8 ms·

The busy-ness of business and our general obligation to "earn our keep" have squandered more human potential than every other stupid thing we've ever done, comb

by rosser 8y ago

The busy-ness of business and our general obligation to "earn our keep" have squandered more human potential than every other stupid thing we've ever done, combined. How many Einsteins never left the patent office? What other contributions were never made, because dude who could have made them decided food and shelter were more important than aspiration? That is a societal loss, and we only have ourselves to blame for it.

lukifer 8y ago
While a great deal of jobs create non-zero-sum value, and many people thrive in their roles (in a Maslow self-actualization sense), a significant subset of the labor market seems to exist only from a slavish devotion to the social ritual of "jobs" for their own sake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- nine_k 8y ago
  OK, people have to be fired from such jobs, because they produce negative value. It's not these people's fault, though. Imagine that they are fired. How do they earn their subsistence? Earth is now too crowded to live by hunting, and subsistence farming is even worse than wage slavery. The only available option is some kind of organized work for the marketplace.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Since they, as you say, "produce negative value", this means that there is enough value produced to sustain everyone already. It's just a matter of distribution. That's very briefly why Marx argued for communism.
- mymythisisthis 8y ago
  I've bounced around and worked in many different kinds of jobs. From my experience; people identify themselves by what they do, the majority of work is 'make-work', people really want to learn new things, the worst type of knowledge is 'internal knowledge'. 'Internal Knowledge', is the paperwork that goes into knowing a specific job in a company. It multiplies rapidly as managers keep inventing more of it to protect their positions. It is useless, and cannot be used in another company. Companies use it as a form of punishment, you have to do this in our particular way or you won't get promoted. But from what I've seen, people are dying to learn new things. Companies just don't want to teach employees anything new, so they won't leave and find another job. I've worked factory jobs, where this was the defacto policy. Don't teach any new skills to the new hires, they'll pickup and leave.
jjtheblunt 8y ago
Except you're skipping over the dual question, of how many true total slackers have had to not weigh down society by the idea of having to work, aren't you?
nightski 8y ago
That's a really one sided view of the equation. You aren't considering all the benefit from encouraging people to do jobs they might not otherwise do, yet that need to be done. I'd imagine there are many positives to the system that you are ignoring simply to find the next Einstein. Which is kind of a fallacy, because science is not done by a lone genius but by teams of researchers over decades.
- rosser 8y ago
  I never said no-one should have "jobs" or do difficult things. Maybe there are people in the world whose aspiration is to do those unglamorous things that need doing, just to keep the societal wheels properly greased. There are absolutely enough people in the world who are civically-minded enough that they'll take on crap work that needs doing, without obligating everyone else also to do what is, for most of them, also crap work, but which doesn't do those "socially necessary" things, and instead merely shuffles papers from one folder to another. I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something..." EDIT: Phrasing
  - giggles_giggles 8y ago
    >I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something... If something needs to be done, someone has to do it. The person who is going to do it either must be forced (slavery) or compensated such that they do the unpleasant, necessary thing voluntarily (payment). If others, who do not want to do that thing want to reap the benefits of it, they can choose to force the other person to do it through violence or they can produce something else of value to exchange. That's why everyone who is able-bodied is ethically required to contribute to society: the only alternative to free exchange is forcing someone to be your slave. For those who are not able-bodied, the able-bodied among us voluntarily enslave ourselves on their behalf, to lift their burdens. But if you have the means to work and you choose to be a burden on society or your loved ones, that is an unethical choice.
- _Microft 8y ago
benjaminjackman 8y ago
I don't know if you meant it to parallel the Bezos quote about blue origin / the desire to push our species out across the solar system but it came to mind right away when I read what you wrote because I have been thinking along similar lines: "The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be," Bezos boasted during a speech at New York's Yale Club, which was transcribed by Business Insider. I wonder if can't figure out something as simple as how to allocate the basic rewards of our system socio-efficiently if the future will turn out more like "The Expanse" than "Star Trek". And if we focused on simply getting all the near-Einsteins out of the patent office (as you said) here on Earth first how much faster the goal of colonizing the star system would be achieved.
- ErikAugust 8y ago
  The irony being that Bezos runs a company that monopolizes a lot of very smart people who end up working on some web microservice that powers some small part of Amazon.com.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    The irony is that he tries to scale creativity and geniuses
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  We have 15x the population as when Mozart lived. Do we have 15 Mozarts now? And arguably more of the population is living in better conditions, so maybe it should be closer to 30x or something?
  - all2 8y ago
    Probably. A major problem with talent, genius, and hard workers is discovery. Our models of societal discovery are broken; we point our focus towards a few 'rock star' type jobs and everything else is left for historians to discover.
  - 8y ago
tony_cannistra 8y ago
Yes, this. It's not even limited to "patent offices" (which I take to mean places of menial labor). I know people even in supposedly high-value intellectual workplaces (like academia, where I am) who don't find any value in their work but stay in it for completely external reasons which have nothing to do with knowledge-generation (family/PI/societal expectations, fear of disappointing others, fear of being unprepared for the 'real world'). I agree with the point that it's the pressure to do anything that keeps people[1] in shitty lifestyles. [1]: using "people" to mean those who have sufficient privilege to have the flexibility to choose their work. edit: word
