The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time.
My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
I think you meant hoard incredible wealth?
There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time.
Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…).
We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.
Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?
The Japanese generally didn't use them (I think?) before they came into contact with European civilization.
I don't think any civilization could survive without entertainment though.
But I think this is a false dichotomy: A comfortable armchair and a good book go well together.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.
And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
The ecocide which we've inflicted on the planet for the last 100 years will some day be seen for what it is - an atrocity.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
When the going gets tough...
About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings.
Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little.
My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad now, because we are at a maximum.
The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.
We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.
> people die from too much food than of too little.
We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.
It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.
These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...
See, the harmful confusion right there.
Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.
If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".
Even a more thought out form doesn't do anything class analysis didn't already do.
Not quite: bullshit jobs are when the workers themselves say their own job isn't doing anything useful. And apparently they comprise a sizeable portion of all workforce.
Of course, jobs people say are useless, jobs the workers themselves say are useless, and actually useless jobs, are 3 different sets. But I think we can confidently say something is wrong when so many workers say their own job is useless, even if they aren't: working a job you think is useless just isn't healthy.
Americans in particular always have pretty narcissistic ideas about what their jobs should be. You can see this from all the examples of hippies trying to start communes, which then fail because everyone appoints themselves official poet instead of farmworker.
Yeah, I'm gonna need a citation for that one.
I grew up in a council house. I.e. a house created by pooled money in the form of taxes.
Houses must exist. Landlords are an inefficiency to be optimized out.
Though for what it’s worth, the government at least has the advantage that it can print its own money, so it doesn’t need to take it from somebody else, unlike investors.
Strictly speaking the answer is zero and zero. They use the money they have to have construction workers build the houses.
> from the money they actually took from somebody else?
Is this supposed to imply someone is taking money from others and the other does not? I know the view that government taxes is basically theft, and I think this view is ludicrous: citizen get that back in the form of infrastructure and public services, and in a functioning democracy it's basically their collective will that decided how to allocate that money. (How functioning the democracy really is is another debate.)
Investors on the other hand… well there are two kinds: those who worked for their money, and those who took it from workers. And it's a spectrum too, it depends how much of your income comes from your work, and how much comes from your possessions. Now I can guess most small landlords like yourself probably paid their houses with money they earned through actual work. Some even have constructed the houses themselves. But if that Second Thought video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m7WmKJZyQ has any accuracy the majority of rented houses are rented by big landlords, and those definitely did not earn their money through their own work (the clerks that work under them do, but they don't own the houses and are paid a meagre salary, compared to the renting money they manage).
I can't speak for government constructed houses, but given the above, your average investor-owned house was constructed or bought with money that was taken from people working for the investor. (Well strictly speaking the worker creates value for their boss, which gives a salary in return, but there's always a difference between value created and salary returned. That difference is the exploitation/theft part. And I'm glossing over the fact that managing a company is valuable work unto itself.)
> And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?
Am I supposed to answer "the investor's houses"? A citation is needed for that answer, and it'd better control for when the house is build (construction norms tend to evolve over time), how much it actually cost, and in some cases who it actually cost. Suburbian houses may be nice for instance, but the car dependency and the unsustainable infrastructure costs definitely are not.
A marketplace of ideas does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes, or even good outcomes.
Suppose the marketplace of ideas is an unregulated marketplace. Then the wealthy and powerful can use their wealth and power to determine the world that other people see, getting those people to mistakenly fight for things that help the wealthy and powerful.
But suppose it's kept a fair marketplace. Fairness is not natural – it's a human value that we have to actively maintain. But suppose we succeed. Even then, the marketplace may not select the best ideas, because people have emotional needs – like belonging to community – that will cause them to stubbornly reject good ideas. But we accept this because it's the only way for us to live with each other; if I want you to let me disagree with you, I have to let you disagree with me.* The price of intellectual freedom is very, very steep, even if it's worth it.
So I don't believe the fact that capitalism is dominant is good evidence that it's the best idea so far. In fact, I think we have little evidence of it at all.
* There are of course complications of the Popperian, paradox-of-tolerance sort, where we do have to fight to the death, so to speak. If someone repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise or act fairly, they've left you the choice of letting yourself perish or eliminating them, which is a shitty situation to be in.
FWIW, Adam Smith has argued that this is unlikely. The world seems to prove him correct.
