Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> I think you would find few people in the art community who agree with this.

I happen to know some successful artists (you'd recognize their names), and they are very much in it for the big bucks.

You will find many who say they are in it for the purity, but their actions belie it.

BTW, your ideal society has a name, it's called a "commune". Communes have been tried over and over in history. Something like 10,000 have been set up in the US. The result? 100% failure.

One hundred percent.

You don't have to believe me. It's perfectly legal to set up a commune in the US. Set one up with your like-minded friends. Throw your hat in the ring. Prove me wrong.

AFAIK, 0% of them have produced any art anyone considered great.

View on HN

What a repulsive argumentative style.

>>>I also expect that making money is a prime motivator for artists, and also drives the quality of their work.

is a much less hostile claim than

>I happen to know some successful artists (you'd recognize their names), and they are very much in it for the big bucks.

which could have been made in the initial comment, but then parent wouldn't be able to Other the grandparent for the heretical belief that people can work together at scale. The parent simply knows better. Even when the grandparent cites what Sikh society verifiably does, which is simply a cultural reorganization of existing resources, not a remodel of the human heart, and certainly within the power of much richer European and North American societies as they now stand, let alone what at-scale automation could provide -- it's never addressed because that's ackshually a commune. Which, as the astute reader will learn by reading further, doesn't work, 100% of the time. In fact, they're "anti-ethical". [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148652

I didn't argue that people cannot work together at scale. My argument, admittedly heavyhanded, is that organizing this work based on altruism does not work. It may work here and there, for a period of time, but it is not sustainable. Organizations that work are ones where people are paid for the work they do, not ones that pay people regardless of the work they do.

By the way, anti-ethical does not mean unethical. It means contrary to, in this case, contrary to human nature. I did not write that communes were anti-ethical. I wrote that they were anti-ethical to human nature, meaning they are contrary to human nature.

There's nothing unethical about voluntary communes, but there's plenty unethical about forcible ones.

> My argument, admittedly heavyhanded, is that organizing this work based on altruism does not work. It may work here and there, for a period of time

For the special case of intellectual creation, which has no marginal cost of reproduction and often benefits from the widest exposure and availability, there are many counterexamples where fully voluntary work has been successful. Even HN itself might fairly be described as one at least partially, since karma points are not a monetary incentive and only the site's moderators and sysops are paid.

Yes, there are, including myself. I work for free for the D Language Foundation. You can't run a country like that, however.

Sikhs [0] are humans, and presumably have the same human nature everyone in this thread shares. If the parent contends that what the Sikhs [0] do is a "commune", then the facticity of their continued success shows that "communes" do not always fail. If what the Sikhs do is not a "commune", then the parent has set up and defeated a strawman unrelated to the example set by Sikhs [0]. Which is it?

As the facticity of Sikh [0] food distribution is not at issue[1], it's obvious that organizing this work based on altruism actually does work, and altruism at this scale is possible. The parent's emotional opposition to the concept has led them to make, and now defend, unrelated claims -- and ignore the reality on the ground.

No one, beyond the parent themselves, brought up communes, forcible or otherwise. Even if this were relevant, the Sikhs [0] do not force anyone to participate in or accept their voluntary food distribution, so I'm at a total loss as to why any of this was brought up at all -- unless the parent is actually trying to advance an ideological position, which seems to be that cooperation doesn't work at scale [1]. Oops, I mean a slightly larger scale [2]. Perhaps that's true in whatever culture the parent grew up in, but as Sikhs [0] prove, it's obviously not a human universal. Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human?

What a repulsive argumentative style.

[0] via langars

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31150154 <- in which it's suggested that since Sikhs [0] do not currently feed the entirety of their home country, this demonstrates that their approach cannot be scaled up any further

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31151819 <- history shows that most countries that attempt to feed all their citizens are naturally regime change'd by the CIA, so this one checks out

> entirety

I never said entirety. If you want to disagree with me, fine, but please don't add extra words that change the meaning.

The Langar was proposed as a model for society. Shall we visit the numbers? 50,000 meals served per day, 1,380,000,000 people. 4,140,000,000 meals needed per day if it was a societal model. I estimate 2,000 volunteers are needed to do the 50,000 meals.

Langar has been around for 400 years. Out of 1,380,000,000 they can only muster 2,000 volunteers. Does that sound workable as a model for society? It doesn't to me.

The Langar relies on donations, too. I.e. whether it is a commune or not, it is not able to support itself.

As for some American examples, there's Woodstock, which subsisted on donated food, medical attention, etc. That lasted for three days, then the people left the field completely carpeted in trash, left it for others to clean up.

There was the summer of love in San Francisco, in 1969, which operated on give what you can, take what you need. It collapsed after 3 months, as too many people took and too few gave.

> Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human? What a repulsive argumentative style.

That's your strawman.

