I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to you?
Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?
A big folly in political movements is completely disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't understand something you refuse to know.
Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel.
Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
What’s interesting about this conversation is the different perspectives on the material, not necessarily the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads like “use hyperbole all the time” or “extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction”. Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you’d expect to see in any high paced, high competition industry, just written for the sort of people that grew up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes between employees who are excited to be there and excited to be working on the company goals and the ones who are just there to punch a clock. And at every company the clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than the excited employees. We can worry about how that tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the game development industry), but the reality is any time you get a group of people together, the folks who have a vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and get along better with the people who share a passion for that vision and mission.
Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
Let me ask that question a different way: let’s say what you learn had no value or it was something that was already pretty well understood (such as the fact that people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was the value to society in that information being created or shared?
Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.
So you feel the person who is doing this competition doesn’t feel like they actually need the money in their lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance around financial stability being exploited?
I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited.
Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need to know
