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Viliam comments on Why capitalism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think it is more complicated than merely "fun" and "not fun".
Some work requires a lot of education -- programming, or surgery. The work itself perhaps is not so bad, and someone would volunteer to do it for free... but first they would have to spend years or decades just getting the necessary education and skills.
If we would have an utopian society tomorrow -- where I would know that I will never have to work for living, and yet all my needs will be fulfilled -- and someone would ask me "Viliam, could you make a new version of LW website?", I would probably say "yeah, it seems like an interesting work, I will start it right now". But I could give this answer only because I have already gained my skills in the existing system, and the process of gaining them included doing a lot of work that I hated. Instead, if the utopian society would start when I was 10 years old, even if I would decide to spend my life programming, I would be focusing on funny parts and ignoring the frustrating parts, so I would probably lack many skills that I have now.
tl;dr -- sometimes the work itself is "fun", but getting all the necessary education and skills is "not fun", which could be a problem in long run even if it would work in short run
Also there is the problem of checking quality. You could have people who want to do surgeries for fun, but you wouldn't want them anywhere near you. There could be many professions where you could get volunteers for the wrong reasons.
While that might be true in your case, I think there are a bunch of self learned hackers who didn't learn their skills in the formal way.
Sure, but a lot of work is just not fun at all, and practically no one is intrinsically motivated to do it. No one is going to become a plumber or garbageman for kicks; some kind of instrumental motivation is needed. I've noticed a lot of people on the political left are really hostile to the idea that some people have to do unpleasant work--and isn't just the fault of some arbitrarily cruel capitalist.
As I mentioned above, Corey Doctorow tried to solve this problem with "Whuffie," but I think Whuffie is fundamentally flawed, and would not provide a well-functioning incentive structure.
This is probably a rude thing to say, but I suspect that these people are spoiled children from middle- and upper-class families, so they never had to do the unpleasant work.
Whuffie is love, and love does not scale.