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I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against t

I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself. The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and enjoying it. It is not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.

janderland 7y ago
Work has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I’ve always been obsessed with building stuff. Really, exploring, building, & optimizing things is a vital part of my humanity. I’m sorry if others have tried to force their version of humanity on you, but what’s de-humanizing to one is the humanity of another.
Barrin92 7y ago
Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and treating it like an incremental game is horrible. In James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games there one chapter on how the use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. I remember an article a while back where archaeologists examined the bones of pre-Columbian women in America. The bones showed the signs of long term debilitating, repetitive work from kneeling and grinding, by hand, corn into flour. Just last night I watched an American Experience episode on the guy who revolutionized wheat farming. He spent his youth on a farm, harvesting corn by hand, estimating that he'd harvested 1 million ears per season by himself. He was amazed at how wonderful it was to get a machine that mechanized corn harvesting. I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. In the 1960s, my dad was writing a book. My mom would type up the drafts for him. Every new draft meant my mom would spend hours banging it out on the typewriter. Think how much easier that is today with our "dehumanizing" computers. Can you imagine today typing the whole thing over again because you made a misteak? Machines have largely free'd us from dehumanizing labor, not caused it.
  - folli 7y ago
    Not everything is a dichotomy. Technology has certainly massively improved our lives, but that doesn't mean one cannot point out that there are also drawbacks.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      That's why I wrote "largely free'd us", not "absolutely 100% in every case free'd us".
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. I think you didn't go far enough with the implications of Carse's statement. It's not just that a machine mows your lawn quicker, it's that you have a homogenous lawn in the first place because it is a thing that can mechanically mowed. For example, why instead of a lawn do more people not have a wild garden, with uneven terrain? Why did everyone feel compelled to put a green square, empty plot of land in front of their houses? is there anything interesting or alive in it, or does it exist because it can be mechanically operated? Given that mowing the lawn is something 'you want to get over with', is it not more accurate to say the lawnmower needs you shoving it around in a system that efficiently maximises lawn-mower production? To understand the implication of what Carse is saying is to understand that machines don't just enter your environment, they shape your entire perception in a way that makes it conducive to be further operated by machines. Is living in estranged suburbs with lawns really positive for human flourishing, or is it in a sense the logic of the car and the lawnmower operating on people rather than the other way around? Is all the corn really part of a diverse diet and ecosystem, or have we adopted the diet because it is the thing that can be mass-produced?
chronogram 7y ago
Slow down. Life is to be savoured.
- scollet 7y ago
  Like my favorite counter quote: "Live slow, die whenever."
jmeister 7y ago
Counter-point: Kobe(RIP) on having time for friends: “I have "like minds." You know, I've been fortunate to play in Los Angeles, where there are a lot of people like me. Actors. Musicians. Businessmen. Obsessives. People who feel like God put them on earth to do whatever it is that they do. Now, do we have time to build great relationships? Do we have time to build great friendships? No. Do we have time to socialize and to hangout aimlessly? No. Do we want to do that? No. We want to work. I enjoy working.”
- acituan 7y ago
  A popular basketball player is hardly an authority in giving out wisdom on this matter. Not because of their profession, but because whatever wisdom they gathered through their exceptionally unique life situation is not going to be transferable to the life of 99.999..% of the world. This is not sound advice for how most of us should orient ourselves in life. He was the top or close to the top of a zero-sum system. There can only be a limited number of hyper-popular NBA players deified in our collective consciousness. Of course he is going to be biased on his work/life satisfaction. The relevant bit is, we are not Kobe. I am not Kobe. You are not Kobe. We never will be Kobe. Now, what is meaningful for us to do?
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    You're doing essentially the opposite of appeal to authority. Imagine being a bright, capable mind, and a hard worker. You've decided to focus on a particular career which makes use of some of your skills, allows you a platform for recognition, and pays the bills. Say programming, or a dancer, or a top-tier professional athlete. Imagine that you still spend your free time satiating your intellectual curiosity in other ways, learning about all the things you didn't have time to devote your life to. Now imagine that you decide to share your own thoughts and opinions about say, cooking, or politics, or whatever, and you get shot down because a programmer's unique life skills isn't transferable to cooking or politics. > whatever wisdom they gathered through their exceptionally unique life situation is not going to be transferable to the life of 99.999..% of the world You can say this about literally any profession when you include the scope of the entire world and the people in it. And this is why we share our knowledge and wisdom with others, because we each only have a few pieces of the puzzle. Kobe shared his point of view so that others might gain some insight into the mind of a hard-working athlete, not so that someone might dismiss his thoughts based on his career (even though you try to claim it's not about his career, you start with the phrase "A popular basketball player", so it's fairly transparent what your meaning is).
