8 ms·

I cite this paper every chance I can get. Bertand would be rolling in his grave now about the current situation where we've gone completely in the opposite dire

I cite this paper every chance I can get. Bertand would be rolling in his grave now about the current situation where we've gone completely in the opposite direction. Here's a Buckminster Fuller quote that I also like to share: "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." ― R. Buckminster Fuller Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials. I made a comment to a friend tonight about how odd it is that workplaces seem to be acting irrationally by just demanding more of people and trying to increase their grip, when I realize it's honestly just like an abusive relationship. It would rationally help the business to foster loyalty and cooperation in this type of market but instead the narrative is "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" and people who have been loyal in positions for many years are just being treated like dirt because their control and narrative is being questioned...and that's pretty much exactly what happens in an abusive relationship when someone tries to leave, the abuser cracks down harder. Utterly bizarre to see such irrational behavior though.

jhbadger 5y ago
Although this ignores how important minor improvements are. It's easy to assume that only Nobel Laureates and the like are important without realizing that they depend on hundreds or thousands of minor scientists who make the discoveries needed for the big ones.
50 5y ago
Connected maybe to the excerpt you mentioned, here is this excerpt (hopefully not too nihilistic or pessimistic) from E.M. Cioran - who seems to have become so apparent to me this past year - and his aphorism-filled, philosophical book titled The Trouble With Being Born: "A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."
- Phenomenit 5y ago
  I'm so happy that I got introduced to Emile Cioran by Stephen Wests podcast. No philosopher or idea has more clearly expressed what I've been feeling and thinking about. But alas talking about nihilism is pointless so there's not much more to say.
  - rramadass 5y ago
    >talking about nihilism is pointless No. It is by Talking and Thinking about it that we are forced to face Reality. This leads to true "Enlightenment" and allows us to develop our own unique path to a "Philosophy of Life". I think of Nihilism as the backdrop against which we paint our chosen "Schools of Philosophy". One needs to be very aware of this important difference. IMO, it is better to live with Unpleasant Reality than Pleasant Fancy. The following passage from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London nicely illustrates this dichotomy; === As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into it. “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.” He shook his head slowly, pondering. “I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.” He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added: “It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.” “Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed. “Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.” “Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution. “More freely, because it costs you nothing.” “And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted. “Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.” === PS: You might find the book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia interesting.
Angostura 5y ago
> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. ... but would they? Or would they keep scrolling down interminably. I know I'd like to think I would go back to school.
- kubb 5y ago
  Yes, I would.
- perfunctory 5y ago
  Russell's essay has the answer: > The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
- paulcole 5y ago
  I wouldn’t! There’s never been anything in my life that I’ve been as passionate about as doing nothing.
beebmam 5y ago
Why does "the media" care at all about anti-work? Wouldn't not working be GOOD for media companies, with more time to consume media? I really don't follow what you said there
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  They're ad funded. You need the proles working to buy their circus tickets.
jstx1 5y ago
> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials. I don't know, my impression of antiwork is only through seeing some posts from the subreddit on the reddit front page. It comes across as "anti-my-job-specifically" or "I have problems at work so nobody should work" or "inequality exists so I shouldn't work". I really don't get the point of the whole thing. It's understandable that people will take the opportunity to complain about stuff but the overwhelming majority of those people aren't Bertrand Russell, not even close. It's a group of people who have found an audience to complain to - they have real problems but they're coming to all sorts of stupid conclusions fueled by groupthink.
- johnwayne666 5y ago
  The antiwork subreddit is now too popular and the signal to noise ratio has therefore dropped sharply. If you want to have some impression of why work can be criticized, In Praise of Idleness is much more interesting.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
- helpfulmandrill 5y ago
  It's a bit like Feminist consciousness-raising in the 60s and 70s. Women started getting together and realising "my problems are not specific to me, my family, my marriage. We're all experiencing the same sorts of things."
- an_ko 5y ago
  I recommend ignoring everything on the front page of Reddit or at most treating it strictly as entertainment. Stuff only gets up there if a large group of people understand it and like it, which means almost all "discussion" that gets up there are one-sided rants that lots of people wanted to hear. A global popularity contest is a game of numbers that doesn't favour subtle goods like truth or intellectual challenge.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> it's honestly just like an abusive relationship Yes. I'd go even further and say it's just another form of slavery. The lash just happens to be economic in nature rather than physical. Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  In my opinion, this is an uncreative misuse of the term "slavery". Words have meanings, and slavery doesn't mean "someone with a shitty job", it means "someone who is fully owned by someone else". I recognize that you're just trying to further a leftist "boo companies" narrative, but even if your employer treats you badly and you're hard pressed to imagine an alternative job, your employer does not own you and you are more free in your choices than any slave has ever been. I recognize that there are jobs that are modern slavery (eg banana plantations), but I don't think that's the kinds of jobs this threat is about. The context is tech employees, or even amazon warehouse workers etc, and even when those are bad, it's not slavery.
  - Fricken 5y ago
    We don't fully own people anymore, we just lease them for a while. That way ensuring they are provided the necessities of life becomes some else's problem. Less liability.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      The Yes Men pointed this out explicitly in their presentation to the WTO on Leisure Wear for Managers of the Future. The golden penis suit was just the cherry on top. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuzVMwsK7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuzVMwsK7o
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      So you prefer owning people? Or you just object to work? It's not clear what you are advocating for. We live in a world where people need three square meals a day, they want heating and transportation and energy, and other people have to work every day to provide those services. It seems a bit entitled to be moaning about the fact that one must work to survive in life -- that's kind of how this whole life thing works.
