LOL at "What’s the point of life, though? To create value for shareholders with B2B SaaS."
I worked as a copywriter for three years at a marketing agency which had these B2B SaaS companies as clients, and while the agency + colleagues were great, the actual work itself lacked depth. My favourite client was actually an insurtech startup in the UK because I got a close(r) look at what insurance does and why bringing even the simplest of tech there (like chatbots) can directly improve things.
That said, learning for learning's sake is not that prevalent in Indian culture, too, from what I have seen. It is looked upon favourably but not enough people do it where I would say it is a culture-defining trait. That would be optimizing for security and stability.
I enjoy learning for its own sake because my mother got me reading in school, the teachers were encouraging of my attitude and I could borrow a whole lot of books from the library. Most of my friends, however, weren't like this. They could perform well academically but (this was in engineering college) seemed to have little curiosity or openness towards fields outside of the ones they were studying. Maybe I'm not assessing them fairly—they were motivated to do projects outside of the classroom and look up extra stuff—but this again, was limited to tech, the field they were pursuing. I'm not sure how many of them now would look to maybe art or science and say, "Let me learn about in the absence of a clear incentive."
The problem with maintaining generational excellence is that the definition of excellence changes over time, and for migrants usually within 1 or 2 generations. I know quite a few Indians who either came to the US as children or were born here as 2cd generation. All of them are way more American than their parents and define success in an American way. Most of them have deep conflicts with parents because their parents cannot understand why their children go their own way instead of following cultural tradition. However what the parents don't understand is that their cultural traditions are tied to a specific environment and aren't inherent. In India, the caste system shapes life incredibly deeply. Once you remove someone from that system, they cannot rely on it to drive the environment needed to meet traditional terms of success. In the US, there's no caste system to provide the support needed for success in the tech industry, but on the other hand the capital markets are much deeper and freer, and there's a lot of advantages to people who take unusual or divergent life paths. So immigrsnt children who don't get that financial asset plan end up doing what every other upper middle class American does- explore the world and cut a unique life path for themselves.
“though it bothers me greatly that no one does times tables in US schools these days” same.
I appreciate your point about the role of an educated parent being able to help navigate complex situations. I often imagine the impact of having highly educated parents on my own higher-education journey.
Lots of thoughts here but as a fellow Bay Area kid, I do worry about a bloodless technocracy unleavened by the humanities as Ross Douthat points out in this excellent response to the debate (https://x.com/DouthatNYT/status/1872341885790126252).
SV's true merit lies it in its ability to embrace failure and risk as an ethos to a much higher degree than the rest of the country. On the other hand, it feels like SV is edging closer Wall Street mentality of "creating value for shareholders" that is so unrewarding. I know we all make fun of the "changing the world" narrative in SV but it does mean something that money is not the validation of the good life (which nearly every ideology/religion outside of Ayn Rand warns against).
I see a lot of similarities between our time and the emergence of Britain in the 19th century with it's emphasis on adventurism and science. I would suggest everyone read JS Mill's autobiography to see the destructiveness of pushing a child too deep into an educational meritocracy.
The whole narrative flipped on its head is not that Americans worship mediocrity but understand that greatness can come the most unlikeliest of places. A man is not his net worth but the love given and shared.
That thread and several others seem to have an almost pathological fear of encouraging children to be excellent in something.... unless that thing is sports, then it's okay, or it's mildly mocked. They also think jocks and prom queens have a certain something in them that can't be taught.
But viewing it as a parent, there are two major things I notice - peer attachment, and parents having such low standards for their children in the things that an Asian parent considers as mattering.
The peer attachment is what leads to bullying culture, and it's been a thing for 3-4 generations now and hence normalized and most Americans, including those who write books about bullying, aren't aware that this is the root cause. And this peer attachment is what breeds anti-intellectualism in schools. To learn something deep takes a lot of effort and vulnerability to fail, and when it's discouraged by the peer culture, less people take it up. Indian moms I know with tech careers say their daughters start losing confidence in math and science by middle school despite encouragement at home. This is made out into sexism, and maybe part of it is, but the reason for LOSING confidence has to be peer culture. The cues are taken from peers and from the media they consume. Not enough from parents. Parents including Indian ones these days think it's really cool their kids go off on their own and don't want to talk to them much.
