I really do not need help with my relationship to Hacker News. As best I can tell, I have the highest karma of any openly female member. But it hasn&#x27;t resulted in the kinds of professional contacts I had hoped for. Getting to the position I have achieved has involved a great deal of work, most of it &quot;behind the scenes.&quot;<p>The point I am trying to make is not about my relationship to HN. The point I am trying to make is that the biggest barrier to success is a million-and-one unquestioned assumptions about how someone is supposed to behave and about how people interact with them.<p>I spent some time reading articles about lottery winners. About 2&#x2F;3s of people who win the lottery are bankrupt within 5 years. In most cases, it does not solve their financial problems. If anything, it seems to multiply their problems.<p>People at the top who worked for it or grew up with it know a great many things about who to trust, how to invest, how to downplay your success and so many other things that poor people do not know. Giving them money doesn&#x27;t convey any of that. Furthermore, when people believe that money per se is the problem and you give them money, you demotivate them from trying to solve the actual hard problems that do exist.<p>Often, financial problems are clues to something going wrong and also serve as a motivator to overcome your problems. I am not in the least concerned about stigma. I am concerned about removing valuable information from the system and making it radically more difficult to figure out what is going wrong, thereby making it harder to fix the problems because we are blind to them.<p>People often do not bother to change bad habits if they can continue to pay the bills. Alcoholics often continue to drink if it isn&#x27;t ruining them financially, even though it is ruining their health and their lives in so many other ways.<p>One of the hardest things in the world is to get people to change entrenched habits. You are talking about making it easier to not bother. This does not sound like a good thing to me.