bloqs 5y ago
The Anti work movement seems mostly driven by US "unreasonablism" in the work place. 1 week holiday, unreasonable manager overreach, politics over competence, unworkable financial pressures on everyday people like medical and student debt etc. Shit is fucked, yo.
bloqs 5y ago
The Anti work movement seems mostly driven by US "unreasonablism" in the work place. 1 week holiday, unreasonable manager overreach, politics over competence, unworkable financial pressures on everyday people like medical and student debt etc. Shit is fucked, yo.
- overlordalex 5y ago
  It's actually worse than that in the US. NO mandated vacation time (not even public holidays), no paid maternity leave, at-will employment, minimal labour laws, minimal consumer protections, etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lelanthran 5y ago
> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials. Maybe not, but the majority of anti-work sentiment I see is coming from people who are clear that they are freeloaders, and aren't ashamed of the fact. Also, you're really cherry-picking the data when you grab two outliers (in terms of brilliance) as support for your argument, and ignore the rest of the high-performance people throughout history. As a percentage of brilliant people (using whatever bar you have for 'brilliance') how many espouse the same sentiment? Not that I agree or disagree with the actual sentiment, I just don't find it convincing when an argument has to cherrypick datapoints in order to work. Trying to convince using absolute numbers and not providing percentages is pointless. We need to know what the denominator is (samples meeting the criteria/total number of samples).
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Sure but there's a lot of social pressure to say to everyone that you had to work hard to get where you are, because of the society we live in. The data you're really after is how many people actually think that. Depending on your prior you might consider that even if a tiny number of brilliant people were to go for the Buckminster Fuller line, perhaps many actually think it. Government mandated FMRI scanners aren't that far off so we'll see soon.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Did you read the piece?
  - maest 5y ago
    From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
    - rambambram 5y ago
denton-scratch 5y ago
When I was a kid, I supposed that robots and automation would make drudgery obsolete, and people would only work if they wanted to. Increasing productivity would mean that everyone had access to the necessities of life, and even some of the luxuries. How wrong I was. Sure, the robots and the automation turned up, as I had anticipated; but the benefits were taken as profits by corporations, and people didn't gain any leisure time at all. I think we were all betrayed. I wonder to what extent my opinions as a kid were formed by finding In Praise Of Idleness on my mother's bookshelf.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Adam Curtis's short documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" explores this idea beautifully, and where we went wrong.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    That is a remarkable documentary.
refurb 5y ago
It’s all about improving quality of life. If we all are satisfied with living like they did in the early 1800’s, we could do it right now and nobody works. Of course you’ll die of a bacterial infection, but otherwise…
- Nevermark 5y ago
  I doubt very much that nobody would work, or that progress would stop. I would expect the opposite as creative people who wished, were able to invest time prior to profitability as never before. Given how one of the "Great Filters" of startups is reaching "Ramen Profitability", I imagine in today's age progress would happen much faster. We could all be Ramen Profitable, or very close to it, for any venture that can start small.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Or people in the US could be allowed to work the same amount as people in other Western democracies. The work cultures in Japan and South Korea seem even more toxic and unpleasant in their embrace of overwork. It is very unlikely that people moving to a four day work week would be less productive. The current number of people working 50 and 60 hours a week while millions are homeless is a scathing critique on how much we have failed to use work for productivity and as a tool to benefit society as a whole.
andrekandre 5y ago
> We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. its like the thesis of bulls*t jobs right there in the simplest of terms...
Perizors 5y ago
The thing I wanted to do was science. I did a bachelor's and recently finished a master's in ecology (academic, I am not in the US). However, I was constantly anxious and in financial distress because, well, academia is not really financially stable and I do not have anyone to fall back to. So I decided to move into programming because it pays better and the job is, in comparison to academia, financially more stable so you won't run out of funds in a couple of years. The thing is I really like programming and tinkering with computers (it was a big part of my masters) so it is a job I really like doing. However, there was something in research that made my mind itches when you got to follow your own questions and get a glimpse of an animals' life. In the end, I am still torn out a bit about wanting to go back to academia or pursuing other career paths and I tough it resonated with your quote.
boppo1 5y ago
I blame the federal reserve's 'maximum employment mandate'. It is official economic policy to sacrifice price discovery, i.e. efficiency, to make sure there's work for people.
- diordiderot 5y ago
  This would be a really good take in a world where there was an all powerful benevolent dictator
  - boppo1 5y ago
    I don't understand what you mean. My argument was along the lines of: - Fed buys bonds to keep yields low - Inefficient businesses are then able to secure funding at lower than 'natural' rates and stay afloat - It takes more effort than necessary to produce the goods and services society needs - But also there are more jobs, so the mandate is met Also, simultaneously: - Fed buys bonds to keep yields low - A. increases the quantity of savings=investment dollars demanding a return - B. lowers denominator in DCF valuations - A & B apply dual pressure causing financial assets grow in price disproportionate to the amount of products & services provided to society (measured in cash flows) - people who get paid a salary get priced out of economic ownership - people who already hold claims on cash flows get "wealthier on paper" even though goods & services for society have not increased Am I missing something? Because these arguments seem to me to explain, in pretty simple terms,the world as I observe it.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>I made a comment to a friend tonight about how odd it is that workplaces seem to be acting irrationally The current workplace is manifestation of a deeper problem, IMO a lack of a relative free market when it comes to housing. Most people work as hard as they have to because the cost of housing is very high, by an artificially induced scarcity in most places.
fijiaarone 5y ago
“ Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men” Actually, it is because of their status and the opportunity to be idle that they were able to nurture their creativity and become known as brilliant men. And so seeing, they became proponents of idleness, both because they saw the benefit for creative minds, but also because they did not the consequence of idleness for the vast majority or people (nor how the idleness of the oppressed masses would — in the end — rob them of their own (profitable) leisure time.