>The Langar was proposed as a model for society

The Langar was proposed as an example of a societal feature that could be amplified by automation. The parent is putting words into 'TaylorAlexander's mouth, but we all can just fucking read his comment. [0] The temerity of the parent, in blithely accusing me of "add[ing] extra words that change the meaning", given how they butcher the claim that started this fucking subthread, is absolutely repulsive. I can dismiss the rest of the parent's argumentation with the ease with which they dismissed mine, namely

>Sikhs [0] are humans, and presumably have the same human nature everyone in this thread shares. If the parent contends that what the Sikhs [0] do is a "commune", then the facticity of their continued success shows that "communes" do not always fail. If what the Sikhs do is not a "commune", then the parent has set up and defeated a strawman unrelated to the example set by Sikhs [0]. Which is it?

The refusal to actually address anything (is the langar a commune? Does whatever it is work, or not? Are Sikhs governed by human nature or not?) is breezily elided, in favour of 'Merican counterexamples. Who cares that the langar is a small-scale example of what the parent literally claimed was impossible and beyond the human spirit, and why should the parent address anything anyone actually says?

It's bananas that 'TaylorAlexander began by citing the tradition of the langars to facilitate the idea that this sort of arrangement was possible -- which was gainsaid by the parent -- and I am now reading what appears to be the grudging acceptance of the reality of that possibility now used to suggest that no greater implementation is possible. It's one thing to Just Want To Be Right, but quite another to dress it up in rationalization and shenanigans on display here.

>> Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human? What a repulsive argumentative style.

>That's your strawman.

I note that the parent still doesn't bother to elaborate here. There's no acknowledgement that the parent made ridiculous counterfactual claims ignoring the actual realities of langyar generosity, or whether they were communes, or whether they were operated by humans, and is now wholehearted accepting it in the name of Being Right -- there's just the satisfaction of a good reversal. Well, enjoy the goalposts, wherever you may find them; I no longer wish to play Calvinball. You "win"; a better world is not possible, certainly not while having this sort of "discussion".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31146511

> I note that the parent still doesn't bother to elaborate here.

Right, because your strawman is your problem.

It should be instructive to the parent that my "strawman" is a direct consequence of, and answer to, theirs...

But that would require acknowledging anything about their specious claims was ever wrong! Can't have that. Just ignore it!

The Sikhs have been doing their thing for 400 years.

I presume you mean the Langar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langar_(Sikhism)

As I noted in another post here, while an admirable endeavor, it has not managed to serve free meals to a significant percentage of India's population. There are apparently limits to selfless volunteerism.

I don't think they purpose is feeding the whole India population.

You seem to have ignored the point where I cited my sources of what I am talking about working successfully in India right now. It’s not a failure in fact it is a major success. Seriously, watch the video is it heart warming! It’s also very real!

I did watch the video. It was a little thin on details, but appears to be a charity, run by volunteers, funded by donations. Like a scaled up soup kitchen in America.

It's a nice setup, I wish them well with it.

I noticed the host did not chip in to wash dishes or make a donation, though he may have off camera.

They serve 50,000 meals a day in a country with 1,380,000,000 people. That's a long way to go to demonstrate it will work for society.

A commune in isolation can not protect itself. Another more aggressive group will overtake them given time. That's why I don't believe that end-goal communism or anarchism could ever work (where the former is contrary to many people's idea, is about small communes, not some Big Government). But with a necessarily strong government it is absolutely not impossible to scale a small commune to a whole country. Pair it with the best kind of democracy (as that is an entirely different axis) we have and I also on the opinion that many of today's problems could be solved.

But even in today's capitalist system UBI could be implemented relatively easily paid for by tax money.

A commune in isolation can not protect itself.

The US ones did not fail because some more aggressive group overtook them. They failed because they did not work and eventually the members tired of it and left.

The state-sponsored kibbutzen in Israel also fail, because they can't exist without massive government subsidy.

Communism has been tried many times on a nation scale. 100% failure.

Your ideas are not new and they have been tried, again and again. They just don't work. They don't work on a small scale, they don't work on a large scale. They don't work when voluntary, they don't work by force.

There is just something about communism that is fundamentally anti-ethical to human nature.

Did you even get my point that communism is different from socialism? I very much stated exactly that communism (in my opinion can’t work either). But socialism as a spectrum of ideas has plenty of working aspects included in basically every Western democracy.

Socialism produces mediocre works, and can't compete with free market operations. This is why socialist operations tend to be heavily subsidized or they simply make free market competitors illegal.

It's most obvious when agriculture is socialized, because it's impossible for people to believe the lie that they aren't starving.

Yes, I know that communism is supposed to be without a government.

Free market is not inherently incompatible with socialism. Hell, free market only works properly (according to its very creator, Adam Smith) when it is confined to a well-regulated market.

The only entity capable of creating such a market is the government itself. Also, don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare.

Socialism isn't defined in terms of a "well-regulated market". Socialism is when the government provides goods and services.

> don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare

Supply-demand is in play even under socialism.

But here's a simple example. Take your corner drugstore. It has a couple aisles of all sorts of healthcare products, from aspirin to toothbrushes to athlete's foot cream to cold remedies. There are multiple brands with multiple formulations at various price points. How does supply & demand not apply there?

More generally, pick any health care issue. For each, there are a multiple of options available, with varying costs, efficacies, risks, and pain. Including doing nothing (by far most diseases disappear on their own). How is that not supply & demand?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com