idavidrein 7y ago
You're not thinking broadly enough about the utility maximization framework. What's wrong with just including bread baking, hanging out with friends, etc. as things you find valuable, and then try and maximize those jointly with the value you find in productivity and working?
- acituan 7y ago
  Because humans are complex emergent systems with inherent information asymmetry. We are not transparent to ourselves in that what will make us satisfied in life. Worse yet, our reward mechanisms have evolved as best-guess proximal reinforcers. For example we find food tasty (proximal force) because nutrition makes us survive (ultimate force). But our taste can be and is hijacked by hyperpalatable food that now we are divorced from our ultimate goal of survival, in fact working against it if we’re obese. This makes it incredibly hard to come up with an objective utility maximization framework, that maximizes your lifetime utility. This is the core of any addictive processes. Hyperstimulus (e.g. cocaine) will wreak havoc on your utility function to the point one narrows and narrows on that one local goal maximization at the expense of total life satisfaction. But the problem is bigger than the reward mechanisms. People were not able to say “I bet bread baking will make me satisfied” and go ahead and do it. Only after necessity pushed them to participate in doing it, they were able to realize its value. They had to gather this participatory knowledge before making any prediction on its utility. This inherent information asymmetry makes broadening the utility maximization framework very very hard for an individual. This is not true for the market; market optimizes the shit out of what they will take out of the worker and the consumer, because market’s objective function is clear. And by them I mean us because it is us who made the market and who treat that objective function of the market is good enough to be objective function of all humanness. It is not, and that is why I’m against using the language of market (currency, utility, productivity etc) in general for all human activity and why I find it inherently dehumanizing; it simply cannot capture all that is human and that is valuable.
  - lsorber 7y ago
    I sympathize with your views in that a formalisation of meaning in life would seem to take away from it somewhat. However, your response also comes across as putting a stake in the ground and thereby closing your mind as to what the utility framework has to offer. These are some of the problems with utility I took away from your comment: 1. Short term utility maximisation does not necessarily align with long term utility maximisation. 2. The utility is difficult to define because we don't know what can contribute to it and how much those components would contribute. 3. The utility, even if defined, can only be partially observed. While these are certainly valid and interesting observations, that doesn't mean there isn't a latent utility that describes your lifetime's value. If you live a thousand lives and had access to a device to measure the (latent) utility, surely you could it to rank lives as more meaningful or valuable than others. Looking at it this way, the problems you raise could be seen as opportunities: how should we align short term utility with long term utility? How can we find out which utility components there are and how much they would contribute? And how can we make the utility observable, so that it can be maximised? Interestingly, attempting to maximise the utility may itself lower the utility as a result of spending time on the maximisation task and the dehumanisation of life as a result of its formalisation.
waingake 7y ago
Yes! Please track down this book "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" it examines time and the value of it in the way your seeing it. Long but great write up on it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead-your-time-is-everything https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead...
dluan 7y ago
"All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien."
dempedempe 7y ago
I don't think this "time saving" argument is only applicable to productivity. It works when applied to happiness as well. You can't deny that there are many things we have to do in modern society that we would rather not do (e.g., taxes). If we can minimize or remove doing these things, then we can spend more time doing the things we enjoy.
kilroy_jones 7y ago
Thanks for saying, and more eloquently than I likely could, exactly what I wanted to.
hyperpallium 7y ago
This is great if you will never have an economic rival or military enemy. There's a strong argument that not aiming at immediate productivity produces better productivity long-term (e.g. fundamental science, pure mathematics), but that still holds productivity as the primary value. But what value survival if we lose our humanity? A resolution is that our intuitions of morality support probabilitistic long-term survival, even if it doesn't seem so in the short-term, shaped as they are by evolution.

janderland 7y ago

Work has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I’ve always been obsessed with building stuff. Really, exploring, building, & optimizing things is a vital part of my humanity. I’m sorry if others have tried to force their version of humanity on you, but what’s de-humanizing to one is the humanity of another.

