David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

I want to add to the above comment. Graeber's lack of integrity and disregard for facts should cast a shadow of mistrust over his other work, not to mention his explosive reaction on being called out for it.

If you can't trust someone's writings on facts you know about, why trust them on facts you don't know about? One of the essential things to understand when taking in information is to first understand: is this information trustworthy?

I see the above as clear evidence Graeber is not only untrustworthy but explicitly seems to feel he has the right to be so. Worse yet, he writes from the perspective of an expert on economic anthropology, but has taken a position where very basic facts of that field are beyond his ken. Not because of a lack of intellect or understanding, but because he has taken that position on purpose.

And now I see so many people on a site for hackers and technology celebrating someone's ideas without first wondering if those ideas are even factually correct and it puzzles me how we ended up here. Discussion about the factual correctness of Graeber's ideas, or the trustworthiness of his perspective and person, seems to be actively discouraged.

How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ?

physical labour -> boston dynamics

office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7)

it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of tasks will just vanish

and i'm saying this with a human life approach. How do we organize cities / nations around that. Do we plan for smooth transition, say 40 years of gradually smarter tooling so people stay in charge but with advanced assist ? do we go UBI ? do we convert every human as a space tourist ?

> It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture

Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau.

Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.

I’m going to assume that you’re basing your opinion of Graeber on Brad DeLong’s unhinged attacks on his work and character. There are no factual mistakes in “Debt” that impact the solidity of Graeber’s conclusions or historical narratives, most inaccuracies were minor and corrected in subsequent editions without changing the character of the book or the arguments within. Many if not most of DeLong’s attacks of inaccuracies are matters of interpretation, and in such cases it’s generally better to give the words of more accomplished and respected academics more weight than less accomplished or respected peers. As to where Graeber stands in relation to DeLong, I quote Graeber from a post here on HN:

“I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England. Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.”

- David Graeber, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164707

That I mostly care about people existence and well being, above the contemporary economic systems (because some can say, we can't sustain GDP without that style of work and that I believe our system is quite unhealthy and that deviating from it can lead to very different but better lives)