7 ms·

Is it a legitimate argument that smart hardworking people who are considered economically valuable will be swayed to non-economically valuable interests within

Is it a legitimate argument that smart hardworking people who are considered economically valuable will be swayed to non-economically valuable interests within this system? As a former fine arts student that became a UI developer mostly for the monetary stability, I do feel like if I had the ability to fully invest myself creating art without constantly struggling with relevancy and rent, I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large.

thomasahle 8y ago
I suppose the validity would depend on at least: - How much does this actually happen? - Is the job market over or under satisfied? - Does what people end up doing somehow turn out valuable to society, even if not in a way we know how to assign monetary value? There are so many unknowns. Great that somebody are actually trying it out and getting us some data.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kvczor 8y ago
Doesn't the fact that you earn more by doing UI work prove that you are far more useful to society than by making art?
- sewercake 8y ago
  I think you're equating 'society' with 'the market' here.
  - mises 8y ago
    I think you may be picking up on a but of a cultural difference here. In America, people are identified, both by themselves and by others, in a large part by there job. It's a huge part of personal and cultural/societal identity.
- montenegrohugo 8y ago
  Not necessarily. I view the advertising industry as a net loss to society, yet the amount of revenue is immense and the salaries of the people working there are equally large.
  - croon 8y ago
    Yes, the idea of exposing potential consumers and informing them of what your product is in principle fine, but that idea was perverted long before any of us were born. Now it's about spending money on selling products that aren't selling themselves, because it's cheaper than making a better product. As always, exceptions exist.
- spaceribs 8y ago
  My skills are now very bounded to building interfaces for consumption, not critical thought. In fact, the choices I make for developing interfaces usually revolve around the user being some level of drunk. My senior thesis was a receipt printer that wireshark'd instant messenger messages on our school's unsecured wifi and dumped those messages into a pile.
  - kvczor 8y ago
    ...so you are not critically thinking about your work in the context of how useful it is to the end user? That's a bad UI work, I'd say. As for your senior thesis - Developer's job is to create software that makes lives easier. It was your decision to use your skills to harm people by exploiting their privacy. Or it could be seen as something good - you discovered a way to exploit people and if you informed whoever was running this app you helped a good amount of people in your school.
    - spaceribs 8y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding both my role as a UI developer and as an artist... It takes critical time and energy to reduce the complexity of a products' features to something a layperson can use, and a layperson is usually barely paying attention. As to your second point, I wasn't a developer, I was an artist, attempting to ask real questions about privacy and spark real discussions and possibly getting myself in trouble to start a conversation.
- futurenanigans 8y ago
  Are you measuring a persons worth based on their income?
  - kvczor 8y ago
    OP wrote: "I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large." There are far more people that need UI work (in the form of websites, apps, etc) these days than art. UI work scales very well, art not really - you can affect way more people and that is reflected in the salary. "Qualitatively" UI work is far more useful to society.
    - qntty 8y ago
      There's absolutely no basis for a judgement like that without introducing assumptions about what's valuable and what's not.
      - 0-_-0 8y ago
        Let's go with "valuable is something that improves your life" or "improves your wellbeing"
        qntty 8y ago
        That doesn't really work. Is my life better or worse if I feel worse about myself because I become aware of the way that I'm part of a unethical social system? Given the choice, I wouldn't choose to be a happy person who lives in the Jim Crow south and supports segregation. Part of what many artists do is help people understand themselves differently. You can't assume people are going to be willing to pay for something that's good for them (by their own standards).
      - kvczor 8y ago
        Earning money is not easy. The fact that on average a larger group is willing to pay for UI work than for art indicates that UI affects their lives more than art and is more worth to them. Whatever one's reason is.
- qntty 8y ago
  Would society be better off if Linux kernel developers stuck to doing things that paid?
  - maccard 8y ago
    How many people work full time ubpaid on the Linux kernel? For the 4.15 kernel, AMD, Intel, Google and Red Hat contributed between 35 and 50% of the changes, depending on whether you count number of commits or number of lines changed.
    - croon 8y ago
      How long did linux exist before there was a corporate sponsored person working on the kernel? Only half rhetorical, as I'm actually curious.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Maybe, if you extend that to free software in general. It's interesting to think about.
Talyen42 8y ago
As an employed person making 100k, if given UBI I would quit and not do anything productive-to-society for most of the rest of my life. So yes, that is a legitimate argument. The counter-argument is that the benefit coming from more people pursuing entrepreneurial/risk-taking/passion-driven endeavors will OUTWEIGH the lazy fucks like me.
- mises 8y ago