mymythisisthis 8y ago
I also feel that this has ruined society. People use to be more rounded. People had knowledge about music, clothing, food, etc. Now people learn one profession, and the majority of info that they learn is just about the bureaucratic aspects, regarding their tasks. Without rounded people the quality of everything drops. People can't distinguish what makes quality clothing, what is an important feature of a car. All we are left with is terrible marketing.
- all2 8y ago
  > People use to be more rounded. People who could afford to be were more well rounded.
  - leftyted 8y ago
    https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/books-vs-cigarettes/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
  - mymythisisthis 8y ago
    I disagree. Most people until the 1930s were farmers. It was the largest class of people. Farmers really needed to know a lot, about a wide amount of things; mechanics, animal husbandry, weather, markets, sales... People also use to live in smaller communities. So they understood each others' roles. Many people in smaller communities also had multiple roles/jobs. There are studies that small towns also produce better athletes for this reason https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community_Size_in_Youth_Sport_Settings_Examining_Developmental_Assets_and_Sport_Withdrawal https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community... With specialization I think that the overall general knowledge of people has declined.
    - all2 8y ago
      This reminds me of Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" [0]. The volume of knowledge the protagonist displays is phenomenal, in my opinion. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86
diminoten 8y ago
I'll take squandered potential every day of the week if the other choice is "no middle class"...
mizchief2 8y ago
at the same time, most of the valuable inventions have come from massive R&D efforts by large companies. That engineering doing a boring job in a large firm is more likely to add to a great invention than working alone in his garage.
sbenitoj 8y ago
Yeah, the USSR produced some great living conditions where people could thrive and reach their creative potential.
sparkie 8y ago
Unless you can "earn your keep", you will not have any time to follow your aspirations because your entire existence will be dedicated to basic survival. You are Baker and Charlie[1] spending all day fishing, while Abel can follow his aspirations because he has capital and does not need to spend his entire waking hours wondering whether or not he's going to be hungry tomorrow. I'll give that there is no point in "work for the sake of work", and that bullshit jobs probably shouldn't exist, but the real question comes down to this: If you are not going to earn your own keep, who is going to earn it for you? Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A 5-year old can understand this, but apparently many college educated westerners cannot (It usually clicks after they start paying their taxes) [1]:http://freedomschool.us/how-an-economy-grows.pdf http://freedomschool.us/how-an-economy-grows.pdf
- asark 8y ago
  > Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A modern economy in a democratic state is built by the collective will of the people. No entity at the top setting rules, no modern economy. So: why the hell should everyone else agree to create and maintain a system that doesn't serve their needs to a degree that, taking into account the constraints of reality and not killing the golden goose et c. et c., satisfies them, regardless how nice a place you've found for yourself in same system?
  - sparkie 8y ago
    This is covered in the book I linked. The "contingency fund" for the most needy. When properly managed, has a net benefit to society because it helps people get back to work and become productive capital accumulators, which benefits both themselves and society. However, when welfare is badly managed and is essentially given out to anybody, is overpaid because "muh rights to basic standard of living," and without adequate consideration of where the capital comes from to provide the welfare service, then there cannot be a sustainable welfare. The government does nothing but drain capital away. Poor voters will always vote for the politicians who promise them freebies (out of other people's capital savings!) It is only savers who have skin in the game and who ultimately have the moral right to decide how their hard earned capital should be spent. Youth for the past few decades have been fed a heavily distorted image of reality where they are expected to believe that capitalists are evil and that government is protecting them from those evil capitalists. It's no surprise they have no idea that capitalists are providing 100% of the funding of their welfare systems, and that their government only consumes the capital - it creates nothing, and cannot survive without the capitalists which fund it. Capitalists are of course not these evil monsters who only care about getting rich at the detriment of everybody else. They're just regular people who try to improve their own lives, and accidentally improve other people's lives in the process if they succeed. You really love capitalism: https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/ https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/
clairity 8y ago
to play devil's advocate, why value (current) efficiency above all else? evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions of organisms, each slightly different, some highly viable, most marginally so, and some not viable. that's super-inefficient! it has to be easier to find the handfuls of best individuals and propagate them to the next generation, right? capitalism, too, is inherently inefficient--people deploy capital in all sorts of ways, often profitlessly. it's not like we have one restaurant chain for each type of cuisine. if the answers are so obvious, why don't we get it right the first time?
- rosser 8y ago
  I am absolutely not valuing efficiency above all — or even much — else. My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask? I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with. EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it? Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices. Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think? EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.

