From someone who started this journey a few years ago before the pandemic:
1. (for now) Ignore all the "read this, study that". If your goal is to be "independent", then I take that to mean you want to make money. "Reading this, study that" does not immediately make you money. It's important, but not THE most important thing right now.
2. Network with other independents and get on jobs they are on. Focus on getting paid and making money as quickly as possible so you can start to get a feel for how much you can charge and how steady an income you get.
3. Let go of your fear of putting yourself out there or getting a "no". Don't worry about telling "everyone" you are independent. Focus on telling people / circles / influencers who are most related to your client base.
Again, I'm not saying the "read this, study that" advice is not important. My advice is that there is a lot out there and your single most important focus should be on your goal: getting paid for your work.
Keep running experiments, different rates, different jobs, different emails, different job boards and get hired. See what works, get paid, rinse and repeat.
If you're just looking for a quick and dirty solution, find the full-time posting of the job you want to do, and apply to the job with your cover letter being honest about how you want to help and work with them, but ask if they are open to a freelancer. You'd be surprised how many people will kick those tires and get you off and running.
This is what I struggle with. We did well this year and I think I can possibly hit my life goal of hitting my first 7 figures sales next year, but I'm not sure if I just want to stand pat and lifestyle the business or try to go for it.
My reasons for going for it are 1) parents are aging and I want to help them with retirement 2) ride the wave b/c you never know when it will stop and 3) yolo.
My reasons for not doing it are 1) it's a bunch of extra stress and work I don't want to do. Lol.
One suggestion is to do a half-step instead of full leap.
Find a small business or smaller shop to work for (even accept less pay and use a little savings so you know how that feels), raise your hand to do stuff you normally wouldn't do (if you're an engineer, volunteer to help with sales, marketing, customer service, etc.), make nice with the owners, and constantly learn what they do.
Once you get their playbook, jump out on your own or side hustle practicing it until you're ready.
That is what I did. It took a few years, but I'm happy I did.
I appreciate everyone's advice regarding your job, but as others have alluded, I suggest the bigger point is to go deeper into your values.
It sounds like your job is tightly-coupled with how you see yourself, so perhaps consider things outside of your job (volunteering, extra-curriculars, investing, etc.) that are closer to what you value.
One way to handle getting through these low periods is to shift your mindset of your job being a reflection of what you like and more your job enabling you do, participate what you like.
Personally, being of service of others, using my vacation days to help others, and investing in projects and people I believe in has helped offset some of the feelings you may be feeling.
my sci-fi perspective is practically on the side of charitable, but in essence more like disinterest.
in less than a century we went from heavier than air flight, to satellites, moon landings, mars probes, et al. and now we're talking seriously about terraforming mars and becoming interplanetary? it could turn out to be ~150 years from the invention of the lightbulb to people on mars.. insane.
another century or two of progress and that spacefaring civilisation, and their tech, will look nothing like 99.9% of the speculation. and may even look nothing like us lol.
so given the amount of time it takes for a ball of dirt to churn out meat computers, and how long it takes them to start making neil armstrong figurines. it would be reasonable to assume that all the other aliens are a few years ahead or behind us.
it is not easy to picture the kind of mind bending spaceships they might have because, for example, for us they are still being thought of as spaceships.
ex. you have to really think about what the internet is to not take the logical route and say that it's just copper, fancy glass and radio-waves.. it's actually extremely weird and magical. we have loads of stuff that is incomprehensible to our ancestors, and it's just going to keep going.
of course in this hypothetical universe, i assume that time creates consciousness and benevolence. which may not be the reality. but if it's true, and that advanced civilisations exist all around us and are enormous, magical realms of impossibility, then we will never see them because they are incomprehensible to us, and to them we are a curious entity which share some similarities to their own history – if that's even something that they still posses.
Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same.
An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
I have a far more charitable theory. The vast majority of human and alien life would want to be friends (or at least just leave their neighbors alone). It’s the elites who desire to destroy each other.
I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
>“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?
The amount of resources some society can gather increases with the square of time and linearly to its expansion speed.
But life around here has an habit of expanding everything (including resource usage) exponentially with time.
There is a mismatch here that you are implicitly claiming that is solved for every space-faring civilization. Many people explicitly make this claim, what is reasonable, but it's not good to keep it implicit.
