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DSherron comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong
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That honestly seems like some kind of fallacy, although I can't name it. I mean, sure, take joy in the merely real, that's a good outlook to have; but it's highly analogous to saying something like "Average quality of life has gone up dramatically over the past few centuries, especially for people in major first world countries. You get 50-90 years of extremely good life - eat generally what you want, think and say anything you want, public education; life is incredibly great. But talk to some people, I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about [starving kid in Africa|environmental pollution|dying peacefully of old age|generally any way in which the world is suboptimal]."
That kind of outlook not only doesn't support any kind of progress, or even just utility maximization, it actively paints the very idea of making things even better as presumptuous and evil. It does not serve for something to be merely awe-inspiring; I want more. I want to not just watch a space shuttle launch (which is pretty cool on its own), but also have a drink that tastes better than any other in the world, with all of my best friends around me, while engaged in a thrilling intellectual conversation about strategy or tactics in the best game ever created. While a wizard turns us all into whales for a day. On a spaceship. A really cool spaceship. I don't just want good; I want the best. And I resent the implication that I'm just ungrateful for what I have. Hell, what would all those people that invested the blood, sweat, and tears to make modern flight possible say if they heard someone suggesting that we should just stick to the status quo because "it's already pretty good, why try to make it better?" I can guarantee they wouldn't agree.
Nonetheless it is important to have a firm grasp on the progress we have already attained. It's easy to go from "we haven't made any real progress" to "real progress is impossible". And so we should acknowledge the achievements we have made to date, while always striving to build on them.
You're right that it would indeed be a mistake to say "things are already great, let's stop here". But then, "things are really awful, so let's get better" doesn't sound quite right either. The attitude I would lean towards, and which I think is compatible with the quote, is "things are already pretty awesome, how could we make them even more awesome?".
The ideal attitude for humans with our peculiar mental architecture probably is one of "everything is amazing, also lets make it better" just because of how happiness ties into productivity. But that would be the correct attitude regardless of the actual state of the world. There is no such thing as an "awesome" world state, just a "more awesome" relation between two such states. Our current state is beyond the wildest dreams of some humans, and hell incarnate in comparison to what humanity could achieve. It is a type error to say "this state is awesome;" you have to say "more awesome" or "less awesome" compared to something else.
Also, such behavior is not compatible with the quote. The quote advocates ignoring real suboptimal sections of the world and instead basking how much better the world is than it used to be. How are you supposed to make the drinks better if you're not even allowed to admit they're not perfect? I could, with minor caveats, get behind "things are great lets make them better" but that's not what the quote said. The quote advocates pretending that we've already achieved perfection.
Sure. But "things are pretty awesome" is faster to say than "our current world is more awesome than most of the worlds that have existed in history".
That's a valid interpretation of the quote, but not the only one. The way I read it, specifically the way it focused on the drinks and the word "complain", it wasn't so much saying that we should pretend that we've already achieve perfection but rather to keep in mind what's worth feeling upset over and what isn't. In other words, don't waste your time complaining about drinks to anyone who could hear, but instead focus your energies on something that you can actually change and which actually matters.
I don't think the comparison is to complaining about very bad things happening elsewhere, it's more like "we've got it so much easier than our forebears, why do people still complain about misspellings on the internet? They should be grateful they have an internet."
One fallacy is that the person who says sort of thing fails to realize that complaining about complaining is still complaining.
Though people have complained about stuff that isn't perfect now even when the imperfect stuff was less imperfect than things had previously been pretty much as far back as we have records, so complaining about that isn't necessarily an instance of the thing being complained about.
Said less obscurely: if we assign the label kvetching to complaining about things even in the face of continual improvement, complaining about kvetching is not necessarily kvetching, since kvetching has continued unabated for generations.
I'm not saying we should settle for anything. Certainly not.
But to forget the awesomeness that already exists is a mistake with consequences. When looking at the big picture, it's important to realize that our current tradjectory is upwards. When planning for something like space travel, it's important to remember that air travel sounded just as crazy a hundred years ago. And when thinking about thinking, it's worth remembering that this same effect will hit whatever awesome thing we think of next.
Sure, I agree with that. But you see, that's not what the quote said. It actually not even related to what the quote said, except in very tenuous manners. The quote condemned people complaining about drinks on an airplane; that was the whole point of mentioning the technology at all. I take issue with the quote as stated, not with every somewhat similar-sounding idea.
Another consequence is to see the that all this talk of a post-scarcity society is nonsense.
Why?
We may quickly come to take major developments for granted, but that doesn't mean that future developments can't, for example, restructure society so that nobody needs to work.
People might quickly come to think of it as normal, but that doesn't mean things would still be basically the same as they were before.
What do you mean by "nobody needs to work"? The standard meaning is that nobody needs to work to provide everyone with a "decent" standard of living. The problem is that popular conceptions of what constitutes a "decent" standard of living change as the average standard itself changes.
I mean that everyone will have access to an abundance of resources without needing to perform any labor.
In terms of material goods and resources, it's possible for technological advances to reach a point where any human labor is more or less irrelevant in terms of total productivity.
Unless we have computers that can organize the work of other computers, there will still be some human work necessary. I mean, we can have a machine that mines coal, and then the humans don't have to mine coal. But then we need humans to operate this machine, repair this machine, invent a better machine, and perhaps do some research about what we can do after we run out of the coal to mine. The day this meta-labor is not necessary is pretty much the day of Singularity.