That said I do disagree with the way GP's argues the point. While the dominant economic system is likely more effective at creating dominating economies, it's not a given that it is good at being fair. Shutting down discussion while claiming that "capitalism is the best so far" because nobody else has come up with an alternative reeks of willful ignorance. It's easy to believe something is the best if you don't actively look for alternatives and demand others to serve it to you on a silver platter.
I didn't realize that Adam Smith had argued on this point, though! Thank you for letting me know.
Beyond that, the only reason they give you more rent money is because you own the house. But you got your ROI so by now they have paid for the house. And yet it's not theirs, so they still have to pay you. And when they do, any additional money you get, you basically took from them. As for your son, who presumably did not work for the house at all, will definitely take money from people through that house. Just because he had the right dad.
Don't get me wrong, you investing for your son and securing his future is you being a good dad. You just can't wave away how the current system works: people who own stuff have the power to take money from people who don't.
People who have invested capital, hedged risks, setup maintenance, did marketing etc.
Now we can agree that housing is very specific branch of economy where if you have upper hand(capital) you can be dealing cards to those who don't. There are ways to address that without the canvas of grand narratives(extracting labour etc).
Struggling as a learning tool is important, but there's a good chance the fastest path to expertise is to start with examples of how to do it, and delay that struggle a bit.
What you don't want is to keep the crutch forever and never struggle. That would be a sure path to stagnation.
The rejection of LLMs for education by otherwise intelligent people is disheartening.
Also, some things are not need to be known anymore, like phone numbers or the inner working of a car. There are plenty of things to learn even if automation made some of knowledge beneign.
- they wouldn’t have yielded all the knowledge of the little kirks, know how, edge cases, etc… they now have to know (and the Pareto rule 20% vs 80%),
- created an intuition from all the hours spent just struggling to understand what is wrong or find a solution and little by little honing their intuition from that hard work they would have done by themselves for themselves (compared to having ChatGPT, a teacher, or an expert telling them most of time what to do),
- and getting a will to find a solution by themselves even after hours looking at a shell prompt (or logs or whatever else) that is taunting them and will tell them nothing.
Edit: I've had conversations with people who write. We have come to an agreement that there are writers who love the process of writing. They want to BE writers. Then there are people who want to HAVE BEEN a writer. ChatGPT was meant for these people.
I disagree with this take. My personal anecdote is that I am far, far better at mental math than I was in high school because I ended up in a job where doing a lot of ad-hoc calculations was just a day-to-day thing. I started out using a calculator, but eventually got to where I didn't need it most of the time just through sheer repetition.
I think AI tools (the kind people are worried about right now, anyway) will be used in a similar fashion to calculators. After learning the basics, it will be a tool taught as an assist for streaming ideas into and getting out a well-formatted and coherent output. People who write a lot will eventually find the hassle of using the tool to be more trouble than it's worth. People who don't will still know how to use it to and know how to recognize when the output doesn't make any sense.
LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new tool can be abused, of course we can't structure education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating our methods and techniques in the face of new technology and knowledge.
I am dreaming when physics students can have an electronics TA that can projection map over a breadboard to help kids understand and debug their circuits. For 70% of physics undergrads, hands on electronics classes are the hardest classes they took.
If those things are a problem, we have already failed. Because if your current education system is built upon taking things at face value, the harm is not in the shoveled knowledge but in building a student who accepts what is presented as unquestionable fact.
My child is an phenomenal bullshit discriminator. So much so that they have been correctly correcting all of their teachers in every grade they have been in. The real education is learning how to use the tools we have available to learn anything you want. And in that way, the LLM is most powerful thing we have since the printed book.
The problem is if there's just one teacher tutoring, one quiz master who points to sources it controls or simply invents as its "proof". My concern is that AI will be trusted more than a single book or a single teacher, precisely because it claims to neutrally encompass a consensus already obtained through all those sources. [It's a tertiary source masquerading as one offering primary and secondary sources, without the ability to differentiate or trust one source more than another].
This is exactly why the frequent comparison to calculators is so misguided: Because calculators are always right. To whatever degree LLM proponents believe LLMs are simply useful tools like calculators, that will be the same degree to which they fail to check for bullshit.
(I hated it, but it's still there 2000+ years after books were invented.)
People aren’t great at writing cursive with fountain pens anymore because we type. Our mental math skills aren’t as strong because we have calculators. Even our sense of direction and ability to navigate is probably weakening due to decades of reliance on GPS.
Are there still people who can memorize whole books, ride horses, write cursive, calculate big numbers in their head, and navigate by the stars? Of course, but they are outliers. Most of us just use our smartphones.
On balance, it's been hugely positive.