walk two miles each way every day and it takes me around 45 minutes to an hour to walk the two miles depending on how fast I'm walking. For the round trip it comes to be a bit less than 2 hours.
I've been walking to work for over 2 years now. My current commute is a bit over a mile, and it takes me a bit more than 30 minutes. So 5 miles is easily 2 hours, even if you have relatively long legs and walk quickly.
Note also the implicit assumption that Dorsey does this to pointlessly inflict suffering on himself.
Much, much more likely it's to give him thinking space outside the office (a.k.a. the place where deep thought goes to die).
I've often walked to work and back in my career, including in times when it's cold and slightly rainy. Typical walking commute: about an hour each way. I've done some of my best work during these walks. It had nothing to do with Stoicism or being some sort of Valley-esque "elite", it's simply too hard to spend time in an office staring in silence at the wall without being interrupted or feeling weird. Plus walking gets the blood moving through the brain.
Mark Greif (of n+1 fame) has addressed this in a slightly different context:
> Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie.[1]
There seems to be significant overlap between the two populations. SV “Stoics” are not the most loveable or even tolerable folks, and it’s not a shock that they draw a degree of scorn, mockery and ire. Where I think that reaction goes wrong is that assigns to malice what is more properly explained by a combination of cluelessness and a lack of social skills. Instead of blaming the cogs who drank the Kool-Aid I wish people would direct their scorn to the people pulling their strings.
Recognize it for what it is, a pseudo intellectual means of control for a group that would be largely unmoved by more common religious, or social structures. It’s also a coping mechanism for people working jobs they hate in a place they can’t really afford, while surrounded by the lottery winners of their field.
This article looks like an excuse to heap scorn on folks that the author (and perhaps NYT generally) doesn't like.
* Kevin Rose, Jack Dorsey and a couple of others are into this subculture. From there the author makes the sweeping claim that "Silicon Valley" loves it. Sampling bias, much?
* "Rank-and-file tech workers frequently have more than one Stoic text on their bookshelves." [Citation needed].
* "Stoics believed that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things that seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath. The philosophy is handy if you already believe that the rich are meant to be rich and the poor meant to be poor." Fuck no. Stoicism about personal responsibility, about changing what you can and accepting what you can't. Marcus Aurelius asks why you think the world should be fair, he doesn't claim that it is fair.
A newspaper that publishes BS like this degrades itself.
They got you and a lot of other people to click on it, no?
After reading a lot of mainstream media article like this I'm starting to wonder whether stuff like this is entirely intentional. There is no intent to stimulate intellectual disclosure, just to evoke a reaction and get more clicks.
Right, finding virtue in suffering is more a trait of Christianity than Stoicism. Stoicism doesn't think suffering is virtuous. Stoicism's approach to suffering is giving you the tools to endure suffering you can't avoid, and the tools to recognize and seize opportunities when you can avoid suffering. It does not teach people to seek out suffering or to endure suffering when it's within their power to prevent or avoid it.
Christianity on the other hand is all about virtue in suffering, perhaps best communicated by the anecdote of Christ having the opportunity to avoid suffering on the cross, but refusing that opportunity. (There is a great deal to be said about how Christianity finds virtue in suffering, enough to fill books, but this singular example is perhaps the most vivid, and maybe even the root of it.)
The confusion may arise because Christians have often voiced some tentative respect for Stoicism, but they in fact have very different approaches to suffering.
When you have an axe to grind, any hard surface will do.
Your comment made me imagine a parody article where suddenly Christianity is really popular in SV and the author lambasts techies for their love of suffering, their cynical beliefs that all people are born sinners, their belief in an all-mighty-all-powerful lord to whom you must submit to be saved, etc etc. It'd be pretty funny.
> Christianity on the other hand is all about virtue in suffering, with Christ having the opportunity to avoid suffering on the cross, but refusing that opportunity
The purpose was virtuous, and consequently so was resisting the temptation to abandon it because of the suffering, but suffering in and of itself is not virtuous.