  The problem is whole I'd like to think they would, I think people will gradually get lazier as they get used to it. Most people do the minimum required now; what makes everyone think they will keep that same level of productivity arbitrarily when it's not the minimum liveable?
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    I'd suggest looking at retirement- one of the important facets of retirement is the encouragement to continue contributing to society once retired because it is always necessary to be productive in some way or form for the human condition as we understand it. It is psychologically damaging to not be constantly doing stuff that is at least mildly fulfilling in some way. If a sizeable portion or even a majority of people recieved UBI we would quickly learn as a population what's always been advised to our elderly.
    - mises 8y ago
      How do you propose to do this? We have a lot of trouble doing it with old people already.
      - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
        Do we? I'm unaware of that, actually. I was under the impression it was widely known that retired people are the sizeable portion of those who volunteer for anything in particular, and there's the existing tropes of retired people getting into art and fitness, and community activities. Book clubs. Crochet/knitting clubs. Bingo. Dancing.
jchrisa 8y ago
Some of my most productive moments have been when I'm following my own whimsy, instead of responding to economic pressure. I can only imagine this effect, scaled up, would be a net benefit for society.
keymone 8y ago
there's a difference between "non-economically viable" and "not useful". i have no problems with people losing interest in doing stuff that current market values because current market values turning people into zombies that occasionally are happy to go murder each other. art, volunteering, social programs and plenty other activities are way more useful for civilization as a whole than almost any random job on the market. as soon as businesses start losing workers as they realize they don't need to do shitty unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table - market will finally put the right price on lots of these jobs and start paying for it adequately.
- mises 8y ago
  > they don't need to do unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table I think at first they will, but I think over time they will realize they don't have to do anything at all. People work because they want something, or at least I always have.
  - keymone 8y ago
    > People work because they want something nope. there is a deep psychological need to feel productive and useful to society in all but very few sociopathic humans.
    - anonlapwarmer 8y ago
      When people retire, they get doubly depressed from age and if they don't have structure and activities to keep them occupied. It's best to never "retire," not because of cognitive "use it or lose it" (which was disproven[1]) but because of the harms of slipping into depression. For example, my step-father was a copy editor for a large government body who was initially happy/go-lucky on retirement initially but is now extremely self-isolated and depressed. EDIT: 1. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4925 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4925
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Yes that is how human nature evolved. Competition for scarce resources so you and your offspring can survive. This extends to supporting society to the extent it helps your personal survival.
Jhsto 8y ago
Yes, but currently you must be unemployed to get most aids. These aids may be as much as your monthly pay at work. If you end up unemployed, it makes sense to stay so for a while. With basic income it would get continuous and unconditional, albeit less in amount. Finland has quite complex welfare system and basic income would make it simpler and avoid people gaming the system to optimize aids instead of focusing on getting employed.
- iagovar 8y ago
  And it's way simpler to manage = Less public employees needed.
lr4444lr 8y ago
You may have thought you'd be more "qualitatively" useful, but the wasn't the prevailing wage for creating art, that you found insufficient, at all reflective of general society telling you that it wasn't more "qualitatively" useful?
dageshi 8y ago
UBI might solve rent, would it solve "relevancy"? There are genres of art where the means of production became so easy/cheap that the world is flooded with them, I recall reading a blog from some years ago discussing how EDM music had become so cheap and easy to produce that the market was flooded with content which fewer and fewer people would actually pay for. UBI might give people the opportunity to explore their interests but ultimately wouldn't you end up in the same place? Torn between a desire to make "art" which suddenly everyone else is also trying to make and follow their passion, or get paid substantially more for UI Development?
- spaceribs 8y ago
  I'd point to fan fiction as a possible outcome. Most writers are never recognized, and they don't seem to be phased by that outcome. They write for themselves and develop a niche that they are happy to contribute to. Just because the cost of writing and publishing has plummeted doesn't mean it's less valuable, it's development becomes either decentralized or internalized.
engineerworks 8y ago
I work for an evil corporation which is harvesting data off gullible people who have no idea how their data is being used. If there was UBI, I'd have stopped working for them altogether.
- fxj 8y ago
  And you could work on a startup and fight them. The world would be a better lace if we wouldn't have to be modern slaves.
  - mises 8y ago
    Seriously? You're comparing a job you don't like to slavery?! Unless you have people who whip you if you run away, it's not, and it's pretty insensitive to compare it to that. Show me the gun being pointed to your head to keep you in that job. Otherwise, shut up about slavery.