Meanwhile we talk about a mental health crisis, girls bullying each other on social media, kids not having freedom. My preschooler is super sensitive, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of a life would help her develop into a mentally healthy adult. Long story short, it feels like she needs to spend her teens building things alongside grownups and not being worried about the approval of peers. That's exactly the opposite of what American culture would suggest.
The humility and the anyone-can-be-great thing is great for grownups, but with children, that just leads to demonizing any kind of effort. With peer attachment you're already feeling awkward about showing your peers up by working harder than them, and that doesn't need to be reinforced by adults. By the time people are grownups, they can grind on their own and be 'cool' socially. But kids need all the help they can get to value effort and hard work.
In any case, yeah, i think the generating value for shareholders thing is an issue with silicon valley in some ways, and it feels like that's behind the enshittification of tech. But now that media culture is determined to present tech and money in the worst of lights (and tech ceos aren't helping their own cause either with their actions), it's just saying another thing is not a good idea for kids to pursue. The blatant demonization of tech in some writerly circles is a sight to behold, and always makes me feel awkward, and that attitude definitely percolates into the zeitgeist.
I feel like the 19th century analogy might have been the case for tech in the 90s and 2005-2015, or for american society as a whole during the space race. But now it's just at mercantilism in tech, and American society feels like a more pessimistic place than ten years ago.
I went over John Stuart Mill's wikipedia page, and.... I should probably read the autobiography, but it seems like he liked it fine for about 20 years? Then he went through a crisis of purpose, and then found it, and the skills he had developed from childhood served him well to pursue subsequent things. I find this pattern quite common in all the self-help I read, where the stories are something like "I spent 10 years in wall street and got fired, and realized nothing in life matters anymore, and now I make a living in a surf shop in hawaii where I understand the true purpose of life"... but you also can see clearly how their wealth and connections from their wall street days is what subsidizes their current lifestyle, and they probably wouldn't have liked being a surf shop guy to start with.
I had my own such crisis recently actually. I had high expectations foisted on me at an early age, and it came at the cost of a few other skills. It hit me hard why I struggled for most of my life, and I decided to do better for my kid. But experiencing this crisis at an older age than JSM with perspective and the added perspective of a child has helped me understand the finer details of what the problems were and weren't. I rather liked the expertise I developed, but I didn't like the cost they came at, the lack of autonomy and the conditional self-esteem. The skills were the high point, and I think I'd have been happier if those skills had been nurtured better with more personalized and more joyful teaching and that had been related to careers I could pursue. So with my kid I'm focusing on the skills best I can, but making sure to avoid the other stuff. My folks were in over their heads with me and did the best they could. I'm seeing if I can do better.
"That thread and several others seem to have an almost pathological fear of encouraging children to be excellent in something.... unless that thing is sports, then it's okay, or it's mildly mocked. They also think jocks and prom queens have a certain something in them that can't be taught."
100% agree. I read a fantastic article [but I can't find it :(] about how so much of YA literature portrays ambition as evil and the hero being innately possessed of some sort of special power (Harry Potter being the best example).
Re: The bullying culture - I think it's roots are deeper than the predisposition towards peer attachment but that children in junior high and high school are playing a very different game than everyone else. See my favorite PG essay ever - https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Re: The enshittification of tech and media - it's lazy thinking by very smart people to think that all critiques of SV (not saying you are doing this). Feels akin to "they hate me because I'm pretty". Maybe because I'm way too plugged into politics for my own good but the lack of self-awareness in SV from the damage of tech versus it's promises is not something that can be dismissed with "they're just jealous" attitude. Matt Yglesias + Noah Smith offer a much more balanced perspective about how we should be encouraging technological progress but not turning into e/acc nutjobs.
Re: JS Mill - Perhaps this inclusion was off topic but I deeply fear a bloodless tech rationalism where people are just automatons to produce utility. As one poignant critique mentions "What's the utility of utility?" Men are meant for more than just pumping out code and math. I look to the old school physicists - Oppenheimer, Einstein, Feynman as just a few inspirations for how STEM does not conflict with the love of humanities and being a well rounded human being.
I'm not a parent but I'd like to think what I loved about my own is that they let me go my own way. Sam Harris points out we have a lot less power to shape our children than we think. As a professional child (lol), I think the best thing to do is love them and tell them they're brilliant.
