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Comment by twoquestions | Hacker News Reader

"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!"

This article kind of reminds me of the super-high-pressure environment of Japanese education, where test scores are the be-all-end-all until you (hopefully) become the appendage of some state-supported hypercorp.

I've heard somewhere (I can't remember and my search-fu is weak) that "People need bread, but they need roses too", where bread is what makes life possible, and roses are what makes life worth living (like art and such). We hyper-optimize for bread, and burn the roses to save on fuel.

This shit makes my blood run cold.

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If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--insisting on having access and to measuring in certain ways. His thesis is that this legibility is actively corrosive to other properties that don't show up in the measurement. The book starts with an account of how 19th C European forestry managers imposed legibility on their forests in terms of lumber production, and ended up killing off everything but a monocrop, which then collapsed. Eventually he gets around to education, where it's pretty clear there are big externalities to the way we insist on measuring what happens in school. There are broader lessons here for the technocratically-inclined.

That's been on my reading list for years now, I should get around to reading it at some point. I've heard good things!

it's really hard to know what even are the properties of complex systems - good article by yaneer bar-yam about them https://mystudentvoices.com/why-complexity-is-different-ecd4...

So, to be clear, we "hyper-optimize for bread" in a society where 12.3% are food-insecure at some point during the year (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...)?

The line you're thinking of goes, "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too." It's how the rose became a socialist symbol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses

>This shit makes my blood run cold.

It makes mine run hot with rage and fire, but honestly, what doesn't?

You seem to be implying we don't have enough bread? Because we do. We would have enough bread if we all switched to 30 hour work weeks too. The problem of bread disparity is largely separate.

Running the mainstream worker ragged does nothing to ensure that the poor have access to necessities.

I'm just suggesting that talking of "hyper-optimization" without getting the cost function right doesn't help.

It's the people doing the hyper-optimizing for bread / raw output that don't have the cost function right.

>"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!"

Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake?

I think the roses comment is from V for vendetta (the comic book not the movie) but it's probably quoting from something better.

> Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake?

If we take that statement literally, then yes. But it seems to be enough if there is one area in which you are better than average. That being said, there would still be loads of people who'd be a "mistake". I am afraid this is in fact how many people receive reality. This is probably one of the reasons why we discuss UBI so much lately.

That quote was meant to be a caricature of a heartless monster who can only regard something like the Mona Lisa by how much heat that burning it would put out.

My blood is also cold. To get personal I feel as if I have extremely stunted social skills/development due to pressure to show my worth in the form of good grades. This became all consuming for me, and my whole life until recently my self worth has been tied strictly to others perceiving me as smart. Not a good look. Kids need 'organic' socialization.

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