thomasahle 8y ago

I suppose the validity would depend on at least: - How much does this actually happen? - Is the job market over or under satisfied? - Does what people end up doing somehow turn out valuable to society, even if not in a way we know how to assign monetary value? There are so many unknowns. Great that somebody are actually trying it out and getting us some data.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kvczor 8y ago

Doesn't the fact that you earn more by doing UI work prove that you are far more useful to society than by making art?

sewercake 8y ago
I think you're equating 'society' with 'the market' here.
- mises 8y ago
  I think you may be picking up on a but of a cultural difference here. In America, people are identified, both by themselves and by others, in a large part by there job. It's a huge part of personal and cultural/societal identity.
montenegrohugo 8y ago
Not necessarily. I view the advertising industry as a net loss to society, yet the amount of revenue is immense and the salaries of the people working there are equally large.
- croon 8y ago
  Yes, the idea of exposing potential consumers and informing them of what your product is in principle fine, but that idea was perverted long before any of us were born. Now it's about spending money on selling products that aren't selling themselves, because it's cheaper than making a better product. As always, exceptions exist.
spaceribs 8y ago
My skills are now very bounded to building interfaces for consumption, not critical thought. In fact, the choices I make for developing interfaces usually revolve around the user being some level of drunk. My senior thesis was a receipt printer that wireshark'd instant messenger messages on our school's unsecured wifi and dumped those messages into a pile.
- kvczor 8y ago
  ...so you are not critically thinking about your work in the context of how useful it is to the end user? That's a bad UI work, I'd say. As for your senior thesis - Developer's job is to create software that makes lives easier. It was your decision to use your skills to harm people by exploiting their privacy. Or it could be seen as something good - you discovered a way to exploit people and if you informed whoever was running this app you helped a good amount of people in your school.
  - spaceribs 8y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding both my role as a UI developer and as an artist... It takes critical time and energy to reduce the complexity of a products' features to something a layperson can use, and a layperson is usually barely paying attention. As to your second point, I wasn't a developer, I was an artist, attempting to ask real questions about privacy and spark real discussions and possibly getting myself in trouble to start a conversation.
futurenanigans 8y ago
Are you measuring a persons worth based on their income?
- kvczor 8y ago
  OP wrote: "I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large." There are far more people that need UI work (in the form of websites, apps, etc) these days than art. UI work scales very well, art not really - you can affect way more people and that is reflected in the salary. "Qualitatively" UI work is far more useful to society.
  - qntty 8y ago
    There's absolutely no basis for a judgement like that without introducing assumptions about what's valuable and what's not.
    - 0-_-0 8y ago
      Let's go with "valuable is something that improves your life" or "improves your wellbeing"
      - qntty 8y ago
        That doesn't really work. Is my life better or worse if I feel worse about myself because I become aware of the way that I'm part of a unethical social system? Given the choice, I wouldn't choose to be a happy person who lives in the Jim Crow south and supports segregation. Part of what many artists do is help people understand themselves differently. You can't assume people are going to be willing to pay for something that's good for them (by their own standards).
    - kvczor 8y ago
      Earning money is not easy. The fact that on average a larger group is willing to pay for UI work than for art indicates that UI affects their lives more than art and is more worth to them. Whatever one's reason is.
qntty 8y ago
Would society be better off if Linux kernel developers stuck to doing things that paid?
- maccard 8y ago
  How many people work full time ubpaid on the Linux kernel? For the 4.15 kernel, AMD, Intel, Google and Red Hat contributed between 35 and 50% of the changes, depending on whether you count number of commits or number of lines changed.
  - croon 8y ago
    How long did linux exist before there was a corporate sponsored person working on the kernel? Only half rhetorical, as I'm actually curious.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Maybe, if you extend that to free software in general. It's interesting to think about.