Oh my now I want to analyze that paul graham article from the perspective of peer attachment. It is so ripe for that. But I'll tell you this - in my school in India, the most popular kids were also the ones who had great grades and were well-regarded by teachers. I think the archetype of the popular kid is very different in India, and it is because parents and teachers play a much bigger role in shaping the behavior of children. Also there can be a much less damaging hierarchy - teachers at the top, kids at the bottom so everyone feels secure in their place and doesn't have to keep playing games to deal with the uncertainty. The issue in American schools is teachers don't see it as their job to provide that certainty for children and they expect kids will just "figure it out"... but they don't teach children how to treat each other well either by modeling good relationships and closely supervising them in the formative stages.
Sam Harris, Bryan Caplan and others also fall into this trap because the West is now four generations into peer attachment - they think parents don't have much of a role in how kids grow up, but they do so from within a society where parents actively keep away from taking a role in how kids grow up. While I do just love my child and encourage her, I'm also working at having her lean into things I think are cool, and I do notice that she wants to do things I think are interesting. She'll do it her own way, but my role is quite important and I can't just have someone else take care of her and think the outcomes will be the same. It's not one or two things I do, but it's patterns of what happens around her that matters. If those patterns are mostly from daycare, then yeah, parents won't seem so important.
One of the issues in the West is sitting down and swotting doesn't have a deeper meaning for its own sake. I suppose the only exception is Jesuit monks. It's either a sliver of religion that allows you to do that, or autism. And we're all out of religion, I suppose. When this was important in the service of war, it was valued. In peace time, what gives academic focus its cachet is money. I'm not sure non-catholic flavors of christianity value deep studies (though a lot of the best engineers and academics I've met tend to be mormon). I remember reading The Big Short and the yeshiva background of Steve Eisman came up a lot in explaining how he was fine with poring over complex texts both in judaism as well as on wall street. There needs to be this kind of purpose. It can come from religion, I suppose, but given the bay area doesn't have a dominant culture that takes from religion, it's going to be hard.
Definitely agree with the peer attachment part. I feel like many successful Americans often had a hatred of schooling in their youth because they didn't fit in and I would wonder if it's the same in India (doubtful imo).
"One of the issues in the West is sitting down and swotting doesn't have a deeper meaning for its own sake."
Completely agree but I think this is very deliberate in American culture which venerates physical activity over reflective thought and study. One book I read about American masculinity noted how evangelicals did not like the European ideal of Christ as emaciated and passive but sought to portray him with more manly characteristics (ex. emphasizing his work as a carpenter). Americans often deride those types as "eggheads" and the tech right is coming around to this view as well despite being unable to fit in (see figures like BAP and Beff Jezos). See this breakdown of masculinity among the extreme right for example (https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-jockcreep-theory-of-fascism) which fits the MAGA debate about immigration in an interesting way imo. The Jock/Douche figures are more likely to venerate the QBs and cheerleaders whereas the creep/loser figures venerate technological and scientific achievement. Your mileage may vary here.
If you write a response to PG's essay, I would be so down to read it.
Why do very few (negligible?) of children of Indian immigrants play professional sports? Join West Point? Play high school or college football, baseball, basketball, track, swimming?
Why do Indian immigrant parents try to be just like their parents in India - a very different place, with much lower per capita GDP and much less opportunities compared to here?
I am a bit disappointed that educated Indian immigrants have not adapted and assimilated into this country.
What an idiotic comment. I can ask "why do descendants of the fighters of the revolutionary war (my kid is one) not play professional sports? im a bit disappointed they have not adapted and assimilated into this country". In all my husband's ancestors going back to before the revolutionary war, there's just one person who played professional sports, and that was also at the college level. Look at your own ancestry, it'll probably be mouthbreathing sportswatchers who spend all week whining about sporting decisions people making millions more than them make and maybe reminiscing about the time you almost made it to college on a sports scholarship.
In any case, Bhagat Singh Thind fought for the US in WW1, applied to be a citizen on the basis of that, and yall told him "lol no" and also changed the rules so no indians could naturalize as american citizens. And Saurabh Netravalkar has represented the US in international cricket and taken cricketing to new heights, and still needs to work at Oracle to maintain his visa.
A child of an Indian immigrant made it to the white house, and one will make it again this inauguration as the second lady. In all of America's history, there hasn't even been an Italian-American in the white house, and no Jewish-American either. No puerto rican either though they play a lot of baseball. But we have done it. Our methods clearly work.
