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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

By what natural law is this true? By what will of nature or physics are you deriving your statements?

Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.

People around the world deserve not to live in fear of their government killing them. Women deserve not to live in fear of being raped. Children should not live in fear of abuse. Yet untold millions starve, are beaten, tortured, abused, have lives of unimaginable torment and despair, and you have the gall to talk about how the privileged few should not work so hard?

How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.

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As I have said in other threads, just because someone else in another part of the world has a worse life than you does not mean yours is OK. If person A gets beaten 3 times a day and person B only gets beaten 1 times a day, does person B not have the right to say they deserve better? Person A might be in a worse position, but perhaps both people deserve a better life.

>Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.

Living as we would in nature would be a HORRIBLE way to live human life. The way things "naturally" would occur is irrelevant, we build societies and develop science to improve our lives to where we all want them to be.

> Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.

Deserves in the same sense that they deserve the other natural rights and protections which are afforded them within our societies. I wouldn't be quite so prescriptive about the number of hours, but being able to work in a decent and humane manner, without damaging your health, and with space for an outside life, is significantly more important than many other natural rights.

> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.

Work, for the vast majority of people, has no such aim, and no such outcome. If anything, people in the developed world are often in direct competition with their counterparts elsewhere.

"How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached."

Chances are, you ain't alleviating suffering around the world by putting in overtime at your shitty startup job. So feel free to pack up at 5PM.

I can't speak for com2kid, but I am alleviating suffering around the world by working hard at my (not particularly shitty) startup job. The amount of money I give to charity is an approximately-constant fraction of my income. If I work harder I'm more likely to get paid more (and, unless I work so hard as to be less productive overall, which is certainly possible and a very bad idea, my employer is more likely to be successful and make my options worth something), so the starving billions get more money from me.

I don't think this situation is all that unusual. Charitable giving that's a fixed fraction of income is common practice in many religions (which have a whole lot of members) and among the "effective altruism" community (which is small but I bet it's overrepresented among HN types), and is a natural enough thing to do that I bet lots of other people do it.

(Ideally I wouldn't need to say these things explicitly, but I will anyway: Of course working harder is not always a good idea; as I said above, it's very much possible to work harder and merely make yourself tired and therefore less effective. And of course working harder, whether it makes you more effective or less, is no guarantee of getting paid more; plenty of employers are quite unresponsive to their employees' commitment and productivity. If anything I've said above looks as if it's denying those things then I expressed myself badly and I apologize.)

Giving money to charity is good. But if you worked less, you'd have more time to volunteer. I'd say that's more valuable.

I think current best estimates are that the most efficient charitable donations you can make save about one life per $2000 donated. If you're a decently but not extravagantly paid US software developer (I'm not, but the money is in the right ballpark) then maybe your salary is $100k/year; let's say you donate 5% of that before tax, or $5k/year; that's 2.5 lives saved per year. Most things you could do by volunteering full time probably do less good than that.

(Of course "lives saved" is an unsatisfactory metric; something like QALYs would be better. But the lives-saved figure is the one I happen to remember.)

Being a developer is a very valuable skill. Presumably, working for eight hours as a developer can pay for a number of volunteering efforts, so it's strictly more valuable.

If a charitable organization needed some software written, volunteering to write it would certainly be helpful, but this still requires you to be a domain expert in two things, rather than one.

Unless you mean "valuable" in the sense of "makes you feel more fuzzy," in which case you are killing people and I advise you to stop.

I think you just argued that first world tech workers should not act like they are entitled to downtime because of warcrimes.

I'm not saying they should feel entitled, but that isn't very rational.

Not really a natural law, but medicine from time to time finds out that working too much or sleeping less or not having time for pleasure/fun/family hurts your health.

> Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.

And yet we've progressed from our prehistoric roots and have decided as a society that everyone does deserve basic rights.

> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.

Working harder at a mundane job won't achieve this. At best it means you'll just have less family time, leisure time, and be unhappier. At worst it means you're taking a bigger slice of the global economic pie, and contributing to inequality.

Deserves may be the wrong term. Worker output is maximized at 8h*5 days/week. This is a lesson learned in the late XIX century that is so counter intuitive that it must be relearned by every management generation. So, yes, current knowledge points to workers "deserving" 8h work leaving the rest for life balance, where "deserve" means "needs" or "performs better at" or "maximizes output at".

In the factory floor, this has been quantitatively measured and is solid. In creative jobs, quantification is a lot harder, so proof isn't as solid. I can argue for longer hours in creative jobs. I can as easily argue for shorter than 40h weeks. In the absence of further solid proof, the best option is probably to stick with 40h weeks.

So, leaving aside the rant about evils in the world and other straw men, Nature does act that way.

There's a good summary of arguments and references here: http://legacy.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-less...

Are you a Hobbesian or a communist? I don't see how it is possible to be both simultaneously, but you sure do appear to be trying for it.

It's all about context. We live in an entirely different world than that. What a weird issue to bring up on a forum where largely everyone works in a nice office. Obviously this stuff still goes down.

Are you one of those people where if I say, "Hey where do you want go for lunch?", would respond with "Nowhere, I just want to DIE, why do I get to eat if everyone else DIES!"

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