That take is not one Paul and many other Christians throughout history seems to agree with. In Philippians he describes there being virtue in suffering as it brings you closer to the experience of Christ on the cross. The practice of 'mortification of the flesh' is another example of Christians seeking out suffering, believing it will bring them closer to Christ. And as I hinted, the Crucifixion is very far from the only instance of Christ's recorded behavior used to justify suffering as a virtue. There are other examples, such as Christ fasting in the desert for 40 days and nights despite there being no obligation (not of his own creations) for him to do so.
As a ex-christian it seems distasteful for me to start quoting scripture, but I can if you demand it. There is ample scriptural evidence for Christians believing there is virtue in suffering, and ample historic evidence of Christians acting in accordance to this belief.
It's a pretty straight forward element of Christianity: Christ suffered, therefore you can bring yourself closer to him by doing the same.
Why do you get the feeling that the author doesn't like these people, or that it is scorn? You are reading into an observational piece more than it seems to actually convey.
Regarding the meaning of Stoicism, I would argue that your definition is no closer than the one given in this flippant conversational piece article. Diogenes is one of the most famous Stoics and was known to live without almost anything: He was influential and capable, but intentionally eschewed almost everything, living in a drain pipe and drinking from his hands. He forced "suffering" upon himself, as in many of the examples given. Intentionally pursuing suffering, or creating need, is a principal element of virtually every interpretation of Stoicism, rather than some AAA-sort of acceptance of what you cannot change.
And I totally subscribe to that philosophy (the convenient subset of Stoicism, which much like Buddhism we tend to pick and choose from), as an aside. Our psychological unpinnings make existence suffering, in a sense, because it will always tune to the baseline being mediocre. Intermix suffering, however, and suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Being cold and uncomfortable makes sitting by a fire and drinking a hot drink magical. Periods of fasting can make a meal, any meal, the best, most enjoyable meal you've ever had. Etc.
>Stoicism about personal responsibility, about changing what you can and accepting what you can't.
Determining what you can and can't change is an (almost) impossible task on its own. The way you describe Stoicism can be used to persuade a person that their status is unchangeable and that it should be accepted as "part of Nature's plan".
You're right. This is a philosophy that can be abused to tell people at they should accept what is as unchangable.
With that said, is it perhaps possible that stoicism when properly understood might encourage people to find what they can change and how they can change it? And might it also, perhaps, be possible that any philosophy can be abused by bad actors? Some might contend that these two points taken together argue for education.
I agree. It's not an authority on right and wrong, but a framework for reaching conclusions. I just think neither the article nor CP's rebuttal covered that point adequately.
>These things seem very obvious to me. What is difficult about this?
Clearly it's not that obvious, because all of your examples are wrong in some sense. Weather can be changed, medically dead people are brought back to life and people can most certainly be manipulated.
On the other hand, some people can't control their own thoughts and actions.
All of this stuff is related - from open source - stoic, to google - do no evil to Apple - we won't compromise privacy even for murderers because hey rights.
I do feel like the walls are starting to fall. The friendly attitude is dropping and we're starting to see through the fake promises and platitudes.
We have startups that claim they are housing the poor or cleaning drinking water for people in Africa, and time and again someone investigates the truth and things fall apart. In the end we find out those were all sales tactics. Maybe even believed by the people selling them, but in the end it HAS to somewhat fit into some exact money making puzzle. It doesn't matter if the REST of the corporation they are building is robotizing jobs and getting rid of employees (hey they are freeing the burdens of people - who cares if they can't afford the house anymore).
Then comes in Basic Income. And there is no effort from Google or Facebook to foot the bill either - they're merely doing the cheap thing - lobbying - to have our taxes pay for it. These are all showmanship efforts to justify the rest.
What is worse is that each of these companies is like a magnet with Good [ --- ] Bad poles. ALL of the Bad on the right is justified by some platitude connected to the Good. The goal is to simply hide the bad.