The TV Show - Big Bang Theory is known to motivated a generation to choose Physics . Not sure if House MD or Grey's Anatomy had any impact on enrollments
At a certain point, management of financial assets matters more than marketable labor skills. A lot of high achieving parents don't understand this and try to replicate their success in their children with the same methodologies. That high skill strategy fails for 2 reasons: (1) reversion to mean, where children don't have the same ability or luck as their parents, and (2) the rising bar of technological change. Technological change is gradually replacing knowledge work; in a world where algorithms do most knowledge work, human labor has to shift to areas where algorithms underperform. Since algorithms can be trained to do anything that can be tested for, education performance will likely cease to corelate with income over the next few decades. Given these factors, the best strategy for parents is to capture as much financial assets as possible for their children and teach their children how to manage their assets sustainably.
That's a good point. Though, on thinking more about this, it also feels important to create something your kids get to join on the second floor so they aren't starting from scratch and can develop more expertise than you did at a similar age. Skills from professional work done away from home is harder to pass on that way.
Yes, those feelings are why most high skill parents won't follow a financial asset strategy and will instead focus in giving their children the skills that would have made the parents succeed even further. It's also why those same parents will blame the kids/themselves when those kids "fail to launch" into the same type of career they had. Id advise parents to redirect those instincts into educating the children on financial assets. For instance if you put $15k into dividend reinvesting S&P instead of a private kindergarten, that money would be worth $112k by the time the child is 25. Do that every year and the child will be a multimillionaire able to live off of interest alone by their 20s. Is the educational benefits from expensive kindergarten going to really provide the child with a better life at 25, especially if they are a return to mean case? Assuming of course they are taught to live frugally and don't waste their capital on drugs & parties. This is a huge ask on the parents though, bevause it's asking them to do something different for their children than worked for the parents, so i don't expect anyone to follow this advice.
That's the balance to think of - the expensive school isn't just to build skills, it's to build a perspective, have access to adults with skills, and increasingly in the US, to not end up with mental health issues, giving up on any ambition, and having a peer group that focuses on being a drain on resources. I find Indian-Americans don't put their kids in expensive schools for the sake of it - they pick schools like Harker which attract a peer group that is focused on excellence than say prep schools full of scions of wealth that will definitely lead to the drain-on-resources lifestyle. With wealth and opportunities you can be a mediocre person and still grain a lot.
My tech peers make enough to invest $15k a year as well as afford private school. They know their kid will not have to hurt for money, but you want them to use the wealth as a springboard to make as much wealth themselves.
People don't regress to the mean just like that. You _can_ maintain generations of excellence, and that's what I'm talking about in this post. There are some things we do consciously and some unconsciously that replicate excellence. We need to figure out what helps and what doesn't so we can do these things on purpose, or if we're not able to, figure out exactly what we'll be missing.
very well written indeed. the ref to PSBB (Nungambakkam) gives away your ancestral pedigree :-)
After this H1B issue exploded, Substack seems to have self built echo chambers for the various POVs though - empirical evidence from profiles of people commenting to articles like this and that of Ann Coulter (i used to like her during the 2016 days, and I am Indian living in India)
Like you said: the masks have come off. I plan to write an article on how Tolerance is preached by those who are InTolerant, Diversity is preached by those who have known no Diversity while growing up and Peace is preached by those who have waged and continue to wage War on others
PSBB now has branches in many cities including bangalore! that's where my US-return friends seem to enroll their kids while they work in electronic city.
I've thankfully not come across racism on substack, but im hearing it's come out in quite ugly ways. People have been fighting it solo. We need to organize as we have done on twitter.
Please do write the article you have in mind. One thought for me is that people notice intolerance around them and preach against it because it's so inherent to their circle, and even themselves. They usually do that when their friends are intolerant to something they like. But they probably are totally okay being intolerant to all the rest of the things lol.
Appreciate this! My son is 7 years old and we've been thinking through a lot of this as well. My conflict is that I just escaped the big tech grind myself, and it's hard for me to want to push my son into doing something that brought me some joy, but mainly burnout.
that's a big reason why my relatives who had luck in tech didn't recommend their kids get into tech. I feel though like tech skills are highly useful, and one doesn't have to work a grindy job to use those skills. If anything, they allow you to tune in to a set of opportunities that you can take advantage of to design the kind of life you want.
LOL at "What’s the point of life, though? To create value for shareholders with B2B SaaS."
