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Comment by Vt71fcAqt7 | Hacker News Reader

>Their strict standards resulted in content that was homogeneous and boring, but safe. It’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field.

This isn't terrifying. People do much worse for 100x less. Prostitution and porn, for example, many times drive people to suicide. People stay on ships for months at a time without seeing their family, not too long ago, sailors would go years on ships. Why? For money. The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.

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> The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.

Why is it childish to want a life in which you don’t need to labor to have everything you need to be happy? It’s childish to think that human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life? Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?

Because at the end of the day you need to obtain food, clothing, shelter and other necessities to even survive to the next day, not even mentioning doing anything for pleasure. Either through labor of your own, or by doing labor to earn money to buy these for you possibly your family. Thinking that "human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life" is childish - the world doesn't owe us anything, and if we want to continue living on it we have to earn it.

It is getting increasingly easier to provide these essentials as time goes on, so why is it unimaginable that there might be a day when those are default, and not something that you need labour for?

Yes, it's increasingly easier. The ratio of (people consuming) / (people producing) has been growing massively. However, it's impossible for (people producing) to reach zero. And, unless (people producing) = 0, there will always be a cost to the goods produced, and (people consuming) has to pay that.

this approach, to me, feels even more childish and lacking in nuance than “human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life”

the “world” may not owe anyone anything, but do we as individuals, groups, tribes, governments, and a species owe each other some attempt at that?

how does this view extend into discussions about marginalized, disabled, the idea of social safety nets?

It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth. That will only get more true as population growth slows while innovation continues to drive productivity improvements.

But we’re still culturally in the mindset you’re describing: that we must each individually wrest life out of the wilderness day by day.

As a result we seem to be inventing more and more complex and bizarre ways of forcing that reality to still exist. Like pointless YouTube challenge videos done solely to provide ad inventory so well-off people can sell things to other well-off people.

>we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth

This should come with a footnote that it's only possible due to slave labor in third world countries. A much smaller subset of people would be buying iPhones if they were $5000.

iPhones are not food, clothing, or shelter.

Many would consider them an "other necessity", if we're being pedantic.

We aren't inventing more and more complex ways of forcing that reality to still exist. That reality does still exist, it's close to not existing, maybe only another 300-400 years, but it's still 100% true right now. You are ignoring the massive logistical challenge of getting all those things to all those people and spreading all that knowledge to get production happening. Additionally, our current system is built on a 100 leaning towers of pisa. Look at Ukraine, it gets invaded and our global supply of food is massively impacted, many people are going to starve and freeze to death over the war in Ukraine this winter who have never set foot in Ukraine or Russia.

"It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth."

But that's only true with incentive to work.

Their point wasn't anything to do with wilderness. It was if you had your needs met without the requirement of work, that a significant portion of people would not work. Without those workers, we would no long have enough production.

>as population growth slows

This is only happening because more women are working. Guess what happens when all men and women are free all day long? It comes from the very essence of evolution that when the carrying capacity increases the population rises until it reaches the new one. Any "utopia" would revolve around sex as it is the principal object of human existence and reality.

There is no shortage of ways to devalue labor though. We all know people who work and would be not rich but prosperous enough, if not the economy system they live in held them hostage. Arguing that income disparity is their fault is neither humane nor logical. Childish is an expectation that people must spend their childhood, teen age or adult mental health on learning hard how to dig themselves out of a pit that they never had a choice not to be born into, when your favorite system at some point makes it adequate for them to present you a knife and to ask for your wallet to just survive, or to participate in a humiliating activity if they have no courage to do the former. It’s up to us to decide how it all should work, not to some trivial natural limitations.

> Thinking that "human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life" is childish - the world doesn't owe us anything, and if we want to continue living on it we have to earn it.

That's just, like, your opinion, man. But, IRL there are plenty of people that require care-taking, who we never expect any labor from.

Isn't that survivorship bias? There are plenty of people that required care-taking and died of exposure.

It seems there's a capacity limit to the safety net and if you go over it, starvation ensues.

The folks working on farms, few though they are in the modern world, deserve compensation. What will the people not working on the farm do to deserve the fruits of their labor? Whatever it will be, will be work. Same for the folks building houses, and all the rest of modern infrastructure that we depend upon to live.

I don't think anyone is saying we shouldn't compensate people doing labour that is required. I think the problem is that we don't really have a societal model that is doing its hardest to cover these needs first before other ones.

If we used the money we spend on, say, entertainment or high-end mobile phone industry on R&D regarding farms and food yield and distribution we might see lots more advancements in this area. But that's not really something that is desirable in our modern economies; for people in the USA and most of the developed world we don't really need to invest any more in solving hunger because we are really not hungry anymore. And the ones that are hungry we don't really acknowledge as a big problem, although they exist.

Housing on the other hand, it's really interesting to think of this problem because acquiring a house has gotten much more difficult even though our capabilities to build houses have increased so much. This seems to be a problem in how we are deciding the prices of houses rather than a pure "we need to pay for materials and construction costs".

So although these people deserve to be compensated, we are in no way paying the "right" prices. I reckon for food we are actually paying less money than we should be paying for some products (counting externalities that are derived from our current methods of production) and for housing we are paying more than the actual material and labour cost of the construction. All in all, it seems prices and cost of living is kind of whacky in modern societies.

"If we used the money we spend on, say, entertainment or high-end mobile phone industry on R&D regarding farms and food yield and distribution we might see lots more advancements in this area."

There are massive sums invested in agricultural R&D. Some of this does include a focus on poorer markets. We also heavily subsidize many crops to be competitive on the global market, thus exporting to poorer nations (overall that might be a bad thing, stunting their economic growth).

