The illusion of work

arithma · 2012-04-18T17:27:33+00:00

I sometimes have the feeling that "work" is just an illusion. That a "job" is an unnecessary artifact of the past pushed against us in a different present....

rtp

Rubz wrotehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg

The Zeitgeist movement, a new perspective?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project

Joe

arithma wroteWhat we need is a Moral driven society. Good deeds will be paid in karma points. Those karma points will allow you to do good for others. That's the whole system. It's a distributed do-good oriented economy, rather than own more stuff economy. Capital is ability to execute to bring benefit to the world (not to one's self).

You're implying that Good is an absolute truth or can be measured in an objective scale. But is it?

Quick example off the top of my head:
Your good deeds include helping the world through science. Where does experimentation on humans stand in your system? Is it Good or Evil?

If we're prioritizing, and decide to put "preservation of human life" above "Science", we're effectively creating a monetary system where karma points act just like dollars. A rigid, formal system will always include people "taking advantage" and others "taken advantage of". We're back to square one.

That said, I agree with your way of thinking. We live in a system that rewards marketability; I'd rather live in a system that rewards something else. (Notice I hate using the word "Good"). For me, that would be technological progress and science. But that's my own little view of the world.

arithma

I was talking about Good as a distributed democratic notion. Something that society would agree it needed. Not as an absolutist notion.

Your notions about taking advantage of and being taken advantage of is exactly what I wanted to think about while having this thought experiment. To take out the very factor that makes people individualistic, materialistic, and capitalistic instead of socially aware and benevolent.

My dramatic change in an economy of an island would be to find global optimums of an economy (am I being communist?) rather than finding many many local optimums for individuals on the account of others. What we need is to accelerate darwinian natural selection on diversified economy models.

This calls for evolutionary simulations :)

xterm

What we need, is human extinction.

rtp

xterm wroteWhat we need, is human extinction.

my thoughts some month ago, i thought that the problem is simply humans.

so no matter what you try to do self centerness, greeed etc.. will have a place and each will try to benefit from the system...

but now i see things differently. if there is abundance there is no need for greed. self centerness and materialistic stupidity comes from the environment we are raised and live in, thus by education and the right environment those can be faded away as well...

there is hope, i hope!

Joe

arithma: Someone (clearly anti-communist) told me his own version of what's wrong with communism through this anecdote:

One day the teacher entered the classroom and announced that from now on, students will not get individual grades on their exams. Instead, she will correct all the copies, calculate the average, and assign it as a grade for everyone. What ensued was pretty much what you'd expect:

The ones performing above par would grow frustrated from getting average grades despite acing the exams. They slowly lost motivation and stopped studying for their tests.

The ones performing below par got annoyed when the top performers stopped studying. When the general average started dropping, they blamed the top performers for having become "lazy".

By the end of the year, the average had dropped to extreme lows, with each side blaming the other for the bad result.

The analogy isn't perfect, but it's relevant to the problem at hand: As much as I hate it, we are not showing any alternative to the stupid carrot-and-stick reward model. It's frustratingly annoying to think that the idea of "working together for a higher communal benefit" is better than individualistic rewards, but we still are incapable of getting people to abandon the former and adopt the latter.

solo220

@xterm LOL my grand father hope .

arithma

@rahmu: Imagine what would happen if all the students would get the minimum grade instead :)

NuclearVision

This topic remind of what Bishop George Berkely realised:

To be is to be preceived

.
i.e, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

dp0001

Arithma, I've been doing a lot of research on eastern thought and philosophy recently

your inquiry is very nice and the answer is in our nature and desires.

why do we work? basically for two main reasons:

it is our nature to be active and we are working according to our desires

Joe

arithma wrote@rahmu: Imagine what would happen if all the students would get the minimum grade instead :)

Racial purification. Since you can blame one culprit, you point at him and kill him (or in a nicer way, ban him from society).

Until there are only a handful left. And even then, they would still kill each other: In the land of overachievers, the guy who caused you a B+ instead of A deserves to die).

This model cannot exist because it's strongly self-destructive. The "average" model has the advantage of dilluting the blame into the mass, and therefore may be more alluring.

arithma

@rahmu: The thing you're trying to disprove is called open source!
Good for everyone (with varying shades of definitions of good). The common denominator of good is "sharing".
The second thing is, to an extent, an open source community is almost as good as the least good regular contributor. Laughingly, your kill the least or hold up the gates away from the idiots holds up for open-source projects (though in reverse, self selection).

Good discussion.

Joe

@rahmu: The thing you're trying to disprove is called open source!

Wrong!

It's foolish to think that open source holds on good will and ideals. There's a shit ton of money involved, personal interests, profitability and general selfishness going around. I had already attempted at covering that before.

Open Source is based on the idea that it produces better softwares. There exists a separate community called the Free Software community, that fights for a Greater Good with strong anti-corporatism, but it's considerably smaller and not nearly as influential.

Open Source is not as good as its worst contributor. I can manage to get a patch in the Apache project, maybe. But it won't affect the global quality of the product. The idea about being as good as your weakest link gets diluted in the mass of really large projects.

Bottom line, if there weren't commercial interests in it, Open Source wouldn't exist. Historically, Open Source was a term invented by a major subset of the then-only Free Software community, precisely in order to attract venture capital and money.

arithma

Are you saying that the basic merits underlying open source are capitalistic. Of course not everything is as crisp as mathematical equations. Nothing in society is.

The thing is, if you're a bad programmer, you'll be shunned off from contributing. If you can only occasionally produce something decent, you will much rarely be able to get something in there. Only the good will be able to put some real work in. It's not a one-to-one mapping with the classroom example, but that is only a mechanism to exemplify the point, not to model it!

As software integrity is mostly dependent on the integrity of all of its components, you can see where the argument "worst contributor" comes from.

Joe

Are you saying that the basic merits underlying open source are capitalistic. Of course not everything is as crisp as mathematical equations. Nothing in society is.

Not exactly, but I an saying that open source, just like any other capitalistic system, rewards marketability. Everything else comes second.
My argument remains the same: An economy (like Open Source or others) works when it rewards individuals proportionately to the efforts put in, in a very ego-centrical fashion.

Ideally, I wish I could find someone to fund my hobby programming. It's not completely idealistic; all I need to do is find a way to make it marketable, or at least have enough potential to attract interests.

PS: I honestly don't get your "worst contributor" argument. Can you elaborate?
PS2: This is an interesting talk.

babum

@rahmu, I think he used the idea wrong there. It should be that the least good project resulting from an open source community will be better than the best project resulting from a regular company. It is a theory or if you will a somewhat proven theory of group wisdom.

I do have a nice book on that matter, will post the name once I find it.

arithma

Think of a truly open source project. Anyone can submit anything. The quality would become true shit because anyone can drive quality down. That's why you need all those maintainers and review processes, especially for open source.
Rahmu's talking about killing people off and 'eliticism' is true to varying degrees in the open source world. That's why we're all hesitant before going for it.
Marketable is necessary asset of a market but not sufficient. Real economies are interplays between capitalism, benevolence, feudalism and probably more dimensions we're not remembering. It is definitely an evolutionary game where all modes are battling for survival. Happily, software provides a seed model for a radical economic model.

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