The new utopias: Should we retain the right to feel unhappy at work?
economist.com
economist.com
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...
Are we?
Most of our greatest achievements seem to have come about through collaboration rather than competition.
edit: Big science projects like the LHC maybe?
Actually, I'd argue that big science projects are international competitions for getting to the right answer first.
The Internet has its roots on a network developed by the US department of defense.
The first nuclear reactors were a byproduct of the development of the atom bomb.
The first computers were developed during WWII to perform cryptanalysis and solve military problems.
I'm sure opposite examples can be found (mapping the human genome ?) but I doubt they would make a vast majority.
Seems like you may need a bit of healthy competition to make the breakthrough, but afterwards cooperation is crucial otherwise the gains of the breakthrough are never realized.
I think it's just a product of the societies we've had. In all those cases it was the cooperative aspect that made the breakthrough. The competition was only needed to allocate the resources for it, though, given the nature of our society.
Far from me from not giving collaboration its due, but it is undeniable that the prime mover of many a human achievement was due to competition.
The real challenge for constant progress, I think, is to make this competition "healthy", as in "not depending on a world war or the threat of nuclear annihilation"...
I suspect much of our current technological age has its roots in the aftermath of the Manhattan project. Bombs led to use, led to other countries developing bombs, drove surveillance, drove space travel, drove the miniaturization of electronics in cycles that eventually gave us Hacker News on a smartphone [2].
[1] Richard Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' [2] Steve Blank, 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
More like the aftermath of WW2 - radar, jet engines, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, computers, nuclear power...
Einstein, Salk, Tesla, Marconi, etc.
These people were't competing with other humans. They were competing with and seeking some dominance over NATURE.
Competing with other humans is a very tribalistic primitive behavior. Like gangs of chimps in a forest.
We need some outer force to compete against instead of turning on each other.
Competition is very much alive and well (not to mention quite vicious) even in the pursuit of knowledge.
The desire to survive against a perceived threat may have been the impetus for all of these but immediately beyond that, all of these could not have been possible without the collaboration between scientists.
If we could but discover a new motivation for technological innovation besides murder, such innovations could occur at a fraction of the time and cost and not run the risk of being used to suicide the entire species (i.e. nuclear weapons).
Additionally, when taking into consideration the existential threat of climate change, the survival of the species may now depend on a status quo of mutual aid rather than mutual sabotage.
In a militarised competitive culture there's a huge "tax" on innovation, because maintaining a competitive posture is so incredibly draining and expensive that it starves all but a handful of possible projects of oxygen.
So instead of a tiny collection of stand-out military-sponsored projects you'd get a broad spectrum collection of equivalently powerful breakthroughs in many more areas.
Medical research on narcissism is still very young, but so far we have indication for genetic inheritance and therefore potential genetic markers have been found, we observed defining prefrontal cortex signatures, and reproducible and predictable phenotypes (e.g. atypical responses to an environmental stimulus). Similar trends are also observed in altruism, which is seen as the opposite narcissism.
It should, however, be possible to opt out of competition (in any particular area) and still live a good life. I think it's perfectly possible to achieve that in a post-scarcity society. Furthermore, a political & moral advancement could ensure that all "common" wealth (infrastructure, land, property, energy) is more-or-less equally distributed (i.e. "you don't deserve to own that penthouse just because you were born in the right family"), perhaps using taxation by "renting" from the society (e.g. more valuable property owners would be paying more taxes/rents to the rest of us, so they will only be able to keep it if they produce outstanding amount of wealth themselves). Then, the only competition would be based on things like intellect and creativity.
The story Manna [0] includes something similar, where energy is distributed equally among all citizens, who can then "use" it (e.g. to create food, clothes, ...) or "donate" it (e.g. to interesting science projects).
When there is competition, there are winners, there are losers, and there are significantly more losers than winners. There is a _reward_ for winning, whether that be tangible (a trophy, or monetary sum), intangibile (pride of winning), or reproductive (potential mates prefer winners). And therein lies the rub - the losers can surely "live a good life"....depending on your definition....but they surely are not in a Utopian setting, as there are intangibile "rewards" to losing as well - lack of partners, shame, insecurity, among many others.
It doesn't matter the arena of competition, the implications of competition are the same - but to different extremes.