Barrin92 7y ago

Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and treating it like an incremental game is horrible. In James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games there one chapter on how the use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.

WalterBright 7y ago
> In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. I remember an article a while back where archaeologists examined the bones of pre-Columbian women in America. The bones showed the signs of long term debilitating, repetitive work from kneeling and grinding, by hand, corn into flour. Just last night I watched an American Experience episode on the guy who revolutionized wheat farming. He spent his youth on a farm, harvesting corn by hand, estimating that he'd harvested 1 million ears per season by himself. He was amazed at how wonderful it was to get a machine that mechanized corn harvesting. I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. In the 1960s, my dad was writing a book. My mom would type up the drafts for him. Every new draft meant my mom would spend hours banging it out on the typewriter. Think how much easier that is today with our "dehumanizing" computers. Can you imagine today typing the whole thing over again because you made a misteak? Machines have largely free'd us from dehumanizing labor, not caused it.
- folli 7y ago
  Not everything is a dichotomy. Technology has certainly massively improved our lives, but that doesn't mean one cannot point out that there are also drawbacks.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    That's why I wrote "largely free'd us", not "absolutely 100% in every case free'd us".
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. I think you didn't go far enough with the implications of Carse's statement. It's not just that a machine mows your lawn quicker, it's that you have a homogenous lawn in the first place because it is a thing that can mechanically mowed. For example, why instead of a lawn do more people not have a wild garden, with uneven terrain? Why did everyone feel compelled to put a green square, empty plot of land in front of their houses? is there anything interesting or alive in it, or does it exist because it can be mechanically operated? Given that mowing the lawn is something 'you want to get over with', is it not more accurate to say the lawnmower needs you shoving it around in a system that efficiently maximises lawn-mower production? To understand the implication of what Carse is saying is to understand that machines don't just enter your environment, they shape your entire perception in a way that makes it conducive to be further operated by machines. Is living in estranged suburbs with lawns really positive for human flourishing, or is it in a sense the logic of the car and the lawnmower operating on people rather than the other way around? Is all the corn really part of a diverse diet and ecosystem, or have we adopted the diet because it is the thing that can be mass-produced?

chronogram 7y ago

Slow down. Life is to be savoured.

scollet 7y ago
Like my favorite counter quote: "Live slow, die whenever."

jmeister 7y ago

Counter-point: Kobe(RIP) on having time for friends: “I have "like minds." You know, I've been fortunate to play in Los Angeles, where there are a lot of people like me. Actors. Musicians. Businessmen. Obsessives. People who feel like God put them on earth to do whatever it is that they do. Now, do we have time to build great relationships? Do we have time to build great friendships? No. Do we have time to socialize and to hangout aimlessly? No. Do we want to do that? No. We want to work. I enjoy working.”

acituan 7y ago
A popular basketball player is hardly an authority in giving out wisdom on this matter. Not because of their profession, but because whatever wisdom they gathered through their exceptionally unique life situation is not going to be transferable to the life of 99.999..% of the world. This is not sound advice for how most of us should orient ourselves in life. He was the top or close to the top of a zero-sum system. There can only be a limited number of hyper-popular NBA players deified in our collective consciousness. Of course he is going to be biased on his work/life satisfaction. The relevant bit is, we are not Kobe. I am not Kobe. You are not Kobe. We never will be Kobe. Now, what is meaningful for us to do?
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  You're doing essentially the opposite of appeal to authority. Imagine being a bright, capable mind, and a hard worker. You've decided to focus on a particular career which makes use of some of your skills, allows you a platform for recognition, and pays the bills. Say programming, or a dancer, or a top-tier professional athlete. Imagine that you still spend your free time satiating your intellectual curiosity in other ways, learning about all the things you didn't have time to devote your life to. Now imagine that you decide to share your own thoughts and opinions about say, cooking, or politics, or whatever, and you get shot down because a programmer's unique life skills isn't transferable to cooking or politics. > whatever wisdom they gathered through their exceptionally unique life situation is not going to be transferable to the life of 99.999..% of the world You can say this about literally any profession when you include the scope of the entire world and the people in it. And this is why we share our knowledge and wisdom with others, because we each only have a few pieces of the puzzle. Kobe shared his point of view so that others might gain some insight into the mind of a hard-working athlete, not so that someone might dismiss his thoughts based on his career (even though you try to claim it's not about his career, you start with the phrase "A popular basketball player", so it's fairly transparent what your meaning is).

