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This is a pretty weird take. Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-

This is a pretty weird take. Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults, “Social predators” be damned.

_yb2s 4y ago
Robin Hanson is the king of “pretty weird takes,” that is kind of the point of this blog
- jefftk 4y ago
  I interpreted mdorazio as politely saying "clearly wrong", which is not what Hanson is trying to do.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    I think that's nearly the same thing, and in part related to what Robin is talking about in the article- people think they already have the answers, and talking about a weird idea is socially unacceptable, and automatically rejected as nonsense. This dynamic serves to lower the social status of the person proposing the weird idea, motivating them to keep quiet next time. I am not familiar with all of Robin Hanson's work, but I have seen two other such cases that really stand out in my memory: -He advocated for intentional covid-19 exposure as "variolation" before a vaccine was developed, suggesting this would save lives -His book "The Elephant in the Brain" explains why virtually all of the supposed motives of people in public culture are dishonest, and the real motives are hidden, even from ourselves - and are mostly all about maneuvering for social status A quote from Tyler Cowen on his wikipedia page: Robin has strange ideas ... My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
Could be both. If I did not need to get along with everyone at work, I could be more lively, even without quitting my job.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Agreed that Job, Mortgage, Kids are a powerful normalizer in many places in the world. (note, my 2 cents: It's not strictly "Adulthood". My wife and I settled "late" in our lives, so we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things - vs now in our 40's that we have two young kids, full time management jobs, mortgage and expenses. This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are legitimately one to two orders of magnitude different) That being said, I think the blog has an interesting perspective about social normalization overall. Whatever one's inherent personal level of "interesting and exciting and weird" may be, there may be significant social pressure of various kinds to minimize it externally. And FWIW, I think it works to different magnitudes in different places and times: in my old country, especially a few decades ago, adults did NOT try new things, and did NOT do exciting things. I love Canada because I can try all these crazy new things and hobbies and activities and suck at them, and average Canadian will still say "Good on YOU! Have fun!:)". Whereas in my old country people would gossip "Who is he trying to BE? He's a [Doctor|Teacher|Programmer|Manager|Whatever] for god's sake, he shouldn't be doing things like that!". You would be judged very harshly with tremendous peer-group pressure to stay in pre-defined zones of your station and lot. Heck, my mom, against all social norms learned to ride a bike when she was 38 in the old country and she was oh my god chastised and judged for that, which feels ridiculous from Canadian perspective.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  What were some of those little experiments you did?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things What you describe isn’t common for people who haven’t “settled” or who don’t have 40 hour per week jobs. That extreme level of hobbies and activity, some of which aren’t cheap, would be an outlier for people in your position. > This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are one or two orders of magnitude different. As a counter example, I watched a number of my friends slide into complacency in their lates 20s and early 30s despite having very easy jobs. I can think of several people who worked remote or for family businesses and did little more than a couple of hours of “work” per day from their phones, yet that didn’t automatically translate into a diverse and outgoing lifestyle. It seems to translate more often to a complacency and inactivity. Having kids was the catalyst for forcing these people to be active again. They now go out and do things, whether it’s going outside to go to the park or going on a mini-adventure somewhere because their kids are bored The idea that “kids make you boring” hasn’t been true in the people I know. It’s true that kids change what you can do with your time, but it’s anything but boring. Getting out of the house and doing social activities with other kids/parents really opens a whole new world of activity and engagement, even if it doesn’t mean dragon boat racing every weekend.
randomdata 4y ago
Couldn't you say that conformity necessity is the result of the "social predators", though? Your employer shouldn't need to care that you choose to shout crackpot theories from the rooftops. They do, but only because they don't want to catch the scrutiny by association. Further, retirees should be freed from that conformity need, yet still seem every bit as boring – if not more so.
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  60+ years of conformity shapes your brain permanently for most people.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  No. I don't understand why this social predators thing is even a hypothesis; it seems totally unfounded to me. This essay starts from a what-if and then bounds forward with great leaps of logic...
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Suggesting that people are inherently boring and don't conform out of social pressure but rather the random chance of evolution?
    - bilbo0s 4y ago
      Wow. This one got me thinking too. What if "boring" social groupings have proven more stable over time than "lively and outraged" social groupings? Would evolutionary pressures start shaping our social structures over the millennia? I mean, I think probably they would right?
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    I think social predators are very real today. That is very much what "cancel culture" is. Its people acting as bandits to those who have violated the "SACRED" whatever and they shout from the mountain tops to bring down whoever has transgressed. They even intentionally ping your employer to bring you down, attacking the very reason so many of us must lead boring lives.
nluken 4y ago
