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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.

In the advanced countries of the world there is no shortage of material and energy abundance, our intractable problems are things like isolation, obesity, inequality, and a lack of purpose, and the mental and physical ailments which accompany them. If there is a technological solution to these things it's not obvious. In some cases, technology is the problem. In others the problem stems from how we order our society, but there are no serious and thoughtful proposals about how to reorder it.

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Lack of purpose is the core thing I think. If you have that, then isolation solves itself, and obesity might very well solve itself too.

Lack of purpose is also the consequence of not being able to even think of a brighter future. Not seeing what humanity COULD be and working towards it.

Lack of purpose is inevitable and unfixable. In the world where success is infinitely scalable as we are living in the information age, most people are doomed to uselessness no matter what. Trick is how to help them get over it.

Obesity is a medical problem and will be solved by rather trivial medical means very soon, at least on that front, future is bright.

Not everyone has to have some grand purpose. I work to earn enough money to do what I like, I'm not planning or hoping to make a heap of money. I would be perfectly happy living a comfortable yet completely unnoticed life.

In fact I think a lot of people my age (late 20s) are starting to feel like this as a reaction to the idea that anyone who isn't driving a nice car or going abroad several times a year is a failure. That's the impression I get from talking to people at work anyway.

You still get those status-driven people but frankly I feel very uneasy around them.

>In fact I think a lot of people my age (late 20s) are starting to feel like this as a reaction to the idea that anyone who isn't driving a nice car or going abroad several times a year is a failure.

Most of the people around me and I always saw that lifestyle as an strong indication of and reaction to no sense of purpose.

Sense of purpose need not have anything to do with money or status.

You should review the psychological literature around sense of purpose. Basically every study ever conducted on humans has concluded that mental health is more or less impossible without a sense of purpose. The experts in this field say it's very likely that "helping them get over it" is either impossible or close enough that we'll never figure it out.

If, as you say, lack of purpose is inevitable and unfixable, many decades of research says humanity is doomed.

>most people are doomed to uselessness no matter what

Well, no mater how smart computers get, mothers will be generally useful to their children. So at least one counter example.

That's right and this is why rates of depression, suicide and stuff, is way lower among women than men. Still it leaves an impression of a Ponzi scheme of a sort?

A Ponzi scheme works because it gives the illusion of being real. Life isn't that. Life is real. The only real thing in many ways.

> Lack of purpose is inevitable and unfixable

Citation needed. We're a loooooong way from post scarcity, as should be pretty obvious from the unemployment numbers.

> In the world where success is infinitely scalable as we are living in the information age

One of those things doesn't follow from the other.

I like spending time with my friends and family. This makes my life purposeful. I love creating experiences for them. Studying and working are secondary. I like messing with data, love linux, and have a blast with emacs and all that... But when I am near death I only think about my loved ones.

Woah that's a contrarian take on obesity. Can you elaborate?

GLP-1 receptor agonists seem to be the one-and-for-all solution for obesity and they seem to work for nearly every person regardless of existing health conditions, diabetes, etc (they are primarily diabetes drugs) with under 3% quit rate from side effects. Only problem is production volumes ramp-up but that will solve itself over time just like with covid vaccines, because drugs are new, 2021-2022. Smart asses willing to pay ~$1500+ per month already all got access to them.

In 3-4 years, at least in developed countries, only people who will still be fat are those with rare and unusual health issues, rare people with extreme side effects to these drugs, and those who don't care. In another few years, health insurance will probably be unaccessible to those who are overweight and don't use these drugs so it will not even be a choice.

So we’ll just be taking pills for everything ?

Why should it be impossible to think of a brighter future? Maybe humans should be living like gods, not worried about diseases, the environment, etc. Maybe humans should strive to become the dominant species in the universe? Why should the current "protestant work ethic" (in a Max Weber sense) guide us - hedonism might also have something to each us.

We tried hedonism as a guiding principle over and over in the 20th century. Whereas Protestant work ethic gave us america, hedonism gave us the aids epidemic, over 100,000 drug overdoses annually, a generation of men that have opted out of adulthood, and the need to import people from non-hedonist countries just to keep the population stable. Enjoy your antibiotic resistant STDs.

> We tried hedonism as a guiding principle over and over in the 20th century.

[citation needed]

What do you define as hedonism and its philosophical roots/components?

I think if you’re talking about social change that happens at scale, people are not necessarily following a specific coherent philosophy. But hedonistic values were widely adopted in various contexts in the mid-20th century. For example the sexual revolution and free love movement of the 1960s: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19053382. These attitudes are also prevalent in terms of messages given to young people regarding vocation (“follow your bliss,” etc.)

