We could also rein in private equity? Culture Study had a great episode about PE [0] recently, with some explanation of what started it and, if I remember right, some gestures towards how it might be brought to heel — or at least made less bombastically awful for most people.
PE has nothing to do with any of it. They are totally up-front, even in their prospectuses, that the only reason they are in this game is because witless dupes (paraphrasing) in local governments are too stupid to build houses. If we would build anything, they wouldn't be in the game.
Private equity has lots of benefits that are never discussed because they make good bogeyman. Existing management is not always good, and I do not benefit from companies employing unnecessary workers and passing the price through to me.
I'm a full-stack developer with over 10 years of experience across early- and late-stage startups, a Fortune 500 company, and academia.
Most recently, I've been working on a reading environment for networked commentaries on ancient texts. I built the first iteration with Elixir and Phoenix, and I'm currently working on a minimal computing setup that others can use for their own commentaries/collections of texts.
I've worked extensively with JavaScript throughout my career, and I also have production-grade experience with Ruby on Rails and Python.
I'm looking for a role in the Boston area or remote (hybrid works too) that has a meaningful impact and room to grow.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or if you think I might be a good fit for your team.
> He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage?
I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.
I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.
My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.
But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.
The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."
Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.
> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market
Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.
Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.
Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.
As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The market doesn't dictate reality - it is part of reality.
If a skill isn't needed, there won't be a demand for it, and it won't pay well, no matter how many years of learning and personal growth are required to acquire the skill.
The big bad market refusing to pay historians a good wage is just society's built-in mechanism for trying to guide people into doing things that are most needed.
A lot of the humanities were historically aimed at rich kids who don't need to engage with the labour market; we really shouldn't be encouraging middle-class kids to take on a mountain of student debt when they should be focusing on maximizing their earnings.
Your explanation is an exemplar of constrained thinking. Thinking
inside the box, or having limited horizons [0].
You start off correctly; markets are "part of reality". That rightly
implies some other "rest of reality", does it not?
You then define all value only within the limited logic of
markets. And wish to a universalise it as "society's built-in
mechanism".
Mathematics is a "humanity". Reading some, you'll gain understanding
of Gödel, Whitehead and Russell who would alert you to the logic that
a system can't deal with what's outside itself.
Markets are a system. A very simplified one.
Humanities are precisely that project that transcends simple models
like markets. Humanities attempt to cover a bigger,
meta-reality. It has nothing to do with "rich kids". Some of the
greatest philosophers, writers and scientists (what we call 'STEM' now
was once "natural philosophy") were dirt poor.
To be more frank, to think only about markets and "maximising
earnings" is stubborn, insular and self-limiting. It's a great way to
stay cloistered and never contribute anything of value to the world.
Sure we have professional economists. But not everyone should reduce
them-self to the level of economics.
[0] EDIT: these are not words meant to insult or belittle - they are
to mean exactly what they mean on face value. There is no 'shame' in
thinking with limited horizons, or seeing in an involuted way if
you've been exposed to nothing else but are open minded to imagine
there is more to the world.
> You then define all value only within the limited logic of markets.
Not all value, just monetary one. There's plenty of valueable activities that do not pay much or even a dime. However, the discussion revolved about making a living, not what's valueable in the abstract. And, regarding making a living, it's true that plenty more people want to be paid as historians that other people have a need for.
I respectfully acknowledge that you aren't the parent to whom I was
responding and that you're jumping in with your own contribution.
But I do not think the "discussion revolved about making a living"
Indeed, it's something of an irritating HN trope/style to try steering
the narrative by telling other people what the "discussion is
actually all about"
As I see it the main theme here was the low social status of academic
work in general.
I realise, and sympathise, that a lot of HN posters are deeply anxious
about "making a living".
My disagreement with the parent is the claim that "the market" is:
"" just society's built-in mechanism for trying to guide people into
doing things that are most needed. ""
Markets are awful at determining what is "needed". They're great at
figuring out how to satisfy people's superficial desires and great at
making money. Look around you. Millions of people doing pointless
make-work jobs in advertising and "the financial industry". Meanwhile,
we keep failing to solve the most elementary challenges of a
sustainable, healthy environment, which is surely a fundamental
need.
For me, this where Neo-liberalism falls flat. Markets cannot tell
society anything about what is needed. Society must tell markets what
is needed... however we achieve that. And so to see things only from
within the frame of "market think" is to remain blind to most of
reality.
Markets are society telling itself what is needed.