jhbadger 5y ago

Although this ignores how important minor improvements are. It's easy to assume that only Nobel Laureates and the like are important without realizing that they depend on hundreds or thousands of minor scientists who make the discoveries needed for the big ones.

50 5y ago

Connected maybe to the excerpt you mentioned, here is this excerpt (hopefully not too nihilistic or pessimistic) from E.M. Cioran - who seems to have become so apparent to me this past year - and his aphorism-filled, philosophical book titled The Trouble With Being Born: "A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

Phenomenit 5y ago
I'm so happy that I got introduced to Emile Cioran by Stephen Wests podcast. No philosopher or idea has more clearly expressed what I've been feeling and thinking about. But alas talking about nihilism is pointless so there's not much more to say.
- rramadass 5y ago
  >talking about nihilism is pointless No. It is by Talking and Thinking about it that we are forced to face Reality. This leads to true "Enlightenment" and allows us to develop our own unique path to a "Philosophy of Life". I think of Nihilism as the backdrop against which we paint our chosen "Schools of Philosophy". One needs to be very aware of this important difference. IMO, it is better to live with Unpleasant Reality than Pleasant Fancy. The following passage from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London nicely illustrates this dichotomy; === As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into it. “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.” He shook his head slowly, pondering. “I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.” He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added: “It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.” “Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed. “Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.” “Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution. “More freely, because it costs you nothing.” “And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted. “Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.” === PS: You might find the book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia interesting.

