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What sort of things would you target your motivation towards? Would they be valuable for humanity? Is "the economy" really the right barometer? (edit: I see you

by geofft 7y ago

What sort of things would you target your motivation towards? Would they be valuable for humanity? Is "the economy" really the right barometer? (edit: I see you added this - I think those are valuable for humanity! I wish you could spend your time on art and woodworking!) Personally, I spend a lot of my time keeping a hedge fund's computers working, because they pay me well for it (and I want to not only avoid destitution now, I want savings to avoid destitution in the future). I spend about zero time on any of my open-source projects, which would be more valuable for humanity as a whole, but I can't figure out how to get paid the same amount (or really anything) working on them. And I know my projects are valuable to the economy too - I arrived at this job to find that another team was doing a big migration onto a project I maintain (and haven't had much time for). I didn't know this in advance, and they didn't know I was joining their company. Besides - it's okay if many people lose their motivation to work, as long as enough people still work from intrinsic motivation. And you'd still have the motivation of needing to earn money for luxuries. Once you finish your stack of books, the survival stipend wouldn't cover buying any more books.

richk449 7y ago
You are payed well to do X. You can’t get anyone to pay you to do Y. Yet you believe that Y is more valuable to society than X. Why? Isn’t society’s willingness to pay you for something a decent signal that society values it?
- geofft 7y ago
  No, because as I just demonstrated, they use my open-source work - society just has no mechanism to monetize it. It is possible that I could charge support contracts for the software now - but it's just about done, and it's pretty well documented, and if anything I'd have less incentive to write public docs. And I have no mechanism to get people to fund the next thing I want to work on and think is a good idea. (Well, I could continue working at a high-paying job for a few years and then quit, of course... but the logical conclusion of that loophole is that nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to quit, else they'd be able to ignore the market, right?)

by geofft 7y ago

richk449 7y ago

You are payed well to do X. You can’t get anyone to pay you to do Y. Yet you believe that Y is more valuable to society than X. Why? Isn’t society’s willingness to pay you for something a decent signal that society values it?

geofft 7y ago
No, because as I just demonstrated, they use my open-source work - society just has no mechanism to monetize it. It is possible that I could charge support contracts for the software now - but it's just about done, and it's pretty well documented, and if anything I'd have less incentive to write public docs. And I have no mechanism to get people to fund the next thing I want to work on and think is a good idea. (Well, I could continue working at a high-paying job for a few years and then quit, of course... but the logical conclusion of that loophole is that nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to quit, else they'd be able to ignore the market, right?)