Comment by avz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avz | Hacker News Reader

When I was a nerdy teenager I imagined that by a date like 2020 humankind would have cured cancer, built a base on the Moon or Mars, eradicated infectious diseases and taken control over climate and weather. It turns out that in the real world progress is a lot slower than in the imagination of a sci-fi-imbued teenager. It turns out that solving problems takes work. A lot of it.

If people work less, especially if engineers, scientists, doctors etc work less, then technological progress will be taking place slower than it is currently. The disappointment of my teenage self with 2030 will then be even greater than that with 2020.

I'm genuinely puzzled by the general anti-work sentiment I perceive on HN (maybe my perception is simply incorrect). I'd expect that most folks here work as engineers or in a similar field that rewards with interesting and meaningful problems and that a substantial fraction had once been sci-fi-imbued teenagers like myself and possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.

I'm very worried that the anti-work movement is (inadvertently?) pushing on the breaks of technological progress :-(

but what percentage of the workforce is actually working in jobs related to solving these problems?

i'd argue that the "anti-work" sentiment here is more to do with lack of fulfillment due to an epidemic of bullshit jobs, rather than not wanting to work.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bullshit_Jobs

Well up until recently I spent 9-10 hours a day programming machines that turned mountains into countertops and fireplace and such for rich people. Every day I kind of made the world worse to make some rich people happy. I mean there was one day we took a slab of 10 million year old fossils cut from the bottom of the ocean and made it into a counter. This arguably does not improve the world.

4 day weeks or 6 hour days would have been pretty awesome, I could have likely been more productive in life things.

My new job is also nothing world changing, though probably marginally more beneficial to more people and less environmentally damaging, but the lack of 6, nine hour day weeks makes it more appealing in many ways.

Though, I'm kind of torn, because I find the actual work less fulfilling and enjoyable, but having time is nice.

do you think its possible to find a job so full-filling it does not feel like a job?

in my years of money work, i contributed to pollution, sugar addiction, advertising, the financial crisis, general environmental destruction, etc. i would have done more good sitting on my hands.

Do you think working more would get us to that place? Purely from an hourly perspective, we're already working 'more'. Way more than the technological progress would allow us to focus on the problems that you mentioned. The problem IMO is who benefits from the extra value produced by that work. Unfortunately it's not society.

The anti-work movement is not 'anti-work' in general. It's anti-meaningless degrading work which allows me to make ends meet while enabling a small number of people to become unbelievably rich.

This book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs outlines some of the issues you mentioned. Technological advancement allowed for a lot of jobs to disappear which should theoretically allow us to have more leisure time or time invested in other directions. However, we need to keep 'the machine' going, so..

Most people in Silicon Valley working long hours are not toiling for missions remotely related to those utopian visions.

Maybe. I'd suggest that it can difficult to tell exactly what advancement brings us closer to "Utopia." Everyone easily accpets the idea that basic research can have long term effects in unpredictable ways. I'd suggest that some trivial commercial advancements can do the same thing.

>possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.

If anything, people should be disappointed at the technological progress that has received priority over others.

Personally I'm aghast at the pace of "technological progress" due to the direction it is going in.

Some people believe that we'd be more efficient if we work 30 hours a week instead of 40+.

If this were really true, you’d expect to see most people with full freedom to set their own hours gravitate towards that 30-hour mark.

Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business owners would show up for 30 hours a week and go home. Fruit pickers, paid by the bucket, would pick more fruit in 30 hours than their colleagues could pick in 50. Professional athletes who spent less time training would beat their harder-working competitors.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2737742

It's an idea that's only recently begun gathering research:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294545

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13318990

https://www.brinknews.com/working-fewer-hours-makes-you-more...

> Professors working 30-hour weeks

This is gated by the fact that teaching even a single class well is almost a 40-hour a week job by itself.

Most people probably aren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for the possible slight advancement of mankind. Especially laborers who are the ones most affected by work time limits.

In doubt it. Most jobs are operations or a function that is mostly hours applied to complete tasks, not product development.

Reducing working hours would likely improve output and employment.

what have you done to move progress along? i'd bet dollars to donuts you have been too busy earning money doing useless shit like advertising, finance, or entertainment, a net negative for everyone, and jerking off to mainstream media on your own time. no offense. i did it too for about 15 years.

on the other hand, it gives motivated people enough free time to tackle difficult problems that they're interested in.

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