9 ms·

Chomsky: Work, Learning and Freedom

122 points by robdoherty2 14y ago

jpdevereaux 14y ago
His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate 18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail as a student. On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.
- zanny 14y ago
  > On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it. The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a creative or investigative spark. We never had an education system centered around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization (insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky really hits on that. I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective. Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I would put in those hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.
  - 46Bit 14y ago
    I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming). It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality though.
- cma 14y ago
  Philip K. Dick has some interesting views on this topic at topic near the beginning of this interview (his time in college with mandatory ROTC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  There's lots of research to support this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html gets posted just about every other day, but it's worth repeating.
dkarl 14y ago
What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice – whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies they found there was no profit advantage to it but it’s just so important to keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don’t do anything but get in their way. This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people. In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of déformation professionnelle due to their different job concerns. In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.
- chipsy 14y ago
  I'm reading your line of reasoning and coming to the opposite conclusions. In the North Korean power structure, superior authorities need to be depended on to improve the "helpless" masses, and a takeover would not be believed to be an improvement because the new leaders would be, at best, equally as strong and wise as the old. But in more egalitarian societies, the idea of "do it yourself" and "fixing the system" is taken seriously, and the corresponding societal myths reflect this - "The Emperor has no clothes", for example.
charlieflowers 14y ago
I am missing something here, and I am genuinely curious what it is I'm missing. If a capitalist starts a manufacturing business with the goal of making money, and if he then discovers that the business would run much more effectively by letting the skilled workers make the decisions than by hiring a layer of management ... then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach? TL;DR rephrase -- why would a business owner maintain a layer of management if that was truly a less effective way to go? Is Chomsky (or Noble) claiming there's something like a "conspiracy" amongst the "managerial class" to create fake jobs for managers, merely to maintain class power? (Or, if not, what am I missing from his argument?)
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  > then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach? "Making money for me" and "making money for everyone" are not the same thing. For example, if your business has 1MM in profits, and you own half, then you get 500k. If you ran that as a cooperative, you made 2MM in profits the next year, but you own 10%, you made $200k. Worse for you, better for everyone else and the group overall.
  - charlieflowers 14y ago
    OK, that makes sense but doesn't connect all the dots for me. I am starting with the assumption that no one gets an ownership stake for free. You can start a business if you want, and you can either bootstrap it or take investment. Either way, the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in. Is this Chomsky/Noble point of view arguing that workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      The basic tenet of socialism is that democracy is good: the traditional corporate model is dictatorship, and it should be reformed into democracy instead. > the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in. Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership. Those people are not being rewarded for the work that they do, which we all agree is bad. > workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do? Basically, yes. People should be in control of themselves, and their situations. Ownership == control. Please note that I'm painting in _very_, _very_ broad strokes here. There is a ton of space under this tent.
dreamdu5t 14y ago
Chomsky is incoherent and sensationalist. He consistently paints a narrative of class struggle and weaves it into everything, ignoring any kind of contextual reality. What a sad, paranoid, naive old man.
- gruseom 14y ago
  A troll, yet I feel like responding anyway. How you get that from this interview is beyond me; it seems to me full of joy and love from start to finish – joy of learning, love of freedom and play. I saw your comment before I finished the article and was going to mention that about the only thing I bet Chomsky was very sad about was the death of his wife, by all accounts the love of his life. And then he brought it up at the very end. Chomsky has his issues like anyone, but it has always been plain to me that there is something very beautiful at the core of the man.
rdtsc 14y ago
> People are supposed to be passive and apathetic and doing what they’re told by the responsible people who are in control. That is the fundamental struggle -- to control the masses. Get them brainwashed, scared, addicted, distracted. One way is to carefully control the information they receive that was very easy up until the Internet showed up. Now it has become a lot harder. China just built up a firewall, here it is a bit more difficult. So it still all has to rely on sophisticated spin and propaganda models. Take Chomsky for example, most people might not even know who he is. They wouldn't have seen (or at least anything positive about) him on TV or mass media. Chances are they read something about him on the Internet or heard from their friends. Sure there were local activist groups, underground zines, but the cost of spreading information that way was pretty high, now the cost is much lower. As propaganda and media control was becoming more sophisticated it seemed like nothing could stop it, until the Internet exploded. For example, I haven't went searching for news to any of the popular American news outlets in years. It is funny (or scary) that I trust some silly site like reddit.com to deliver better news than CNN, Fox or other such thing.