There's a 19th century German philosopher that would agree with you (as would I): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#From_their_Gattungswesen_(species-essence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. A full-time job and adult responsibilities still leave plenty of time to be “not boring” for people who make an effort to manage their time. Many jobs also provide an opportunity for social exposure, get people out of the house (or at least out of their comfort zone and interacting with others remotely). I suspect a lot of people would actually become less socialized and outgoing if they didn’t have the structure of a job to make them adopt routine and discipline in their lives. > I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults The only remotely feasible UBI programs wouldn’t be supplying enough money for people to go out and live their best lives. It’s more of a subsistence amount of money. In a theoretical world where large numbers of people received significant amounts of money and didn’t have to work, we wouldn’t all be going around doing leisure activities everywhere. The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done, which would require significantly higher labor costs to make up for the decreased supply of labor. This would make everything more expensive, which means people would have to go back and get jobs if they wanted to have enough funds to do the “interesting” things beyond subsistence living on UBI. It’s a common fantasy that removing the 40 hours per week of work would cause individuals to suddenly become more outgoing, adventurous, and interesting, but if people aren’t already doing those interesting and outgoing things on the weekends then I don’t think they’d suddenly start doing more of them with the job removed.
- chii 4y ago
  > The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done the magic that UBI proponents bank on is automation and increased productivity of the remaining workers. And also taxing the wealthy.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    Right. It’s more of a fantasy where they don’t have to give up any of the things they enjoy about the world we inhabit, but the things they don’t enjoy (paying money and doing work) are shifted to the rich and robots.
xwdv 4y ago
Yup, the most interesting people I know also happen to be well off or rich and have time for eccentric hobbies.
mynegation 4y ago
I am pretty sure Hanson is talking about a subset of people and organizations that are vocal: i.e. they have something to say, or have to say something (e.g. issue a press release or they are journalists etc), and positions they have to take. As for UBI - you might be right, but that depends on how truly "universal" it is. If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest".
- __derek__ 4y ago
  > If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest". This is true. Personally, it's hard to imagine the public supporting a UBI scheme that extends to ex-convicts, let alone the imprisoned. Ditto undocumented immigrants.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  If UBI is conditional than it is not UBI. The 'U' stands for 'Universal'.
aaroninsf 4y ago
A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs, very much to the liking of and very useful for the so-called 1%. If you aren't aware, since 1971 the US reversed post-WWII decade of increasing widespread prosperity during which gains in GDP and hence quality of life were relatively equitably shared across wealth-holders and wage-earners, and social mobility was on the rise. Access to high-quality health care, home ownership, and world-class education was understood increasingly as a goal and staple of a growing middle-class—and that often in the context of single earner households. In the last 50 years that story has changed profoundly for the worst. Why? Because the top 10% and most of all the top few % of wealth-holders found their (already biggest) part of the pie not big enough, and they have systematically and very effectively eviscerated the middle class and social mobility, producing not just lives of economic desperation and despair, barriers to stability security prosperity health and happiness, but deep political unrest. Why is the (class) enemy not known to the masses? Because this same period saw an intentional program of consolidated media ownership and the undoing of provisions for fair-and-balanced reporting, and the cooption even of national media like NPR and PBS, and the quiet acquisition of nominally "left" leaning bastions like the NYT and now CNN. Media market consolidation and the founding of FOX were literally, openly, intended to steer the discontent of the disenfranchised and increasingly desperate into tribal nationalist (and racist) action, rather than labor and class mobilization. Seriously, if you aren't familiar with the ways in which wealth has been consolidated since especially Reagan, it's not hard to find. So to with correlated numbers on social mobility, media consolidation, percentage of full-time wage earners, etc ad nauseum. This is not "Socialism 101," it's American history many of us have lived. Things could be drastically better, but we are right f---d now because wealth consolidation is now so total that both government and the media have been all but entirely captured. There is no conspiracy, there is just the aggregated impact of decades of venal self-serving manipulation by wealth of the mechanisms whereby wealth is secured and its accumulation accelerated. 99% of those who played a part believed in good faith they were merely acting according to their self-interest, as "anyone would." Anyone but the 90%+ of us being turned into miserable "boring" adults apparently. Me? I'm part of the precariate, the 10% of white collar wage earners being brought to heel (so we read) by corporate masters discomforted by too much intrusion into the sacred space of the managerial 1% capital class—like most of you reading this. We are part of the problem. We are the anxious halo around the truly rich, deeply enamored of and deeply dependent on our meager bag of formerly middle-class lifestyle affordances, like access to decent health care, decent education, and a modest amount of leisure. I like you am in no way interested in losing those things. I am interested instead of returning our society to one in which such things are vastly more commonly shared. The problem is NOT wealth to support this. It's there. We just have smarmy self-satisfied very old white men sneering at the notion that the bounty is to be shared. You know what's an X factor? The fascism lite and racist nationalism those men have unleashed, believing a seething mob of enraged deluded conspiracy theorists serve as useful shock troops... ...it may bring down the whole house. They're going to bring it down it all down one way or another—if not with civil war lite, with the slow burn of climate change bred massive upheaval courting logistic collapse. Don't forget the empty shelves and hoarding of the early pandemic, the stuck cargo chips, or if you have slightly longer memory, the unavailability of hard drives after Thailand flooded. So yeah. UBI? Bring it ASAP and remember: the enemy is above.
musicale 4y ago
> boringness comes from adults having to… make a living Companies want boring robots, and schools produce them. They're driven by efficiency reasons - narrow specialization can improve performance on a narrow range of tasks, but increases boredom. Working at your own business, while perhaps more interesting, still constrains many of your working hours to specific activities. Humans are so much more capable, but generally the working world isn't structured to support human creativity and potential.