People want lots of plumbers, so they pay for it. Not many people want to be plumbers, so they get paid a lot.
People want one or two historians, so they vote and pay tax for it. Lots and lots of students would rather be historians than plumbers, so they don’t get paid a lot.
If you want people to want a sustainable economy, be less smug and judgemental and convince them to vote and pay for it.
I'd be very curious to know how old you are, where you were educated
and how you got these ideas.
The idea that markets literally are society seems not only wrong to
me, but an extremist and quite dangerous idea.
Instead of spending time convincing random people to vote for plumbers
of historians, I'd rather convince one person to take a wider look at
the world and question the views they've been raised on.
Is there even the slightest possibility that you're wrong? That maybe
society is more than just "markets"?
I don't agree with your political positions so clearly the problem is with me. I'm too old, too young, uneducated, or educated in the wrong place.
First of all, I'm surprised you can't see the simple truth that markets are an emergent property of any community. You yourself are part of various markets - every time you choose from an array of options, even if they're all free; every time you produce anything at all, you're in a market. That this isn't obvious to you makes me question why I bother talking to you.
Second of all, your attitude is absolutely smug and insufferable. You're convincing a negative number of people to see things your way. It's so wild to me that an entire half of the political spectrum in the West adopts this attitude, and when they lose there's an immense wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the other side is brainwashed. Meanwhile, the answer to their problems is in the mirror.
You're right Fred, we just don't see the world the same way
I personally don't think the idea of "markets" has much to offer the
world now, it's an outdated and immature way of trying to see complex
things in a simple way.
Sorry we can't seem to have a more grown up conversation about it, but
not only are you inflexible you've crossed the line into making
personal remarks which is unacceptable.
the problem is that having a healthy community of scholars doing good historical research using sophisticated methods, produces a lot of positive externalities. most people never engage with it but having such people around does limit historical bullshit. this has been good for society. but it's now falling apart.
I agree it’s a positive, but each one of us has to sell our value-add to the rest of society. This is actually a wonderful constraint to have because it keeps each of us in touch with the rest of humanity
Is it really falling apart? The US universities hire many, probably thousans or even tens of thosands, of excellent history professors. What's the problem with it?
I'm a math PhD, was a tenured professor and then transitioned to industry. We've got two humanities PhDs that work as QA testers on our team. They're both fantastic, especially in thinking about either big picture questions or nuanced takes that others missed out on.
Considering the length of the road they took to become QA testers, they had better be. This is more evidence that humanities studies are a substantial stumbling block, in terms of career growth.
Appreciate this post, and will add my voice to it. Current senior manager in technology whose only academic credentials are undergrad and grad degrees in history and (non-quantitative minor) economics.
I do think my career stalled a bit as a result of studying these things, but that's a consequence of the same market thinking you're challenging. The people who hired me are happy they gave me the chance, and presumably like OP said, we aren't that special and there are tons of other talented people who can do this work being ignored because of an excess concern for credentialism.
They're also a thing in Boston and a few other areas in the US. It's blatantly exploitative, to say nothing of the obvious corruption pointed out in other comments.
There was supposed to be a crackdown on the practice in NYC in 2020, but the brokers lobby was too powerful.[0]
One can only hope that such legislation eventually passes -- and has teeth.
Tbh, I’m put on more on alert by the spelling errors in the linked post than I am by the ostensible threat of a server timing my requests in order to serve malware.
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
> Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
It seems like this is a rumor that refuses to die. Humanities majors do just fine.
According to a 2018 ACS survey,[0] humanities majors are looking at 2.13% unemployment, which is comparable to other fields. The same survey shows that people who majored in the humanities earn comparable salaries to their peers in other disciplines.[1]
A 2014 study in Forbes found that humanities majors go on to earn even more than their peers in other disciplines as they all advance on their chosen career paths.[2]
I'm curious why the image of the deadbeat humanist persists, especially in an era where we need people who have been trained to look at potentially misleading information, identify why it is misleading, and point us towards better sources. Rampant misinformation in this social media age has shown us that "the facts" are much more slippery than anyone would like, and we need people who have been trained in the subjective arts of parsing contradictory information and -- even more importantly -- justifying their interpretation to others.
That article doesn’t argue for any sort of causal relationship between climate change and racism. Rather, it argues that a similar kind of denialism in the face of facts undermines the notion of shared truth by further entrenching people within their (a priori) belief systems.
Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
This isn’t an entirely accurate picture. In Hanink’s first book, she demonstrates how the classical Athens that we think of today was largely an invention of Athens in the fourth century BCE.
To oversimplify a bit, although Athens lost its military hegemony at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Athenianness maintained a powerful cultural influence for centuries.
I think the lede, then, is clear from the first paragraph: classical Athens (synechdochically represented through Thucydides here) is a construct that can be used for diverse ends, and we need to pay careful to attention to who uses it and how.
The problem with this view is that foreign language education isn't about the language per se (although that's a bonus if you manage to get good), it's about providing a vehicle for understanding history and culture in context.
Latin is a favorite punching bag in this discussion, and I don't want to argue about the practical benefit of _speaking_ Latin right now. But learning to _read_ Latin is learning how to deal with long, difficult, and poorly defined problems---skills that translate (no pun intended) to almost any field.
> The problem with that article is not that it makes 0 valid points, it's that it makes some terrible correlations as an attempt to prove cryptos won't be huge.
Actually, the article doesn't set out "to prove cryptos won't be huge," and ends on a crypto-positive note:
> Bitcoin has shown us the promise of blockchain technologies despite its design shortcomings.
> The future of the technology will probably evolve towards a model that more resembles real world needs, rather than the needs of “cyberpunks”.
To diverge from the article a bit and respond to your final point, I don't know that the mantra of individual empowerment in the Bitcoin world amounts to anything other than solipsism. Bitcoin, as far as I can tell, ignores structural biases preventing people from accessing the cryptocurrency. We can see evidence of this in the "Bitcoin in Africa" startups, which on the surface seem benign and even benevolent, but are hiding an uninterrogated colonialism: their chief assumption, it seems to me, is that the developed world will always control more of Bitcoin's limited resources, and the value of spreading a small portion of those resources to the developing world comes from lock-in. It's a classic unfair trade agreement, and it doesn't take much thought to see how problematic this situation can become.
eBay can bend you over with fees because they control the market; Bitcoin's limited resources are susceptible to the same kind of market control. That's the discussion I wish more people were having.
Bitcoin is not susceptible to market control like eBay. eBay is a single entity so it is easy to coordinate self-serving decision. Bitcoin is multiple agents that have to co-operate. That prevents any one agent from making unilateral decisions.
Another huge difference is that anybody can become a new agent in Bitcoin. You just buy the hardware. You cannot influence or join eBay in the same way.
I like your ideas about the colonial aspects of Bitcoin in the developing world. That is an angle I haven't heard anyone else mention before. It pairs nicely with another critique I don't often see, that Bitcoin is undemocratic; there are economic assumptions baked in that, if it were a government-backed money, people could discuss, vote on, and ultimately change. With bitcoin, there is no way that the people whose lives could be affected by those assumptions can have a say in them--the design and operation of bitcoin doesn't answer to the people in a democratic way.
That Bitcoin is undemocratic is a good thing. Look around in the world at what democracy has done to currency. Not a single democratic currency has withstood the test of time. It's time for a different approach.
I want an undemocratic currency and I don't want to forbid you from using a democratic currency if you prefer it. I doubt those that like you, who are unable to agree with the statement above, will willingly extend the same courtesy to those like me, who disagree with that statement.
I wonder which group might be in possession of the right idea, the group saying "you don't have to use it if you don't like it" or the group that is already forcing the new currency to be under the same democratic rules of the old, "democratic" currency.
Statism, ideas so good we have to force them on people.
There's nothing wrong with the developed world providing a service to the developing world. It's a symbiotic relationship, as both are better off from the arrangement. Mining farms in the developed world giving Somalians in the developing world a secure currency that can't be expropriated, and lets them receive international remittance at a fraction of the fees they paid before, is a good thing.
With respect to fairness, what's important is the characteristics of the framework within which the resource is used, that enable rent-seeking. With Bitcoin, each individual is their own bank. They control their own private key, meaning access to money is not intermediated by rent-seeking third parties with their lock-ins and closed networks.
Mining is ultra-competitive, because there are no barriers to market entry to the open mining network, ensuring transaction fees are driven down to the maximum extent possible. The algorithmic money supply ensures that no powerful organization and its host of satellite institutions can inflate the currency on a perpetual basis, to slowly the tax the people over generations.
Any way you look at it, Bitcoin is a force for distributing power and control, by eliminating the roles of rent-seekers.
[0]: https://culturestudypod.substack.com/p/how-private-equity-de...
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