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> startup would have succeeded, just by providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume.

You've just described hustle culture. And yes, it does lead to business success. Engineers don't like hustle.



Yep, but most hustles fail, the number of startups that succeed is like, what, 5 or 10%?


Hustles don't fail, why would you think they would? Customers love hiring hustlers. Startups fail because they want software economics, not hustle economics. If you're willing to accept hustle economics, you'll never run out of work.


Weird arguments you are making. I'm talking about startup business.

> Hustles don't fail

Then by definition there should be few engineers with financial problems, right? Almost every engineer wants to succeed with their side hustle


No engineer wants to hustle.

You're still only thinking in terms of startups. I'm thinking about landscapers and ticket scalpers. No engineer is doing that. But if you were willing to, you'd make money.


You're not communicating well--it's unclear what you mean by "hustle". It's also pretty unlikely that speaking in absolutes ("no engineer") is correct here.

It sounds a lot like you're saying "all engineers are lazy" and that's just obviously wrong.


Using the words of the person I was discussing with.

> providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume

This is hustling.


And if that's what you're saying, you're unambiguously wrong on your overall point.

Plenty of engineers are building barely-functional products as fast (cheap, because time is money) as can be and doing a ton of volume. The entire Bangalore contractor scene was built this way, as well as a ton of small Western contractor shops. You honestly think no engineers understand undercutting competition? Really?


Some engineers are alive to the hustle game. But if you're focused on quality you're not hustling.

I'm not sure though I'd call business folks with software products that are hustling engineers. Different mindset.


Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid. Quality is a means to an end goal, and eschewing quality is also a means to an end goal. And again, there are both business folks and engineers who are smart enough to choose when a focus on quality fits their goals and when it doesn't.

It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity. For your own good, stop. Contrary to what you seem to believe, hustles do fail, and if you close your mind to that possibility you're going to eventually hustle on the wrong thing and burn yourself out on a hustle that doesn't work. And even if you don't, you'll make yourself intolerable to anyone you'd want to interact with. It's not a good path.


> Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid.

Of course it is.

> It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity.

This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective. My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days. You're the one mistaking my generalization for gatekeeping, and it's precisely because you're holding on to a rationalist mindset, so you project that onto others.

All I was doing was committing to the bit. No half-measures for me. Nobody follows threads after the first day or so anyway. No harm in continuing discussions past the sell-by date.


> This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective.

The terms "rationalist" and "institutionalist" you're using have too many different meanings in different contexts for this to be a meaningful set of sentences. Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?

> My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days.

I do not care how popular a wrong idea is. This is especially true on HN, where the focus on profit over humans has led to extremely harmful ideologies becoming popular.

> All I was doing was committing to the bit.

So this was supposed to be a joke? It was pretty unfunny.


> Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?

Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.

Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.

> I do not care how popular a wrong idea is.

I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.

I'll give an example so as to not leave you completely lost. If I told you 1+1=3, then you could prove it to me that I'm wrong. All you'd need is a few apples. This would be a positivistic approach to reasoning and since you're a rationalist, this is the kind of reasoning you value.

If you tried to convince me Naziism was the best political theory, I would have two fundamentally different ways to respond. I could try the rationalist way, to attempt to construct a convincing argument through the history of political movements, perhaps grounding my argument in the idea of best for most.

But intuitionist me knows that's a dumb plan, and would just solve it by having the bartender throw you out of the bar, no nazis allowed.

The reason the rationalist approach to the Nazi question doesn't work is because positivistic logic must flow from something and that something must be a settled place of knowledge, the justified true belief. Political philosophy isn't a positivistic domain. You can't prove Naziism isn't the best political philosophy because politics is one group of people having power over others. Nazis are immune to reason. That's why no nazis in bars.

When rationalists try to operate in non-positivistic domains, they get out of their element quickly, because rationalists tend to discount the humanities as useful fields to study, and so they have to substitute something other than knowledge to form positivistic arguments.

An intuitionist very much values the humanities and realizes, over time, the limitations of positivism. If you study enough of the humanities, you will form an intuitive view of the world that can survive being challenged, proof isn't as useful as the rationalist thinks it is. A rationalist's view of reality is thus brittle, while intuitionist understanding is flexible.

And so when you said I was buying into some sigma grindset bullshit, that's an example of rationalist reduction of someone's understanding as similar. In reality I was just intuitively wandering around the space of what different folks in and around business care about, using my experience in corporate America as a guide. I identified this idea of 'hustle' as separating two different mindsets and was trying to sketch a loose picture of what this was.

An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.

Anyway, that was fun to write, even though I'm pretty sure you aren't going to follow.


> Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.

So... you basically define "rationalist" as someone who is wrong. Sounds like a pointless word to me. And let me guess, you're going to call me a rationalist later, rather than actually respond to anything I said? Let's continue and find out!

> Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.

So... someone who doesn't use phrases like "no engineer" because they're obviously wrong in a messy, imprecise world?

It doesn't sound much like you're the intuitionist here, but I am sure you think you are!

> I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.

My argument wasn't based on my feelings. It's based on your beliefs. I'm appealing to your belief that popularity isn't equivalent to correctness. And if you're going to pretend you don't believe that, I'm out, because you're not making an honest argument.

> An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.

Wow, what self-congratulatory nonsense.

Maybe, the intuitionist isn't interested in helping you reduce the world into two deterministic roles: hustling business people and quality-focused engineers. Maybe, the intuitionist's experience has led them to a very different intuition, because they actually care about understanding what other people are doing instead of congratulating themselves for getting a business degree.

To use your silly terminology, the intuitionist solution to people like you dismissing pretty obvious facts isn't to argue facts, because you're more interested in sounding smart than in reality. The solution is to dismiss your nonsense as "sigma grindset bullshit" or some equally pejorative AND ACCURATE description. The argumentative equivalent of kicking the Nazi out of the bar.

Believe it or not, one can be an intuitionist without losing interest in the truth. One can both kick the Nazi out of the bar and argue against Nazism.

But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro. All I ask is that you don't spread that mental illness.


> But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro.

Lol. I trade the markets. One trade, ten minutes. Then I catch up on socials, close up the machine then do whatever the hell I want. You wouldn't catch me dead doing anything remotely resembling hustling. Read my essay again. Or don't!


So you're spreading an ideology you won't even act on yourself? Great.


You're really like a dog with a bone, aren't you. Let me be explicit. I was not spreading any kind of ideology. You just believed i was. And because I didn't argue with you in the precise way you wanted me to argue you with, just doubled down on your preconceptions. Letting reactionary emotions be your guide instead of the logic you think you were arguing from.


I honestly don't understand what point this comment is trying to make.




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