I think it might be just the opposite: convincing yourself of things relies on exploiting limits for which very intelligent people have much higher threshold they might as well not have them. When it comes to happiness, it’s kind of a superpower which I think very intelligent people just don’t have because it fights against their intelligence by definition. It’s also something that I think happens unconsciously.

It’s ironic, as you yourself provided a perfect example: a logic argument depending on unproven assumptions, if it lands in “convincing” yourself, exploits a limitation in accounting for the validity of the assumptions themselves (meaning: you believe it anyway). Assuming one could pick and choose the arguments (i.e., what to believe in) wouldn’t that trivially unlock happiness?

I mean, the article says each of the points it is complaining about has “_a basic justification that's trivial for a provider to come up with, along with good arguments for why this is good for the user_“, which to me sounds like implying these are just bs to have people accept them, but is that actually the case?

For instance, this [0] was mentioned here a while ago, and based on that it seems pretty clear why one would choose not to provide the _thinking_ anymore…

[0] https://role-confusion.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902269

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Good luck with that

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655747

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money

I wonder how long that will last

It's not a fault of the tools themselves, but in practice they don't help much in real world situations. Basically you end up in need to do so many checks and manual fixes that you might as well not use these tools in the first place.

In an enterprise context one of three things happens: (1) you end up relying on a commercial solution (which is also not that reliable but you delude yourself into thinking it's not your problem anymore... although to be fair commercial solutions have curated licenses attributions and facilitate handling this mess); (2) you build your own thing that uses these (and other) tools but automates a bunch of fixtures so you don't need to go insane every time you need to regenerate an accurate SBOM with related licenses; (3) you quit software engineering, move to a remote location and start an alternative career as an alpaca breeder while whomever takes on your role pretends to ignore the issue and keeps shipping inaccurate declarations of licenses for dependencies thinking that's fine because nobody really cares.