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That's why I have high hopes for humanity once we get closer to post scarcity (if we ever get close). Sure..some people will just watch TV all day, but I'd expe

That's why I have high hopes for humanity once we get closer to post scarcity (if we ever get close). Sure..some people will just watch TV all day, but I'd expect I'd start sitting down with math books and eventually finally learn the stuff I never had the time for when trying to put food on the table. The rich person life back in the day was having personal tutors at a young age teaching you Latin, Greek, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and so on. Then if you were really good you'd just work on whatever problems you fancied, while the rest of the family probably took care of the fortune. That's my very limited understanding for how it worked for some anyway. They would correspond with other scientists, but mostly focus on their work. There's some advantage to the university system, but the administrative beauracracy is intense. Writing government grants or proposals and so on is an enormous time suck. If you didn't need money, you could focus 100% on whatever you want.

godelski 3y ago
I love sitting down an reading math books. Problem is, it's hard to do after a long day's work where I've been exercising my brain a lot. Especially when I have far more important and time sensitive things to do like cooking, eating, and cleaning up the messes I've made in the day. Sure, that doesn't take all the time, but between that and some time to be human, there's often not enough time + energy left. I think it is clear why so many people get so much knowledge when they're in school. Because your job is to learn. Why you can do so much in a PhD (sometimes, maybe not the best example) because you spend all day doing this. Now just imagine what OSS projects would be if people were doing it full time and not in addition to their jobs? Would the xz incident have happened? Would xz only have "two" maintainers?

godelski 3y ago

I love sitting down an reading math books. Problem is, it's hard to do after a long day's work where I've been exercising my brain a lot. Especially when I have far more important and time sensitive things to do like cooking, eating, and cleaning up the messes I've made in the day. Sure, that doesn't take all the time, but between that and some time to be human, there's often not enough time + energy left. I think it is clear why so many people get so much knowledge when they're in school. Because your job is to learn. Why you can do so much in a PhD (sometimes, maybe not the best example) because you spend all day doing this. Now just imagine what OSS projects would be if people were doing it full time and not in addition to their jobs? Would the xz incident have happened? Would xz only have "two" maintainers?