idavidrein 7y ago

You're not thinking broadly enough about the utility maximization framework. What's wrong with just including bread baking, hanging out with friends, etc. as things you find valuable, and then try and maximize those jointly with the value you find in productivity and working?

acituan 7y ago
Because humans are complex emergent systems with inherent information asymmetry. We are not transparent to ourselves in that what will make us satisfied in life. Worse yet, our reward mechanisms have evolved as best-guess proximal reinforcers. For example we find food tasty (proximal force) because nutrition makes us survive (ultimate force). But our taste can be and is hijacked by hyperpalatable food that now we are divorced from our ultimate goal of survival, in fact working against it if we’re obese. This makes it incredibly hard to come up with an objective utility maximization framework, that maximizes your lifetime utility. This is the core of any addictive processes. Hyperstimulus (e.g. cocaine) will wreak havoc on your utility function to the point one narrows and narrows on that one local goal maximization at the expense of total life satisfaction. But the problem is bigger than the reward mechanisms. People were not able to say “I bet bread baking will make me satisfied” and go ahead and do it. Only after necessity pushed them to participate in doing it, they were able to realize its value. They had to gather this participatory knowledge before making any prediction on its utility. This inherent information asymmetry makes broadening the utility maximization framework very very hard for an individual. This is not true for the market; market optimizes the shit out of what they will take out of the worker and the consumer, because market’s objective function is clear. And by them I mean us because it is us who made the market and who treat that objective function of the market is good enough to be objective function of all humanness. It is not, and that is why I’m against using the language of market (currency, utility, productivity etc) in general for all human activity and why I find it inherently dehumanizing; it simply cannot capture all that is human and that is valuable.
- lsorber 7y ago
  I sympathize with your views in that a formalisation of meaning in life would seem to take away from it somewhat. However, your response also comes across as putting a stake in the ground and thereby closing your mind as to what the utility framework has to offer. These are some of the problems with utility I took away from your comment: 1. Short term utility maximisation does not necessarily align with long term utility maximisation. 2. The utility is difficult to define because we don't know what can contribute to it and how much those components would contribute. 3. The utility, even if defined, can only be partially observed. While these are certainly valid and interesting observations, that doesn't mean there isn't a latent utility that describes your lifetime's value. If you live a thousand lives and had access to a device to measure the (latent) utility, surely you could it to rank lives as more meaningful or valuable than others. Looking at it this way, the problems you raise could be seen as opportunities: how should we align short term utility with long term utility? How can we find out which utility components there are and how much they would contribute? And how can we make the utility observable, so that it can be maximised? Interestingly, attempting to maximise the utility may itself lower the utility as a result of spending time on the maximisation task and the dehumanisation of life as a result of its formalisation.

waingake 7y ago

Yes! Please track down this book "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" it examines time and the value of it in the way your seeing it. Long but great write up on it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead-your-time-is-everything https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead...

dluan 7y ago

"All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien."

dempedempe 7y ago

I don't think this "time saving" argument is only applicable to productivity. It works when applied to happiness as well. You can't deny that there are many things we have to do in modern society that we would rather not do (e.g., taxes). If we can minimize or remove doing these things, then we can spend more time doing the things we enjoy.

kilroy_jones 7y ago

Thanks for saying, and more eloquently than I likely could, exactly what I wanted to.

hyperpallium 7y ago

This is great if you will never have an economic rival or military enemy. There's a strong argument that not aiming at immediate productivity produces better productivity long-term (e.g. fundamental science, pure mathematics), but that still holds productivity as the primary value. But what value survival if we lose our humanity? A resolution is that our intuitions of morality support probabilitistic long-term survival, even if it doesn't seem so in the short-term, shaped as they are by evolution.