by rosser 8y ago

lukifer 8y ago

While a great deal of jobs create non-zero-sum value, and many people thrive in their roles (in a Maslow self-actualization sense), a significant subset of the labor market seems to exist only from a slavish devotion to the social ritual of "jobs" for their own sake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

nine_k 8y ago
OK, people have to be fired from such jobs, because they produce negative value. It's not these people's fault, though. Imagine that they are fired. How do they earn their subsistence? Earth is now too crowded to live by hunting, and subsistence farming is even worse than wage slavery. The only available option is some kind of organized work for the marketplace.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Since they, as you say, "produce negative value", this means that there is enough value produced to sustain everyone already. It's just a matter of distribution. That's very briefly why Marx argued for communism.
mymythisisthis 8y ago
I've bounced around and worked in many different kinds of jobs. From my experience; people identify themselves by what they do, the majority of work is 'make-work', people really want to learn new things, the worst type of knowledge is 'internal knowledge'. 'Internal Knowledge', is the paperwork that goes into knowing a specific job in a company. It multiplies rapidly as managers keep inventing more of it to protect their positions. It is useless, and cannot be used in another company. Companies use it as a form of punishment, you have to do this in our particular way or you won't get promoted. But from what I've seen, people are dying to learn new things. Companies just don't want to teach employees anything new, so they won't leave and find another job. I've worked factory jobs, where this was the defacto policy. Don't teach any new skills to the new hires, they'll pickup and leave.

jjtheblunt 8y ago

Except you're skipping over the dual question, of how many true total slackers have had to not weigh down society by the idea of having to work, aren't you?

nightski 8y ago

That's a really one sided view of the equation. You aren't considering all the benefit from encouraging people to do jobs they might not otherwise do, yet that need to be done. I'd imagine there are many positives to the system that you are ignoring simply to find the next Einstein. Which is kind of a fallacy, because science is not done by a lone genius but by teams of researchers over decades.

rosser 8y ago
I never said no-one should have "jobs" or do difficult things. Maybe there are people in the world whose aspiration is to do those unglamorous things that need doing, just to keep the societal wheels properly greased. There are absolutely enough people in the world who are civically-minded enough that they'll take on crap work that needs doing, without obligating everyone else also to do what is, for most of them, also crap work, but which doesn't do those "socially necessary" things, and instead merely shuffles papers from one folder to another. I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something..." EDIT: Phrasing
- giggles_giggles 8y ago
  >I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something... If something needs to be done, someone has to do it. The person who is going to do it either must be forced (slavery) or compensated such that they do the unpleasant, necessary thing voluntarily (payment). If others, who do not want to do that thing want to reap the benefits of it, they can choose to force the other person to do it through violence or they can produce something else of value to exchange. That's why everyone who is able-bodied is ethically required to contribute to society: the only alternative to free exchange is forcing someone to be your slave. For those who are not able-bodied, the able-bodied among us voluntarily enslave ourselves on their behalf, to lift their burdens. But if you have the means to work and you choose to be a burden on society or your loved ones, that is an unethical choice.
_Microft 8y ago

benjaminjackman 8y ago

I don't know if you meant it to parallel the Bezos quote about blue origin / the desire to push our species out across the solar system but it came to mind right away when I read what you wrote because I have been thinking along similar lines: "The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be," Bezos boasted during a speech at New York's Yale Club, which was transcribed by Business Insider. I wonder if can't figure out something as simple as how to allocate the basic rewards of our system socio-efficiently if the future will turn out more like "The Expanse" than "Star Trek". And if we focused on simply getting all the near-Einsteins out of the patent office (as you said) here on Earth first how much faster the goal of colonizing the star system would be achieved.

ErikAugust 8y ago
The irony being that Bezos runs a company that monopolizes a lot of very smart people who end up working on some web microservice that powers some small part of Amazon.com.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  The irony is that he tries to scale creativity and geniuses
oh_sigh 8y ago
We have 15x the population as when Mozart lived. Do we have 15 Mozarts now? And arguably more of the population is living in better conditions, so maybe it should be closer to 30x or something?
- all2 8y ago
  Probably. A major problem with talent, genius, and hard workers is discovery. Our models of societal discovery are broken; we point our focus towards a few 'rock star' type jobs and everything else is left for historians to discover.
- 8y ago

tony_cannistra 8y ago

Yes, this. It's not even limited to "patent offices" (which I take to mean places of menial labor). I know people even in supposedly high-value intellectual workplaces (like academia, where I am) who don't find any value in their work but stay in it for completely external reasons which have nothing to do with knowledge-generation (family/PI/societal expectations, fear of disappointing others, fear of being unprepared for the 'real world'). I agree with the point that it's the pressure to do anything that keeps people[1] in shitty lifestyles. [1]: using "people" to mean those who have sufficient privilege to have the flexibility to choose their work. edit: word

mymythisisthis 8y ago

I also feel that this has ruined society. People use to be more rounded. People had knowledge about music, clothing, food, etc. Now people learn one profession, and the majority of info that they learn is just about the bureaucratic aspects, regarding their tasks. Without rounded people the quality of everything drops. People can't distinguish what makes quality clothing, what is an important feature of a car. All we are left with is terrible marketing.