Talyen42 8y ago

As an employed person making 100k, if given UBI I would quit and not do anything productive-to-society for most of the rest of my life. So yes, that is a legitimate argument. The counter-argument is that the benefit coming from more people pursuing entrepreneurial/risk-taking/passion-driven endeavors will OUTWEIGH the lazy fucks like me.

mises 8y ago
The problem is whole I'd like to think they would, I think people will gradually get lazier as they get used to it. Most people do the minimum required now; what makes everyone think they will keep that same level of productivity arbitrarily when it's not the minimum liveable?
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  I'd suggest looking at retirement- one of the important facets of retirement is the encouragement to continue contributing to society once retired because it is always necessary to be productive in some way or form for the human condition as we understand it. It is psychologically damaging to not be constantly doing stuff that is at least mildly fulfilling in some way. If a sizeable portion or even a majority of people recieved UBI we would quickly learn as a population what's always been advised to our elderly.
  - mises 8y ago
    How do you propose to do this? We have a lot of trouble doing it with old people already.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      Do we? I'm unaware of that, actually. I was under the impression it was widely known that retired people are the sizeable portion of those who volunteer for anything in particular, and there's the existing tropes of retired people getting into art and fitness, and community activities. Book clubs. Crochet/knitting clubs. Bingo. Dancing.

jchrisa 8y ago

Some of my most productive moments have been when I'm following my own whimsy, instead of responding to economic pressure. I can only imagine this effect, scaled up, would be a net benefit for society.

keymone 8y ago

there's a difference between "non-economically viable" and "not useful". i have no problems with people losing interest in doing stuff that current market values because current market values turning people into zombies that occasionally are happy to go murder each other. art, volunteering, social programs and plenty other activities are way more useful for civilization as a whole than almost any random job on the market. as soon as businesses start losing workers as they realize they don't need to do shitty unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table - market will finally put the right price on lots of these jobs and start paying for it adequately.

mises 8y ago
> they don't need to do unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table I think at first they will, but I think over time they will realize they don't have to do anything at all. People work because they want something, or at least I always have.
- keymone 8y ago
  > People work because they want something nope. there is a deep psychological need to feel productive and useful to society in all but very few sociopathic humans.
  - anonlapwarmer 8y ago
    When people retire, they get doubly depressed from age and if they don't have structure and activities to keep them occupied. It's best to never "retire," not because of cognitive "use it or lose it" (which was disproven[1]) but because of the harms of slipping into depression. For example, my step-father was a copy editor for a large government body who was initially happy/go-lucky on retirement initially but is now extremely self-isolated and depressed. EDIT: 1. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4925 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4925
- ams6110 8y ago
  Yes that is how human nature evolved. Competition for scarce resources so you and your offspring can survive. This extends to supporting society to the extent it helps your personal survival.

Jhsto 8y ago

Yes, but currently you must be unemployed to get most aids. These aids may be as much as your monthly pay at work. If you end up unemployed, it makes sense to stay so for a while. With basic income it would get continuous and unconditional, albeit less in amount. Finland has quite complex welfare system and basic income would make it simpler and avoid people gaming the system to optimize aids instead of focusing on getting employed.

iagovar 8y ago
And it's way simpler to manage = Less public employees needed.

lr4444lr 8y ago

You may have thought you'd be more "qualitatively" useful, but the wasn't the prevailing wage for creating art, that you found insufficient, at all reflective of general society telling you that it wasn't more "qualitatively" useful?

dageshi 8y ago

UBI might solve rent, would it solve "relevancy"? There are genres of art where the means of production became so easy/cheap that the world is flooded with them, I recall reading a blog from some years ago discussing how EDM music had become so cheap and easy to produce that the market was flooded with content which fewer and fewer people would actually pay for. UBI might give people the opportunity to explore their interests but ultimately wouldn't you end up in the same place? Torn between a desire to make "art" which suddenly everyone else is also trying to make and follow their passion, or get paid substantially more for UI Development?

spaceribs 8y ago
I'd point to fan fiction as a possible outcome. Most writers are never recognized, and they don't seem to be phased by that outcome. They write for themselves and develop a niche that they are happy to contribute to. Just because the cost of writing and publishing has plummeted doesn't mean it's less valuable, it's development becomes either decentralized or internalized.

engineerworks 8y ago

I work for an evil corporation which is harvesting data off gullible people who have no idea how their data is being used. If there was UBI, I'd have stopped working for them altogether.

fxj 8y ago
And you could work on a startup and fight them. The world would be a better lace if we wouldn't have to be modern slaves.
- mises 8y ago
  Seriously? You're comparing a job you don't like to slavery?! Unless you have people who whip you if you run away, it's not, and it's pretty insensitive to compare it to that. Show me the gun being pointed to your head to keep you in that job. Otherwise, shut up about slavery.