So if stoicism is part of all of it, I think that's just another self-lie. I do think that people are good, in general, but in modern society we have made justification part of the mental process. The first step in creating your company is to convince yourself that you're doing good. Then you can turn on the steam roller.
A culture of occupational martyrdom makes it much easier to build a pyramid. People are rushing to supply correct definitions of stoicism but oddly those stoic sentiments rarely appear discussions about IPOs and how to be a billionaire.
You'll see plenty of conversations on the topic here if you hang out long enough. I'm not a billionaire either so I have to store my cash in a swimming pool like everyone else.
A lot of people are criticizing it here. There is a bit of condescension in the tone of the criticism. It was not hard to search for the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bowles) and find that she graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and was a Fulbright Fellow. That certainly doesn't mean she's correct about anything, but I think that casual dismissal of the article is a bit lazy.
On a personal basis, it seems worth looking at how certain intellectual trends propagate through certain SV populations. Neotrophics/microdosing, Burning Man, and Stoicism are examples off the top of my head. In particular, it feels like the general point of the "Why are they attracted to Stoicism" section isn't completely incorrect. It is definitely a topic worthy of a longer form exploration.
> it seems worth looking at how certain intellectual trends propagate through certain SV populations.
Please keep in mind the SV populations sensationalized in articles such as this represent maybe 1-2% of the people in SV. Everyone else is simply trying to support their families and raise their kids the best they know how - pretty much exactly what the rest of America does.
she graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and was a Fulbright Fellow
Not being from the US I don't fully grasp what these things are (is Columbia Ivy League?) but all knowing this does for me is make me conclude these qualifications don't seem to mean very much and may even be anti-correlated with intelligence - the author seems to be very sure she's making some deep social comment with this piece, but she isn't.
I'm not exactly an expert on Stoicism, but even I knew it's not about pointlessly imposing suffering on yourself: it's about caring about what you can change or improve and accepting the rest.
The article misses a key reason why Silicon Valley tech industry leaders would become Stoics: to learn to live with the misery their wealth is built upon.
Many, if not most, Silicon Valley innovations over the past ten years have led directly to human suffering and misery. Facebook has inflicted widespread psychological damage to humanity's self-worth. Loot boxes introduced gambling to young children. YouTube recommendations promote racist and fascist content to adults and machine-generated content to children.
I don't agree that this is a correct implementation of Stoicism, but from the decade I lived in SFbay, the following accurately models how I have seen many tech founders warp Stoicism into a way to avoid confronting their immoral behavior:
Step 1: Have an idea that's profitable, at the cost of inflicting suffering on others.
Step 2: Inflict that suffering, while twisting Stoicism to make "suffering" seem a virtue.
Step 3: Profit from the results of your now-virtuous efforts, free of moral consequences from the 'virtue' you inflicted.
As you state (I believe), that's not what Stoicism is about - it does not advocate to impose suffering on others. (It does suggest to voluntary undergo deprivations occasionally to reset the hedonistic treadmill: Seneca is said to have slept on the floor every now and then, to appreciate the bed afterwards.)
Interesting theory though, that a simplistic caricature of Stoicism is invoked to justify immoral behaviour. Pity the article didn't seriously investigate that.
the stoicism of marcus aurelius is about personal responsibility and accepting what you can't change, which seems a handy ideology to push so that people don't try to affect change.
I'd interpret the Stoic dichotomy not so much as "accept it and don't worry about it", but rather as "if it's unacceptable, it is not enough to worry, but you have to do something." It's not fatalistic, in other words.
Second, I see the necessity for concerted (political) action to right societal ills; I wonder what Stoicism has to say about that. Many Stoics were in politics or academia, so it does not strike me as an isolationist position.
"I can't change the outcome of self-worth destruction from my billion-dollar idea, so I'll just have to learn to accept what I can't change."
As opposed to:
"I should try to change the outcome of self-worth destruction from my billion-dollar idea, even if I think I can't or it might cost me my wealth."