What is the net social negative then? How do we know, given that counterfactuals are not readily available. What philosophy (in a broader sense) should people follow? Do we want forever a society where people need to do "shitty jobs", for example, to satisfy some philosophical need for "suffering"?

You’re right, we don’t have any easy counterfactual. But we can draw inferences from observations and conduct thought experiments. If we dropped some people from San Francisco off in the hostile desert of Utah, would they be able to create thriving cities like the Mormons did? If we dropped them off in the frigid plains of Illinois, would they be able to create Chicago? If you dropped them off in the mudflats of Singapore, would they be able to turn it into the modern and wealthy city it is today?

Not sure why building cities in the Utah desert matters today. The question is much broader, I think: without some of the 1960s hedonism, would we have had some of effects of counterculture that manifested in tech? Would we have had more wars like Vietnam? How would society look like?

You can, of course, say you want a different society - but that is a different take, really.

I come from a poor country. I want people back home to act like the Mormons, not like people in San Francisco. And America exports its culture all around the world. Moreover, I don’t think a hedonistic, individualistic culture is prepared to tackle the challenges we face (like climate change) nor to take society to the next level.

I also came from a poor country that could use a big dose of Protestant work ethic. If you have $0, getting an extra million is the biggest of deals for your happiness.

But once you are rich and you’ve got snowballing wealth, maybe a change of perspective is in order. You won’t find as much meaning in going from $5m to $10m as in 0-$1m for example.

Not that laziness is the answer, but you need a new motivating principle.

The 20th century had some large-scale "experiments" with non-individualistic society models - they were not pretty.

Signapore is a terribly bad example. It's geography meant it was a ready source of money. Barring an absolutely terrible level of mismanagement, or chronic worldwide economic depression, there was no way it won't become rich.

There’s nothing magic about the geography of Singapore, which is self-evident from a map. Singapore was poorer than Malaysia when the two countries split.

The notion that the economic fate of countries is outside their control is incredibly pernicious. Britain went from being a backwater that was almost a millennium late to the Bronze Age to the greatest empire in the world.

Epicureanism perhaps? The hedonist mindset is certainly not novel to the 20th century as that poster seems to imply- Though I largely agree with their characterization of it, as its popularity seems to accompany periods of societal decline- Though whether it is a cause or a symptom is hard to say

I would find it hard to draw a line from classical Epicureanism towards social decline or simply map some hedonistic periods of the 20th century onto it.

The line would be overly broad and blurry, to be sure. But I think Voltaire's maxim has some sense to it- "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." The rise and fall of great societies frequently parallel this general difference in temperament- The prosperous fruits of stoic labor create a lavish environment for their successors, in which they languish in indolence and allow the foundations built by their ancestors to crumble for want of diligence and prudence.

The problem is, that it is so much in the interest of those in power and with means to promote "stoic labor".

Maybe, but it’s also in the interest of ordinary people. Look what that attitude did for countries like Singapore, Korea, and Japan. It’s easy to rile people up for redistribution. It’s much harder to create a culture oriented towards building.

I am not talking about redistribution or riling people up, but I don't see building and some forms of hedonism as fundamentally incompatible.

Not saying it should be. But for many it is.

I thought Max Tegmark had some pretty awesome words to say they resonate with this on his latest interview with Lex Fridman, it was quite inspiring albeit kind of scary. Worth checking it out if you like him.

But yeah, we really need to start questioning if optimizing everything is the best way forwards as a species.

This list of problems really just sounds a lot like the goals of humanity at large for the last couple hundred thousand years.

To have plenty, more than your neighbors, and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit).

> and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit)

This is actually a new phenomenon. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older, but I've literally grown to see this shift in mindset. There was a time when it was common to invite neighbors over for dinner, now more often than not, it seems like people want to have bigger fences and less interaction with their community. Meanwhile, all mental health indicators are going in the wrong direction in the developed world.

A lot of people, myself included, get tired of dealing with people as we get older.

We have to deal with people for the majority of our lives, especially during our schooling and working years. Once we've accumulated enough to retire into the countryside with no need to give a fuck to anyone it becomes a very appealing change of scenery.

The question is why a lot of people get "tired of dealing with people". Was that even a thing in most of history? Is there some subconcious cost-benefit analysis their brain is working out where solitary activities are more enjoyable for them? Probably. There's infinite entertainment at our fingertips these days.

It’s funny because I grew up in the country and I have mostly worked alone. Now at 38 I’ve moved in to the city and I’m fascinated by how many interesting people there are here! I guess we just appreciate change and novelty over the course of our lives.

And I’m saying this wasn’t always the case for the majority. It’s worth understanding how that came to be

Wait why do we need more than our neighbors to be happy? I mean, I don't believe that personally. It is also unachievable for humanity as a whole to all have more than our neighbors.

