Hacker News Reader

Comment by Staross | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was very interesting, but maybe also incredibly naive politically ? it's like he's re-discovering alienation under capitalism.

A wood-worker could do the same argument, there's the "official" wood-working word of perfect joinery and beautifully finished tables one can buy, but behind it there's the "secret" messy human element, the art, the craft, the mistakes and hard-ships, the elevation of human skills and imagination, the creation of whole new types of wood-working inventions and techniques, the perpetuation of millenia-old traditions, the teaching, the joy of selling to a happy customer, etc.

But now comes techo-capitalism, division of labor, you cut that piece a that piece over and over, you operate that machine, you won't even see the finished table, fuck your human element, we want that profit !

View on HN

I don't think you have it right- the analogy to woodworking and craftsmanship is a category error and probably misses the broad thrust of the essay.

The goal of a woodworker or craftsman is the production of a finished good. He's arguing that, although it's been convenient to position a mathematician as a "theorem-producer", that's never really been the aim of mathematics, and that the actual products of mathematics are some kind of "mental software"- see his references to neuroplasticity. Basically, he's saying that the goal of mathematics is to create abstract structures that allow humans to reason about increasingly complex concepts, and that the "mathematician as theorem producer" is more like a convenient fiction that mathematicians have allowed to persist for too long, and now threatens to endanger the whole practice of mathematics.

> I thought it was very interesting, but maybe also incredibly naive politically ? it's like he's re-discovering alienation under capitalism.

To be fair, a number of professional politicians and political scientists don’t understand alienation under capitalism.

You start with instincts that are more easily ascribed to ethically-neutral or ethically-positive reasoning, and then turn them into a spurious criticism of capitalism. Case in point: in the USSR, the means of producing chairs were 100% state-controlled and not motivated by profit, but the country operated soulless production lines too.

The motivation behind all this is less "haha I want profit" and more "billions of people need chairs, approximately none of them care about the craftsmanship, so it's in our best interest to make furniture in the most resource- and labor-efficient way possible". Even if the state subsidizes the production of handcrafted chairs, the population is the poorer for it on a resource allocation basis, because we now need a million artisanal chair-makers instead of a bunch of factories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com