Chathamization

Yeah. The widespread belief that memory is reliable - a false belief that this article propogates - is probably a lot more problematic than any of the research being discussed. It's not uncommon to see people presented with facts suggesting that their memories are false, and respond by dismissing the facts ("That can't be true, I remember it, I was there").

It's nearly impossible to improve on something if you're convinced that there's no room for improvement and that anyone who offers constructive criticism is a hater. If you know you have a blind spot for something, getting constructive feedback from others would be useful. But there seems to be a strong amount of resentment from Vogel and a certain subsection of his fanbase whenever it's suggested that he might be able to do better. Such an attitude isn't conducive to improvement.

I mean, there definitely seems to have been a large decline in population, economic output, political cohesion, urbanization, record keeping, trade, etc., in much of the former Roman world following the fifth/sixth century. I suppose it's a value judgement on whether one considers that a "bad time."

It's not uncommon to see incorrect answers highly upvoted on AskHistorians - even ones from flaired users. That's one of the problems with the sub - though it's better than most Reddit subs, it's still far below the quality that most of its users and moderators believe it to be. Like with Wikipedia, you need to be skeptical of claims and actually look at the sources.

True, productivity growth is very low compared to the past. It seems that the long recession coincided the hyping of certain new tech (self-driving cars, drone delivery) leading some people to wrongly believe that we were on the verge of robots causing mass unemployment.

On the other hand, I think we might not have really dealt with the changes from mass automation in the past. If you look at things like "bullshit jobs"[1], or large sectors of the economy that provide negative value to society, it seems like previous automation freed up huge amounts of labor that simply haven't been used to improve society. Since that's already happened, though, it's much harder for people to see it as a problem.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-jo...

Also, a county closing all schools for several years lead to significant drops in IQ scores[1].

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294274?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

Kurzweil is an interesting case. His predictions have been impressively wrong for the most part, yet he seems to refuse to admit it.

There seems to be a tendency to exaggerate the breadth of things that people should study. When you ask for specific instances where something would be useful, you usually get a hand wavy answer that since X field is connected to what you want to study, it is therefore worthwhile to study X field ("Of course computer scientists should study advanced chemistry, we wouldn't even have computers without chemistry! And what if you needed to written a program for chemists!").

In my experience people retain very little of something if they don't keep using it. Many people take things like calculus in highschool or college, and completely forget it within a few years. I often checked with classmates about how much they retained from courses we had just taken the previous semester, and most of the stuff that wasn't directly connected to what they were currently studying seemed to be forgotten (if they ever had a real understanding of it to begin with).

This reminds me of the excuses for spending billions of dollars hosting the Olympics. "All the infrastructure improvements will help the locals!" Well, yes, but if infrastructure is your goal there are a lot less costly ways to go about it. I'm sure a country that decided to build an underwater amusement park would end up acquiring some technical know-how on engineering, but that doesn't make that a practical goal.

Yeah, it's strange. People think that tourists from cruise ships are destroying the city because they visit for several hours, but then they recommend that tourists should stay in the city for several days?

What's always funny to me is that tourists who are part of the derided "masses" always seem to have a lot more common with locals than the "elite traveler" types who preoccupy themselves with finding an "authentic local experience." It's hard to truly connect with the common people when you look down on the common people in your own culture.

I think one blindness we have is seeing the question of what to do with these workers as pertaining to the future. But it's hard not to look at things like "bullshit jobs"[1][2], or entire sectors that are parasitic (advertising, credit cards, sales, etc.) and see that we're already decades into this problem. As we've automated much of our work, we've largely failed to move most people to other productive jobs. Instead have been funneling an ever growing part of the population into careers where they're only helping to extract wealth from the ever dwindling percent of the population that actually produces useful things, if they're actually doing anything at all.

[1] https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-w... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard...

That's a large part of the problem. Another is that the vast majority of online content and votes comes from a small minority of people who are probably mentally ill[1]. Also, the way sites like Reddit (or HN) work are also in opposition to long and thought out conversations (you have a very short window of time to participate in the discussion before it drops off the front page and effectively dies).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827

> His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity.

I don't think that's true though. There are vital commodities that have been effectively free in some societies (water and salt, for example). Even energy - wind energy is free and some societies used it extensively, and biomass for burning was abundant in some places.

We can argue whether or not it's likely that energy would get to be so cheap in the future, but there doesn't seem to be much basis for his claim that it's economically impossible.

> per-capita energy use has surged dramatically over time

Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1].

> But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt...There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP.

That seems to be a bizarre understanding of how the economy works. Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy. You're not going to get an inventor to say, "Hey, this new product would be too efficient, I'm not going to introduce it to the market because then energy is going to get so cheap that someone will buy it all up."

And someone could already try committing energy blackmail now if they really wanted. Pepco powers Washington, D.C. and parts of Maryland, and Exelon bought them for $6.8 billion. Some one, or a group of people could pay that and try to blackmail the government. Of course, they wouldn't get anything for it but a quick trip to prison.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...

It seems like a larger and larger percentage of our economy is being taken up by parasitic sectors that have a net negative value for society. Advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive.

There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.

> First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common

Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).

You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).

A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

> IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition.

I'd say that it is usually what we treat philosophy as when these discussions come up. As you said, it's probably too restrictive, and the truth is we're all philosophers to some degree, and all working off of certain philosophical underpinnings. But the article (and many philosophers) end up treating philosophy as the above poster describes ("what academics who work in philosophy departments do").

