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Never Enough

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Re: Never Enough

#61

Post by yeoyeo42 »

technology is just a red herring. GTA-level whacky NPCs will have NPC behaviour regardless of what situation you throw them in.

The same "person" that shows absurd behaviour like that, assuming it's not just rage/clickbait, has absurd behaviour in a completely technology disconnected world as well.

The only thing that might differ is that it's not as outwardly obvious. Those behaviours are a result of who they are at a person (whether this be because of genetics and environment, poor soul RNG, or something else).

To that extent all technology does is make it more obvious. Basically the average NPC has more opportunities to reveal themselves as such. It's not indicative of a fundamental problem.

Re: Never Enough

#63

Post by Aurornis »

TFYS wrote: post #58
raychis wrote: post #24

This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained? Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening…

This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.

People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away.

Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened.

It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global average income is around $10K per person. If you make more than that, you’d have to give up a lot. That’s not even accounting for the sharp drop in production of things you need that would happen if the upsides of working hard were removed, leading to people working less.

Re: Never Enough

#64

Post by Aurornis »

abirch wrote: post #60
raychis wrote: post #24

This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained? Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening…

"one of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations." Yuval Noah Harari Think about email. There is usually an expectation of a response within minutes/hours and not weeks/months like mail of the 1900s

On the other hand, my wife wouldn’t have survived to this age if not for technology that wasn’t available in the 1900s.

I can answer those emails from my air conditioned office or house.

I have time to answer them because we’re not spending all of our effort just trying to survive or working the farms.

Seems like a good trade to me.

Re: Never Enough

#65

Post by whereistejas »

As someone who is a victim of never feeling he has done enough, I totally empathise with this blog post. The incentives which got me into tech were completely intrinsic and altruistic. Over time, I have felt them warp into something which can be best as "capitalist greed", everything is now about wanting more. The first and perhaps the easiest, thing to be sacrificed at the altar of wanting more, is mental health and relationships. Thankfully, I'm conscious of this now and is something I actively work on.

However, this is something I can only do at this point in my life, in my early 20s I was much more of a grind person and even if I could change things I wouldn't change that.

Re: Never Enough

#67

Post by tonyedgecombe »

weatherlite wrote: post #34
markovs_gun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you raise kids in a society that scruitinizes and measures every aspect of their existence against all ither kids, and then send those kids to a workforce where every aspect of their performance and personality are scruitinized and analyzed to attempt to rank them against their peers, why wouldn't said kids seek out such "objective" ranking in their personal lives? We have designed society to produce people neur…

> We have designed society to produce people neurotically obsessed with ranking and comparison in school, work, and social media Comparing ourselves to others is probably built into our DNA. Most primates also have a social hierarchy. A human who didn't somewhat obsessively socially compare himself to others and/or self reflect on his behavior might have been thrown out of the tribe because he would never self correc…

We didn't have to turn the dial up to eleven though.

Re: Never Enough

#68

Post by jimmydddd »

ttd wrote: post #38
FinnLobsien wrote: post #33

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line. I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something wel…

> Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing. I'm not sure if there's more context to this quote, but on the surface: what a dismal take! Letting some measure of worth dictate what you do feels pretty limiting to me. I understand that he's not saying "make sure you attach worth to everything you do," but there's an implicit judgement process in what he's suggesting. If you do something well,…

I don't think he's talking about personal fulfilment. His take is more simple. He's saying don't do the following: "I created a piece of software, and it works pretty good, but I have no customers. Should I work on coding to get it to work 5% better, or try to do some marketing? Well, I'm really, really great at coding, so let me do more of that."

Re: Never Enough

#69

Post by reasonableklout »

tptacek wrote: post #50

This is still not as weird as the valley was in the late 1990s during the first Internet bubble, with the exception that housing scarcity, which was notably bad then (I had to pay my year's rent up front to secure an apartment in San Francisco), has been left to fester for 2 decades.

What was weird during the first Internet bubble?

Re: Never Enough

#70

Post by TFYS »

Aurornis wrote: post #63
TFYS wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.

People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away. Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened. It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global avera…

A transition away from competition could also be implemented by capping the standard of living to what it currently is in the richest countries and then waiting for others to catch up. After that production would slow down yes, and that's the point. People could spend more of their time on things that really matter to them instead of things they're forced to do by competition.
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