> do to deserve the fruits of their labor

This is the issue. No one needs to do anything to deserve access to food, shelter, clothing, etc.

I think you're framing it something like lazy people vs. people who work hard, which I don't think we need to do. If we ever lived in world where we could all access unlimited food, shelter, etc. then do you think people would still have to do stuff to actually "earn" access to it? Why or why not?

The issue I had in my original comment was that the OP suggested merely _wanting_ to live in that world, where we are all handed the ingredients for a happy life at 0 cost, is childish. I can't fathom thinking that someone wanting to live a happy life without needing to toil is _childish_

It is childish to want to fly to America from Europe in 1700 and get upset that it is not possible. That is what I meant: "want" as a present demand, as seen in some dictionaries.[1] I should have been more clear about this as it seems to have become the point of contention. But see my later point about the carying capacity for why this is an unreasonable future want as well.

[1]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/want

They do need to do something though. Why would the farmer work harder than he has to feed his own family? He can produce just enough food for himself and relax. Why would the people building houses build an extra one?

We do not live in a world with unlimited food and shelter.

Yeah I know, I wasn’t saying we do live in that world. I’m continuing to say that _wanting_ to live in that world isn’t childish. Wanting to live in a world where we are all handed food, medicine, shelter, etc. for free seems like something we should all obviously be in favor of achieving eventually. Instead, there seem to be some people who view this ideal as childish, as if even if there are enough resources for everyone, one ought to have to work to earn access to those resources, which just seems cruel and domineering.

The premise that there can be free food and housing, without people having had to work to provide them, is fantasy. Wanting to live in a fantasy is not unreasonably childish, but it is childish.

> Why is it childish to want a life in which you don’t need to labor to have everything you need to be happy?

The same way it’s childish to want my parents to provide for all my needs. Or to want dragons to be real.

It’s not realistic and is counterproductive to being creative and providing for myself.

We can’t all be trust fund kids, thankfully as all the ones I’ve known have been insufferable.

People aren't born worthy of anything. Thinking otherwise is childish. We need to earn things because they're not unlimited. Living a happy peaceful life means consuming things, if you don't provide things back no one is going to give you anything to consume.

> People aren't born worthy of anything. Thinking otherwise is childish.

The entire fields of early childhood development and mental health counseling firmly disagree with you.

I'm not sure what this means. It'd be nice if people had free access to mental health counseling, but guess what, mental health counselors require payment. If you want things you need to work for them. Until robots do everything that will remain reality.

Isn't the point of standing on the shoulders of giants that we should reach farther and greater heights than they ever could? To seek to provide for your children is human - and to provide for others in general is human as well. So what happens when the provisions of the past exceed the demands of the present? Do we grow our demand, as we've done so many times? Or do we seek to alleviate our struggles and strive for growth for it's own sake, rather than for the sake of our own survival? I prefer the 2nd option

Because if no one had to work, nothing would get done, and we would not have the abundance of food and goods that we do. All that stuff is made by the labor of others.

That's a logistical issue. The point of concern is that the person I was responding to said that merely wanting to live in a world where you are handed everything is childish. Why would wanting to be able to have access to everything you need for a happy life at 0 cost ever be childish?

We are all born worthy of a life free of struggle. If we can ever obtain that, we deserve it, regardless of how hard we worked for it. I don't understand this mindset of "you gotta _earn_ happiness/safety/security, etc."

You're mixing two different things. I agree with you - if we could live in a world where we didn't have to work, that's great! That's the desired outcome IMO.

But you also ask:

> Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?

And if I'm understanding correctly, the reason we need to earn these things is because right now, we're not living in a world in which we can stop working. The world doesn't just hand us what we need without toil, unfortunately.

I can't edit the post anymore, but after reading the comments, taking a break, and comming back to this, I realize that I didn't use the right language here. The tone is too negative and demeaning to the author. Since I felt that the article was unfair to Beast I "attacked back" in this post and that was wrong (perhaps in a way childish). I still hold the main points, but I think the word childish is not a nice word to use and lowers the overall discusion on HN. "Unreasonable" would be better, but the effect is not as good and misses some points in my opinion. But I think the effect shouldn't be the focus here. Attacking the author shouldn't be the priority at all. Childish implies an intelectual defect, and that can't be removed from the meaning. That's not what I meant in the context of my argument. But that shouldn't matter.

>The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.

The author seemed to deliberately avoid making value judgements of this sort until it compared to traditional reality media where there are more guardrails built in. Otherwise Just about the only editorializing there is the author’s speculation about Mr. Beat’s motives, that they are driven by a an extreme focus on creating desirably content for his audience.

No, the ideal world is where everyone gets everything at no cost. That’s basically utopia. The only difference is we can’t make it happen yet.

Not to say, people go to work at 9 and leave at 5 for years and years for small recurring amounts of money

> go to work at 9 and leave at 5

Most people aren't even lucky enough to have this much consistency, and for even less money.

What’s the deal with this hay bale and why are we admiring it?

The issue here isn't the money in a direct sense. People in the real world do worse jobs for less money, yes. But those jobs aren't intermediated by some benefactor who essentially treats human beings like lab rats.

Prostitution may be grueling but people generally do it to pay the bills in a trivial sense. Being put into some sort of alternate reality where you are being treated and experimented on like a video game character, to an audience who also probably perceives you as a virtual source of entertainment deserves to be looked at through a different lens than just bucks/hour made. It's a sort of low stakes hunger games where rich patrons throw people into an arena for their fun and benefit. The Mr Beast content could be its own Black Mirror episode.

And it's terrifying not despite but because the money isn't even that relevant. There's probably people who would do that stuff for free just to meet Mr Beast or get five minutes of online attention.

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