Comment by jorprp93j | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorprp93j | Hacker News Reader

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First, jobs are work in that they’re emotionally boring repetitive tasks the bean counters have whittled down into cost saving nonsense. So fuck them: https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

Second, there is a ton of work out there our society likes to ignore the value of because it’s not shallow novelty: https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...

And really if automation does take more jobs than we can replace, being really nice to each seems like a good idea. Cause most people won’t be needed. Are we to descend into Mad Max life or could we, you know, kill the notion alpha attitudes are useful.

I am reminded of a paper by chimp researchers who watched a community of chimps gang up on some alpha male chimps and kill them off. Then noted how their community became much more ethical after such selfish, entitled behavior was eradicated.

Applying ethical standards to chimps seems weird. By what measure did they become more ethical?

“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” - Marx

Yeh. Though I think it’s not explicit enough? A bit open to literal interpretation only.

I actually see it as “too little” new information that’s of utility to the general populace.

We spend then “too much” time focused on “too few ideas that matter”.

Like what celebs eat is discussed more than environment, and on and on. Too little new progress is made to satisfy these less discussed but ultimately far more important problems.

Thinking Keynes, our demand has been nudged to focus on consumerism, celebrity, gainz!. But we maybe need to balance that with the demands of the literal majority being shat on.

I’ve seen it discussed here too, that focusing on poverty via a statistic emotionally numbs analysis, ignoring that it’s still hundreds of thousands or whatever number it is, of real people barely scraping by.

We’re fetishizing opinions that we’re obliged to import as education from our parents and institutions, which is unavoidable. What is avoidable and manageable is the content of those opinions.

Free speech is generating whatever syntax you want. You’re not owed a society that kowtows to the embedded semantics.

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