Dr John Goodenough’s story suggests some people become more creative with age
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having enough funds for expenses.
Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.
That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills.
Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do, realistically.
$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with.
But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.
How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
This will never fly politically. You think lower-middle class people (the vast majority of the country) are going to agree to that?
I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway.
If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.
I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off.
Good luck with your efforts!
I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.
Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?
I'd say many would like to have more people to have this sort of opportunity, which is currently only limited to the very privileged.
So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.)
So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now.
I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.
Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
Minimal income could only be achieved by more and more government intervention. Answer yourself how good that would be.
In UK history some monasteries probably get close to being communist communities, but they're very small scale.
I am not aware of a successful "communism" that scales above the Dunbar number, and while I can point at ones that are arguably successful at sizes below that number there are even more that have failed even below that number.
[1]: People who post to the internet about how wonderful Communism are generally posting about how wonderful it would be to have a government who would target them for death pretty early on, as they are the "talkative ones" who would be watched. Same, incidentally, for the people who actively riot in favor of giving the government lots more powers to, oh, say, take "care" of people passionate enough to riot in favor of overthrowing the government, which is really appealing right up to the point that you are the government.
If they're "staying more equal" then surely that shows you didn't have a communist state.
IMO the transition is nearly impossible because you need those in power to want benevolence and humanitarianism more than power and wealth.
>I can point at ones that are arguably successful at sizes below that number //
Please do?
Of course, once we have true AI, human history is also over.
Additionally, there were few incentives for people to be creative (you couldn't benefit from your creative work), and also many restrictions on creativity (art/culture was directed by the state, freedom of speech minimal).
Yes, it may require higher taxes or new taxes like a carbon tax or land value tax. But is higher taxes == more government intervention?
Let's talk numbers: to give every adult in the us a BI of $25k/yr , would require $5T. Current tax base of the US is $1T.
This way you're not giving a flat $25k to someone who's already earning $100k. But if that person loses their job, they'll still get enough to live on.
Right now if you receive welfare, and you make a dollar, you lose a dollar of welfare. That's the actual disincentive to work.
The idea is that, currently, "not working" is dis-incentivised to such a degree that it creates more problems than it solves. Consider:
- For currently unemployed people: are they lacking in motivation, or in ability?
- For people who legitimately cannot find employment: is it moral to expose them to policies aimed at punishing 'freeloaders'?
- Considering existing work-requirements even for basic assistance with food and housing: is it correct to say these operate from a model of human motivation where people stop trying as soon as they can afford the basic necessities of life?
- Do you stop trying as soon as you know you have enough food and a roof over your head for the foreseeable future?
- Do you know anybody who does that?
- If people are forced into jobs with the thread of starvation or homelessness, what are the trade-offs they are required to make? I. e. to what degree is this forcing short-termism, and hindering their ability to invest time into, for example, education?
- To what degree does the looming threat of starvation compromise the position of low-income workers in negotiations with employers?
- Consider some model citizen from the lower middle class that you can think of: maybe a factory worker from the midwest, or an accountant's clerk in Houston, whatever... They have been gainfully employed for all their (adult) life, and will be for the foreseeable future. Question: How much needless anxiety is that person possibly experiencing, because they are just some random economic events away from complete destitution?
- To what degree could society profit by mitigating some of the risks associated with attempting something new?
This is one of the main problems UBI seeks to address by not being means tested like current benefits.
If instead of phasing out the earned credit for any earnings below $25k/year it was just withdrawn above that threshold (an effective marginal tax rate of 100% beteen $25k-$50k/year) then you would get clustering of incomes at just under $25k/year with no incomes between $25k-$50k/year. Potentially you could phase it out starting at $25k as arguably the incentive effects are less pronounced at higher incomes. Obviously this could not be considered universal however.
if you earn $500, ($50 in taxes), you get 2 for one credits, so that pulls $25 out of your 1000, you take home $500 for working, and $975 for BI.
if you earn $100000, $10000 in taxes, you get a 2 for one credit, so only $8000 in taxes.
BI makes it always better to earn some money.
People always seem to forget the tax credit side, and assume we're just writing everyone a check.
If you earn $0, you get $25k.
If you earn $10k, you get $15k
If you earn $24999, you get a $1 credit.
Anything $25k and up, you get 0 credits, with a progressive tax scheme to support the above.
I guess it's not "universal" per se, but the only means testing would be to figure out how much income you made, which the government already does in the course of collecting income taxes anyway.
Many people are not going to just sit around the house and play video games all day. People have a natural desire to do productive things.