all2 8y ago
> People use to be more rounded. People who could afford to be were more well rounded.
- leftyted 8y ago
  https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/books-vs-cigarettes/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- mymythisisthis 8y ago
  I disagree. Most people until the 1930s were farmers. It was the largest class of people. Farmers really needed to know a lot, about a wide amount of things; mechanics, animal husbandry, weather, markets, sales... People also use to live in smaller communities. So they understood each others' roles. Many people in smaller communities also had multiple roles/jobs. There are studies that small towns also produce better athletes for this reason https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community_Size_in_Youth_Sport_Settings_Examining_Developmental_Assets_and_Sport_Withdrawal https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community... With specialization I think that the overall general knowledge of people has declined.
  - all2 8y ago
    This reminds me of Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" [0]. The volume of knowledge the protagonist displays is phenomenal, in my opinion. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86

diminoten 8y ago

I'll take squandered potential every day of the week if the other choice is "no middle class"...

mizchief2 8y ago

at the same time, most of the valuable inventions have come from massive R&D efforts by large companies. That engineering doing a boring job in a large firm is more likely to add to a great invention than working alone in his garage.

sbenitoj 8y ago

Yeah, the USSR produced some great living conditions where people could thrive and reach their creative potential.

sparkie 8y ago

Unless you can "earn your keep", you will not have any time to follow your aspirations because your entire existence will be dedicated to basic survival. You are Baker and Charlie[1] spending all day fishing, while Abel can follow his aspirations because he has capital and does not need to spend his entire waking hours wondering whether or not he's going to be hungry tomorrow. I'll give that there is no point in "work for the sake of work", and that bullshit jobs probably shouldn't exist, but the real question comes down to this: If you are not going to earn your own keep, who is going to earn it for you? Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A 5-year old can understand this, but apparently many college educated westerners cannot (It usually clicks after they start paying their taxes) [1]:http://freedomschool.us/how-an-economy-grows.pdf http://freedomschool.us/how-an-economy-grows.pdf

asark 8y ago
> Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A modern economy in a democratic state is built by the collective will of the people. No entity at the top setting rules, no modern economy. So: why the hell should everyone else agree to create and maintain a system that doesn't serve their needs to a degree that, taking into account the constraints of reality and not killing the golden goose et c. et c., satisfies them, regardless how nice a place you've found for yourself in same system?
- sparkie 8y ago
  This is covered in the book I linked. The "contingency fund" for the most needy. When properly managed, has a net benefit to society because it helps people get back to work and become productive capital accumulators, which benefits both themselves and society. However, when welfare is badly managed and is essentially given out to anybody, is overpaid because "muh rights to basic standard of living," and without adequate consideration of where the capital comes from to provide the welfare service, then there cannot be a sustainable welfare. The government does nothing but drain capital away. Poor voters will always vote for the politicians who promise them freebies (out of other people's capital savings!) It is only savers who have skin in the game and who ultimately have the moral right to decide how their hard earned capital should be spent. Youth for the past few decades have been fed a heavily distorted image of reality where they are expected to believe that capitalists are evil and that government is protecting them from those evil capitalists. It's no surprise they have no idea that capitalists are providing 100% of the funding of their welfare systems, and that their government only consumes the capital - it creates nothing, and cannot survive without the capitalists which fund it. Capitalists are of course not these evil monsters who only care about getting rich at the detriment of everybody else. They're just regular people who try to improve their own lives, and accidentally improve other people's lives in the process if they succeed. You really love capitalism: https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/ https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/

clairity 8y ago

to play devil's advocate, why value (current) efficiency above all else? evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions of organisms, each slightly different, some highly viable, most marginally so, and some not viable. that's super-inefficient! it has to be easier to find the handfuls of best individuals and propagate them to the next generation, right? capitalism, too, is inherently inefficient--people deploy capital in all sorts of ways, often profitlessly. it's not like we have one restaurant chain for each type of cuisine. if the answers are so obvious, why don't we get it right the first time?

rosser 8y ago
I am absolutely not valuing efficiency above all — or even much — else. My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask? I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with. EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it? Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices. Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think? EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.