I worked as a copywriter for three years at a marketing agency which had these B2B SaaS companies as clients, and while the agency + colleagues were great, the actual work itself lacked depth. My favourite client was actually an insurtech startup in the UK because I got a close(r) look at what insurance does and why bringing even the simplest of tech there (like chatbots) can directly improve things.
That said, learning for learning's sake is not that prevalent in Indian culture, too, from what I have seen. It is looked upon favourably but not enough people do it where I would say it is a culture-defining trait. That would be optimizing for security and stability.
I enjoy learning for its own sake because my mother got me reading in school, the teachers were encouraging of my attitude and I could borrow a whole lot of books from the library. Most of my friends, however, weren't like this. They could perform well academically but (this was in engineering college) seemed to have little curiosity or openness towards fields outside of the ones they were studying. Maybe I'm not assessing them fairly—they were motivated to do projects outside of the classroom and look up extra stuff—but this again, was limited to tech, the field they were pursuing. I'm not sure how many of them now would look to maybe art or science and say, "Let me learn about in the absence of a clear incentive."
Very well put!
The B2B SaaS quote is pure gold :)
You should write a book about this.
Yeah posts like this are exploring how to write more comprehensively about this.
The problem with maintaining generational excellence is that the definition of excellence changes over time, and for migrants usually within 1 or 2 generations. I know quite a few Indians who either came to the US as children or were born here as 2cd generation. All of them are way more American than their parents and define success in an American way. Most of them have deep conflicts with parents because their parents cannot understand why their children go their own way instead of following cultural tradition. However what the parents don't understand is that their cultural traditions are tied to a specific environment and aren't inherent. In India, the caste system shapes life incredibly deeply. Once you remove someone from that system, they cannot rely on it to drive the environment needed to meet traditional terms of success. In the US, there's no caste system to provide the support needed for success in the tech industry, but on the other hand the capital markets are much deeper and freer, and there's a lot of advantages to people who take unusual or divergent life paths. So immigrsnt children who don't get that financial asset plan end up doing what every other upper middle class American does- explore the world and cut a unique life path for themselves.
Come to Texas. Our children learn their multiplication table, though the school calls it “math facts”.
Oh this is great.
Great. In depth analysis. More information to note my action items.
“though it bothers me greatly that no one does times tables in US schools these days” same.
I appreciate your point about the role of an educated parent being able to help navigate complex situations. I often imagine the impact of having highly educated parents on my own higher-education journey.
Lots of thoughts here but as a fellow Bay Area kid, I do worry about a bloodless technocracy unleavened by the humanities as Ross Douthat points out in this excellent response to the debate (https://x.com/DouthatNYT/status/1872341885790126252).
SV's true merit lies it in its ability to embrace failure and risk as an ethos to a much higher degree than the rest of the country. On the other hand, it feels like SV is edging closer Wall Street mentality of "creating value for shareholders" that is so unrewarding. I know we all make fun of the "changing the world" narrative in SV but it does mean something that money is not the validation of the good life (which nearly every ideology/religion outside of Ayn Rand warns against).
I see a lot of similarities between our time and the emergence of Britain in the 19th century with it's emphasis on adventurism and science. I would suggest everyone read JS Mill's autobiography to see the destructiveness of pushing a child too deep into an educational meritocracy.
The whole narrative flipped on its head is not that Americans worship mediocrity but understand that greatness can come the most unlikeliest of places. A man is not his net worth but the love given and shared.
Loved the article!
That thread and several others seem to have an almost pathological fear of encouraging children to be excellent in something.... unless that thing is sports, then it's okay, or it's mildly mocked. They also think jocks and prom queens have a certain something in them that can't be taught.
But viewing it as a parent, there are two major things I notice - peer attachment, and parents having such low standards for their children in the things that an Asian parent considers as mattering.
The peer attachment is what leads to bullying culture, and it's been a thing for 3-4 generations now and hence normalized and most Americans, including those who write books about bullying, aren't aware that this is the root cause. And this peer attachment is what breeds anti-intellectualism in schools. To learn something deep takes a lot of effort and vulnerability to fail, and when it's discouraged by the peer culture, less people take it up. Indian moms I know with tech careers say their daughters start losing confidence in math and science by middle school despite encouragement at home. This is made out into sexism, and maybe part of it is, but the reason for LOSING confidence has to be peer culture. The cues are taken from peers and from the media they consume. Not enough from parents. Parents including Indian ones these days think it's really cool their kids go off on their own and don't want to talk to them much.