Per a very worrisome concurrent to this 4 8 2017 thread about stroke survival and cost, how is a UBI in a land of 'buy more hamburger, buy more tobacco, buy more white bread, buy more audience-centric entertainments' ... maybe all using non-pedestrian means for the purchase [ vehicle, taxi, ...] not having a hidden cost to society in obesity/stroke/diabetes constant diet and exercise sub-par but par for that the neighbors are doing and up to and demand for friendliness, earlier stroke risk in a sizable number of the UBI while young but much more less healthy, not out of breath activities during ones day 2019 vs 1819, and the consequential thirty years after its onset not Pritikin or similar while young and in one's productive years, tearing asunder the capacity of society to deal with it in a traditionally within-ones-extended family medical care with once a week medical assitance, where the norm is now maybe or will be, confiscate, put in villa of warehoused stroke obese survival bedrooms, with TV, cake, etc, and overworked underpaid and maybe even deprived of retirement income for current health plan tax, nursing staff and the like?......Which is not to be overly critical of the conversation, because I was once a part of a same group and overfed, but due to ignorance and naive utopian goal from being bullied that in hindsight was only extremely damaging to my own health, vs victimizng to others which one could take it as, since it encouraged overeating if one was observing my overeating, and was accompanied by my strange silences as one by birth-surgery isolation not very conversant, still, in conversation as I prefer to write to expound, as this, and .... well, whatever. ..... tl;dr... UBI may impose a decades-later extreme uptrend in stroke among a not-small subset of its recipients... costly to society and the families of those UBI gainers of income at the earliest years of its onset. Something to put into the mix, if one is so inclined. [ text input box here not conducive to editing, and also out of time, dual-reason only of draft quality small treatise, I as newbie to YN may be excused. Thanks! IAMYD ]
$25k a year is about the poverty line for a family of four.
And people at the poverty line get state support(Medicare , etc) . So that's more money.
Isn't this whole notion of BI dependent on the political support of a large share of Americans who think they'll get money - and now you're saying they won't ?
Or in other words - why aren't talking about unemployment insurance that doesn't forces you to work ? because that's what's your offer is.
BI is not the same as unemployment insurance, because that would require you to work beforehand. It's also not the same because with every dollar you earn, you loose the same dollar from your unemployment insurance. BI would mean that the first couple of thousand of dollars you earn, you will keep. Essentially it provides an incentive for those on welfare or unemployment to engage in at least some work, because they can keep that money.
I've noticed a trend where someone thinks that some napkin math ends a conversation, and it seems a bit like scientism to me.
For example, many BI schemes I've seen discussed assume that most people with jobs will be taxed to reclaim the UBI and the actual benefit is for people trying to get out of poverty who aren't trapped by egregious equivalent tax rates where they lose 2 dollars of benefits for every extra dollar they earn and so rationally decide that working less is more financially rewarded.
Why don't you run the numbers for that?
But could you please share some numbers for those offers you proposed - they'll be interesting to hear.
If automation takes over, human labor is going to have to be redirected at the household and community level.
"But...but redistribution!"
Yeah, about that. Unless you've been protesting the massive policy-driven upward redistribution of wealth that's happened over the past three decades, your position probably isn't as principled as you imagine. More on the specifics of how the great grift worked can be found here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/how-middl...
(And don't bust my chops about using the word losers. I am homeless. It is not me looking down my nose at other people, JFC.)
Let's focus on education and healthcare first. An effective universal education and healthcare system could be the foundation for BI in the distant future (both socially and politically).
1. Young age - obsess about what others think of them
2. Middle age - don't care what others thing of them
3. Old age - realize that nobody is thinking of them
Which is liberating for intellectual freedom.
More so a single isolated case of a researcher with an entire lab of young students is not particularly good supporting evidence of some people become more creative with age either -- if the intention is to write about the later an actual over-view of the field or related fields should be required.
Imagine someone of the calibre of Feynman at 150!
(Like the Meths in Altered Carbon)
However, you don't need to be 94 to be brilliant either.
When you're young you have fewer commitments, more time, more energy, and an ability to recover from marathon slogs to get work done. Your lack of experience may hamper you in some fields, but it also allows you to see the World from a different angle which might, given your field, be an advantage.
When you're older, you will have far more experience, insight, and the ability to allow your subconscious to bring together disparate experiences and thoughts into new ideas. However, you may be cognitively locked into seeing things a certain way, you will more likely have other draws on your time and you're less likely to be able to do (or recover from), 100-hour weeks.
Both groups have something to offer, but the idea that one group is better than the other is ludicrous.
Young people are not smarter. Old people are not wiser. They each just have different life experiences, abilities and ways of prioritising time.