In the early years, sure, no problem. But conceivably the pace of resource utilization will increase as well. Eventually they will conflict. Worse, greedy civilizations would probably be selected for.
And how long before random differences and exponential growth mean the other side gets an overwhelming power advantage? Historically in human societies, that is essentially never a good thing.
Maybe civilisations will merge. I just had my double LOR'xin with extra pumpkin spice. Later I will resume work on my ansible station for the Y'norxa-Wallmart Corporation… hopefully I can push some lines of lox-lang to production today.
Or just defensively. The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Other planets might have WMDs too. And they might think we have WMDs. Doesn’t matter if any of the sides actually do.
The point is that public justifications are more important than actual motivations. Actual motivations can be enslaving other beings, ruling / mining an extra planet or just wanting to watch the universe burn. Motivations are already present because there are millions of motivations that map on to the same result - destruction of another group of living things. I'm pointing out that it's easy to find public justification as well.
It's also possible to do this unilaterally. China or any other country could also unilaterally decide to destroy another planet. And same possibility on the other side.
The problem with interstellar warfare is, outside the "Dark Forest" concept of "kill everyone just in case", there aren't all that many motivations that seem to make sense.
Any interstellar species probably doesn't really need to steal planets, resources, etc.
1. That seems very unlikely, from what we've found so far. We'll know more as things like the JWST come online, but right now it seems like planets of all sorts are everywhere.
2. Any civilization capable of interstellar travel is likely not to care all that much about a narrow band of natural habitability. They've already solved harder problems.
I'm not sure its given that a civilization that has technology for interstellar travel is going to consider a planet that is suitable for life with little work to be roughly equivalent to a planet that is suitable for life with a lot of work. Its equally likely that they would be economical with their resources and consider a planet that is closer to the desired end state to be much more valuable than a planet that is much further from the end state.
This seems likely; both sides might see it as a prisoner's dilemma situation, where there isn't any basis for trust and it's safer to destroy the other civilization before they're destroyed themselves.
(I don't think Iraq was actually such a situation, but at least on the American side some influential decision makers may have believed that it was.)
On the other hand, you might have something more like a cold war situation, where both sides have the capacity to destroy the other completely or almost completely but not without an equivalent counterattack, and so both sides have much more to lose than to gain by striking first.
Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource. Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move and there’s less than 5 good options in this solar system. In time they’ll be full too.
Not at all, first our population will never exceed 11 billion, and most developed countries are in a demographic crisis. There is no sign of this trend reversing anywhere.
Second, what does 'earth is full' even mean? We have vast swaths of 'useless' land, like arctic and desert. Cities/towns/anything cover like
1% of the world. It is easier to desalinate water / build cities and greenhouses in deserts than it is to move people to another planet. We could host a lot more people if we adopted some serious geoengineering and built greenhouses /ate less meat.
Thirdly, travel to another star system requires insane amounts of energy, and could only be done by civilisations that already have enormous space infrastructure and industry. In which case you build habitats like we build skyscrapers, you can terraform, etc. In that case you don't need or want to ship billions of people to another star system.
> Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource.
Are they? That was once a common belief, but recent results in extrasolar planet searching would tend to contradict it, or at least cast it into serious doubt.
> Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move
Will we? It's quite possible we'll see humanity's maximum population within the next century. Malthusianism didn't really survive contact with modernity; it turns out that most people don't particularly _want_ to have fifteen children, and as countries develop their population tends to become self-limiting. Wholesale emigration off earth feels like a very unlikely solution to population pressure, especially given that society seems to be automatically solving it.
And if we have the energy to lift billions of people off earth, we also have the energy to massively increase population density. Food, in particular, is ultimately largely a question of energy; we typically grow it in fields today, but given super-cheap energy there are other options.
If we've got the technology to travel between stars, we've probably also got the tech to leave planets behind entirely, or to terraform, or to adapt ourselves to conditions.
The only logical path is to download our brains onto computers, which will happen before that point. Once that technology exists, that's the only form of life that will dominate. Robots, nano-machines and hyper-intelligences will blow easily damaged flesh with finite lifespans. Habitable regions would be massively expanded.
I understand the criticism but I think that moment will come LONG before we start effectively colonizing or terraforming the other planets. Id bet a LOT of money on that.