Again, I am not saying that this is Stoicism. This is the misuse of Stoic principles, by declaring that wealth-generating activities as "things that can't change" and then applying Stoicism to bear the burden of the resulting harm that they "can't change".
This goes hand in hand with the culture of "anyone can do anything as long as the have an idea and are willing to work hard" culture of silicon valley. Experience in an area definitely reduces the suffering because you have a better idea where the problems are and know where to most effectivly apply effort.
I'm skeptical about this Cicero Institute. Palantir, Niall Ferguson, private prison contracts, ...? It strikes me as west coast version of the Cato Institute. Also, I also don't think of Cicero as any sort of stoic. He was a lawyer, a politician and a republican. He certainly used stoicism in his orations from time to time but only out of convenience in the way an American politician might appeal to our 'rugged individualism'.
I think many of the commenters in this thread doth protest too much.
I do think there is something to the article. What do you do when you've been raised with progressive liberal values that rail against inequality but then find yourself wildly rich? How do you feel good about yourself while knowing you have access to power and privilege almost no one else does?
One option is to plow a lot of that money back into programs to help increase the prosperity of everyone. But then you end up poorer and who wants that?
A simpler approach is to find some symbolic hair shirt you can wear, a little token suffering, as a way to assuage your guilt without making any real sacrifices. Of course, the irony is that the only reason these people do any of this "opt-in suffering" is because they are secure in the knowledge that they can stop it whenever they want.
Dorsey's contemplative long walk is a lot less fun when it's your only way to get to work, and Rose's cold shower loses some of its charm when it's because the power's been cut off.
The problem is what you're describing has more in common with Catholicism (particularly penances) than it does with Stoicism. The article is poorly argued. For instance, the article provides no real evidence that Dorsy gives a shit about Stoicism, and provides no real evidence that a few anecdotes of penance-like behavior is a trend, let alone has any causal link to a perceived trend of Stoicism.
Other HN commenters have suggested that the discrepancies between the behaviors described in the article and Stoicism are the result of techies corrupting Stoicism, but I think an alternative hypothesis should be considered: that the author has corrupted Stoicism in order to create a palatable narrative.
For what it's worth, I've seen Stoicism mentioned on HN way more than any other philosophy, except possibly libertarianism. The most frequently mentioned philosophy book is definitely Meditations.
I don't think the author is off-base for claiming it's a thing in SV.
Does seeing other people suffer cause you to suffer? Probably, right? Unless you're some sort of psychopath who has no capacity for empathy. Therefore a stoic is encouraged to alleviate the suffering of others, when it's possible.
The idea that stoicism calls on people to ignore all the social wrongs of the world is a malignment of the philosophy. It's not fatalistic, nor is it isolationist. Somebody who is a stoic acts to improve the world when it's possible.
110 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadIn terms of US-based journalism, the industry has been gutted by ours truly. My observation is that there's hardly any traditional newsmedia content worthy of the HN front page and that the NYT is one of the very last daily papers worth reading along with the WSJ and Washington Post. The NYT has real journalists given the budget to do long form and investigative reporting and cultural commentary. That they would be one of the few general news outlets consistently producing content relevant to SV and tech should be no surprise.
If you'll forgive me for reading between the lines, you dislike that the NYT's particular bias is being over represented on HN. But all media has always been biased and the only treatment is a diversity of sources. Unfortunately there's no longer much diversity when it comes to high-quality reporting, so even if HN's audience would want to upvote a different viewpoint, the papers that used to publish those viewpoints have long since turned to clickbait.
paid journalists. HN has a habit of elevating paid journalists to ultimate arbiters of truth
But the larger issue is that I don't really know what you're comparing professional journalism to. Is there actual volunteer journalism that attempts to enforce editorial standards and faces consequences when they fail?
Ie. Being paid for it is an insufficient condition for "real journalism", though it may or may not be a necessary one.
