Conversation
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A thought. People working on a task X can be motivated by multiple things.
1. The enjoyment of doing X. For example coding.
2. The result of doing X. A program to solve the problem you have, money (in case of work).
3. The result of being seen to be doing X. For example status or money. Regular salary should be more of a case 2 though as it's ultimately dependent on getting results, except in really dysfunctional organizations.
People can be motivated by different things to different degrees. For example one can enjoy coding, the result of it and being seen as a hacker.
Some people are highly motivated by being seen to be doing X but not so much by doing X or the result of doing X. That's a bad situation because if X is solving a problem get people who are interested in making the problem look bigger and their contribution to solving it look bigger but not to have the problem go away (they'd lose the status of doing X if the problem is solved).
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- Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.
- Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) repeated this.
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We see this pattern in coding. You have people who code because they like coding. You have people who code because they like problems to be solved (the famous scratching an itch). And you have people who like the benefits of being a coder, the fame (yeah, programmers have positive status now, crazy world).
In the "making the world a better place for everybody" (usually abbreviated "social justice") environment there's a similar observation to make. You have people who work to help people because they like helping. You have people who help out because they want to fix injustice. And you have people who want to be seen to be helping.
Group 3 has a big incentive to be very vocal and communicative. If you want to be seen to be doing X you need to be visible. Thus group 3 will be very active in "the community" even if they're not the ones doing the actual work. And they'll shape outwards appearances of "people doing X".
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Some activities have more status associated with them than others. Helping others is considered noble and noble carries a high status bonus. In the olden days coding had a low or even negative status bonus so people looking for status didn't come near it. Now that coding is hip it gets status oriented people dominating the communities of particularly visible subgroups of coding (e.g. nodejs).
In the past visibility was limited geographically. You could maybe get some news articles about you in the newspapers but that's hard and usually it's only the local papers. With the rise of the "social" media however it's much easier to become visible to much more people.
As a result particularly high kudos topics like social justice attract much more status oriented people than they already did. Those dominated the community at the expense of actual progress. With the eventual result that social justice has become a negative term for a lot of people.
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Verius
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