122 points by robdoherty2 14y ago

His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate 18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail as a student. On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.

zanny 14y ago
> On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it. The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a creative or investigative spark. We never had an education system centered around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization (insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky really hits on that. I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective. Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I would put in those hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.
- 46Bit 14y ago
  I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming). It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality though.
cma 14y ago
Philip K. Dick has some interesting views on this topic at topic near the beginning of this interview (his time in college with mandatory ROTC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo
steveklabnik 14y ago
There's lots of research to support this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html gets posted just about every other day, but it's worth repeating.

dkarl 14y ago

What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice – whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies they found there was no profit advantage to it but it’s just so important to keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don’t do anything but get in their way. This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people. In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of déformation professionnelle due to their different job concerns. In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.

chipsy 14y ago
I'm reading your line of reasoning and coming to the opposite conclusions. In the North Korean power structure, superior authorities need to be depended on to improve the "helpless" masses, and a takeover would not be believed to be an improvement because the new leaders would be, at best, equally as strong and wise as the old. But in more egalitarian societies, the idea of "do it yourself" and "fixing the system" is taken seriously, and the corresponding societal myths reflect this - "The Emperor has no clothes", for example.

charlieflowers 14y ago

I am missing something here, and I am genuinely curious what it is I'm missing. If a capitalist starts a manufacturing business with the goal of making money, and if he then discovers that the business would run much more effectively by letting the skilled workers make the decisions than by hiring a layer of management ... then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach? TL;DR rephrase -- why would a business owner maintain a layer of management if that was truly a less effective way to go? Is Chomsky (or Noble) claiming there's something like a "conspiracy" amongst the "managerial class" to create fake jobs for managers, merely to maintain class power? (Or, if not, what am I missing from his argument?)

steveklabnik 14y ago
> then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach? "Making money for me" and "making money for everyone" are not the same thing. For example, if your business has 1MM in profits, and you own half, then you get 500k. If you ran that as a cooperative, you made 2MM in profits the next year, but you own 10%, you made $200k. Worse for you, better for everyone else and the group overall.
- charlieflowers 14y ago
  OK, that makes sense but doesn't connect all the dots for me. I am starting with the assumption that no one gets an ownership stake for free. You can start a business if you want, and you can either bootstrap it or take investment. Either way, the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in. Is this Chomsky/Noble point of view arguing that workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    The basic tenet of socialism is that democracy is good: the traditional corporate model is dictatorship, and it should be reformed into democracy instead. > the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in. Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership. Those people are not being rewarded for the work that they do, which we all agree is bad. > workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do? Basically, yes. People should be in control of themselves, and their situations. Ownership == control. Please note that I'm painting in _very_, _very_ broad strokes here. There is a ton of space under this tent.

dreamdu5t 14y ago

Chomsky is incoherent and sensationalist. He consistently paints a narrative of class struggle and weaves it into everything, ignoring any kind of contextual reality. What a sad, paranoid, naive old man.

gruseom 14y ago
A troll, yet I feel like responding anyway. How you get that from this interview is beyond me; it seems to me full of joy and love from start to finish – joy of learning, love of freedom and play. I saw your comment before I finished the article and was going to mention that about the only thing I bet Chomsky was very sad about was the death of his wife, by all accounts the love of his life. And then he brought it up at the very end. Chomsky has his issues like anyone, but it has always been plain to me that there is something very beautiful at the core of the man.

rdtsc 14y ago

> People are supposed to be passive and apathetic and doing what they’re told by the responsible people who are in control. That is the fundamental struggle -- to control the masses. Get them brainwashed, scared, addicted, distracted. One way is to carefully control the information they receive that was very easy up until the Internet showed up. Now it has become a lot harder. China just built up a firewall, here it is a bit more difficult. So it still all has to rely on sophisticated spin and propaganda models. Take Chomsky for example, most people might not even know who he is. They wouldn't have seen (or at least anything positive about) him on TV or mass media. Chances are they read something about him on the Internet or heard from their friends. Sure there were local activist groups, underground zines, but the cost of spreading information that way was pretty high, now the cost is much lower. As propaganda and media control was becoming more sophisticated it seemed like nothing could stop it, until the Internet exploded. For example, I haven't went searching for news to any of the popular American news outlets in years. It is funny (or scary) that I trust some silly site like reddit.com to deliver better news than CNN, Fox or other such thing.