[1]. And I suppose it is implied that the NYT doesn't (always?) meet those factors.
I still don't know what the specific alternative to "paid journalists" is. I don't need a random HN commenter to tell me that there are humans in newsrooms and sometimes they display bias, make mistakes, or even lie on purpose. But injecting comments like the original don't actually add anything to the conversation other than a generalized paranoia. If return0 has specific complaints, they should articulate them.
Yet it's on front-page as though it's relevant, when it appears the majority are balking at the article.
I think it's a question worth asking.
Like many other sites, the NYT publishes both articles that make good HN submissions and articles that make bad HN submissions. We want the good ones.
Is this really true? Were Epicureanism or middle Platonism really adverse to being wealthy and powerful? I haven't gotten that impression.
NYT reading level keeps plummeting every year to new bottoms.
That said, I am not sure that Stoicism was particularly rich-friendly, nor that it was necessarily more successful than its competitors.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/the-enchiridion/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus#cite_note-simpl1-11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
[33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse.
Kind of how the "prosperity gospel" is a very convenient form of Christianity to have if you're wealthy, even though it seems in opposition to the general interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. You can't blame Jesus for people thinking their wealth is sanctioned by God just because people adhere to the prosperity gospel.
https://mashable.com/2017/06/05/you-are-a-doer-gig-economy/
generally when I find myself on the NYT website getting a sense of general annoyance, I look up and see that I'm reading a Style article, and then just relax and don't take it too seriously.
Stoicism- is to have the dignity of not beeing a slave of ones own emotions, in happiness as in suffering.
But if you want to really know what Stoicism is really about, here are some links
An introduction, Stoicism 101: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seLLJP3H1FU&t=201s
A pod cast https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations
The early Stoics also opposed wealth inequality: they held that we should be "like a flock feeding together with equal right in one common pasture."
Sources: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/L... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Zeno)
The author must really hate walking if she thinks it's an example of stoicism.
Time has value. It’s foolish to think otherwise.
Much, much more likely it's to give him thinking space outside the office (a.k.a. the place where deep thought goes to die).
I've often walked to work and back in my career, including in times when it's cold and slightly rainy. Typical walking commute: about an hour each way. I've done some of my best work during these walks. It had nothing to do with Stoicism or being some sort of Valley-esque "elite", it's simply too hard to spend time in an office staring in silence at the wall without being interrupted or feeling weird. Plus walking gets the blood moving through the brain.
> Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie.[1]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greif-t.html
Recognize it for what it is, a pseudo intellectual means of control for a group that would be largely unmoved by more common religious, or social structures. It’s also a coping mechanism for people working jobs they hate in a place they can’t really afford, while surrounded by the lottery winners of their field.
* Kevin Rose, Jack Dorsey and a couple of others are into this subculture. From there the author makes the sweeping claim that "Silicon Valley" loves it. Sampling bias, much?
* "Rank-and-file tech workers frequently have more than one Stoic text on their bookshelves." [Citation needed].
* "Stoics believed that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things that seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath. The philosophy is handy if you already believe that the rich are meant to be rich and the poor meant to be poor." Fuck no. Stoicism about personal responsibility, about changing what you can and accepting what you can't. Marcus Aurelius asks why you think the world should be fair, he doesn't claim that it is fair.
A newspaper that publishes BS like this degrades itself.
After reading a lot of mainstream media article like this I'm starting to wonder whether stuff like this is entirely intentional. There is no intent to stimulate intellectual disclosure, just to evoke a reaction and get more clicks.
Christianity on the other hand is all about virtue in suffering, perhaps best communicated by the anecdote of Christ having the opportunity to avoid suffering on the cross, but refusing that opportunity. (There is a great deal to be said about how Christianity finds virtue in suffering, enough to fill books, but this singular example is perhaps the most vivid, and maybe even the root of it.)
The confusion may arise because Christians have often voiced some tentative respect for Stoicism, but they in fact have very different approaches to suffering.