Yeah, srsly. Just inserting the word "more" suddenly ties the comment to an entire discredited life philosophy of competitive acquisition.

To quote from Martin Luther King Jr., during his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers"

> Admittedly, it does seem slightly ludicrous to forget about one’s immortal soul and instead busy oneself, as Faust does, with the project of reclaiming land from the sea.

> We should acknowledge that there are many perils with the scientific and technological trajectory on which we find ourselves. But we should never forget that the alternatives to technological acceleration are far from ethically or politically neutral.

> Technology means doing more with less. In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/against-edenism

Yes this is from Peter Thiel. Yes it is not very persuasive. But it is worth thinking what the alternatives are and if they can be any better.

AI will shift things, if I can boot up another doctor or therapist or educator that's 80% as good as a human, in comparison to nothing at all, that's good, so one professional doctor could oversee a small squad of AI doctors and sign off on treatments. Whether this makes things better or worse, who knows! The apocalypse has been arriving since we invented the word.

If in the developed world most policies now are based on the premise that the future is bleak (climate change, war, deficits, ...) then it comes as no surprise that actual progress isn't high on anyone's agenda. Until the future is seen as a land of opportunity again, things will remain bleak.

Curious - many people do see those "problems" as the "opportunity" of our time, just as past generations had their own bleaknesses to overcome.

If you compare, for example, the 1960s view of future with the current - quite a difference. A lot now is about costs to bear and then eventually it might get better. Are there business opportunities in the problems - for sure, but that isn't quite the same as a general bright outlook on the future.

Our future was robbed between the 1960s and now.

Crazy great things have happened - usually thanks to the best of us. But the worst of us have been pulling the same mega-destructive stunts for decades, and they keep getting away with it.

There are good reasons to have optimism, but like... We were violently mugged, and are bleeding. We need to do something about all that before worrying that our outlook isn't rosy enough.

Nothing was robbed or destroyed - not sure why you adopt that defeatist attitude. The future could probably be all yours.

The anthropocene extinction, the insect apocalypse, ocean acidification, topsoil destruction, the pollution of 99% of wells and rivers....

Do I really need to go on? Yes, we were mugged. Yes, it was violent, and yes, we are bleeding. There is a fossil fuel and plastic industry rep right over there, with a smoking gun, saying we all need to do our part to recycle with a smirk on their face.

if you believe in the world ending, sure.

Huh?

The anthropocene extinction and the insect apocalypse aren't matters of belief.

We don’t become more productive because we are striving towards it like some shared goal, we do it because if we don’t, we lose (our jobs, among other things).

There is no element of choice. There is no stopping this.

That my be true, but what I was referring to when I used the word productivity, and what for example an economist would usually be referring to, isn't personal productivity per se. Like yes you can work more hours a day, or potentially work more efficiently, and yes a shitty boss may force you to do too much of this. But that is a very small part of what happened in the Industrial Revolution.

Better to think of increased productivity in this context as "all inputs generate greater outputs," or as a function of available energy a society can produce. Like the increase in what society can produce when you go from horsepower to burning fossil fuels to splitting the atom is many orders of magnitude because you get more energy for cheaper at every step up. Or the way that agricultural technology has enabled us to obtain a harvest that is 100-1,000x more productive in terms of calories than it was in antiquity. That's productivity in this context.

Calories (as in food) is a really good example of what I'm talking about with relation to the problems of modernity. For much of human history famine and starvation were basically an agricultural problem, there were situations where a geography couldn't produce enough calories to feed all the people there. Technology has solved this problem, we now produce an insane surplus of calories and can ship them all over the globe with ease, if people starve today it is not an agricultural problem, it is a political problem, it is systems of people choosing not to allocate food to the starving. It's not clear that better agricultural tech will further reduce starvation - quite possibly it won't without some kind of societal evolution.

I understand and thank you for the clarification.

My point was that societal productivity progress is ultimately not driven by factors such as “better lives” (satisfying primary needs). It is IMO not going matter if increasing productivity leads to “better lives” or not because that was never the primary driver in the first place.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if this march continues even if it in fact decreases our quality of life as is already happening.

What is a primary driver? Good question. I can think of multiple candidates, but power comes to mind. Given a choice we would all rather be financially independent rather than tied to a job. Why? Some of us like the status, others like the freedom, but we all enjoy the power to just say “nope, not going to do that”.

I think “nope” may be the most powerful driver of human progress.

Edit: I forgot to quote.

> it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.

This was my point: no better lives, but an order of magnitude productivity will increase the power we (or a small group) will experience and ultimately that is a stronger drive.

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