I've never forgotten the scene in the OSC short story "Fat Farm", in which the protagonist's mind has been copied to his clone, which clone has left the facility to "continue" to enjoy his fine life, and the protagonist realizes he hasn't thought about what comes next. The answer is grim.
A consciousness might awake in the machine, but it won't be my consciousness.
I think about this a lot. The answer, I think, is No, the distinction does not matter.
The consciousness in the machine will think "Wow this worked!" and go on with life in the machine. The original consciousness (you) will say "well that was dull - look at that machine consciousness having all the fun inside the machine."
But now extend the metaphor. Is there really any difference - in your perspective as the original consciousness - between the consciousness in the machine (your copy) and the consciousness next to you? (Your wife, husband, friend, brother, or sister). Or the consiousness across the street? Or any other consciousness that's not you? Each has its own set of memories that gives it a sense of self. Each sees the world outward from its own perspective.
So really, is there any difference at all? Either they're all totally different...or maybe they're all the same......
The single question that has helped me to remember the pitfalls highlighted in this article that I constantly ask myself in every situation: "Am I focused on being right or being successful?"
It inevitably walks me through the critical thinking process of what defines success, what questions should I be asking, and am I standing in the way of that.
Serious response: Framing it as an 'Or' implies the two are mutually exclusive. They are not. Diversity is fact. The world is diverse in a variety of ways (skin, eyes, experiences, gender, language, nationality, etc.). Inclusion is the action. Equity is the goal.
In the OKR framework, being able to measure your progress towards the goal is important. The real question is, which aspects of people who work for your company do you measure to ensure proper decisions around inclusion to achieve the equity goal?
It's easiest to measure by 'skin deep' factors b/c that is what human beings most easily make poor decisions on (fear, bias, stereotype, self-segregation, NIMBY-ism, etc). It is also required for companies to report to the US government on these factors because of our history of poor decisions (to put it lightly). It is therefore easiest to use that as a metric.
Serious question: If implied in your question that the goal should be equity in 'thought', how do you propose that is measured?
> If implied in your question that the goal should be equity in 'thought', how do you propose that is measured?
OP mentioned "ideas & experience," not "thought," which seems like an intentional framing as something unbounded and immeasurable.
Diversity of ideas could be measured by the average number of options/solutions that are seriously considered (and investigated/piloted) over the course of multiple projects for a team.
Diversity of experience seems somewhat obvious to me. But if you want clarity on this as well, the idea would be to value various types of experiences in the same way that companies value diverse outward traits like gender, sex, skin color, racial identity, etc. It's a balance. You could hire a person of each gender/skin color combination, but if they all grew up in the New England suburbs and all of them went to either MIT or Harvard, you are generally NOT going to have a diversity of experience, even though everyone _looks_ different. On the other end of the scale, you could hire one person from each type of school, big state school, small technical school, ivy league, "public ivy", liberal arts college, bootcamp graduate, etc. Hire people native to your country/culture, and people who come from a different part of the world. But if they are all white men, you are not going to realize as much benefit.
I think it's important to make an attempt to combine all of these concepts to come up with something that approaches the concept of "diversity of thought."
I appreciate your response and respect your idea of trying to combine a lot of aspects to get the goal. I would challenge you on one point though:
> gender/skin color combination, but if they all grew up in the New England suburbs and all of them went to either MIT or Harvard, you are generally NOT going to have a diversity of experience, even though everyone _looks_ different
Unfortunately, there are many stories, points of evidence, and history that say people who look different, but come from the same place and education level DO have different experiences. Race and gender are exponentially powerful factors that can change a person's experience and outlook no matter how wealthy they are or what school they graduated from.
You are correct, I should not have used absolute, either-or terms there ("you are generally NOT ..."). I meant to say that you would not have _as much_ diversity of experience.
Well stated. Until I saw it, I did not realize how many people went from rich (interpretations vary based on your experience, so "comfortable") suburbs and homes to "good" schools to "good" companies and professions. This is my experience, but that tends to be a common path and results in little diversity of "thought" (meaning ideas and experience).
It's become apparent to me that diversity is an ambiguous terms and its interpretation can vary a lot over many factors and time. I am not discounting any definition of it. When it comes up, it feels like people are on different pages with it. It could more prudent to state the definition when it is said.