Your comment made me imagine a parody article where suddenly Christianity is really popular in SV and the author lambasts techies for their love of suffering, their cynical beliefs that all people are born sinners, their belief in an all-mighty-all-powerful lord to whom you must submit to be saved, etc etc. It'd be pretty funny.
The purpose was virtuous, and consequently so was resisting the temptation to abandon it because of the suffering, but suffering in and of itself is not virtuous.
As a ex-christian it seems distasteful for me to start quoting scripture, but I can if you demand it. There is ample scriptural evidence for Christians believing there is virtue in suffering, and ample historic evidence of Christians acting in accordance to this belief.
It's a pretty straight forward element of Christianity: Christ suffered, therefore you can bring yourself closer to him by doing the same.
Some Christians took it even further and sought out martyrdom to get closer to Christ or ensure themselves a place in heaven.
Even now, there are people (in Brazil, if I'm not mistaken) who crucify themselves for similar reasons.
Not exactly stoic.
Regarding the meaning of Stoicism, I would argue that your definition is no closer than the one given in this flippant conversational piece article. Diogenes is one of the most famous Stoics and was known to live without almost anything: He was influential and capable, but intentionally eschewed almost everything, living in a drain pipe and drinking from his hands. He forced "suffering" upon himself, as in many of the examples given. Intentionally pursuing suffering, or creating need, is a principal element of virtually every interpretation of Stoicism, rather than some AAA-sort of acceptance of what you cannot change.
And I totally subscribe to that philosophy (the convenient subset of Stoicism, which much like Buddhism we tend to pick and choose from), as an aside. Our psychological unpinnings make existence suffering, in a sense, because it will always tune to the baseline being mediocre. Intermix suffering, however, and suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Being cold and uncomfortable makes sitting by a fire and drinking a hot drink magical. Periods of fasting can make a meal, any meal, the best, most enjoyable meal you've ever had. Etc.
Determining what you can and can't change is an (almost) impossible task on its own. The way you describe Stoicism can be used to persuade a person that their status is unchangeable and that it should be accepted as "part of Nature's plan".
With that said, is it perhaps possible that stoicism when properly understood might encourage people to find what they can change and how they can change it? And might it also, perhaps, be possible that any philosophy can be abused by bad actors? Some might contend that these two points taken together argue for education.
What? No it's not. You can't change the weather, you can't bring the dead back to life, you can't force other people to think a certain way.
You can control your own thoughts and actions. These things seem very obvious to me. What is difficult about this?
Clearly it's not that obvious, because all of your examples are wrong in some sense. Weather can be changed, medically dead people are brought back to life and people can most certainly be manipulated.
On the other hand, some people can't control their own thoughts and actions.
Wot? I have absolutely no problem doing that.
I do feel like the walls are starting to fall. The friendly attitude is dropping and we're starting to see through the fake promises and platitudes.
We have startups that claim they are housing the poor or cleaning drinking water for people in Africa, and time and again someone investigates the truth and things fall apart. In the end we find out those were all sales tactics. Maybe even believed by the people selling them, but in the end it HAS to somewhat fit into some exact money making puzzle. It doesn't matter if the REST of the corporation they are building is robotizing jobs and getting rid of employees (hey they are freeing the burdens of people - who cares if they can't afford the house anymore).
Then comes in Basic Income. And there is no effort from Google or Facebook to foot the bill either - they're merely doing the cheap thing - lobbying - to have our taxes pay for it. These are all showmanship efforts to justify the rest.
What is worse is that each of these companies is like a magnet with Good [ --- ] Bad poles. ALL of the Bad on the right is justified by some platitude connected to the Good. The goal is to simply hide the bad.
So if stoicism is part of all of it, I think that's just another self-lie. I do think that people are good, in general, but in modern society we have made justification part of the mental process. The first step in creating your company is to convince yourself that you're doing good. Then you can turn on the steam roller.
