5 ms·

The current economic system prevents virtually everyone in the system other than a few at the top of the pyramid from achieving their potential. How much extra

by VLM 6y ago

The current economic system prevents virtually everyone in the system other than a few at the top of the pyramid from achieving their potential. How much extra money will the people at the top centrally controlling everything make if, for example, your plumber is a more intellectually well rounded individual? Possibly a negative amount of money. So the plumber plays modded minecraft. Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. If political demographic membership is more important than programming skill, such that a skilled programmer cannot be hired, that person should grind survival rations at walmart and play factorio for recreation. There's the optimistic view that maximizing intellectual potential means curing cancer and living on mars. But the people currently at the top make a lot of money off cancer, and won't make any money off mars, but we do know "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." so in that pessimistic sense I'm glad our propaganda driven prison is not as optimized as it could be. Unleashing autonomous walking AI robots to randomly kill people in the middle east to make oil cheaper would require amazing intellectual potential but is a negative outcome, and frankly it would make the people in charge a lot more money than positive stuff like curing cancer. People are already educated beyond the economies means to employ them. Having them pretend to work while remaining unable to employ them sounds like too much of a free lunch. Who benefits, follow the money, it won't be us. We already have too much intelligence and education to apply to our current economy, making even more structural underemployment isn't going to help. If under the current system there's 20 postdocs living in poverty trying to apply for that one paying job to cure cancer, creating a "fairer" system where 2000 people intellectually capable of being postdocs all living in poverty applying to that one paying job to cure cancer isn't going to provide statistically better results for the cancer curing program although it will make 1980 people highly dis-satisfied with life. Is it worth making 1980 people suffer if the overall program isn't more successful? Even if the program is more successful, which I find unlikely, how much torture of how many people is acceptable in exchange?

