4 ms·

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP and is considered beneficial, even flower arranging and witchcraft accessories and cloud-connected sneakers. Somehow that assessment ends up being correct, because nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit.

quacked 1y ago
I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%. I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..." If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.
- card_zero 1y ago
  I'm trying to imagine the chain in reverse order, and without reference to money but just to things people want. So Pfizer has this idea to organize people to make more medicines. But this is slightly risky, because it's not a shoe-in that people want more medicines. So they need permission, and lenders can grant that, but only if the lenders' other, um, projects have been successful recently, which equates to "consumer confidence", and that is due to millions of flower arrangers (or equivalently frivolous businesses) successfully pleasing flower-likers. It seems to amount to: if people are generally making one another happy in small silly ways, they have the courage and imagination necessary to try doing bigger stuff. If not, they're all like "I didn't even get to see any pretty flowers this week, I'm in survival mode now", which means they aren't throwing much permission to do stuff (money) around, and consequently there's no will to try anything, and that's a depression. I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity. We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads. We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.) But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things. Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted. Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight. Many of these things are impossible to unwind.
jerlam 1y ago
In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity. But these costs are basically taxes in a different form. There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy. I'd reframe that as people don't want to pay for an appliance that lasts forever. There are exceptions. Things built for professional use are of a much higher quality. For example, restaurant grade kitchen equipment and appliances are far more durable than consumer ones. Of course, they cost quite a bit more, too.
WalterBright 1y ago
> people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul. One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.
- shigawire 1y ago
  You seem to think your experience is universal.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Scratch the surface, and people are the same. There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately. But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren't in heaven, you're in hell. Be careful what you wish for.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      I wish at least to be protected by the army in some disastrous circumstances, I think. Pathetic or not.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        My dad told me that during WW2, if a young man was walking down the street in street clothes (rather than in uniform) he'd be spat on.
sunrunner 1y ago
> nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive. Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather: "Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."
- card_zero 1y ago
  Yes, but you can see this both ways. You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing - or growing, or exploring, which are a couple of other values. Learning. If we have this idea of purpose, why not attach it to some candidate quest or value? What's wrong with recursion anyway? Too meaningless to be your goal? You must have higher ideas of purpose, then. People have a ton of different values, but a lot of general agreement, because this is some knowledge about reality, moral knowledge, a work in progress.
  - sunrunner 1y ago
    > You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing I really like this angle and do find my own solace in this approach, but I've never quite been able to convince myself that it's not essentially just an artificial or manufactured purpose. Which is fine. It's useful for my own goals and personal growth. But it still feels like a very localised view. If there is some kind of global maxima, I certainly haven't heard about it yet.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      I worried about the ultimate purpose for years and years, and people would offer me unsatisfactory answers like "the point is, there is no point". But in the end I just looked up a long list of commonly held values, and thought: OK, so I don't agree with all of it, and what I'm left with is an incoherent laundry list of values, and the overview of the whole thing is very impressionistic, but fair enough. Got to be Popperian about it: we're guessing, badly, and trying gradually to do better. The point is, there are several vague points.

quacked 1y ago

I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%. I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..." If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.

card_zero 1y ago
I'm trying to imagine the chain in reverse order, and without reference to money but just to things people want. So Pfizer has this idea to organize people to make more medicines. But this is slightly risky, because it's not a shoe-in that people want more medicines. So they need permission, and lenders can grant that, but only if the lenders' other, um, projects have been successful recently, which equates to "consumer confidence", and that is due to millions of flower arrangers (or equivalently frivolous businesses) successfully pleasing flower-likers. It seems to amount to: if people are generally making one another happy in small silly ways, they have the courage and imagination necessary to try doing bigger stuff. If not, they're all like "I didn't even get to see any pretty flowers this week, I'm in survival mode now", which means they aren't throwing much permission to do stuff (money) around, and consequently there's no will to try anything, and that's a depression. I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity. We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads. We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.) But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things. Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted. Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight. Many of these things are impossible to unwind.

jerlam 1y ago

In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity. But these costs are basically taxes in a different form. There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

WalterBright 1y ago
> in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy. I'd reframe that as people don't want to pay for an appliance that lasts forever. There are exceptions. Things built for professional use are of a much higher quality. For example, restaurant grade kitchen equipment and appliances are far more durable than consumer ones. Of course, they cost quite a bit more, too.

WalterBright 1y ago

> people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul. One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.

shigawire 1y ago
You seem to think your experience is universal.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Scratch the surface, and people are the same. There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately. But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren't in heaven, you're in hell. Be careful what you wish for.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    I wish at least to be protected by the army in some disastrous circumstances, I think. Pathetic or not.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      My dad told me that during WW2, if a young man was walking down the street in street clothes (rather than in uniform) he'd be spat on.

sunrunner 1y ago

> nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive. Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather: "Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

card_zero 1y ago
Yes, but you can see this both ways. You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing - or growing, or exploring, which are a couple of other values. Learning. If we have this idea of purpose, why not attach it to some candidate quest or value? What's wrong with recursion anyway? Too meaningless to be your goal? You must have higher ideas of purpose, then. People have a ton of different values, but a lot of general agreement, because this is some knowledge about reality, moral knowledge, a work in progress.
- sunrunner 1y ago
  > You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing I really like this angle and do find my own solace in this approach, but I've never quite been able to convince myself that it's not essentially just an artificial or manufactured purpose. Which is fine. It's useful for my own goals and personal growth. But it still feels like a very localised view. If there is some kind of global maxima, I certainly haven't heard about it yet.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    I worried about the ultimate purpose for years and years, and people would offer me unsatisfactory answers like "the point is, there is no point". But in the end I just looked up a long list of commonly held values, and thought: OK, so I don't agree with all of it, and what I'm left with is an incoherent laundry list of values, and the overview of the whole thing is very impressionistic, but fair enough. Got to be Popperian about it: we're guessing, badly, and trying gradually to do better. The point is, there are several vague points.