_yb2s 4y ago

Robin Hanson is the king of “pretty weird takes,” that is kind of the point of this blog

jefftk 4y ago
I interpreted mdorazio as politely saying "clearly wrong", which is not what Hanson is trying to do.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  I think that's nearly the same thing, and in part related to what Robin is talking about in the article- people think they already have the answers, and talking about a weird idea is socially unacceptable, and automatically rejected as nonsense. This dynamic serves to lower the social status of the person proposing the weird idea, motivating them to keep quiet next time. I am not familiar with all of Robin Hanson's work, but I have seen two other such cases that really stand out in my memory: -He advocated for intentional covid-19 exposure as "variolation" before a vaccine was developed, suggesting this would save lives -His book "The Elephant in the Brain" explains why virtually all of the supposed motives of people in public culture are dishonest, and the real motives are hidden, even from ourselves - and are mostly all about maneuvering for social status A quote from Tyler Cowen on his wikipedia page: Robin has strange ideas ... My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."

ReactiveJelly 4y ago

Could be both. If I did not need to get along with everyone at work, I could be more lively, even without quitting my job.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Agreed that Job, Mortgage, Kids are a powerful normalizer in many places in the world. (note, my 2 cents: It's not strictly "Adulthood". My wife and I settled "late" in our lives, so we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things - vs now in our 40's that we have two young kids, full time management jobs, mortgage and expenses. This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are legitimately one to two orders of magnitude different) That being said, I think the blog has an interesting perspective about social normalization overall. Whatever one's inherent personal level of "interesting and exciting and weird" may be, there may be significant social pressure of various kinds to minimize it externally. And FWIW, I think it works to different magnitudes in different places and times: in my old country, especially a few decades ago, adults did NOT try new things, and did NOT do exciting things. I love Canada because I can try all these crazy new things and hobbies and activities and suck at them, and average Canadian will still say "Good on YOU! Have fun!:)". Whereas in my old country people would gossip "Who is he trying to BE? He's a [Doctor|Teacher|Programmer|Manager|Whatever] for god's sake, he shouldn't be doing things like that!". You would be judged very harshly with tremendous peer-group pressure to stay in pre-defined zones of your station and lot. Heck, my mom, against all social norms learned to ride a bike when she was 38 in the old country and she was oh my god chastised and judged for that, which feels ridiculous from Canadian perspective.