Basically, as long as we have different values, there will be different "competitions" going on. The only reason we even consider some people "successful" is precisely because winning in certain areas bring something most of us value (money). But in an abundance-utopia, money would have no value, so the only important outcome of competition would be status among the people that value whatever you competed in. Which seems quite good to me - I'm sure there will be explicit "non-competition" communities as well for those who really don't want it (meditative monks and such?!).
Do note there is also a "Meta" competition which each of those subjects you mentioned are all vying for market share amongst each other. For example - Twilight fan subculture is dwindling, online gaming subculture is growing. Given a finite, albeit considerably large, number of resources, each subject, at the "Meta" level, competes with each other for the [wo]manhours of eyes spent and invested on it.
To get to the bigger point: Within each of those "arenas" you posited, there are few winners and many losers. Money actually is a minor concern even in our society today. Money is a means to an end.
A "fictional" fiat currency does not hold inherent value but the purchasing power that comes with it!
And actually, amongst professional poker and golf players, the top players have shown time and time again to have already removed themselves from the prize money and are in it for the victory, despite the "Purse" being what every casual observer sees. Wearing the Green Jacket of the Masters means significantly more to many of the seasoned players than the money.
In your "abundance-utopia-with-competition" the status is everything, and to be quite honest, it has already been everything. Save for the barest of bones, rags-to-riches stories of people going from dead broke to being successful, many people at the top of their fields would have been fine, monetarily speaking, if they didn't have this success.
But the key phrase here is "monetarily speaking." -
- More importantly to many people than the money, the mating opportunities do not come to losers. We are closer to chimps than bonobos. That inherently is not a utopia. You're missing this.
I disagree. I think much of human suffering due to competition stems from lack of security, or the lack of reassurance that basic needs will be met.
Imagine a technological utopia. All of your needs as a human being are met. All of the needs of your friends and family are met. Can you not imagine how much easier it would be to advance toward a "social utopia"?
Before the Renaissance, the cut-throat psychotic human beings tended to do the best in terms of gathering resources, security, etc. Since the Renaissance, this has become less and less true and merit has started to take precedence.
Eventually, once the conditions for a technological utopia are met and for the majority of the population, it will be a like a light has suddenly been turned on. Those that have all of their basic needs met, tend to be nicer to others on the whole.
Besides, even if I'm wrong, it's not hard to imagine some sort of machine or system that short-circuits "our biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool" for the good of humanity.
This is the case for basically everyone I know, and I'd imagine this being the case for a lot of the people here. But we're not advancing to a social utopia.
Until that floor is a lot closer to what we call "middle class" you're not going to realize many social benefits.
"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
I'm mildly optimistic that we can at least encourage the better bits of society found in the real world today.
Surely Italy at the time had a far larger population base than Switzerland.
Also, Switzerland did produce something: a much better society, which served as an example to others. Unfortunately, just as we see today with the difference between developed and undeveloped nations, people are generally too stupid, in groups, to actually learn from others' examples.
Good comment - there are two places I disagree with you:
1) See the hedonic treadmill theory[0]. You could point to someone, relatively speaking, who is on top of the world. But they are still unhappy. Why is this? It's sometimes theorized that we are at a "set point" in happiness, and while we can run faster on the treadmill, or slow down on the treadmill from time to time, we are stuck at this set level of happiness.
2) Surely the vast majority of the developed western world is not at a lack for "basic needs", but why is there so much anger and despair? Because I believe you might be missing more of the "basic needs" than just Food and Water. See Maslow's hierarchy of needs[1]. While it is also theory which has arguments against it, it utilizes a more comprehensive definition of "needs."
Surely there are many people in the western world who lack psychological stability or lack companionship.
> All of the needs of your friends and family are met.
You will need to define "needs" because IMHO, that is not true. I have relatives who are veterans of war, friends who have had psychotic breaks, friends who have everything they need but something just doesn't "click" with them.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Relevent HAPPYish scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AWcB_xuBSM
As for the hedonic treadmill, I'm sure this is something that philosophers have considered for ages, but I can only give my personal thoughts on it which are this:
I believe that "happiness" is attainable. Perhaps not pure bliss like popular culture likes to portray it as, but when I think of "happiness" I usually think of "contentedness." In this frame, I think it becomes more obviously attainable.