Old people do tend to be wiser. When you are 20 you simply can't make up for the 10 extra years of experience you are missing against someone who is 30...and someone who is 50 and has used the last 20 years improving themselves (after having a decade of their 20s to make mistakes you can't imagine)...forget about it. No matter how smart you are you can't overcome the slow accumulation of experience that time brings.
I think what Goodenough says about not closing your mind as you age is key. Some old people stop learning, but if you combine a lifetime of learning and being willing to change your mind, it's remarkable what you can do. One of the great detriments to the tech industry is the youth movement. Giving college kids the world is detrimental to the world and ultimately those people. Adversity is good.
You can't know what you don't know?
The article is about genius, but the strengths you attach to the young here apply more to what I would consider being a good worker drone.
When considering the cases of both Goodenough and Zuckerberg, my takeaway is that when it comes to genius, age is a non-factor.
It's just a poorly managed/developed project. Plain and simple.
It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make.
Studies show that older people are smarter. Despite your apparent youth, I'm fairly certain you can find the relevant studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli... :
"In psychology, fluid and crystallized intelligence are factors of general intelligence, originally identified by Raymond Cattell."
Fluid intelligence peaks around 18 years of age, then declines.
Crystallized intelligence is your accumulation of knowledge and skill. It increases until age 65 then slowly declines.
Readers should be careful not to interpret this as meaning you're washed up at age 66. It means you're still close to your peak.
All the stuff you mention, you can measure. How do you measure intelligence? The kind of intelligence/wisdom that leads to making new scientific discoveries?
I will posit that raw intellectual horsepower might decline with age (and even then, what the hell is this thing and how would we measure it?), but it's also clear to me that decades of accumulated wisdom and study can increase the likelihood of making a new discovery.
Of course eventually you start running up against mechanical limits and you decline. But that peak is much later than the peak in sensory bandwidth.
If peak physical condition was correlated with peak intelligence, we would expect 17-18 year olds to be making major changes in our world
Only it was 640K (the old IBM PC limitation), and Gates never said it (at least can't be verified from any source).
But even if he HAD said it, it's still a perfectly fine claim, since it spoke for users of the IBM PC of the time, given programs and common applications of the time. And as it's said to be told around 1980-81 it was totally write: it took half a decade or more for the limit to even matter to users. Obviously the hypothetical Gates would have perfectly known future PCs would need more memory, and there's nothing in the quote to imply it was meant as something that would be true forever.
Zuckerberg's line on the other hand is total BS. But then again his main claim is hitting the jackpot with the right crappy PHP app that appealed to the zeitgeist. So more of an "right idea at the right time" person than a real genius like Bill Joy.
While there were smaller declines in things like remembering names, one theory was that what we know gets consolidated, allowing older brains to make greater leaps in logic more quickly. While older brains are distracted more easily, one study suggested people learn to compensate by using the left and right brain together to maintain focus and progress, and this results in bringing more "firepower" to bear on the tasks at hand.
We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences.
But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less common.
You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.
> Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent
Unrelated? If you think the latter is completely unrelated, what do you think it involves?
As I know it, the concept of creativity is much more than "copying existing techniques with a minor twist".
Publication here.
E.g. it's not like someone with an IQ of 80 can be totally creative -- except if by "creative" we just mean "has lots of imagination".
But what we casually call creative is not just being imaginative in abstract, but coming up with innovative solutions and important works. Which requires intelligence -- especially if those works are of the engineering and scientific kind.
However, it's very easy to be immensely intelligent and have zero creativity, indeed to be conformist to an absurd degree. Elite bureaucrats are exactly like this, at least in many European countries.
Is it possible to be very creative and dim-witted? I'd be very tempted to say yes but I have to admit I can't provide lots of examples.
:)
An easy example is music. The world is full of professional and amateur musicians, many of who are considered obsessed and yet people considered geniuses rare, perhaps only a handful every century.
I still think it did deserve to be made fun of.
"Hello? Automobile engine self repairable? Impossible!"
"Hello? Programming with cards? Impossible!"
Also that companies design stuff to break, and design things to be hard to fix.
Legally mandating long warranties and long term parts availability would probably help?
You should check out YouTube. Your perception seems to be skewed, maybe by your social circle? We're living in a golden age of "ability to get in there and see how the machines work".
I'm 28 and nothing infuriates me more than late 20's or early 30's year old man-children making fun of a generation who won WW2, put a man on the moon, improved civil rights tremendously, and ushered in an era of human prosperity and progress never seen before. Such arrogance from a group of people who have accomplished little of note in comparison.
