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Why do we assume everyone should be working?

wilsoniumite.com

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#41

Clearly he is not a socialist LOL I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...

it would be naive to assume that you would be paid to be an artist or poet in a socialism as opposed to a farmer

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#43
post #18
post #5

> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.

That won't be a good heuristic much longer. A few weeks back I saw Gemini write "Redundant Abstraciton Overhead" (-citon instead of -ction). It was the first time I saw a model make a "typo", so I made a note of it.

I've seen Opus 5 make typos this week, which is something I haven't seen since early GPT days. I have no idea why.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#44
Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#45
Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority.

So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.

Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#46
The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them.

If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#47
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#48

> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff” This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto. In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to…

> if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.

Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.

So what happens is not _really_ unknown.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#49
post #2

Before that, a more important question is: why assume that buying or having "more stuff" leads to a better life?

Human life requires some consumables. Even with less stuff, you will always need some stuff.

We need very few non perishables aside from the roof on your head.

Re: Why do we assume everyone should be working?

#50
post #14

UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive…

Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families. We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is diff…

Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?
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