I guess see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19492813
A lot of people are criticizing it here. There is a bit of condescension in the tone of the criticism. It was not hard to search for the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bowles) and find that she graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and was a Fulbright Fellow. That certainly doesn't mean she's correct about anything, but I think that casual dismissal of the article is a bit lazy.
On a personal basis, it seems worth looking at how certain intellectual trends propagate through certain SV populations. Neotrophics/microdosing, Burning Man, and Stoicism are examples off the top of my head. In particular, it feels like the general point of the "Why are they attracted to Stoicism" section isn't completely incorrect. It is definitely a topic worthy of a longer form exploration.
Please keep in mind the SV populations sensationalized in articles such as this represent maybe 1-2% of the people in SV. Everyone else is simply trying to support their families and raise their kids the best they know how - pretty much exactly what the rest of America does.
Not being from the US I don't fully grasp what these things are (is Columbia Ivy League?) but all knowing this does for me is make me conclude these qualifications don't seem to mean very much and may even be anti-correlated with intelligence - the author seems to be very sure she's making some deep social comment with this piece, but she isn't.
I'm not exactly an expert on Stoicism, but even I knew it's not about pointlessly imposing suffering on yourself: it's about caring about what you can change or improve and accepting the rest.
Many, if not most, Silicon Valley innovations over the past ten years have led directly to human suffering and misery. Facebook has inflicted widespread psychological damage to humanity's self-worth. Loot boxes introduced gambling to young children. YouTube recommendations promote racist and fascist content to adults and machine-generated content to children.
I don't agree that this is a correct implementation of Stoicism, but from the decade I lived in SFbay, the following accurately models how I have seen many tech founders warp Stoicism into a way to avoid confronting their immoral behavior:
Step 1: Have an idea that's profitable, at the cost of inflicting suffering on others.
Step 2: Inflict that suffering, while twisting Stoicism to make "suffering" seem a virtue.
Step 3: Profit from the results of your now-virtuous efforts, free of moral consequences from the 'virtue' you inflicted.
Interesting theory though, that a simplistic caricature of Stoicism is invoked to justify immoral behaviour. Pity the article didn't seriously investigate that.
Second, I see the necessity for concerted (political) action to right societal ills; I wonder what Stoicism has to say about that. Many Stoics were in politics or academia, so it does not strike me as an isolationist position.
As opposed to:
"I should try to change the outcome of self-worth destruction from my billion-dollar idea, even if I think I can't or it might cost me my wealth."
Again, I am not saying that this is Stoicism. This is the misuse of Stoic principles, by declaring that wealth-generating activities as "things that can't change" and then applying Stoicism to bear the burden of the resulting harm that they "can't change".
Though I suppose "Why [is this non-representative subset of] Silicon Valley So Obsessed with the Virtue of Suffering?" is less catchy.
I do think there is something to the article. What do you do when you've been raised with progressive liberal values that rail against inequality but then find yourself wildly rich? How do you feel good about yourself while knowing you have access to power and privilege almost no one else does?
One option is to plow a lot of that money back into programs to help increase the prosperity of everyone. But then you end up poorer and who wants that?
A simpler approach is to find some symbolic hair shirt you can wear, a little token suffering, as a way to assuage your guilt without making any real sacrifices. Of course, the irony is that the only reason these people do any of this "opt-in suffering" is because they are secure in the knowledge that they can stop it whenever they want.
Dorsey's contemplative long walk is a lot less fun when it's your only way to get to work, and Rose's cold shower loses some of its charm when it's because the power's been cut off.
Other HN commenters have suggested that the discrepancies between the behaviors described in the article and Stoicism are the result of techies corrupting Stoicism, but I think an alternative hypothesis should be considered: that the author has corrupted Stoicism in order to create a palatable narrative.
I don't think the author is off-base for claiming it's a thing in SV.
The idea that stoicism calls on people to ignore all the social wrongs of the world is a malignment of the philosophy. It's not fatalistic, nor is it isolationist. Somebody who is a stoic acts to improve the world when it's possible.