Meanwhile we talk about a mental health crisis, girls bullying each other on social media, kids not having freedom. My preschooler is super sensitive, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of a life would help her develop into a mentally healthy adult. Long story short, it feels like she needs to spend her teens building things alongside grownups and not being worried about the approval of peers. That's exactly the opposite of what American culture would suggest.
The humility and the anyone-can-be-great thing is great for grownups, but with children, that just leads to demonizing any kind of effort. With peer attachment you're already feeling awkward about showing your peers up by working harder than them, and that doesn't need to be reinforced by adults. By the time people are grownups, they can grind on their own and be 'cool' socially. But kids need all the help they can get to value effort and hard work.
In any case, yeah, i think the generating value for shareholders thing is an issue with silicon valley in some ways, and it feels like that's behind the enshittification of tech. But now that media culture is determined to present tech and money in the worst of lights (and tech ceos aren't helping their own cause either with their actions), it's just saying another thing is not a good idea for kids to pursue. The blatant demonization of tech in some writerly circles is a sight to behold, and always makes me feel awkward, and that attitude definitely percolates into the zeitgeist.
I feel like the 19th century analogy might have been the case for tech in the 90s and 2005-2015, or for american society as a whole during the space race. But now it's just at mercantilism in tech, and American society feels like a more pessimistic place than ten years ago.
I went over John Stuart Mill's wikipedia page, and.... I should probably read the autobiography, but it seems like he liked it fine for about 20 years? Then he went through a crisis of purpose, and then found it, and the skills he had developed from childhood served him well to pursue subsequent things. I find this pattern quite common in all the self-help I read, where the stories are something like "I spent 10 years in wall street and got fired, and realized nothing in life matters anymore, and now I make a living in a surf shop in hawaii where I understand the true purpose of life"... but you also can see clearly how their wealth and connections from their wall street days is what subsidizes their current lifestyle, and they probably wouldn't have liked being a surf shop guy to start with.
I had my own such crisis recently actually. I had high expectations foisted on me at an early age, and it came at the cost of a few other skills. It hit me hard why I struggled for most of my life, and I decided to do better for my kid. But experiencing this crisis at an older age than JSM with perspective and the added perspective of a child has helped me understand the finer details of what the problems were and weren't. I rather liked the expertise I developed, but I didn't like the cost they came at, the lack of autonomy and the conditional self-esteem. The skills were the high point, and I think I'd have been happier if those skills had been nurtured better with more personalized and more joyful teaching and that had been related to careers I could pursue. So with my kid I'm focusing on the skills best I can, but making sure to avoid the other stuff. My folks were in over their heads with me and did the best they could. I'm seeing if I can do better.
"That thread and several others seem to have an almost pathological fear of encouraging children to be excellent in something.... unless that thing is sports, then it's okay, or it's mildly mocked. They also think jocks and prom queens have a certain something in them that can't be taught."
100% agree. I read a fantastic article [but I can't find it :(] about how so much of YA literature portrays ambition as evil and the hero being innately possessed of some sort of special power (Harry Potter being the best example).
Re: The bullying culture - I think it's roots are deeper than the predisposition towards peer attachment but that children in junior high and high school are playing a very different game than everyone else. See my favorite PG essay ever - https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Re: The enshittification of tech and media - it's lazy thinking by very smart people to think that all critiques of SV (not saying you are doing this). Feels akin to "they hate me because I'm pretty". Maybe because I'm way too plugged into politics for my own good but the lack of self-awareness in SV from the damage of tech versus it's promises is not something that can be dismissed with "they're just jealous" attitude. Matt Yglesias + Noah Smith offer a much more balanced perspective about how we should be encouraging technological progress but not turning into e/acc nutjobs.
Re: JS Mill - Perhaps this inclusion was off topic but I deeply fear a bloodless tech rationalism where people are just automatons to produce utility. As one poignant critique mentions "What's the utility of utility?" Men are meant for more than just pumping out code and math. I look to the old school physicists - Oppenheimer, Einstein, Feynman as just a few inspirations for how STEM does not conflict with the love of humanities and being a well rounded human being.
I'm not a parent but I'd like to think what I loved about my own is that they let me go my own way. Sam Harris points out we have a lot less power to shape our children than we think. As a professional child (lol), I think the best thing to do is love them and tell them they're brilliant.
