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Against Productivity

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Re: Against Productivity

#101

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pron wrote: post #71
calinet6 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're optimizing the wrong thing if you're looking outside of the human mind. Change the behavior surrounding our desires and happiness and you solve many of these problems. You might say changing the way our minds work is very difficult, but surely it's easier than attempting to create an impossible utopia.

But then we'd no longer be human...

Jolly good then, if "human" means "so psychologically rotten as to be incapable of enjoying what is actually a perfectly good situation."

Re: Against Productivity

#102

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

Gosh, yes. What if you died having not measured, optimized, and made the most of your leisure. How awfully guilty and ashamed you can presently imagine your future dead self would feel if you picture dead-you actually alive in an afterlife somewhere.

Re: Against Productivity

#103

Post by aleh »

wyager wrote: post #92
calinet6 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're attempting to find a productive rhetorical truth in a piece about shedding productivity as a focus, you're missing the point. In fact, you're arguing that she should 1) be able to quantify happiness, 2) consider life-expectancy as a proxy for life quality, and 3) pursue optimizing life by quantifying and measuring it. I think you're missing many points. The whole idea—the wisdom, if you will—is that you los…

> and is not particularly hindered by slight rhetorical mistakes or lack of clarity. It's that true. Clearly it is hindered by bad writing and rhetoric, because here we are not agreeing with it. >It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical, yet we know it's true. Speak for yourself. >converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and false at the same time That's not impress…

Schrodinger's cat hates the Principle of Excluded Middle.

Re: Against Productivity

#104

Post by aleh »

calinet6 wrote: post #68
pron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

You're optimizing the wrong thing if you're looking outside of the human mind. Change the behavior surrounding our desires and happiness and you solve many of these problems. You might say changing the way our minds work is very difficult, but surely it's easier than attempting to create an impossible utopia.

There are numerous drugs which make people feel subjectively happy by changing the way their mind works, however from the outsider perspective the outcome is hardly desirable.

People are inherently irrational just like the nature itself. It is possible to predict the probable outcome using mathematical models here and there, but the solution is always local and temporary.

Re: Against Productivity

#105

Post by jokoon »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #89
jokoon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime I wonder about the "meaning of life", but the real question is "what is the purpose of civilization?". Cynics could argue that civilization is like a cancer, thus we should make sure civilization grows as fast and as big as possible to survive a cataclysm or to make sure one's country wins a future war. That's the only argument to have higher standards and incentives to be productive, just so that society ca…

There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them out. I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world runs on. Pretty much all of us exc…

Do you think communism, in some way, was a different form of civilization, and that the fall of the berlin wall increased this phenomenon of "monoculture" ?

Re: Against Productivity

#106

Post by pron »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #101
pron wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then we'd no longer be human...

Jolly good then, if "human" means "so psychologically rotten as to be incapable of enjoying what is actually a perfectly good situation."

I didn't make up the rules :) That weird situation is what most art of the past few centuries is about (i.e. once we've pretty much nailed basic survival down), and it's really not that bad, just... peculiar. But if you think about it, it makes sense: you have this species that evolved through increasing brain function, rather than speed, strength or built-in weaponry, which then managed to reduce survival issues to a few hours a day. How does that brain behave when it's got so much free time and so little to actually worry about? Is there any reason to believe that "rationality" will be how it does it? Decades of psychological research have shown that the human brain had been tuned for survival in ways that are anything but rational.

Re: Against Productivity

#107

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

jokoon wrote: post #105
SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them out. I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world runs on. Pretty much all of us exc…

Do you think communism, in some way, was a different form of civilization, and that the fall of the berlin wall increased this phenomenon of "monoculture" ?

Yeah, I think so. I'm not a fan of communism as it was practiced by the USSR, but I think in smaller communities that collectively agreed to it, it would work.

Re: Against Productivity

#108

Post by wyager »

aleh wrote: post #103
wyager wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is not particularly hindered by slight rhetorical mistakes or lack of clarity. It's that true. Clearly it is hindered by bad writing and rhetoric, because here we are not agreeing with it. >It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical, yet we know it's true. Speak for yourself. >converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and false at the same time That's not impress…

Schrodinger's cat hates the Principle of Excluded Middle.

You've touched on a trend I've noticed. A lot of Zen preachers on HN abuse their misunderstanding of QM to attack the PEM and other principles. I've heard "light is both a particle and a wave! Zen:1 Logic:0" quite a few times.

Re: Against Productivity

#109

Post by saeguaiga »

Besides tax contribution topping, and market protection (what's this siphon to p-shares that trade in microseconds doubling my concern's trade overhead, and where is it rubbing the walls;) and citizenship (why is there a regulatory forbidden level where we may want our customers;) it's hard to say there is a forum; and that you don't rent there. Pretty sure I missed it.

Re: Against Productivity

#110

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

But PPP is also extremely easy to fake.

Let's say all deers get sick and the price of deer meet rises substantially. Is the living standards of the swedes now falling compared to the danes who do not consume deer meet? Or do the swedes just switch the deer meet for some other kind and enjoy the same standard of living as always?

My iphone has many many times the computing power of my old (but back then high-end) Nokia phone, but cost me twice as much. Am I now poorer in PPP because a good cellphone is more expensive or am I richer because my cellphone is faster?

PPP is extremely easy to fake.

The point of the post is that (A) the obsession with optimizing will harm us and (B) most optimization is done for the sake of optimization.

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