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Eji1700HNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can …

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil. Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it. The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high. Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge. But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.

Original discussionWhy I Left iNaturalist159 source comments · at import
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WoodenChairHN

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures. It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go wel…

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GrowingSidewaysHN

Well, yes. Narcissism, pragmatism etc are often commingled with being evil. the material effects order the general characterization. I suppose if you're particularly shitty at fucking over others you might sort out as not evil. That is, the people who run our society are happy to absolutely ruin our lives in order to get a nice house and a driver. But we will hang the worst regardless

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cyberrockHN

I used to roll my eyes at fictional settings like LotR and Starcraft (Protoss) that pit orthodox/"white" magic versus forbidden/"black" magic, but now I've woken up to see this industry split into such a moral schism in multiple ways. (Aside, of course, from white/gray/black hat hackers, which is more about actions rather than knowledge)

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geocarHN

If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die. That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help. The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm. I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil". But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more…

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