Angostura 5y ago

> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. ... but would they? Or would they keep scrolling down interminably. I know I'd like to think I would go back to school.

kubb 5y ago
Yes, I would.
perfunctory 5y ago
Russell's essay has the answer: > The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
paulcole 5y ago
I wouldn’t! There’s never been anything in my life that I’ve been as passionate about as doing nothing.

beebmam 5y ago

Why does "the media" care at all about anti-work? Wouldn't not working be GOOD for media companies, with more time to consume media? I really don't follow what you said there

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
They're ad funded. You need the proles working to buy their circus tickets.

jstx1 5y ago

> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials. I don't know, my impression of antiwork is only through seeing some posts from the subreddit on the reddit front page. It comes across as "anti-my-job-specifically" or "I have problems at work so nobody should work" or "inequality exists so I shouldn't work". I really don't get the point of the whole thing. It's understandable that people will take the opportunity to complain about stuff but the overwhelming majority of those people aren't Bertrand Russell, not even close. It's a group of people who have found an audience to complain to - they have real problems but they're coming to all sorts of stupid conclusions fueled by groupthink.

johnwayne666 5y ago
The antiwork subreddit is now too popular and the signal to noise ratio has therefore dropped sharply. If you want to have some impression of why work can be criticized, In Praise of Idleness is much more interesting.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
helpfulmandrill 5y ago
It's a bit like Feminist consciousness-raising in the 60s and 70s. Women started getting together and realising "my problems are not specific to me, my family, my marriage. We're all experiencing the same sorts of things."
an_ko 5y ago
I recommend ignoring everything on the front page of Reddit or at most treating it strictly as entertainment. Stuff only gets up there if a large group of people understand it and like it, which means almost all "discussion" that gets up there are one-sided rants that lots of people wanted to hear. A global popularity contest is a game of numbers that doesn't favour subtle goods like truth or intellectual challenge.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> it's honestly just like an abusive relationship Yes. I'd go even further and say it's just another form of slavery. The lash just happens to be economic in nature rather than physical. Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.

skrebbel 5y ago
In my opinion, this is an uncreative misuse of the term "slavery". Words have meanings, and slavery doesn't mean "someone with a shitty job", it means "someone who is fully owned by someone else". I recognize that you're just trying to further a leftist "boo companies" narrative, but even if your employer treats you badly and you're hard pressed to imagine an alternative job, your employer does not own you and you are more free in your choices than any slave has ever been. I recognize that there are jobs that are modern slavery (eg banana plantations), but I don't think that's the kinds of jobs this threat is about. The context is tech employees, or even amazon warehouse workers etc, and even when those are bad, it's not slavery.
- Fricken 5y ago
  We don't fully own people anymore, we just lease them for a while. That way ensuring they are provided the necessities of life becomes some else's problem. Less liability.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    The Yes Men pointed this out explicitly in their presentation to the WTO on Leisure Wear for Managers of the Future. The golden penis suit was just the cherry on top. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuzVMwsK7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuzVMwsK7o
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    So you prefer owning people? Or you just object to work? It's not clear what you are advocating for. We live in a world where people need three square meals a day, they want heating and transportation and energy, and other people have to work every day to provide those services. It seems a bit entitled to be moaning about the fact that one must work to survive in life -- that's kind of how this whole life thing works.

bloqs 5y ago

The Anti work movement seems mostly driven by US "unreasonablism" in the work place. 1 week holiday, unreasonable manager overreach, politics over competence, unworkable financial pressures on everyday people like medical and student debt etc. Shit is fucked, yo.

bloqs 5y ago

overlordalex 5y ago
It's actually worse than that in the US. NO mandated vacation time (not even public holidays), no paid maternity leave, at-will employment, minimal labour laws, minimal consumer protections, etc.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lelanthran 5y ago

> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials. Maybe not, but the majority of anti-work sentiment I see is coming from people who are clear that they are freeloaders, and aren't ashamed of the fact. Also, you're really cherry-picking the data when you grab two outliers (in terms of brilliance) as support for your argument, and ignore the rest of the high-performance people throughout history. As a percentage of brilliant people (using whatever bar you have for 'brilliance') how many espouse the same sentiment? Not that I agree or disagree with the actual sentiment, I just don't find it convincing when an argument has to cherrypick datapoints in order to work. Trying to convince using absolute numbers and not providing percentages is pointless. We need to know what the denominator is (samples meeting the criteria/total number of samples).

