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| ▲ | voidfunc 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Unfortunately the winds are not blowing in your preferred direction. We are being shown time and time again and in increasing frequency that being an asshole is the best way to succeed. | | |
| ▲ | anon_e-moose 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success. If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party. | | |
| ▲ | voidfunc 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :) | |
| ▲ | thwarted 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's only a tragedy if everyone acts the same way. If a few act against the grain then it's no longer a tragedy. The common thief is an example. Also pirating games and movies is another example. | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability. And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion. In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them. I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended. | |
| ▲ | llbbdd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities. Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements). Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well. | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational. |
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| ▲ | glitchc 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Dawkins in The Selfish Gene demonstrated through experiments that society collapses when everyone is an asshole. It also collapses when everyone is nice. There's an optimum ratio (~23% assholes to the rest) that leads to long-term sustainability. | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This in opposition to millennia of human history, which should teach us that the surest path to human success is cooperation. Why else would we have invented language? | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | being an asshole is the best way to succeed. Being an asshole is the opposite of success. Unless you think life is a video game and the score is tallied in dollar signs. In which case, you've already lost. | | |
| ▲ | afarcryfromhome 6 days ago | parent [-] | | this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about. humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence. | | |
| ▲ | llbbdd 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Some people seem to think that because they don't want to be assholes that assholes have no reproductive usefulness, and I'm not sure that's valuable. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then maybe we'll never see eye-to-eye. I grew up with an iTunes account, but I never spent my money on music. Some weeks my family lived paycheck-to-paycheck, some nights skipping dinner. I downloaded my music off YouTube to my 2005 HP Compaq, put it on my iTunes library and synced it to my iPod Shuffle. Didn't weigh on my conscience when I pirated video games or FL Studio either, not then and not now. If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide. | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal. Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well. I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content. | | | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 6 days ago | parent [-] | | You actually don't understand the consumer desire for free, if you necessarily conflate it with class warfare and moral grandstanding. It seems to be a karma sink insisting upon this, but this is the hacker ethos. Nobody lords information over anyone, any paywall you erect will eventually fall. For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on? Draw out this line of reasoning long enough, and one could argue that Richard Stallman is the worst human alive for "moral grandstanding" the software industry and taking glee in destroying software jobs with copyleft licensing. But more accurately, he ushered in the information age for everyone and prevented it from being cordoned-off behind a proprietary paywall. Yes, he predicated Napster and ThePirateBay and 4chan and all the horrible examples you're apt to draw upon. But he also invariably pushed technology forward - we're better people, that we aren't slaving away remaking the Cairo library for the 30,000th time. Common access to at least some information enables a great deal of art and provides countless value to would-be artists. I'd like to think that the entire human race is bettered with access to information. It would certainly be idyllic if we could compensate artists, authors and scientists along the way, but humanity would be ruined if all information came at-cost. I am willing to fight for a world where individuals have free access to information, and I reckon my tools are more powerful than the publishers who seek to thwart me. I won't stop when the musicians scream out bloody murder, and if you think that's the most immoral thing imaginable then don't ask how 15-year-old me found the money to afford Jimmy John's. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Argue one way or the other but it's extremely distasteful to use the suffering of children in Gaza in that way. | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on? Nonsense like this is where I leave the conversation. You can't deny the accusations of moral grandstanding in the same breath you say this. I commented directly on the topic being discussed in a specific HN thread. That does not mean I think this is the most important issue on the planet and the non-sequitur of contrasting a discussion of IP law with children in Gaza being firebombed is just straight up offensive. The "karma sink" here isn't voicing your "ethos", it is you. | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I love seeing your perspective here among all the hand wringing, thanks for not letting downvotes scare you off. IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music, and it’s rich seeing calls for free information get downvoted on the same site singing praises of LLMs, as tho those companies paid a dime for their source material | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music The person they're responding to has repeatedly said this is not their position. |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | cindyllm 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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