Yeah, it’s the same reason that Alex Karp goes on those unhinged apocalyptic rants about Palantir. It’s not for public consumption, it’s for defense insiders. The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.
> The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.
Except it is both true AND it works. Keeping your foot down on who can produce weapons-grade fissile materials is working out pretty damn well so far.
And the Russo-Ukranian War is proving any idiot with a few rubles can cobble together incredibly efficient combat drones. We need to be probing the limits of that yesterday.
It can both feel bad and be the right thing to do because the alternatives are worse.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
The ‘little incentive’ that it you don’t do it you starve to death.
There’s tons of work being done because it feels meaningful, later today I’m cooking a meal for a potluck, etc. but if you want your Job to be meaningful that comes at a huge premium.
Good on you for cooking for the potluck! I think that's meaningful.
I don't think having a meaningful job comes at a huge premium, though:
1. I don't think it's true that if you don't work, you'll starve to death. At least, not in the west. You won't have the high quality things compared to your peers, but the state will provide you with housing, food, and resources, so long as you're psychologically capable of using them.
2. But even so, is there any other creature on earth that doesn't have to do some sort of work so it won't starve to death? Even hunter gatherers had to hunt, forage, raise kids, make tools, or otherwise contribute to their tribes, in an endless grind, just to get enough calories to survive.
3. And that doesn't seem… wrong? Many of us enjoy an incredible abundance of options for food, shelter, safety, entertainment, etc., produced by our peers in our tribes and communities. Why shouldn't we have to contribute as well if we want to partake?
4. The idea that "meaning" comes at a premium is the story I want to contradict. It's just that: a story. I know someone who delivers the mail. He loves delivering mail. He feels a ton of meaning. He says, "Yeah there's a lot of junk, but without me, people wouldn't get their wedding invitations. And they wouldn't get their bills paid." Most jobs contribute something, and contribution is meaning. The sad thing to me is we have so many voices telling everyone, "Your job is meaningless!" that people are starting to believe it, and they're ignoring the lives that their work touches.
Delivering mail is meaningful for sure! So is teaching, people want to do these things and sometimes it lines up that there’s a market for it too.
The premium is that stuff like my job where I’m fiddling on Azure is to the benefit of no one and making four times as much.
If you want something meaningful you have to accept worse conditions because all the wonderful lovely people of the world who care and want to make a difference want to work there and not somewhere else.
And it’s interesting you picked mail as an example, when at least in the USA it’s run by the state ;p
I don’t really think it’s horrible that it’s not possible to mooch off your community and give back nothing forever but I don’t think ‘a little incentive’ is the right way of putting it, especially for all the people that hate their jobs for reasonable reasons but stay at it because of the alternative.
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
> Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.
Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.
Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
I’m curious about the overlap between people that want a keyboard driven experience, but also would prefer a Mac-native GUI rather than a TUI or a vim / emacs distro. Seems like a very narrow audience to aim for.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
IMO the problem with GDP is it's basically always normalized in USD, and USD isn't that universally representative of units of production/utility.
I mean, not to be political, but there's probably a place somewhere on Earth selling 10 standard chicken eggs for 540 local coins that's equivalent to $0.01 by the official government rates then-and-there, and the idea of GDP being meaningful means they must be either producing something like thousands of eggs per hour per employee or they live with something like a single pieces of chocolate worth of calories per day. And it's really not like that.
I'm sure GDP figures normalized on local consumer price index will have its own flaws, but especially USD-normalized GDP feels wrong to me in that regards.
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.
I suspect that the US having better investment opportunities than other countries (tech companies for example) might be more important than reserve currency status.
People tend to pay more attention to trade than investment, but investment flows are just as important. A trade deficit often means that foreign investors are buying and a trade surplus goes along with people investing in foreign countries.
In addition to a class marker, high GPA is also a marker of obedience and conformity, both highly prized attributes when market consolidation relaxes competitive pressure. You don’t need innovative rebel types being all critical and making waves in your org when you can just chill and collect rent.
I don’t totally disagree, insofar as a very low GPA is probably a countersignal of common sense and work ethic. The problem you get is by converting these things from measures to targets, and then putting them on a permanent record.
Suddenly everyone is competing for limited slots, the minimum standard for hiring goes from high GPA to perfect GPA, any misstep in your learning process, any teacher who didn’t like you, any elective that may have enriched you personally but you weren’t particularly good add it, etc… gets distilled down into a numerical value (like a credit score) that bureaucrats treat as some sort of object truth. The ATS filters you out without you ever having had a shot, orgs optimize for low-risk tolerance individuals and organizations are starved of potential creative problem solvers and other types of change agents.
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