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You're missing the point. The strong men are the ones building roads and sewers and buildings and exploring and policing and making safe and guarding and inventing and transporting, and the weak men are the ones deferring and allowing things to slide into safety and overly generous (with someone's money) social programs and overseas programs and politeness laws, and when things go wrong, populism, and the circle continuing.

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kybernetikos 5 days ago | parent [-]

I'm really struggling to match your definitions of weak and strong here to anything like normal usage.

I think you're saying that it's strong to be employed? I'm not really sure how that matches up to being against the things you mention in connection with "weak".

Incidentally, I don't know if you intended this, but building roads and sewers and policing are, in most countries, socially funded programs.

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Kon5ole 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's a metaphor, "strong" and "weak" refers to the ability to overcome the "hard times", whatever that may be.

Basically if you experienced the direct consequences of a "hard time" (a demagogue, a famine, a recession or financial crisis, SCRUM, or whatever) you will be more aware and resilient to allowing the things that caused that to happen than if you never experienced it. That's "strength".

It is of course true, we see it everywhere in nature, but it's perhaps often more due to hard times eliminating weakness than actually creating strength.

Good times tend to increase the number of people who don't know how serious bad times can get, don't realize the importance of principles that were obvious to the people who survived the bad times.

So "strong people" can perhaps be "created" equally in good times as well, but they are increasingly outnumbered. During hard times the "weak" are eliminated.

This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)

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astrange 5 days ago | parent [-]

> This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)

Remember economics isn't a morality play where bad things are secretly good. The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf

	▲	Kon5ole 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Bad times are named "bad" for a reason of course, but there are many sayings - sayings being based on human observations throughout history - along the lines of "every cloud has a silver lining". One that conceptually rhymes with the "bad times lead to good people" saying is "bad manners lead to good laws".