4 ms·

If you spend your time around artists and engineers you might think that freeing people from their jobs will lead to a modern-day Italian Renaissance but if you

If you spend your time around artists and engineers you might think that freeing people from their jobs will lead to a modern-day Italian Renaissance but if you knew the people I knew growing up you’d realize that the need to go to work is the only thing keeping them from being even more violently alcoholic than they already are.

prepend 4y ago
Brave New World addressed this by classifying members of society into “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” etc. The lower classes just worked and took drugs (soma) so they could withstand working. Of course Huxley was writing sci-fi but it does fit into human nature of kind or messing around if possible. Look at chimps… they basically just gather food, sex, and lounge about. We aren’t too far evolved from chimps.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Huxley's Island is his counter-point to the world of BNW. In it they take drugs for enlightenment. He creates a society inspired by Confucian meditation as well as through the economic lens of Henry George. Henry George advocated for a UBI(what he called citizen's dividend) funded through the taxation of land values. I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.

4 ms·

If you spend your time around artists and engineers you might think that freeing people from their jobs will lead to a modern-day Italian Renaissance but if you

by spoonjim 4y ago

prepend 4y ago
Brave New World addressed this by classifying members of society into “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” etc. The lower classes just worked and took drugs (soma) so they could withstand working. Of course Huxley was writing sci-fi but it does fit into human nature of kind or messing around if possible. Look at chimps… they basically just gather food, sex, and lounge about. We aren’t too far evolved from chimps.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Huxley's Island is his counter-point to the world of BNW. In it they take drugs for enlightenment. He creates a society inspired by Confucian meditation as well as through the economic lens of Henry George. Henry George advocated for a UBI(what he called citizen's dividend) funded through the taxation of land values. I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.