Precisely. That's what was embedded in the question. It doesn't matter what color people are. It's not meaningful diversity on its own.
What they seem to be doing is judging people based on surface traits, not the content of character. Their approach to diversity is a regression and not good for progress.
What they seem to be doing is judging people based on surface traits
Do you believe that a poor black kid from Detroit is only different in "surface traits" as compared to a rich white kid from Orange County?
Or would you be willing to concede that there may be reliable correlations between some "surface traits" and diversity of life experiences and viewpoints? Demographic analysis of things like voting patterns in the US seems to suggest differences of such magnitude that I doubt you'd find another factor more strongly predictive.
I don’t think this is a good goal. Unless you mean equity of opportunity. Equity of outcome is a ridiculously foolish goal in that outcomes will vary substantially and trying to have equity at the end on arbitrary human factors with easy to measure biases (gender, race, etc).
So the goal is not 45/45/10 for gender distribution for all roles. As that is obviously impossible as roles change and then people would need to be redistributed ad infinitum (eg, project managers have “perfect” gender diversity of 45/45/10 today but now the role is changes and split into product owner and product manager. Does this mean that the roles must include the same gender mix?)
Equity and equality are different. Equitable means fair, just, unprejudiced, considerate of all involved, etc. Equality means evenly balanced, identical on both sides, measurably indistinguishable.
I think we want an equitable outcome and that most people (regardless of any other opinion) would actually agree that equality of outcome is not necessary.
I appreciate you making the distinction, but I still don’t think outcomes are the place for equity. My gender example still stands using your clarified definition.
Is it fair that now a sub population has different gender distributions? Is it fair that 90% of programmers are male? Etc etc. I think it is counterproductive and too late to making meaningful changes based on outcomes.
Perhaps if you get to a high enough macro, but even then, I see logical weaknessss in opinions comparing income based on gender because outcome does not, necessarily, mean bias. It’s just easier to measure.
Is that a real policy for anywhere? How / where do you find 10% non binary from? I don’t think there’s enough people to go around even if you hired every single non binary person in a given city.
I did mean 10% as non/binary, but my numbers were just notional. I should have been more clear.
I think, especially with improved technology, that 10% will be more common. Cynically thinking, it will be easier if there were some specific quota. Gender is probably the easiest protected class to change after religion, so it’s especially sensitive to outcome quotas.
The poster was suggesting a hypothetical situation where that is a policy. Very few places in the US have 50/50 gender quotas, and I doubt any have quotas which include non-binary people. I believe they were mocking the idea.
I was not mocking the idea, but giving an example where a reasonable quota led to bad outcomes. While I’m against outcome quotas, I’m firmly against discrimination (including mocking) of people based on who they are.
Not at all. For instance, if there are innate gender dispositions to certain subjects, then those fields will have a much larger proportion of that gender. There's evidence this may be the case in STEM for instance, which would explain the so-called gender equality paradox.
Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be useful for companies since even google’s 20k population wouldn’t be big enough to clear out all of the confounding variables.
Why does this seem like the VC version of "...but I have Black friends"?
On a less cynical note, I guess it has to start somewhere and these folks have demonstrated how to build a business and a brand. Well, maybe not Durant, but we'll see.
The language used in the post just feels so mechanical, like "black people are great because they've contributed to culture a lot, and we want to get involved with more culture, so it's a good reason to get together with black people".
Maybe I'm alone in reading it this way, but it comes across as treating black people as this "other" that can only be approached through "culture" and not as neighbors, friends, and people you know and work with.
I read it in the same way, and it just felt really off to me.
Also just factually incorrect. I'm fairly certain "most fashion" in the US has not come from the Black American community. A lot, sure. Most? Name me a top 10 fashion brand that is run / was started by a person of color.
From my point of view, this is a PC-washed way of folding Black wealth into the venture capital behemoth. I'm also pretty uncomfortable with the identification of "cultural leaders" with "media celebrities with plenty of coin". Yes, they are very accomplished people, but the term "cultural leadership" is a bit too strong o use primarily for folks who made their living catering to popular tastes.