If we use a broad definition of philosophy then of course it is useful, and of course its changed over time (most would consider it progress, some wouldn't). But this doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not the small subsection of philosophers who work as academics in philosophy departments have made useful contributions recently. The fact that they struggle so much with this question suggest that they might not have.

It makes me wonder why more effort isn't put into finding alternatives to this fundamentally broken system.

That's a valid point, but it's worth pointing out that it can be applied to many more things than just marijuana (TV, video games, alcohol, social media, most articles people read, many apps, etc.). There's an enormous section of our economy that's devoted to wasting people's time when they could be "learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative" (I'd add taking care of your body, your mind, and your community to that list as well). For a lot of people, evenings have been the time to sit mindlessly in front of a screen for a few hours.

This ends up hurting our society on multiple fronts: people not being as productive as they could be because they're encouraged to waste time, an overall less happy society, a less healthy society because of the encouragement of sedentary behavior (and the economic burden that comes with that), a large part of the economy that could be devoted to improving people's lives but is instead wasted on encouraging negative behavior, etc. The problem is that we've grown so accustomed to this situation that we rarely think much about it, or what we can do to change it (whereas marijuana is getting at least some scrutiny, since legalization is new).

Here's a decent breakdown:

https://thinkprogress.org/the-full-global-warming-solution-h...

One mistake people make is pretending that every choice we make is a hard one with no good answers. Sometimes there are good decisions and bad ones, and we end up making bad ones even when the good ones are obvious. We often see this happen with individuals, it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens with societies as well.

A few years back when I looked at solutions to "cooking this planet" that didn't involve anything that would cause much disruption to most people's lives. The reason we're not solving the problem isn't because of the hard choices we have to make. It's because a few industries that might make less money if we fight climate change try to stop efforts to combat it, politicians who get money from these industries say climate change is a hoax, the public at large is largely too apathetic to remove politicians who don't act, people who oppose all collective action oppose collective action to fight climate change, the media doesn't report on it because it doesn't get ratings, etc.

Could we have everyone's standards are close to the current standards enjoyed by developed countries without destroying the planet? Maybe, maybe not. It's insanely premature to pretend that we know it's impossible. Not only have we not seriously tried to solve the problem, but a large part of the U.S. is actively opposed to even stopping the problem. "There's no solution" is an easy way to absolve us from our failures.

Indeed. Also some platforms (I believe Coursera and EdX were like this last time I used them) only let you access old content if you signed up with a course when it was active. So you are incentivized to sign up for any course if you think there's a possibility that you might want to access some of the content at some point in the future.

People shouldn't confuse completion rate with a particular course with a student reaching proficiency in a particular subject. There have been several courses I've started were I quickly got annoyed by the copious amount of filler in the lectures and dropped the course in favor of a book or web tutorial.

In general I think MOOCs are doing themselves a disservice by trying to copy college courses.

You're right, and productivity growth isn't particularly high at the moment (indicating a low rate of automation compared to past decades). I also think it must take a colossal lack of imagination - not to mention lack of awareness in the world around you - to think that we're going to run of of things to do anytime soon.

On the other hand, a lot of the work that needs to be done is stuff that needs to come from collective action (Replication crisis, aging infrastructure, global warming, cancer research, environmental destruction, food scarcity, etc.), which we don't seem to have much a a political/societal will for at the moment. And a lot of the work that people are currently doing seems rather pointless, or even having a net negative impact on society (soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, arguably almost all advertising, etc.).

It's possible that we'll end up as a society where a larger and larger percentage of the population will end up working parasitic jobs meant to leech off of the smaller and smaller percentage of the population doing actual productive work. Again, this seems to stem from the lack of political and societal will to try to allocate resources more efficiently.

Most people don't seem to realize this. Even if the nearest star had an earth level civilization, we wouldn't be able to detect its signals[1].

[1] https://www.seti.org/faq#obs12

Its funny. I think if you took away the context of it being an old Shakespeare play, most people would find The Taming of the Shrew (which 10 Things I Hate About You is very loosely based on) fairly abhorrent.

I had the opposite experience. I saw Shakespeare plays every year as a child and enjoyed them a lot. As I got older, however, I began enjoying them less and finding more issues with the plays. I think it would be worthwhile for people to explore more playwrights rather than simply focusing so much on a single one; you never know which one will resonate with you.

> It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive. There might not be a perfect solution for this problem, but we don't seem interested in having a discussion about any solution to it.

Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well). Because most people will calculate someone's worth by having a job, not by judging its impact on society (at least, most of the time).

>) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;

I don't think that's actually true. Here's a quick list I threw together on another post:

>Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.

But as people pointed out, those things need collective action and political will. Our current mentality is that we should have minimal collective action, and the vast majority of our resources should go towards what can bring us the largest personal profit returns, no matter the impact on humanity in general. I think we're seeing some of the limits to that approach.

> Every year there are articles about how Burning Man has 'lost' or is 'done'.

Yeah, I wonder what the earliest article about that is. I did a brief search for the decline of Burning Man found a Wired article from 1997[1] (and of course numerous people talking about the decline later, like this blog post from 2004[2]).

It reminds me of all those "I'm 13, is it too late for me to start learning programming/body building/learning the guitar/studying Japanese/etc." type posts. If you don't do something you're interested in because you think its too late, there's a good chance that a decade later you'll be kicking yourself for not having done it.

[1] https://www.wired.com/1997/07/burning-man-burnout/ [2] https://eplaya.burningman.org/viewtopic.php?t=7447

One of the things I found interesting is that in Thailand there seemed to be a big difference in the food at the Thai restaurants for tourists (which were similar to the food in the Thai restaurants abroad) and the Thai restaurants for Thai people.