thendrill 6y ago
I was going to write something but then I started reading your comment. I couldn't agree more, and I couldn't write it better myself. Thank you
js8 6y ago
I upvoted you, and leftist in me agrees with you.. but then I am also not so sure. I spent a lot of time in Minecraft and Factorio, managing my virtual house/factory to perfection, while completely forgetting that I could (and in some sense, would love to) learn skills to maintain my apartment (and my parent's house). I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world. Lot of it has to do with the perception of freedom, and some of the perception comes from the fact you're not serious about something, and you don't have to deal with other people. So I suspect some (if not most) people are more productive in games precisely because they do not take them too seriously. Maybe in a different economic system, if we take the stress out (and have something like basic income), we could somewhat resolve that problem, but perhaps some component of it would still stay. Also, when you write "achieving their potential", I always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r, who showed that we might be educating our children very much under their potential. However, his method is extremely time consuming - you would have to be a really dedicated parent to go for it (although understandably economic system might prevent it here as well). Most parents, I believe, do not have the patience for this, so they do not believe it. And many successful computer games (like Minecraft or Factorio) are really environments that are optimized for learning via immersion. So it is somewhat understandable that in the absence of direction for the real world, kids do gravitate towards such environments.
- WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
  >I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world. I've thought about this and have since I was a kid who enjoyed Harvest Moon while not enjoying growing plants in the garden, something my parents didn't hesitate to call attention to. Speaking for myself (but expecting at least some of this to generalize to others) I think there are quite a few factors. * The immediate turn around between work and result. If I want to grow strawberries, I have to wait months from start to finish. In Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley I get results in under an hour. * The ratio between input and output. Strawberries can take many hours of labor over those months, and while I do get strawberries (or money if I sell them) in exchange for it, the overall enjoyment per hour spent is much lower than with virtual strawberries. * The clarity and simplicity of the rules of 'the game'. If I grow real life strawberries, there are many things that can destroy them that I have little knowledge about or that I can stop. Industrial farmers might be able to control for most of these, but as a kid with a family garden I'm at the mercy of these factors. In a game the rules are much simpler and the risks much easier to understand and account for. A game with too many risks for the reward ends up being an unfun game and I can pick a better one, but we are stuck with a single instance of reality. * Ability to avoid what I don't like. Expanding upon the freedom that games offers, I can avoid content I don't like. For example, I don't like spiders. In real life gardening, I can't avoid them. In a game, I can either avoid them or settle for a compromise involving virtual spiders that are simplified to the point they don't activate my phobia. This can even expand to avoiding laws of man (building things virtually that would never pass legal building code) and even laws of nature (building things that would collapse in reality). I don't think economic system plays a major role in these factors. Sure, it is related in a few areas, but even if were to pick the most optimal legal and economic systems I think the end result would still not be as good as a game because of the systems beyond our control which can't be changed.
ryandrake 6y ago
This is a great comment. We are already way too educated and self-improved as it is. Consider the 24 year old with bachelors and masters degrees who is currently working at Starbucks because there simply is no professional work available to him. Does anyone really think “moar education” is going to improve his life? If I were him and the decision was between vegging out on the PlayStation or futilely going to night school, I know what I’d choose. We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along, and a glut of educated people wanting to do that work. More education, more up-skilling, and more self-improvement is not going to fix this.
- moosey 6y ago
  Making more money isn't the only potential life improvement that is possible. Yes, there are things that a person working at Starbucks can learn that will still improve their lives, and make it more fulfilling: languages, philosophy and knowledge are often their own reward. Further, it seems obvious to me that hunting money is a fools game. If money made people happy, at some point, then why do billionaires push for tax cuts, and more power and wealth? As research is starting to show, wealth is an emotional hunger that you can never sate.
  - VLM 6y ago
    "make it more fulfilling: languages, philosophy and knowledge are often their own reward" The required crushing level of debt closes more doors than it opens.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along Half true. Knowledge workers yeah, but there's actually a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers.
RhodoGSA 6y ago
I played an incredible amount of Runescape. Then the creators of the game ended up getting bought out by a Chinese mining and commodity's company. Slowly the game started dying as they pushed microtransactions and changed the very nature of the game. But the spirit of the game never died. That spirit of the game was the 'Dos Equi's guy' [0]. You had all these different skills (mining, woodcutting, farming, etc.) and the purpose of the game was to have the highest level in them all, while accumulating gold and items. As I started hating the changes that where going on within the game, I slowly started to feel a sense of waste as i spent time into the game. I started to think of how i could spend my time better and it turns out this vision for what time spent valuable is directly shaped from my experiences with runescape. If you replaced those 'Skills' in-game, with real life skills and tracked your progress, you could theoretically gamify life. Take for instance cooking. It is a skill in runescape that you can perform in real life. The goal of runescape is to gain more experience and you 'Unlock' the ability to 'Cook' a certain fish or item. In real life there is no barrier to entry or immediate feedback, but you can 'learn' these skills. Turns out they aren't as fun because you can't show off to your friends that you have level 40 flute playing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_th...
rektide 6y ago
I share much of your grim assessment. It is such a vast indignity that so much of use, so much amazing awesome potential, has no where to go, while the demands to support ourselves remain so persistent & challenging. I do have some areas of hope. > Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing. We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software. But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2], > No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility. Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential! The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with. So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner. It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in. In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism. [1] https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/ https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862 [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

by VLM 6y ago

thendrill 6y ago

I was going to write something but then I started reading your comment. I couldn't agree more, and I couldn't write it better myself. Thank you

js8 6y ago

I upvoted you, and leftist in me agrees with you.. but then I am also not so sure. I spent a lot of time in Minecraft and Factorio, managing my virtual house/factory to perfection, while completely forgetting that I could (and in some sense, would love to) learn skills to maintain my apartment (and my parent's house). I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world. Lot of it has to do with the perception of freedom, and some of the perception comes from the fact you're not serious about something, and you don't have to deal with other people. So I suspect some (if not most) people are more productive in games precisely because they do not take them too seriously. Maybe in a different economic system, if we take the stress out (and have something like basic income), we could somewhat resolve that problem, but perhaps some component of it would still stay. Also, when you write "achieving their potential", I always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r, who showed that we might be educating our children very much under their potential. However, his method is extremely time consuming - you would have to be a really dedicated parent to go for it (although understandably economic system might prevent it here as well). Most parents, I believe, do not have the patience for this, so they do not believe it. And many successful computer games (like Minecraft or Factorio) are really environments that are optimized for learning via immersion. So it is somewhat understandable that in the absence of direction for the real world, kids do gravitate towards such environments.

WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
>I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world. I've thought about this and have since I was a kid who enjoyed Harvest Moon while not enjoying growing plants in the garden, something my parents didn't hesitate to call attention to. Speaking for myself (but expecting at least some of this to generalize to others) I think there are quite a few factors. * The immediate turn around between work and result. If I want to grow strawberries, I have to wait months from start to finish. In Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley I get results in under an hour. * The ratio between input and output. Strawberries can take many hours of labor over those months, and while I do get strawberries (or money if I sell them) in exchange for it, the overall enjoyment per hour spent is much lower than with virtual strawberries. * The clarity and simplicity of the rules of 'the game'. If I grow real life strawberries, there are many things that can destroy them that I have little knowledge about or that I can stop. Industrial farmers might be able to control for most of these, but as a kid with a family garden I'm at the mercy of these factors. In a game the rules are much simpler and the risks much easier to understand and account for. A game with too many risks for the reward ends up being an unfun game and I can pick a better one, but we are stuck with a single instance of reality. * Ability to avoid what I don't like. Expanding upon the freedom that games offers, I can avoid content I don't like. For example, I don't like spiders. In real life gardening, I can't avoid them. In a game, I can either avoid them or settle for a compromise involving virtual spiders that are simplified to the point they don't activate my phobia. This can even expand to avoiding laws of man (building things virtually that would never pass legal building code) and even laws of nature (building things that would collapse in reality). I don't think economic system plays a major role in these factors. Sure, it is related in a few areas, but even if were to pick the most optimal legal and economic systems I think the end result would still not be as good as a game because of the systems beyond our control which can't be changed.

ryandrake 6y ago

This is a great comment. We are already way too educated and self-improved as it is. Consider the 24 year old with bachelors and masters degrees who is currently working at Starbucks because there simply is no professional work available to him. Does anyone really think “moar education” is going to improve his life? If I were him and the decision was between vegging out on the PlayStation or futilely going to night school, I know what I’d choose. We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along, and a glut of educated people wanting to do that work. More education, more up-skilling, and more self-improvement is not going to fix this.

moosey 6y ago
Making more money isn't the only potential life improvement that is possible. Yes, there are things that a person working at Starbucks can learn that will still improve their lives, and make it more fulfilling: languages, philosophy and knowledge are often their own reward. Further, it seems obvious to me that hunting money is a fools game. If money made people happy, at some point, then why do billionaires push for tax cuts, and more power and wealth? As research is starting to show, wealth is an emotional hunger that you can never sate.
- VLM 6y ago
  "make it more fulfilling: languages, philosophy and knowledge are often their own reward" The required crushing level of debt closes more doors than it opens.
Izkata 6y ago
> We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along Half true. Knowledge workers yeah, but there's actually a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers.

RhodoGSA 6y ago

I played an incredible amount of Runescape. Then the creators of the game ended up getting bought out by a Chinese mining and commodity's company. Slowly the game started dying as they pushed microtransactions and changed the very nature of the game. But the spirit of the game never died. That spirit of the game was the 'Dos Equi's guy' [0]. You had all these different skills (mining, woodcutting, farming, etc.) and the purpose of the game was to have the highest level in them all, while accumulating gold and items. As I started hating the changes that where going on within the game, I slowly started to feel a sense of waste as i spent time into the game. I started to think of how i could spend my time better and it turns out this vision for what time spent valuable is directly shaped from my experiences with runescape. If you replaced those 'Skills' in-game, with real life skills and tracked your progress, you could theoretically gamify life. Take for instance cooking. It is a skill in runescape that you can perform in real life. The goal of runescape is to gain more experience and you 'Unlock' the ability to 'Cook' a certain fish or item. In real life there is no barrier to entry or immediate feedback, but you can 'learn' these skills. Turns out they aren't as fun because you can't show off to your friends that you have level 40 flute playing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_th...

rektide 6y ago

I share much of your grim assessment. It is such a vast indignity that so much of use, so much amazing awesome potential, has no where to go, while the demands to support ourselves remain so persistent & challenging. I do have some areas of hope. > Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing. We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software. But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2], > No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility. Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential! The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with. So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner. It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in. In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism. [1] https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/ https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862 [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...