altdataseller 4y ago
What were some of those little experiments you did?
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things What you describe isn’t common for people who haven’t “settled” or who don’t have 40 hour per week jobs. That extreme level of hobbies and activity, some of which aren’t cheap, would be an outlier for people in your position. > This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are one or two orders of magnitude different. As a counter example, I watched a number of my friends slide into complacency in their lates 20s and early 30s despite having very easy jobs. I can think of several people who worked remote or for family businesses and did little more than a couple of hours of “work” per day from their phones, yet that didn’t automatically translate into a diverse and outgoing lifestyle. It seems to translate more often to a complacency and inactivity. Having kids was the catalyst for forcing these people to be active again. They now go out and do things, whether it’s going outside to go to the park or going on a mini-adventure somewhere because their kids are bored The idea that “kids make you boring” hasn’t been true in the people I know. It’s true that kids change what you can do with your time, but it’s anything but boring. Getting out of the house and doing social activities with other kids/parents really opens a whole new world of activity and engagement, even if it doesn’t mean dragon boat racing every weekend.

randomdata 4y ago

Couldn't you say that conformity necessity is the result of the "social predators", though? Your employer shouldn't need to care that you choose to shout crackpot theories from the rooftops. They do, but only because they don't want to catch the scrutiny by association. Further, retirees should be freed from that conformity need, yet still seem every bit as boring – if not more so.

jakeinspace 4y ago
60+ years of conformity shapes your brain permanently for most people.
sdenton4 4y ago
No. I don't understand why this social predators thing is even a hypothesis; it seems totally unfounded to me. This essay starts from a what-if and then bounds forward with great leaps of logic...
- randomdata 4y ago
  Suggesting that people are inherently boring and don't conform out of social pressure but rather the random chance of evolution?
  - bilbo0s 4y ago
    Wow. This one got me thinking too. What if "boring" social groupings have proven more stable over time than "lively and outraged" social groupings? Would evolutionary pressures start shaping our social structures over the millennia? I mean, I think probably they would right?
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  I think social predators are very real today. That is very much what "cancel culture" is. Its people acting as bandits to those who have violated the "SACRED" whatever and they shout from the mountain tops to bring down whoever has transgressed. They even intentionally ping your employer to bring you down, attacking the very reason so many of us must lead boring lives.

nluken 4y ago

There's a 19th century German philosopher that would agree with you (as would I): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#From_their_Gattungswesen_(species-essence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. A full-time job and adult responsibilities still leave plenty of time to be “not boring” for people who make an effort to manage their time. Many jobs also provide an opportunity for social exposure, get people out of the house (or at least out of their comfort zone and interacting with others remotely). I suspect a lot of people would actually become less socialized and outgoing if they didn’t have the structure of a job to make them adopt routine and discipline in their lives. > I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults The only remotely feasible UBI programs wouldn’t be supplying enough money for people to go out and live their best lives. It’s more of a subsistence amount of money. In a theoretical world where large numbers of people received significant amounts of money and didn’t have to work, we wouldn’t all be going around doing leisure activities everywhere. The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done, which would require significantly higher labor costs to make up for the decreased supply of labor. This would make everything more expensive, which means people would have to go back and get jobs if they wanted to have enough funds to do the “interesting” things beyond subsistence living on UBI. It’s a common fantasy that removing the 40 hours per week of work would cause individuals to suddenly become more outgoing, adventurous, and interesting, but if people aren’t already doing those interesting and outgoing things on the weekends then I don’t think they’d suddenly start doing more of them with the job removed.

chii 4y ago
> The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done the magic that UBI proponents bank on is automation and increased productivity of the remaining workers. And also taxing the wealthy.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Right. It’s more of a fantasy where they don’t have to give up any of the things they enjoy about the world we inhabit, but the things they don’t enjoy (paying money and doing work) are shifted to the rich and robots.

xwdv 4y ago

Yup, the most interesting people I know also happen to be well off or rich and have time for eccentric hobbies.

mynegation 4y ago

I am pretty sure Hanson is talking about a subset of people and organizations that are vocal: i.e. they have something to say, or have to say something (e.g. issue a press release or they are journalists etc), and positions they have to take. As for UBI - you might be right, but that depends on how truly "universal" it is. If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest".