Watch this without tearing up - https://x.com/VanityFair/status/1785338326213382440
Oh my now I want to analyze that paul graham article from the perspective of peer attachment. It is so ripe for that. But I'll tell you this - in my school in India, the most popular kids were also the ones who had great grades and were well-regarded by teachers. I think the archetype of the popular kid is very different in India, and it is because parents and teachers play a much bigger role in shaping the behavior of children. Also there can be a much less damaging hierarchy - teachers at the top, kids at the bottom so everyone feels secure in their place and doesn't have to keep playing games to deal with the uncertainty. The issue in American schools is teachers don't see it as their job to provide that certainty for children and they expect kids will just "figure it out"... but they don't teach children how to treat each other well either by modeling good relationships and closely supervising them in the formative stages.
Sam Harris, Bryan Caplan and others also fall into this trap because the West is now four generations into peer attachment - they think parents don't have much of a role in how kids grow up, but they do so from within a society where parents actively keep away from taking a role in how kids grow up. While I do just love my child and encourage her, I'm also working at having her lean into things I think are cool, and I do notice that she wants to do things I think are interesting. She'll do it her own way, but my role is quite important and I can't just have someone else take care of her and think the outcomes will be the same. It's not one or two things I do, but it's patterns of what happens around her that matters. If those patterns are mostly from daycare, then yeah, parents won't seem so important.
One of the issues in the West is sitting down and swotting doesn't have a deeper meaning for its own sake. I suppose the only exception is Jesuit monks. It's either a sliver of religion that allows you to do that, or autism. And we're all out of religion, I suppose. When this was important in the service of war, it was valued. In peace time, what gives academic focus its cachet is money. I'm not sure non-catholic flavors of christianity value deep studies (though a lot of the best engineers and academics I've met tend to be mormon). I remember reading The Big Short and the yeshiva background of Steve Eisman came up a lot in explaining how he was fine with poring over complex texts both in judaism as well as on wall street. There needs to be this kind of purpose. It can come from religion, I suppose, but given the bay area doesn't have a dominant culture that takes from religion, it's going to be hard.
Definitely agree with the peer attachment part. I feel like many successful Americans often had a hatred of schooling in their youth because they didn't fit in and I would wonder if it's the same in India (doubtful imo).
"One of the issues in the West is sitting down and swotting doesn't have a deeper meaning for its own sake."
Completely agree but I think this is very deliberate in American culture which venerates physical activity over reflective thought and study. One book I read about American masculinity noted how evangelicals did not like the European ideal of Christ as emaciated and passive but sought to portray him with more manly characteristics (ex. emphasizing his work as a carpenter). Americans often deride those types as "eggheads" and the tech right is coming around to this view as well despite being unable to fit in (see figures like BAP and Beff Jezos). See this breakdown of masculinity among the extreme right for example (https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-jockcreep-theory-of-fascism) which fits the MAGA debate about immigration in an interesting way imo. The Jock/Douche figures are more likely to venerate the QBs and cheerleaders whereas the creep/loser figures venerate technological and scientific achievement. Your mileage may vary here.
If you write a response to PG's essay, I would be so down to read it.
Why do very few (negligible?) of children of Indian immigrants play professional sports? Join West Point? Play high school or college football, baseball, basketball, track, swimming?
Why do Indian immigrant parents try to be just like their parents in India - a very different place, with much lower per capita GDP and much less opportunities compared to here?
I am a bit disappointed that educated Indian immigrants have not adapted and assimilated into this country.
What an idiotic comment. I can ask "why do descendants of the fighters of the revolutionary war (my kid is one) not play professional sports? im a bit disappointed they have not adapted and assimilated into this country". In all my husband's ancestors going back to before the revolutionary war, there's just one person who played professional sports, and that was also at the college level. Look at your own ancestry, it'll probably be mouthbreathing sportswatchers who spend all week whining about sporting decisions people making millions more than them make and maybe reminiscing about the time you almost made it to college on a sports scholarship.
In any case, Bhagat Singh Thind fought for the US in WW1, applied to be a citizen on the basis of that, and yall told him "lol no" and also changed the rules so no indians could naturalize as american citizens. And Saurabh Netravalkar has represented the US in international cricket and taken cricketing to new heights, and still needs to work at Oracle to maintain his visa.
A child of an Indian immigrant made it to the white house, and one will make it again this inauguration as the second lady. In all of America's history, there hasn't even been an Italian-American in the white house, and no Jewish-American either. No puerto rican either though they play a lot of baseball. But we have done it. Our methods clearly work.