And if it is attainable in the far-from-perfect world we live in now, then surely it will be attainable in some-distant-future-full-of-convenience. I also think that this concept of hedonism is self-perpetuating. If you believe in nihilism, it becomes your reality. If you reject nihilism, it doesn't.
"The author is flat out wrong. The Hedonic Treadmill has been disproven. Moreover, the author seems to be conflating the concept of the treadmill, with adaptation. The former denotes the subject returns to the original state. The latter recognizes that while we become accustomed to new things, we still improve in happiness.
The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."
Relevant links:
"Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being"
http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pd...
Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056
Kahneman's paper where that OP misquotes Kahneman from:
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
It's too bad our branch of the great apes family is the one that evolved high intelligence, instead of the branch that has the Bonobos. If they were the ones who grew huge brains and high intelligence, they'd probably already have Utopia by now.
Instead of sating this desire by building power over (or commuting violence against) others, you exercise domination over yourself.
As a sometimes climber, it's a nice - if incredible - thought.
Many novels and movies use this to build their story. In a "bad" world a guy saves everybody or in a "good" world things go wrong because one of them starts doing "bad" things.
The modern approaches we take give more emphasis to the differences of people in both work environment and society.
Software development in particular is hard. The problem you work on doesn't care about your feelings. We gloss over this fact when we turn our workplaces into creches. Pride in doing a job well is more sustainable than a demand for happiness and novelty.
It's not the software work per se that isn't fun most of the time.
Often the problem is that people who have no idea about software development want to shape "how" we work.
"I pay you mad bucks for this, so you have to sit here and be watched multiple times a day so you I know you're really working!"
Admittedly some lucky people get paid to work on the open-source thing they created, but they're in a tiny minority.
(Yeah, I had problems with assignments in school too. I'm just wired this way.)
You could argue people would be willing to work for less if it was fun and you would have a point. But the idea that the other party is paying you to work because it is unfun is bonkers.
They usually have to pay you for a variety of reasons:
- It's not so much fun that you're willing to do it for free
- You can't afford to do it for free even if you would be willing to do so in principle
- Someone else is willing to pay you to do more or less the same thing
But that's not what UBI does, and UBI wouldn't work (at least not in the near term) if it were like that. UBI is a basic income: it gives you just enough so you're not starving or living on the street. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to eat cheap, crappy food and live in the ghetto. So even with a UBI, I'm going to want to have an unhappy job so I can afford a nice place and a nicer lifestyle.
I can see the UBI making it so that fewer people take really crappy jobs though: poorly-paid jobs that are dangerous or just plain miserable. Why work for some asshole boss, perhaps working in a hot kitchen at some greasy-spoon restaurant, if you can just sit at home with your UBI and not deal with that stress and hot grease splattering on you? Sure, working the crappy job will give you more money than just having the UBI, since the job doesn't take away your UBI, but if the job is that miserable, it'll either go unfilled or the boss will have to pay more to get people to want to bother with it. But software development is rarely that bad, and is much more highly paid due to its difficult nature. They're not going to have much trouble, under a UBI system, finding people willing to do boring ERP system development for 6 figures.
The quality of the code, yes, the idiocy of management, the bureaucracy of the corporate environment...but all of those are or stem from people problems, not innate to the actual process of generating code that does something. I doubt that anyone has ever left a job because the software problems they were solving were too hard.
I'm not saying your base point, that the reality of work is that some of it is unpleasant, is wrong; I largely agree with that (as even if you manage to build a product by yourself that is commercially successful, you start having to deal with users, meaning back to people problems). I -am- disagreeing with your example (because defining the source of the problems is necessary to improving your workplace, or finding a better one)
For me, I never get angry about programming problems. But I do get frustrated over e.g. the whole idea of the project I'm working on, or some design decisions made in it.
I completely disagree. Why do you think some software developers move into management? Obviously, people like that are more interested in people problems than in coding problems.
As an example, you may hold grudge about a coding problem, but when you beat it and find the solution, you are instantly satisfied, gain self-gratification, if the problem was important to others you also gain gratification from your peers, and in the process you learn a new way to solve a problem
I always thought the idea of being happy about doing a job was a little weird, and maybe it's just me, but given that almost every job puts you in a service position, I find it weird that people expect you to be happy to act as a service-monkey to someone's whim all in the goal of making someone else lots of money.
