> 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 factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit.
An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies.
Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect.
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.
The downside of using modern metrics to estimate the happiness of past people is that you won't ever measure the stuff that we've lost. We'll never really know, and you should look at all such comparisons with deep suspicion (especially eyeballing you, Steven Pinker)
The vastly overwhelming body of evidence clearly indicates that today humanity is materially and by nearly all concrete measurements of human well-being better off than at any time in all its long history. This paints a powerful case for humanity also being psychologically and emotionally better off, on average, than at any older time in history since, as should be obvious, dodging starvation, random war, plague and een minor medical problems becoming deadly isn't exactly conducive to being as happy as you could be without these things.
If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures, sure, it could be attractive contrasted against the cacophony of modern digital and other distractions, but here's a basic thing: If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.
If on the other hand, you, living in some grimmer, dirtier past, wanted any other sort of life, the choice didn't even really exist unless you were one of an incredibly tiny minority that formed the elites of society. And even among these people, the slightest infection could randomly kill you, losing your eyesight with age was a gradual sentence into blindness, and god help you if you ever were to have any major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss.
Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true even if some specific details might be cherry-picked(and i'd like to see which one's you're referring your suspicion to)
Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.
To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.
And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.
Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.
What did we lose that you think would make us happier? I can only think of things certain people lost that would make them happier at the expense of making others as miserable as possible.
I wouldn't mind Steven Pinker so much if it wasn't for the blatant cherry picking. Always trying to make today look a good as possible and the past as terrible as possible. It just produces bias on both sides when like usual - it is full of greys.
We are doing some cool things nowadays, yes there is some blow back to account for. The past had a lot of awful things, but there were something things we did that we should consider integrating with modern techniques. And so on.
The article is not really about happiness estimates but if it were, the case would be easier to make - most people are happier not having half their children die.
Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees.
The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.
That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back."
The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."
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 blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.
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.
What do you mean by "criticizes Marx on his own terms"? What terms are those? A problem I have is there are hundreds of pages of stuff he wrote so he's hard to pin down. Not a fan myself. He seems to do a lot of taking everyday life and splitting the people into classes who should fight each other which was then ceased upon but unpleasant people to cause 100m + deaths and much suffering. Also much of the basic content seems crap to me but it's hard to pin the arguments amongst the endless waffle.
To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.
> 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.
Friendship ended with Fascist Hacker News, now Primitivist Hacker News is my best friend /s
>It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?
Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes.
The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern.
This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again.
>The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns.
Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions.
>Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not.
You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest.
>The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time.
Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites.
[0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years
[1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense
[2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing.
>This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again.
Having worked with solar for a long while, I am always trying to tame people expectations of it. I think that and most renewables are awesome but we are trying to make them match the societal paradigm of fossil fuels and I think that is a fools errand.
We are going to go to a green energy grid eventually (fossil fuels are limited) and it will mostly likely have a lower total energy per capita than what we have today. Combine this with technology innovations, personal reductions in demand and the end result won't be so bad. It isn't going to be a dystopia but I don't think we will be living the same level of today's abundance.
openrisk|1 year ago
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 factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit.
An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies.
Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect.
Xen9|1 year ago
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.
thinkingemote|1 year ago
(Yet they probably thought the world was less bad than it was!)
Yodel0914|1 year ago
darby_nine|1 year ago
southernplaces7|1 year ago
If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures, sure, it could be attractive contrasted against the cacophony of modern digital and other distractions, but here's a basic thing: If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.
If on the other hand, you, living in some grimmer, dirtier past, wanted any other sort of life, the choice didn't even really exist unless you were one of an incredibly tiny minority that formed the elites of society. And even among these people, the slightest infection could randomly kill you, losing your eyesight with age was a gradual sentence into blindness, and god help you if you ever were to have any major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss.
Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true even if some specific details might be cherry-picked(and i'd like to see which one's you're referring your suspicion to)
Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.
jbgt|1 year ago
Here's the post about what's needed to feed society with bread (there are many others) https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.
And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.
Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.
Larrikin|1 year ago
DaoVeles|1 year ago
We are doing some cool things nowadays, yes there is some blow back to account for. The past had a lot of awful things, but there were something things we did that we should consider integrating with modern techniques. And so on.
pvg|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
cratermoon|1 year ago
Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees.
The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.
That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back."
The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."
adrianN|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
kelseyfrog|1 year ago
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 blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.
Yodel0914|1 year ago
His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.
tim333|1 year ago
To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.
munchler|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
codevark|1 year ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax|1 year ago
>It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?
Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes.
The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern.
This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again.
>The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns.
Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions.
>Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not.
You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest.
>The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time.
Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites.
[0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years
[1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense
[2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing.
DaoVeles|1 year ago
Having worked with solar for a long while, I am always trying to tame people expectations of it. I think that and most renewables are awesome but we are trying to make them match the societal paradigm of fossil fuels and I think that is a fools errand.
We are going to go to a green energy grid eventually (fossil fuels are limited) and it will mostly likely have a lower total energy per capita than what we have today. Combine this with technology innovations, personal reductions in demand and the end result won't be so bad. It isn't going to be a dystopia but I don't think we will be living the same level of today's abundance.