The TV Show - Big Bang Theory is known to motivated a generation to choose Physics . Not sure if House MD or Grey's Anatomy had any impact on enrollments
At a certain point, management of financial assets matters more than marketable labor skills. A lot of high achieving parents don't understand this and try to replicate their success in their children with the same methodologies. That high skill strategy fails for 2 reasons: (1) reversion to mean, where children don't have the same ability or luck as their parents, and (2) the rising bar of technological change. Technological change is gradually replacing knowledge work; in a world where algorithms do most knowledge work, human labor has to shift to areas where algorithms underperform. Since algorithms can be trained to do anything that can be tested for, education performance will likely cease to corelate with income over the next few decades. Given these factors, the best strategy for parents is to capture as much financial assets as possible for their children and teach their children how to manage their assets sustainably.
That's a good point. Though, on thinking more about this, it also feels important to create something your kids get to join on the second floor so they aren't starting from scratch and can develop more expertise than you did at a similar age. Skills from professional work done away from home is harder to pass on that way.
Yes, those feelings are why most high skill parents won't follow a financial asset strategy and will instead focus in giving their children the skills that would have made the parents succeed even further. It's also why those same parents will blame the kids/themselves when those kids "fail to launch" into the same type of career they had. Id advise parents to redirect those instincts into educating the children on financial assets. For instance if you put $15k into dividend reinvesting S&P instead of a private kindergarten, that money would be worth $112k by the time the child is 25. Do that every year and the child will be a multimillionaire able to live off of interest alone by their 20s. Is the educational benefits from expensive kindergarten going to really provide the child with a better life at 25, especially if they are a return to mean case? Assuming of course they are taught to live frugally and don't waste their capital on drugs & parties. This is a huge ask on the parents though, bevause it's asking them to do something different for their children than worked for the parents, so i don't expect anyone to follow this advice.
That's the balance to think of - the expensive school isn't just to build skills, it's to build a perspective, have access to adults with skills, and increasingly in the US, to not end up with mental health issues, giving up on any ambition, and having a peer group that focuses on being a drain on resources. I find Indian-Americans don't put their kids in expensive schools for the sake of it - they pick schools like Harker which attract a peer group that is focused on excellence than say prep schools full of scions of wealth that will definitely lead to the drain-on-resources lifestyle. With wealth and opportunities you can be a mediocre person and still grain a lot.
My tech peers make enough to invest $15k a year as well as afford private school. They know their kid will not have to hurt for money, but you want them to use the wealth as a springboard to make as much wealth themselves.
People don't regress to the mean just like that. You _can_ maintain generations of excellence, and that's what I'm talking about in this post. There are some things we do consciously and some unconsciously that replicate excellence. We need to figure out what helps and what doesn't so we can do these things on purpose, or if we're not able to, figure out exactly what we'll be missing.
very well written indeed. the ref to PSBB (Nungambakkam) gives away your ancestral pedigree :-)
After this H1B issue exploded, Substack seems to have self built echo chambers for the various POVs though - empirical evidence from profiles of people commenting to articles like this and that of Ann Coulter (i used to like her during the 2016 days, and I am Indian living in India)
Like you said: the masks have come off. I plan to write an article on how Tolerance is preached by those who are InTolerant, Diversity is preached by those who have known no Diversity while growing up and Peace is preached by those who have waged and continue to wage War on others
PSBB now has branches in many cities including bangalore! that's where my US-return friends seem to enroll their kids while they work in electronic city.
I've thankfully not come across racism on substack, but im hearing it's come out in quite ugly ways. People have been fighting it solo. We need to organize as we have done on twitter.
Please do write the article you have in mind. One thought for me is that people notice intolerance around them and preach against it because it's so inherent to their circle, and even themselves. They usually do that when their friends are intolerant to something they like. But they probably are totally okay being intolerant to all the rest of the things lol.
Appreciate this! My son is 7 years old and we've been thinking through a lot of this as well. My conflict is that I just escaped the big tech grind myself, and it's hard for me to want to push my son into doing something that brought me some joy, but mainly burnout.
that's a big reason why my relatives who had luck in tech didn't recommend their kids get into tech. I feel though like tech skills are highly useful, and one doesn't have to work a grindy job to use those skills. If anything, they allow you to tune in to a set of opportunities that you can take advantage of to design the kind of life you want.