[Viliam1234]

> If you are in an org that actually lets people work great flexible hours you won't advertise it too much, for fear of attracting workers whose primary goal is to slack, or getting a reputation an org of slackers.

This reminds me of: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

The common idea is that if there is a norm that everyone follows, and you visibly deviate from the norm in some direction, it will disproportionately attract people who extremely care about that direction, even if you only wanted a minor change.

The difference between working 8 hours a day and working e.g. 7 hours a day is not that dramatic, but if all jobs require 8 hours and you are the only job who requires 7 hours, then all people who want to work as little as possible will run to you, because you are the best option available for them. But you didn't want the people who want to work as little as possible; you wanted people who think that 7 hours is appropriate. People who believe that 7 hours a day are best would have been happy at your company, but instead you will be full of people who would actually prefer to work 4 or 2 hours a day, and while your offer is better than the alternative, they will still be unhappy. So instead of getting happier employees, you will actually get less happy ones.

If instead the job market offered the full spectrum: jobs with 8 hours a day, jobs with 7 hours a day, jobs with 6 hours a day... and perhaps even jobs with 1 hour a day (with proportionally smaller salaries, I suppose), then offering a position that requires 7 hours a day would attract exactly the people who prefer to work 7 hours a day, no more, no less. Unfortunately, this is not the current situation.

And I have no idea how to get from "here" to "there". The incentives seem set up so that anyone who moves away from the current equilibrium gets punished. (And in a parallel universe, where the norm is 9 hours, or 7 hours, anyone who moves away from that equilibrium gets punished.)

Also, if people pretend to work 8 hours a day, but they actually work 6 (and spend 2 hours watching cat videos), then if you say you want to work 6 hours a day, people will assume it means 4 hours of work and 2 hours of cat videos. Why shouldn't they assume you are just as hypocritical as anyone else?

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Honestly, that's kind of what I've begun to think of (axiomatically) as where government needs to step in. When society's collective interest is in an equilibrium which it's no one's individual interest to move towards, the incentives need changing.

I have no idea how to fix it, but you're spot on that you can't change it individually unless it's all at once. Or if we somehow figure out a better incentive structure so that individual and collective best decisions match.

[Viliam1234]

I could imagine some collective action not organized by government, for example to write a "6-hour day manifesto", share it on networks, have people sign it, wear t-shirts, choose a day when you celebrate the idea... i.e. gradually introduce the idea to the general public. (Perhaps even edgy t-shirts, such as "I only work 6 hours a day, but I spend 8 hours at work to appear busy. And so do you.") So that people notice that others share their opinions.

Sometimes memes have power (but it is difficult to engineer them properly). I believe that jokes contributed to the fall of Soviet Union, so perhaps jokes could make 8-hours day go away. Just imagine if average people would start saying: "So, you also work at a company where people pretend to work 8 hours a day? Me too." Maybe if laughter became an automatic reaction to saying "8 hours", something would change.