While it may be taboo, I think it's important to add context to her impact. Her 'contributions' were more than a 'sad story'. She was a Black woman who was experimented on without consent and without compensation who created one of the most important cell lines in medical research. 'Contribution' implies she did it willingly. 'Sad' implies it was unavoidable. These were deliberate acts grounded in racism and sexism to rob an American and human being of any reasonable sense of dignity. The fact that she happened to have remarkable genetics is a key leverage point that can remind people of the importance of ethics, not just science. It's extremely important for that to be a part of the headline, not just a detail if you click through to the story.
A couple clarifications: it was the cancer that had the unique mutation, Henrietta was genetically healthy. Secondly, it wasn't an experiment, they took a biopsy: an important distinction because black people were literally experimented on[1] from 1932 to 1972. Finally, the Wikipedia page downplays the racist element in the biopsy, claiming that "At that time, permission was neither required nor customarily sought."[2]
Even if it was standard practice, it is not fair that pharma companies are making billions off of her cells when her descendants are struggling to get by
Market valuation is determined by supply and demand. HeLa cells are substitutable goods in that if Henrietta asked for money for the cells, it would have been easy to find some other donor.
Also it's overly simplistic to say pharma companies are making "billions" off her cells. HeLa is a part of the workflow but far far far from the only part. Also value is in the work of scientists understanding the cell biology using her cells as a model, not some inherent value in the particular genome of HeLa.
As much as this story is fascinating, "her" impact is actually non-existent. The cells of the HeLa line come from a routine biopsy; she had no knowledge and no part whatsoever in anything that was possible thanks to the cells line that was taken from her.
Why is this being downvoted? If people want female and/or black symbols, there are so many others who actually made a contribution (David Blackwell of the famous Rao-Blackwell equation, Shafi Goldwasser who won a Turing award, etc.).
Are we going to now start celebrating the people who got the first smallpox or polio vaccines as great contributors to science just because they were chosen to be the first for a procedure?
Attributing impact to figures who didn't personally do anything demeans the struggles and accomplishments of actual minority scientists.
The story of Henrietta Lacks has less to do with whether the acts were deliberately malicious and more about medical researchers, and humanity as a whole, coming to a realization that patient consent is a fundamental ethic, whereas going back to ancient Greek times, doctors would deliberately mislead patients about their condition because it was thought to be, "within their best interests," and because, "doctor knows best." Nazi medical experimentation where human beings were treated like animals in the holocaust was being brought to light around this same time in history, and in the subsequent decades the entire practice of patient consent was changed - it was the biggest thing since the Hippocratic oath.
Framing the conversation into the typical American oppression zeitgeist is ignoring the fact that Henrietta played a role
in changing how humans looked at this ethical conundrum, period. This change in thinking will last forever, whereas America will not, just like the Ancient Greek civilization did not last forever, but much of the thinking and discovery influenced the rest of history (such as the Hippocratic oath). She allowed her cells to be used - she choose to be trusting to the doctors who were treating her, having no idea whether she would be OK or not, having no idea what would happen in the future, and then the doctors turned around and shared her cells for free with thousands of other doctors because they saw it as a medical miracle. This has subsequently been discovered, from an ethical sense, to be totally immoral, regardless of the good intentions of the doctors, whereas previously it was considered a moral imperative. Her decision and role in this part of history didn't "remind us to think about ethics," it completely changed how this area of ethics are even thought about, and that will be a benefit to anyone who ever visits a doctor or has any medical problem, ever, which is pretty much 100% of everyone.
1. (for now) Ignore all the "read this, study that". If your goal is to be "independent", then I take that to mean you want to make money. "Reading this, study that" does not immediately make you money. It's important, but not THE most important thing right now.
2. Network with other independents and get on jobs they are on. Focus on getting paid and making money as quickly as possible so you can start to get a feel for how much you can charge and how steady an income you get.
3. Let go of your fear of putting yourself out there or getting a "no". Don't worry about telling "everyone" you are independent. Focus on telling people / circles / influencers who are most related to your client base.
Again, I'm not saying the "read this, study that" advice is not important. My advice is that there is a lot out there and your single most important focus should be on your goal: getting paid for your work.
Keep running experiments, different rates, different jobs, different emails, different job boards and get hired. See what works, get paid, rinse and repeat.
If you're just looking for a quick and dirty solution, find the full-time posting of the job you want to do, and apply to the job with your cover letter being honest about how you want to help and work with them, but ask if they are open to a freelancer. You'd be surprised how many people will kick those tires and get you off and running.