There is also something strange about this process. It eliminates the cognitively trivial work first, which increases the entry cost to the job market. I mean, in the past a person could start with some trivial work, such as moving things from place A to place B. You could have a retarded person do that and contribute to the society meaningfully. These kinds of jobs will be gone first; and some of the highly-qualified jobs will be necessary until the Singularity.
I can imagine a world where everyone works, and I can try to imagine a post-Singularity utopia where nobody needs to work. The difficult part is the interval between that -- for example a situation where 95% of people would not have to work at all, and the remaining 5% would have to spend decades learning hard just to be able to do something meaningful in their jobs, because all the simpler tasks have already been automatized. At the same time, the 95% would most likely guard the working 5% enviously, making sure they don't have any significant reward for their sacrifices, because that would be against our egalitarian instincts.
Are we at the beginning of that period now, in the developed world? Is that why we have an underclass of people living their lives on welfare -- there simply isn't enough work needed, of the sort that they are capable of, that can't be done more cheaply with machines?
I am not qualified to answer this, but it seems to me like this. I am also not saying that this is the only or the greatest problem. Just that it already exists.
Let's start with a naive question: How is it possible that so many people are unemployed and yet there are so many things that should be done but no one (or not nearly enough people) is doing them?
This is typically answered by: Not everything that is useful is also profitable. Some things are not done because it is not possible (or not easy enough for an average person, with all the natural lack of strategy) to make money doing them. All those unemployed people are trying to get some more money; of course they will not choose activities they can't make money from.
But this is not a complete answer. First, there are many non-profitable activities, and yet many people are doing them. So perhaps the causality is not (merely) "can make money -> does the work", but (also, significantly) "does many things -> makes money on average". (Or using the signalling hypothesis: Middle-class people are more likely to do non-protitable activities, because it signals they make enough money to live decently so they don't need the extra penny.) Second, if lack of money would be the only problem, then every problem could be fixed by getting some funding. However, I suspect that if you get funding, the first people to come will be those who already are employed, and they will come if your offer is better (better paid or more interesting). The naive assumption would be that the unemployed people would get there first, as soon as your offer is better than being unemployed. -- At this moment I admit that I actually never tried creating jobs specifically for unemployed people, so this is just a guess. My experience suggests that when something needs to be done, the most busy people volunteer first. (Which is probably the trait that makes them so busy.)
As a specific example, ten or fifteen years ago everyone wanted to have a webpage, and the whole Java EE business did not exist yet; you could make decent money by making just HTML, or HTML with a little of PHP. At some moment I had much more offers than I could handle, and they were well paid. At the same moment, there was like 15% or 20% unemployment in my country. Well, the unemployed people remained unemployed, as I was slowly making one web page after another. It was the lack of education and/or skills that prevented them from taking my work; I would not try to stop them. These days there is a lack of Java EE programmers, and almost everyone is asking me whether I know one, because their company needs one. But when I was a teacher at high school and tried to teach children programming, a lot of them resisted, because it's "boring and useless". To avoid a possible connotation: I am not saying all children are like this, not even that most of them are. I also had an experience of teaching teenagers programming by e-mail, because they wanted to learn, but they lived in some small town and didn't have good teachers there, so they found some of my blogs and contacted me. Also, I am not getting to a conclusion that unemployed people deserve it; being not strategic is a natural human condition. Just saying that when there is an abundance of jobs next to a big unemployment, lack of skills seems to be the cause, although many people would say otherwise.
In the past there were many things that a person without an education could do with a very short training. Today there is not enough of these jobs, compared with the number of people who formally had some mandatory education, but never studied something deep enough. And it goes against people's intuition; it's like: "Are you saying that a good, honest, hard-working person is useless today?" And the answer, unfortunately, is: If they don't have the necessary skills, and are not strategic enough to gain them, then they cannot contribute meaningfully to the economy today. And it feels completely evil. -- We could create some economically meaningless jobs for these people to give them some status and illusion of purpose. (Actually, we are already doing this, but perhaps we should do it more.) But it would not solve the problem with lack of highly skilled people. We wouldn't have unemployment anymore; but we still wouldn't have enough web pages, cure for cancer, or whatever. (The problem could actually get even worse, if those meaningless jobs would become attractive also to the skilled people.)
Also, in a situation where there is not enough work, reducing the work week feels like a natural solution; but it's not. Instead of having 20% unemployment, how about reducing the work week from 5 days to 4, so everyone can have a job? If the work does not require any education or skill, this solution may work. But what about jobs that require a lot of education? You may have 80% of the work week, but you still need 100% of the education. The society as a whole would have to spend more study-hours to produce the same number of work-hours. And the more technologically developed we get, the less we will need to work, but the more we will need to study. -- Using the veil of ignorance, the best solution would be to have a few people study hard and work hard all their lives, and the rest of the society just to have fun all the time; welcome in Omelas, the city of maximum total happiness. Again, this feels contrary to our concept of justice. It would be fair if people who worked hard could have more fun. But it is more efficient if people who worked hard continue to work even harder, because they already have the skill and the experience. And by "work" I mean education and, uhm, "luminous" work.
See this and the links therein.
What do you mean by "abundance"?
More than they could possibly use up for any practical, non-signalling related purposes.
You may want to reread the original quote.
Drinks do also have practical, non signalling related purposes.
But yeah, a society where one of the main things you'd have to miss out if you didn't work is decent drinks on a plane would definitely count as post-scarcity by my standards.