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The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

ucl.ac.uk

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Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

#81

Post by bryan_w »

Kalium wrote: post #45
jokoon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people work to provide food and shelter, that's what I meant. We do have a magic porridge pot surplus. Just look around you.

You are absolutely correct. This is true. There are comparatively few people who work to provide food and shelter. That said, when I look around me I see massive complexity to accomplish the seeming of a magic porridge pot surplus. I think it may be possible to understate what goes in to producing these things. The food production system requires a whole series of industrialized inputs to work at this level of labor…

Thank you for breaking this down. Just because we see a stack of bananas at whole foods, doesn't mean that it was easy to produce

Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

#82

Post by tapas73 »

ryan93 wrote: post #80
mlatu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you believe the food, clothing, housing, and medical care/technology is coming from in the current world? Same people, except in my hypothetical the workforce would be a tad bigger: Bezos, Musk and Gates, like the Kennedies, Rothschilds and Murdochs would (like everyone else on the planet) put in their own ~4 hours of daily work (4 out of 7 days should be plenty) towards feeding/clothing/housing/caring-for t…

If you want everyone to give up wealth you will have to do it at gun point.

not strictly necessary. laws could ve passed that 0.001% is taken over each year. this would be sslowerrl, but would have lower resistance.

Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

#83

Post by broesl »

Does anyone have a good guess why on Prof. Appiahs homepage there is this hidden (via style="display: none;") paragraph? It's displayed when googling him.

"Google has been a useful tool for internet browsing and searching since its inception. Professor Appiah, an Oxford professor of darknet in the College of Arts and Sciences Department who specializes in African intellectual history, is one such user. In his recent article on darknet published by The New York Times, he explained how he uses Google darknet to search for websites related to his field of study like . Professor Appiah is a darknet user and darknet dealer, who was caught for using darknet in Oxford looking for websites on Google. He was sentenced to 1 year of community service with the National Cybercrime Unit at New Scotland Yard."

Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

#84

Post by badtension »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #48
jokoon wrote: post #5

I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Food and shelter are abundant. Technology improved the human condition, but it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities. The individual car/kitchen/living room/bathroom generate exclusion. I'm an introvert, I want to have my safe space, but…

>I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Seems like a good comparison to me. Society is not post-scarcity. People in society must produce a surplus and contribute that surplus. Economics is how we measure how much contribution happened. >Food and shelter are abundant. Food prices are climbing and housing is in bubble…

I think the issue is we are not in a post scarcity world and do not work towards such a thing. If it is cheaper to hire a human instead of automatic a job - we do that. Eventually exporting jobs to the poorest countries where people suffer creating useless crap or fast fashion.

What we are doing is not reasonable if you had the greater good of humanity and planet in mind. The return on investment alone is a bad compass that will make more and more people suffer.

Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

#85

Post by joshgrib »

samhw wrote: post #66
joshgrib wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're sneaking in some assumptions here that people just develop these skills within themselves and have the same opportunity to do so as anyone else. If you start the clock with them already having those skills and other people not then it makes sense, but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills. However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither o…

> If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on ba…

I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on.

I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".

I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.

In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.

Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!

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