Or rather, I still love to code - I just immediately switch to loathing it when the "for money" part gets involved. In time I realized that there is likely no job that would make me happy, and even if I started my own business, I'd probably be overwhelmed by various market-related bullshit. I stopped expecting to be happy at work, and... I got much happier.
(It's either that or SSRIs working.)
Stress is working over 55 hours a week. It's having bosses who want impossible things faster. It's being overwhelmed with complexity and responsibility with little control. It's being compelled to continuously mask my personality, identity, and emotions.
But, that's just me.
I just want a safe, simple place to think about ideas and concepts and collaborate with other like-minded people whom I trust to build them into reality. The trust part is really important (and increasingly hard to find).
With billions of people networked together and with general understand of who the inventors, thinkers, leaders, and doers are, why can't we have something better?
I'd pay $$$$$$$ if some of you brilliant people can figure that out.
Capitalism served us well, but it's time to move on.
Not to mention the fact that not a soul on this planet is capable of the foresight necessary to endure the changing needs of the people. We feel far safer keeping rigidly to the known doctrine, even if it makes everyone miserable.
Every single utopian vision is tyranny.
Couldn't resist...
"Historically, cooperation is what drives humanity forward."
What I'm pretty sure about is that simplified-to-utter-uselessness statements are NOT what drives humanity forward. Lots of empty meaningless phrases here.
The competition theory of social organisation tries to stimulate this by creating artificial adversity through (typically non-violent) competition between people. I speculate that one of the key issues with this approach is that a lot of the problems that you create are not bounded by "underlying reality" as such - they emerge from the competition itself, and so we end up spending a lot of effort solving meta-problems which, if you stripped away the competition, aren't really "helpful".
Further, it seems difficult to distinguish which problems are "real" problems, and which aren't, because the competition does exist - what we end up with is a pervasive sense that a lot of what we're doing isn't useful, but we can't work out what or why.
Considering a post-scarcity world, it is not difficult to imagine a pseudo-utopia with the way technology is going. Using the example of Manna, imagine the ability to plug into some perfect VR world that looks and feels just like reality. Why would anyone want to "compete" in that scenario?
Already today, human beings would rather stay at home and consume various forms of media (tv, games, etc..) than go out and "compete." Humans typically value security over a marginal gain in luxury. Even the risk-takers among us err closer to the security-side of this spectrum on the whole.
I think those in this thread that worry that humans will always have an innate desire to one-up their brethren are worrying about nothing or some close approximation to nothing.
The best we could hope for in such a situation is that we realise the immediacy of the "real" problems, and start to focus on those, arresting the decline before it becomes too severe. I have an (unfounded) expectation that the process of switching our (i.e. humanity's) productive capacity to focus on the "real" problems would be characterised by cooperation rather than competition, because the adversity required for progress would already be there, and we wouldn't need competition to create it.
If humanity becomes more fragmented during that process (see the rise of the isolationist right around the world), then we would run the risk of that cooperation being focused on destructive goals - that would seem to me to be along the lines of the worst-case scenario.
It strikes me that a lot of that is my interpretation of some of what is in Joseph A. Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies", which I saw recommended on here, and subsequently read. I heartily re-endorse the recommendation (I did a search to see if I could work out whose recommendation it was that pushed me to read it, but I'm afraid I can't work out which it might be, for which I apologise).
At the moment the most played video game seems to be League of Legends where player compete to accumulate gold through killing other players amongst other things. So the human instincts come out, just in the virtual world.
Maybe the future is humans merrilly killing in VR while peaceful robots look after them in the real world, a bit like a variation on The Matrix.
Can't really reproduce history, though. We've yet to see the extent what humanity can do if they work as one, but most practical and theoretical fields are advanced by competition more than cooperation. Mathematics is a global competition between universities, chemistry is a race to make industry more efficient and profitable, biology requires patents and being first to market to be viable. Physics actually seems cooperative to me, but I'm sure the more practical sub-fields: electronics, structures, energy etc are all driven by competition.
My point is not about anecdotal examples. The ones you provided merely prove that mankind can withstand competition to some degree. My point is that you are making a statement which is likely supported by your vision and its bias, but not by any scientific study.
It is interesting to note that a conflicting opinion could be supported by the same logic and different anecdotes.
I'd say it was more technology that did it. Chimps both compete and cooperate and don't advance much. It was the invention of writing, printing, electricity and the like that changed things.