I don't feel superior teaching a man to use Google if that man when he was a decade younger than the age I am now was flying a chopper over Vietnam to support his wife and two children. Listen and learn from them while they are still around.
I'll use myself as an example. Growing up, I helped my dad do most of the maintenance on our house & 7-acre property. We brought in experts sometimes, but we'd typically take a crack at it first and could usually handle it ourselves. So many weekends and evenings were spent on these projects like replacing toilets, installing hardwood floors, building sheds, painting, cutting down trees, etc.
I've noticed that as an adult with a house and family, I am much more likely to call in a professional. I'll still do the quick and easy stuff, like replace a ceiling fan or maybe a bathroom faucet, hang some blinds, etc., but once a project looks like it'll take more than, say, 2 hours, I'll find a professional. For example, I use a yard service for my yard that is about 1/15 the size of my childhood yard.
Sometimes I feel stupid paying others to do things I can do. I know my ancestors (especially male ancestors) would find it ridiculous for me to pay someone else to do something so basic. But it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
For example, I recently paid someone $800 to install flooring. It took him and his helper 2 days to complete the job. I could saved that money by doing it myself, but to me, it was totally worth it. They're pros; so what took the two of them ~14 hours probably would have taken me at least 30-40 hours. That's roughly 4-5 days of non-working time, weekends or PTO. Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid, or I could spend that time working and at my billable rate, make a substantial multiple of $800. And the pros almost certainly did a better job than I would have.
If I had done it myself, I would have learned/honed a skill, but how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
Of course, my dad was a c-level exec, and he came to a different conclusion. I can respect the self-sufficient approach, but I don't place a ton of value on it. And that shifting mindset seems to be true for many of my friends and acquaintances who are under 40 or so.
You just got done saying how you spent all this time with your Dad fixing stuff, but you don't want to spend 4-5 days fixing stuff because you want to spend time with your wife and kid... Why not just work together? Jobs like that have lots of different parts, from demolition to making lunch. It's much more fun as a family than for Dad to go off and do it alone.
> how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
If your work involves creativity you'll use that experience thousands of times. Every detail of the process is a metaphor for all kinds of things. There's no border in my head between coding, business, gardening, and homebuilding. All of those practices self-reinforce. Things I learn in one domain constantly solve problems in others.
There is this idea in the tech world that the most stimulating environment for solving coding problems is a sterile office with a bunch of computers, and non-stop exposure to the concrete problem space. But I find a few minutes in the garden, a long walk, a break to cook lunch... these are often much more fertile areas for me to solve challenging questions.
Most software management processes just value "did today's widget do it's behavior", and don't encourage people to solve the higher level challenges in their codebase. Those are opportunities which can offer 100x increases in productivity, but most tech managers would rather get 20 widgets built than suffer watching an engineer smoking pot and making elaborate meals in the kitchen for two weeks and then two weeks refactoring things that already worked into a (seemingly arbitrarily) different shape.
Sure, it's good to have hobbies. I like to forage mushrooms, cook, hike, photograph, etc., and I agree they are stimulating, creative, whatever. Who's arguing otherwise? I don't follow. My dad's only real hobby was working on the house and yard. One could argue that's less stimulating than having hobbies spanning a more diverse set of skills. Also, maybe parents should occasionally consider what hobbies their children want to do.
I have installed flooring a few times in my life. I have never consciously used that experience in other facets of life. All it taught me is that I would rather spend my time doing something else. I don't find it particularly satisfying or enjoyable. Let's say I have 5 more instances of wanting new flooring in my life. What I'm saying is I'd prefer to have 25 days where I can choose how I want to spend time rather than spend those 25 days installing flooring to save $4000. I think most of my peer group thinks similarly, whereas I think many middle class people would have made the opposite decision a generation ago.
My point was not that you should only be coding or sitting in an office or something. I don't know where you got that idea. My point was that I don't inherently value self-sufficiency when it comes to home/yard/car maintenance – at least not to the same degree that previous generations did.
And obviously all of this is on a spectrum, right? I think it's important to know how to change a tire or jump a battery, if you drive often. I know how to change my own oil but rarely choose to. I don't know how to, say, change my brake pads. It's probably easy, but it's not something that comes up often enough that I care about learning – and not an area I want to test my amateur abilities.
EDIT: Anyway, I'm not trying to argue, though I acknowledge I am bristly in the text above. I actually agree with most of what you said. You're totally right that as my daughter gets older, there's more opportunity for the family to do projects together, and if she enjoys learning how to install a new light fixture or whatever, that can be a hobby for us to do together. Though I still wouldn't view it as inherently much more valuable than other hobbies, like camping or painting, and that's where I think my viewpoint differs from my parents' or grandparents'.