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jaime2000 comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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It's not that simple. There are people who just don't function without having to work for a living; give them lots of freedom and they simply use it to destroy themselves and others. Maybe they are consumed by superstimuli like World of Warcraft, or maybe they are the marginal case that is barely behaving in a civilized fashion because of the strong incentives associated with the work paradigm. You are probably thinking about the how the kinds of people who post on LessWrong would all have their lives improved with little to no downsides by such a scheme, but that's the typical mind fallacy at work.
Many people also consider being "productive" or "making a difference" to be important parts of their identity, and while inefficient make-work could plausibly look enough like real work to trigger this instinct, free monthly paychecks can't.
From that link:
I don't understand how one can say "The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man's wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.", and then one paragraph later say "I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England."
It seems to me that giving a man a choice to give you his wife for sexual favors, or go to prison, involves a significant loss of dignity, and a significant amount of self-centeredness. What is causing this disconnect? Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it's exhibited by the lower classes, than when it's exhibited by the ruling elite?
Yvain mentioned that here:
This is not as implausible as you might think. In the spirit of Yvain's Versailles-building czar, imagine a king of lousy moral character who likes to go around randomly raping the wives of men. In fact, he does this every week, so in a single year there are 52 men who have had to suffer the indignity of having their wives so violated. Sounds horrible, right?
Now, Wikipedia tells me that the rape rate in the U.S. is around 27 per 100,000 per year. The United States has a population of 320,000,000 or so, which works out to around 86,000 rapes per year. If the aforementioned king came to power in the United States and enacted policy changes which reduced the rape rate by even 1%, he would have paid for himself 16 times over.
What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man. I know that, in practice, the most powerful politicians and the richest of celebrities in the U.S. could probably make my life pretty damn miserable if they wanted to, maybe because I somehow pissed them off or because they have sadistic predilections they just randomly decided to satisfy at my expense, and yet, I am not nearly as afraid of them as I am of the members of the underclass I occasionally pass by on the street.
But that isn't a society in which "political authority ... was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt", or where "you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone", or where "the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers" - that is a society in which a vast majority of elites, not a tiny fraction, indulge themselves regularly in a wide range of transgressions against the common man. And that isn't merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped; it's a society in which all but one in a million people have to suffer poverty and malnutrition, and arbitrary death due to poor conditions, poor safety regulation, and poor concern for welfare in general. I think that a slight risk of street crime from the underclasses pales in comparison to the kinds of organized depravations inflicted regularly on the populace in such places.
If we're still talking consequentially, that is.
It's also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.
I'm a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!
It jarred me too, but I don't like to point out factor-of-two mistakes in arguments relying on orders-of-magnitude differences because this.
(Well, that may be problematic for different reasons too, but I was stunned speechless by the fact that a discussion mentioning rape had managed not to mindkill anybody thus far, and was afraid that calling that out could break the spell.)
Scratch everything I just said, army1987 just summed up my position far more succinctly than I did.
EDIT: Really?
The problem with letting yourself be distracted by that kind of phrasing, is that you spend so much time crusading for Right Thinking that you never get to make your actual point. Clever debaters will notice this, and will start deliberately trolling you just to see how many times they can derail you.
Also, declaring that only men are people is a statement of value, not a statement of fact. Oftentimes, when you find someone whose values you disagree with, it is more fruitful to take their value system as given and find discongruities WITHIN it, or discongruities between that value system and the behavior of the person espousing it, than it is to merely declare that you are appalled by that value system.
Couple of things.
First, it might well be that fubarobfusco does not believe that your value system actually embeds the idea that only men are people, and therefore your suggestion about what is more fruitful to do when such a value conflict arises might not seem apposite to them. They might have instead been (as they said) objecting to the implications of the line of argument itself.
Second, do you mean to imply that fubarobfusco was actually allowing themselves to be derailed/distracted from something in this case? Or are you just expressing your concern that they might hypothetically be in some other, similar, case? (Or is this just an indirect way of suggesting that their comment was inappropriate for other reasons?)
