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Human history in the very long run (2021)

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Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#71

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

psychoslave wrote: post #54
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they take it, theft. If its willingly given, charity.

One have to recognize that manufacturing consent, including consent to give away to their threateners, is not necessarily always the most trivial job.

I genuinely do not understand what you’re saying, but my guess is that you’re saying charity sometimes isn’t charity because they’re manipulated into giving or something? In the parent story though, the person who would be given food is an old man for whom physical labor is difficult. It’s not manipulation, but kindness from someone who finds the work much easier to do.

I want to throw you a question. If one man grows twice as much food as he can eat before the food will spoil (and has nothing to do with it etc.), but then refuses to give any to a hungry beggar, is he committing an immoral act?

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#72

Post by chongli »

deanCommie wrote: post #47
adrian_b wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have already lost the kind of food to which I had access as a child, because now I cannot buy anything similar from anywhere, at least as a city dweller. When I was spending my vacations with my grandparents as a child, they had a huge garden with an astonishing number of different kinds of fruits. They were planned in such a way that most of the year, from early spring until the beginning of the winter there…

I think this is the perfect example. You're absolutely right in every example. But what's changed by having these fruits having less flavour but lower costs, and longer shelf life, is that now much MORE of humanity has access to nutritious and delicious fruits the entire year round, with international supply chains resilient to individual incremental weather phenomenon. I'm not even going to go down the route that mo…

is that now much MORE of humanity has access to nutritious and delicious fruits the entire year round, with international supply chains resilient to individual incremental weather phenomenon.

My grandparents grew up on farms similar to what was described above (in the early 20th century). They did not have access to all these delicious fresh fruits year-round, only during the summer. However they did have access to a crazy number of delicious preserves which they dutifully made when the fruit was at peak ripeness. These they were then able to enjoy throughout the winter months.

I also strongly feel the need to bring population growth and the Repugnant Conclusion [1] into the picture. World population was less than two billion when my grandparents were born [2] and less than one billion a century before that. I believe you are correct that more total people (than ever before) have access to nutritious and delicious fruits year round, despite the fruits having less flavour and likely lower nutritional value overall.

However, if the world population were smaller (down to one billion, for example) an even greater proportion of the population could have access to delicious fruits year-round. Then it must be said that what we have gained from technological progress has been offset to some degree by population growth. We of course can expect world population to level off as access to reproductive technologies and education becomes universal. What I am skeptical about is whether we will ever have the technology to give the entire world population a standard of living comparable to an average American today, never mind someone from a century ago (or a person lucky enough to own a homestead today).

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#73

Post by somenameforme »

bsder wrote: post #56
somenameforme wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is speaking of the distant past (and perhaps you are as well) but in relatively recent history, I think the losses can be clearly demonstrated. Near to every form of emotional and mental disorder is at record highs in most Western countries, including the US. [1] IQ levels, after increasing ever since it began being measured, have started declining. [2] Testosterone levels are plummeting, obesity is skyr…

> but in relatively recent history, I think the losses can be clearly demonstrated. Maybe within the last 30 years but certainly not if you count even just prior to 1970 when heavy manufacturing still provided the primary jobs. Mill and mine jobs sucked worse than agriculture. Women had zero choice other than homemaker, teacher and secretary. Many Rust Belt men were basically functional alcoholics because life was so…

Studies on the decline of IQ (and various other issues) normalize for socioeconomic and other obvious factors. So it's not just e.g. malnourishment. Studies in Scandiland (which are easy to carry out due to compulsory enlistment + IQ testing) have even observed the decline within the same family over time! Nobody knows why they're decreasing, similar to the mystery of why testosterone levels are plummeting, autism/depression/anxiety/etc rates are increasing, and so on.

With mental health, the issue is not of how we deal with it, but with the rate of disorders. Rates seem to be perpetually moving upward with no end or even slowing down in sight. As per the previously linked article [1], it's estimated that about 1 in 4 Americans have had such severe anxiety or depression that they'd been unable to continue regular activities for 2+ weeks. That's not the sort of stuff that could be treated with alcohol and cigs. And these rates are all rapidly increasing.