__derek__ 4y ago
> If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest". This is true. Personally, it's hard to imagine the public supporting a UBI scheme that extends to ex-convicts, let alone the imprisoned. Ditto undocumented immigrants.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
If UBI is conditional than it is not UBI. The 'U' stands for 'Universal'.

aaroninsf 4y ago

A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs, very much to the liking of and very useful for the so-called 1%. If you aren't aware, since 1971 the US reversed post-WWII decade of increasing widespread prosperity during which gains in GDP and hence quality of life were relatively equitably shared across wealth-holders and wage-earners, and social mobility was on the rise. Access to high-quality health care, home ownership, and world-class education was understood increasingly as a goal and staple of a growing middle-class—and that often in the context of single earner households. In the last 50 years that story has changed profoundly for the worst. Why? Because the top 10% and most of all the top few % of wealth-holders found their (already biggest) part of the pie not big enough, and they have systematically and very effectively eviscerated the middle class and social mobility, producing not just lives of economic desperation and despair, barriers to stability security prosperity health and happiness, but deep political unrest. Why is the (class) enemy not known to the masses? Because this same period saw an intentional program of consolidated media ownership and the undoing of provisions for fair-and-balanced reporting, and the cooption even of national media like NPR and PBS, and the quiet acquisition of nominally "left" leaning bastions like the NYT and now CNN. Media market consolidation and the founding of FOX were literally, openly, intended to steer the discontent of the disenfranchised and increasingly desperate into tribal nationalist (and racist) action, rather than labor and class mobilization. Seriously, if you aren't familiar with the ways in which wealth has been consolidated since especially Reagan, it's not hard to find. So to with correlated numbers on social mobility, media consolidation, percentage of full-time wage earners, etc ad nauseum. This is not "Socialism 101," it's American history many of us have lived. Things could be drastically better, but we are right f---d now because wealth consolidation is now so total that both government and the media have been all but entirely captured. There is no conspiracy, there is just the aggregated impact of decades of venal self-serving manipulation by wealth of the mechanisms whereby wealth is secured and its accumulation accelerated. 99% of those who played a part believed in good faith they were merely acting according to their self-interest, as "anyone would." Anyone but the 90%+ of us being turned into miserable "boring" adults apparently. Me? I'm part of the precariate, the 10% of white collar wage earners being brought to heel (so we read) by corporate masters discomforted by too much intrusion into the sacred space of the managerial 1% capital class—like most of you reading this. We are part of the problem. We are the anxious halo around the truly rich, deeply enamored of and deeply dependent on our meager bag of formerly middle-class lifestyle affordances, like access to decent health care, decent education, and a modest amount of leisure. I like you am in no way interested in losing those things. I am interested instead of returning our society to one in which such things are vastly more commonly shared. The problem is NOT wealth to support this. It's there. We just have smarmy self-satisfied very old white men sneering at the notion that the bounty is to be shared. You know what's an X factor? The fascism lite and racist nationalism those men have unleashed, believing a seething mob of enraged deluded conspiracy theorists serve as useful shock troops... ...it may bring down the whole house. They're going to bring it down it all down one way or another—if not with civil war lite, with the slow burn of climate change bred massive upheaval courting logistic collapse. Don't forget the empty shelves and hoarding of the early pandemic, the stuck cargo chips, or if you have slightly longer memory, the unavailability of hard drives after Thailand flooded. So yeah. UBI? Bring it ASAP and remember: the enemy is above.

musicale 4y ago

> boringness comes from adults having to… make a living Companies want boring robots, and schools produce them. They're driven by efficiency reasons - narrow specialization can improve performance on a narrow range of tasks, but increases boredom. Working at your own business, while perhaps more interesting, still constrains many of your working hours to specific activities. Humans are so much more capable, but generally the working world isn't structured to support human creativity and potential.