lordnacho 5y ago
Sure but there's a lot of social pressure to say to everyone that you had to work hard to get where you are, because of the society we live in. The data you're really after is how many people actually think that. Depending on your prior you might consider that even if a tiny number of brilliant people were to go for the Buckminster Fuller line, perhaps many actually think it. Government mandated FMRI scanners aren't that far off so we'll see soon.
rambambram 5y ago
Did you read the piece?
- maest 5y ago
  From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
  - rambambram 5y ago

denton-scratch 5y ago

When I was a kid, I supposed that robots and automation would make drudgery obsolete, and people would only work if they wanted to. Increasing productivity would mean that everyone had access to the necessities of life, and even some of the luxuries. How wrong I was. Sure, the robots and the automation turned up, as I had anticipated; but the benefits were taken as profits by corporations, and people didn't gain any leisure time at all. I think we were all betrayed. I wonder to what extent my opinions as a kid were formed by finding In Praise Of Idleness on my mother's bookshelf.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Adam Curtis's short documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" explores this idea beautifully, and where we went wrong.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  That is a remarkable documentary.

refurb 5y ago

It’s all about improving quality of life. If we all are satisfied with living like they did in the early 1800’s, we could do it right now and nobody works. Of course you’ll die of a bacterial infection, but otherwise…

Nevermark 5y ago
I doubt very much that nobody would work, or that progress would stop. I would expect the opposite as creative people who wished, were able to invest time prior to profitability as never before. Given how one of the "Great Filters" of startups is reaching "Ramen Profitability", I imagine in today's age progress would happen much faster. We could all be Ramen Profitable, or very close to it, for any venture that can start small.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
Or people in the US could be allowed to work the same amount as people in other Western democracies. The work cultures in Japan and South Korea seem even more toxic and unpleasant in their embrace of overwork. It is very unlikely that people moving to a four day work week would be less productive. The current number of people working 50 and 60 hours a week while millions are homeless is a scathing critique on how much we have failed to use work for productivity and as a tool to benefit society as a whole.

andrekandre 5y ago

> We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. its like the thesis of bulls*t jobs right there in the simplest of terms...

Perizors 5y ago

The thing I wanted to do was science. I did a bachelor's and recently finished a master's in ecology (academic, I am not in the US). However, I was constantly anxious and in financial distress because, well, academia is not really financially stable and I do not have anyone to fall back to. So I decided to move into programming because it pays better and the job is, in comparison to academia, financially more stable so you won't run out of funds in a couple of years. The thing is I really like programming and tinkering with computers (it was a big part of my masters) so it is a job I really like doing. However, there was something in research that made my mind itches when you got to follow your own questions and get a glimpse of an animals' life. In the end, I am still torn out a bit about wanting to go back to academia or pursuing other career paths and I tough it resonated with your quote.

boppo1 5y ago

I blame the federal reserve's 'maximum employment mandate'. It is official economic policy to sacrifice price discovery, i.e. efficiency, to make sure there's work for people.

diordiderot 5y ago
This would be a really good take in a world where there was an all powerful benevolent dictator
- boppo1 5y ago
  I don't understand what you mean. My argument was along the lines of: - Fed buys bonds to keep yields low - Inefficient businesses are then able to secure funding at lower than 'natural' rates and stay afloat - It takes more effort than necessary to produce the goods and services society needs - But also there are more jobs, so the mandate is met Also, simultaneously: - Fed buys bonds to keep yields low - A. increases the quantity of savings=investment dollars demanding a return - B. lowers denominator in DCF valuations - A & B apply dual pressure causing financial assets grow in price disproportionate to the amount of products & services provided to society (measured in cash flows) - people who get paid a salary get priced out of economic ownership - people who already hold claims on cash flows get "wealthier on paper" even though goods & services for society have not increased Am I missing something? Because these arguments seem to me to explain, in pretty simple terms,the world as I observe it.

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

>I made a comment to a friend tonight about how odd it is that workplaces seem to be acting irrationally The current workplace is manifestation of a deeper problem, IMO a lack of a relative free market when it comes to housing. Most people work as hard as they have to because the cost of housing is very high, by an artificially induced scarcity in most places.

fijiaarone 5y ago

“ Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men” Actually, it is because of their status and the opportunity to be idle that they were able to nurture their creativity and become known as brilliant men. And so seeing, they became proponents of idleness, both because they saw the benefit for creative minds, but also because they did not the consequence of idleness for the vast majority or people (nor how the idleness of the oppressed masses would — in the end — rob them of their own (profitable) leisure time.