And again the fertility issue, which you failed to even consider, is just so huge. Our society is literally unsustainable. If humanity, at any time, started acting like we are today (and did not meaningfully change) then humanity literally would not exist today. That alone makes glamorizing modern society essentially a nonstarter, because it means it is inherently liminal - temporary, a placeholder as we more onto something else. And I'm not especially fond of what that "something else" may easily be, which is why I think emphasizing that we need to correct this issue is so important.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#75

Post by doubleyou »

munchler wrote: post #40
kelseyfrog wrote: post #4

Is there any writer who criticizes Marx on his own terms? Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement. It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do. If folks can be blame…

> It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do. Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy, even when they have to live under the power imbalance. For Marx to be right, you have to argue that these people are deluded somehow, which isn't particularly convincing.

when did you choose? only 24 countries or so have full democracy (note the US and china, the largest economies, do not qualify) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#76

Post by Xen9 »

openrisk wrote: post #62

> there’s this new class of people who don’t grow the food and just take stuff Pretty good summary of the latest "tech" business models as well :-) The question is: why does this happen? Why do the many typically fail to limit how exploitative the few? People usually seek answers in morality (or the lack thereof) but morality is a complex emergent phenomenon that is always "too little, too late". One fundamental fact…

Organizations not connected to remote manipulation of public opinion have an evolutionary disadvantage. Were there no one using it, then it would be a power vacuum, and those tend to get filled regardless.

My personal theory regarding morality is that since we did not spend long time evolving to world where writing is a technology, there is no emotional reaction to contract that will allow a factory to pollute killing humans, compare to woman who sees a man to stab a baby with a fork.

Human society has three classes: owners, hermits, and pets. The owners have assets, do not need to work for money, and have means of influencing the public opinion. Hermits do not work for money, but also do not have assets or influence. Pets are 99%

Same as you train a dog to sit and run, you train a pet to BUY and VOTE. Then you laugh in the room with your fellow owners because you've bought all the representatives, won the election, and can now use legislation to crush your opponents. Kropotkin was right one hundred years ago:

"We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority."

Were I to re-establish a society in an empty land with no worries about existing nations coming after us militaristically: (1) Supply of money would be limited, tied to gold (export controls), have demurrage (except for government accounts), be cryptocurrency so that one can near infinitely move it to smaller denominations (eliminating deflation). I have quite sepcific system for this, where even all property will be demurraged algorithmically—based on ∆ market value! (2) Direct democracy, EG everything would be directly elected. If you cant participate, that is ok, but the elections will keep flowing. The voting system will be tied to prediction markets, EG vote for a thing that fails to perform as predicted and you may have less votes for the next election. (3) System that connects the prediction markets somehow to how public is informed / educated, probably involving censorship or at least having news outlets that are recommenmded by state because no state that allows CIA type propaganda to flow in survives.

These are only the policies that would affect the problem you brought to surface the most.

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#77

Post by adrianN »

DaoVeles wrote: post #18
adrianN wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a brutal philosophy.

To be fair, cleaning the grounds and pruning the trees is not exactly brutal work. Like most koans, look at the broader message here.

The broader message seems to be that the frail, the disabled and others who are unable to work don’t deserve food.

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#78

Post by beezlewax »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #29
kelseyfrog wrote: post #4

Is there any writer who criticizes Marx on his own terms? Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement. It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do. If folks can be blame…

I'm very much not a Marxist, but I think he is remarkably undervalued for his analysis of capitalism, particularly how specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness, the dissolution of family and social structures etc. His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.

"specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness" what does this mean? Doesn't everyone want to specialise in something?

Re: Human history in the very long run (2021)

#79

Post by Yodel0914 »

beezlewax wrote: post #78
Yodel0914 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much not a Marxist, but I think he is remarkably undervalued for his analysis of capitalism, particularly how specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness, the dissolution of family and social structures etc. His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.

"specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness" what does this mean? Doesn't everyone want to specialise in something?

As Adam Smith pointed out, specialization is the engine of capitalism. The problem that Marx saw (I think, correctly) is that capitalism will continue to push for more and more specialization until the jobs people perform are all-but divorced from meaningful outcomes.

His example is a clock maker. At some point, a clock maker was a person who made every aspect of a clock. If we split the jobs up between someone making the cabinet, someone the clockwork, someone the face and hands etc, productivity will increase and more clocks can be made for less effort, and at higher quality. However it's not as fulfilling to create a component of a clock as it is to create the entire thing.

I think a better modern example is the building industry. Back in they day, people made their own houses - very labour intensively and not particularly well. But I wonder if there's much more rewarding and meaningful than literally building the house your family will live in?

With the the emergence of building as a trade, you get cheaper, higher quality houses. An individual builder still gets a ton of fulfillment knowing they built a house for someone they know to live in. As the trades become more and more specialized, there's less and less connection. Eventually you end up with someone working in a pre-fab factory making frames for a house they'll never see, for people they'll never meet.

It requires a level of comfort with abstraction to be OK with being so disconnected from actual outcomes. You either have to substitute in a secondary meaning ("I'm supporting my family") or be able to hold the whole picture in your head of how your job eventually contributes to an meaningful outcome.

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