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Against Productivity

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Re: Against Productivity

#51

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pron wrote: post #27
ggreer wrote: post #16

This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does. First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. In…

> This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it. In Notes from Underground the hero attains his own measure of happiness through spite, i.e. self harm, i.e. misery. Any measure of human happiness is contradictory, or it wouldn't be human. Try to imagine the most perfect utopia you can, where any measure you come up with is maximized, or optimized (to use the SV parlance).…

You can have my Humanity Card, because that's a complete load of crap. You don't need to always drive yourself to misery wanting what you don't have, especially because, if you know you're not going to enjoy it when you get it, you can simply stop wanting it.

Bloody hell, give me three months of vacation time to spend at the beach and I can make a solid start on coming up with an ideal way to spend the rest of my life. It's just a matter of resources.

Re: Against Productivity

#52

Post by simonh »

America is also the country that gave us 'stick it to the man', 'tune in, turn on, drop out', 'make love, not war'. America is a big country, big enough to find a space somewhere to l9ive your life almost any way you like and pobably find others who want to do the same too. In fact I'm hard pressed for think of any other nation on the entire planet that is more diverse. Anyone care to name one?

I speak as an outsider (a Brit) that's visited the US several times and has many friends and acquaintances there.

Re: Against Productivity

#53

Post by hrktb »

ggreer wrote: post #16

This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does. First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. In…

> The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!

There is a huge unbalance between men and women (which traditionnaly don't get the same chances to work in high pressure environments, and are less subjected to karoshi) and as someone else point Okinawa people won't have the same life expectancy as Tokyo area people.

This is a factor in the juxtaposition of workaholism and high quality of life in the same country.

Re: Against Productivity

#54

Post by pron »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #51
pron wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it. In Notes from Underground the hero attains his own measure of happiness through spite, i.e. self harm, i.e. misery. Any measure of human happiness is contradictory, or it wouldn't be human. Try to imagine the most perfect utopia you can, where any measure you come up with is maximized, or optimized (to use the SV parlance).…

You can have my Humanity Card, because that's a complete load of crap. You don't need to always drive yourself to misery wanting what you don't have, especially because, if you know you're not going to enjoy it when you get it, you can simply stop wanting it. Bloody hell, give me three months of vacation time to spend at the beach and I can make a solid start on coming up with an ideal way to spend the rest of my lif…

You completely misunderstood me. I'm not saying that you always drive yourself to misery wanting what you don't have, just that human happiness is often a very complicated thing, and not one that should be viewed first through the SV prism of "optimization".

> if you know you're not going to enjoy it when you get it, you can simply stop wanting it.

Actually, Daniel Kahneman has spent the last few decades showing that that's exactly what people do: they want something that they know will make them happy, but once they get it, it doesn't make them as happy as they thought, and they want something else[1]. It is called the focusing illusion and Kahneman summarizes it as "nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." Stupid, I know, but that's how our particular species of apes actually behaves, and this is a lot more rooted in reality than optimizing happiness.

Aside from the focusing illusion, Kahneman demonstrates that people's tastes change over time, and you might not even want what you want now by the time you get it.

Again, this all simply shows that human happiness is complicated; not that anyone knows exactly how it works.

[1]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/201204/nobel-pr...

Re: Against Productivity

#55

Post by ondrejzabojnik »

You wrote about the time when you weren't beating yourself for not being productive enough and you described that past experience in a way that seemed to me like you were happy. What made you want to become productive? What did you imagine 'productive' looks and feels like? Could you track down your most internal motives?

Re: Against Productivity

#56

Post by Htsthbjig »

ggreer wrote: post #16

This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does. First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. In…

"Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!"

I had seen as many workaholics in the USA as in Japan. For different reasons, and in different ways.

In the US you are supposed to do it because of ambition, in Japan you do it because of social pressure or constriction of the environment.

Oh, never mind, in the US they have this beautiful two words that describe everybody: Loser or Successful, that does wonders to social pressure people to work more, but thinking "they actually want it", like in Japan, anyway.

But food is much better in Japan. They also eat a lot of fish that before Fukusima, was the less toxic or industrialized food you could eat. No artificial feed(until recently), no genetically modified, no antibiotics, no hormones like US loves so much.

Re: Against Productivity

#57

Post by runj__ »

quonn wrote: post #46
6t6t6 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how you explain the fact that USA has one of the lowest life expectancy among the developed world? I think that what the author tries to explain is that, in some places, societies have gone too far in the seek of productiveness and, ironically, people there is less happy and healthy. I guess finding the good balance is more important than trying to be the number one.

Why is this downvoted? Given that the US is as economically powerful as it is, why _is_ life expectancy lower [0], compared to other _developed_ nations? Check out Canada, Australia, Japan and West-Europe on the map. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Life_Exp...

The US is a big country, it's incredibly diverse. Comparing the US as a whole to other countries is not really fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_exp...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...

But we can of course all pick our own statistics to fit our standpoint. But it's important to keep in mind that the US can be a bit of an edge case.

Re: Against Productivity

#58

Post by [deleted] »

ggreer wrote: post #30
wodenokoto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you. I thought it was very clear and well written. > Of course per-capita GDP doesn't fully capture quality of life, but it's easy to measure and hard to fake. It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars. > Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite t…

It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars. I didn't want to sidetrack my comment by getting into PPP and other adjustments[1], but suffice it to say that economists have been aware of these issues for over a century. We are too focused on optimizing, when a lot of what it mea…

[deleted]

Re: Against Productivity

#59

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #56
ggreer wrote: post #16

This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does. First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. In…

"Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!" I had seen as many workaholics in the USA as in Japan. For different reasons, and in di…

The US doesn't love it, the food industry does because it allows them to produce higher volumes of food and sell it for lower prices, which (by extension) the consumer loves. I'd like to think people in Japan care more about the quality of their food, not so much the quantity per $ like I see in the US ($1 cheeseburgers and such). Another possibility is that the Japanese have more expendable income (also because of 12+-hour workdays), thus more budget for food, thus less of an inclination to buy the cheapest products.

But, off topic.

Re: Against Productivity

#60

Post by Cthulhu_ »

erikb wrote: post #48

Okay we should spend more time wasting more time. But how to pay your bills in that time? As long as this question is not answered all this discussion is meaningless in my eyes.

How about a regular 40 hour / week or part-time job for a decent wage? It's what the vast majority of people do.
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