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Life Is Short (2016)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#81

Post by sinlar-multiple »

yarrowy wrote: post #76
twblalock wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone behaved like that, our society wouldn't have the wealth needed to make anyone's lives comfortable and secure, except for the lives of the rich. A job that provides an income to a worker, and generates wealth for society, is not bullshit -- even if all it involves is making crappy consumer products, or working on an assembly line, or doing paperwork all day. In fact, such jobs are the reason the majority o…

Universal Basic income would solve those problems. Eventually AI and automation should perform all the mundane jobs which is a good thing but we need to provide basic sustenance for everyone.

lmao @ UBI

I can't understand how educated people can still gobble ubi propaganda up when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#82

Post by AussieWog93 »

lgas wrote: post #78
fsflover wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should one choose humanism instead of personal prosperity (egoism)? Religions have an answer. Humanism AFAIK doesn't.

What is religions' answer? "Because Sky daddy said so"?

If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason.

If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution.

Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#83

Post by Karsteski »

sinlar-multiple wrote: post #81
yarrowy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal Basic income would solve those problems. Eventually AI and automation should perform all the mundane jobs which is a good thing but we need to provide basic sustenance for everyone.

lmao @ UBI I can't understand how educated people can still gobble ubi propaganda up when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially

How has it been proven?

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#84

Post by sofixa »

sinlar-multiple wrote: post #81
yarrowy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal Basic income would solve those problems. Eventually AI and automation should perform all the mundane jobs which is a good thing but we need to provide basic sustenance for everyone.

lmao @ UBI I can't understand how educated people can still gobble ubi propaganda up when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially

> when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially

How exactly has it been proven? That's a very strong word to use for something that has never been tried on anything but very small scale limited pilots.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#85

Post by bombela »

raydiatian wrote: post #24

Here’s my perspective on life: dying is probably the whole point of your life, or perhaps coming to terms with it, and conquering your fear of it. All other forms of “importance” derive from this root. - It is is unlikely anything you do will “matter”. Out of ~117 billion people to have ever lived over countless millennia, the lives of note throughout history are what? 10k? 100k? Even if it’s 1b meaningful lives that…

DMT trip sounds rather nice. The closest I ever was to death was a simple fall into darkness. No more fear. Peaceful. With a single regret: leaving the family around in pain.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#86

Post by eastbound »

yarrowy wrote: post #76
twblalock wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone behaved like that, our society wouldn't have the wealth needed to make anyone's lives comfortable and secure, except for the lives of the rich. A job that provides an income to a worker, and generates wealth for society, is not bullshit -- even if all it involves is making crappy consumer products, or working on an assembly line, or doing paperwork all day. In fact, such jobs are the reason the majority o…

Universal Basic income would solve those problems. Eventually AI and automation should perform all the mundane jobs which is a good thing but we need to provide basic sustenance for everyone.

France has UBI in the form of “RSA” since 1981. It is proportional to the number of children, so you can live with children on it, and use the state-provided accomodations.

For now it rather seems that it has created two sorts of populations: Those who live off it, and those who work, the two forever opposing each other, the latter literally enslaved by the masses of the former. The enslavement in a society which is ever-more reliant on the remaining workers meets another phenomenon: Shunning the workers who protest, because looks at all this poverty, why would you not accept to fund them.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#87

Post by stavros »

10x_contrarian wrote: post #29
ElFitz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, human life got remarkably longer in the last century. Well, yes and no. That we live longer than our ancestors seems obvious and is a very common belief. And average life expectancy has indeed increased. But it really isn’t that clear cut. For example: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

I feel it's destructive for people to hold this incorrect belief. People living into their 60s and 70s was very common for all of recorded history. By ignoring this, modern people are less incentivized to criticize and challenge their modern lives and the societies we live within.

Nobody says no people lived to their 70s. Just like the fact that people live to their 100s now doesn't mean that it doesn't matter if most people live to their 100s.

Then again, I'd rather be young for 50 years than old for 70.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#88

Post by Viliam1234 »

Nomentatus wrote: post #68
isoprophlex wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season. Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.

Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.

I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away".

Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.

Re: Life Is Short (2016)

#89

Post by NoToP »

brutusborn wrote: post #50
epicureanideal wrote: post #39

...but it doesn't need to be. There are people working on real, scientific, anti-aging technology, like the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, SENS Foundation (I prefer LEVF though), and the many individuals involved, but especially Aubrey de Grey. One of the reasons I got into software development was to try to make enough money to contribute to these causes, or to work on the problems directly in bioinform…

What got you interested in life extension? And how long would you want to live for? I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken. However I love people with passion and I value freedom, so I’m glad that people get to work on it even if I feel like it’s probably a bit of…

It's simple really. I want to exist because I exist. I exist because I want to exist. This mutually recursive loop belies the bottom of everyone's motivations for everything. All wants and urges, from an evolutionary standpoint, stem from wanting to keep existing. Wanting to exist stems from already existing, as anything which exists without wanting to will readily lose out to those that do exist and want to. That's all "point" there is at the bottom of it all.

What's the point of extending our life? The same as the point of eating and breathing. I want to keep on existing.

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