EDIT: army1987 just explained better. Feel free to TL;DR the rest of this post and most of my previous one.
Hmm. English lacks distinction between specific and generic 'you'. :(
I was trying to describe my own thought processes when I chose to continue the "suffer the indignity of having their wives raped" line, rather than challenge it in the typical gender-crusader fashion. (Also, I suspected that jaime2000 was stating that line hyperbolically in any case - Poe's Law is tricky that way.)
While I agree with gender equality goals myself, displaying that I am appalled at someone else's disregard for gender equality has an opportunity cost that I didn't want to pay at the time, and wasn't likely to achieve the results that one normally hopes for when performing that display. Lesswrong doesn't seem to be the sort of place where shaming and rallying tactics work, nor do I want it to be. So I'll try to treat people's positions courteously as long as their positions don't seem actively disingenuous.
When I saw fubarobfusco's post, I read it as a shaming/rallying tactic for 'my side', which I felt a minor social obligation to respond to. Rather than falling into line, I decided to explain my dissent.
You can use “one” for the latter.
Me too, but I was too lazy to try to guesstimate whether I was right (e.g. by looking at jaime2000's contribution history) and so I didn't even mention that.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
It's true that one person committing personal crimes with impunity doesn't have much measurable effect on crime rates in a society of any size, but that's neither surprising nor particularly informative. No matter how shiny that person's hat.
You'd be surprised how quickly even normally very rational people go to the "but... Versailles! Droit du seigneur!" emotive argument when someone suggests that there can be socioeconomic benefits to a high level of inequality.
The same scope insensitivity which makes people care more about a single sick puppy than millions of starving people makes it very difficult to see that the highly-visible opulence of the elite costs much less than the largely invisible 'welfare' superstructure which provides our underclass their bread and circuses. Not to mention that one produces value for society while the other annihilates it.
If a rationalist knows anything it should be how easy it is to forget to multiply or use inappropriately anchoring null hypotheses, especially when ideological sacred cows are involved.
That's assuming a leader's vices somehow correlate with enacting positive societal changes (when the contrary would seem more likely). Otherwise choosing instead one of the many, just as competent and not as corrupt potential leaders is still a superior choice.
The article was comparing societies where the population was horribly poor or subjected to tyrannical leaders but still had their drive, human dignity, and joie de vivre, with the nihilistic U.K. underclass who did not have such problems but who used their freedom to do little more than eat, sleep, fuck, fight, and dope, and deciding that the former was preferable. Obviously if you can have a functioning population without vicious leaders, that would be best, and the article made no claim that this was impossible or unlikely.
I think this depends on how you read "I never saw the X." Consider something like "I never saw the death due to accident in England that I see in Tanzania." If you view this as the claim that no one ever dies in accidents in England, then obviously this is wrong. If you view this as the claim that death due to accident is qualitatively different in England and Tanzania, and worse in Tanzania, then it seems sensible.
Ideological mind-projection. The writer who hates the English welfare state has somewhat different values from all the Third World people who want to protect their female family members from rape and eat meat once in a while. The writer therefore believes that rather than wanting to be English poor people - with food banks, benefits, and council houses - the Third World people are much better off the way they are.
We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
So, if humans need work, we are doomed; because productive labor aims to extinguish itself. Moreover, the extinction of labor is already in progress.
My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.
Well, EY says
(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)
See here (and followup here).
Very relevant ... and there's a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren't retirees/pensioners reliably broken?
OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.
I award myself five points for guessing that quote was from Dalrymple.
I lack the information necessary to evaluate what is likely, but barring very specific definitions of the word "unnecessary" I don't think it's obvious that it's impossible without massively curtailing the future of humanity. If the importance of the work paradigm exists and is fundamental to parts of human nature we like(1), there are a number of imaginable ways for those to be made necessary even if it could be made unnecessary. While some of these possible futures are dysutopian (Brave New World), not all of them need be.
(1) I'm not sure this is the case. Some sort of act-or-unpleasant-things-happen seems necessary to get a good future, but this may or may not circumscribe the work paradigm.