[oh-4-fucks-sake]

[I think psychologists have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magic...)

Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it).

People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.

[quacked]

I don't think I agree with this assessment. I myself am "brainy", but working for actually useful endeavors is easy to balance with a rich, involved life. I can happily dig rocks out of the ground in the morning and write plays in the evening.

The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily for myself and my family, rather than for shareholders. Would "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if they were doing road-building work on their own street? I certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the reward was significant time off that I could spend with my family and friends.

I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people have been trained to believe in the necessary division of labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you won't ever consider a vision of society where you help produce textiles.

If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be building everything that we use in our society for ourselves, not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate processes for white collar companies providing services that we don't actually need.

[nobodyandproud]

I really dig the comment about serfs.

We’ve done a great job of hiding-away slavery in the name of consumerism and “uplifting” third world economies.

Instead, I would love to see a world where repair and reuse is the norm.

And chasing after the largest/outrageous/most-expensive/trendiest is nothing short of embarrassing.

[NoOneNew]

I watched a thing on youtube regarding luxury goods manufacturers as the ultimate slave makers. Not because of the obvious sweat shops, but because they can convince smart/rich people that they're still inadequate and need to work even more so they can buy whatever the hell is being pushed. I thought it was an interesting concept, not 100% onboard, but interesting.

[javajosh]

The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game.

I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.

[kevinventullo]

I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of funding pure mathematics.

[jimbokun]

Another reason is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

[rjbwork]

If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it, honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.

[jimbokun]

In high school, I had a job driving a tractor and planting grass seed for a summer. I was working with a couple gentlemen near retirement age.

I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad, getting physical activity, breathing fresh air.

They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office. I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their age.

[quacked]

I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is. You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or not, based on what you said.)

I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters.

The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...

[s1artibartfast]

Specialization and increased efficiency is exactly what leads to the high minded goals you mention.

>4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger.

It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics and medical care.

[quacked]

Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.

Come on, man. This is simple. I recently got a $10,000 hospital bill for an ultrasound, for which insurance decided I owed $1800. It doesn't cost $10,000 for an ultrasound, that's a made up ratio calculated by accountants trying to maximize their firm's ROI. An ultrasound costs {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, none of which require anyone to work constantly; the market has simply set it up that way because everyone working constantly yields great market valuations in the system that the owners of the markets set up.

A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world.

[s1artibartfast]

>Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.

It happens, but the asphalt guy probably has coverage, like 92% of Americans. [1] There are a long list of simple solutions that can increase this percent and bring costs down, but people working less isn't on it as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see the connection.

>A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world

If anything, bringing the costs of goods down and increasing access to them will increase the number of labor hours needed. More and cheaper ultrasounds means more {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, not less.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

[Scalestein]

I agree with your general outlook but would also question why we need to make "efficiency" a goal to be attained at all costs. Why not rotate who does the drudgery jobs so no-one gets stuck doing it day in and out? It might be less efficient but everyone would appreciate the work that needs to be done more and no-one would be pigeon holed. What sort of efficiency loss is that worth?

As long as we prioritize economic efficiency there will be an never ending treadmill of improving efficiency. Until we start bringing human factors into the equation we will stay on this path.

[jimbokun]

Sorry, but finding your arguments a little silly.

> The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society.

Maybe, but you don't have any strategy for changing the current system, or what kind of system should replace it, or how to demonstrate that system will be better than the one we have now.

[quacked]

That is a fair criticism; I don't have a perfect solution built out right now, so I can't paint you a picture of how a theoretical nation full of well-educated laborers and farmers building things and providing for themselves would look in comparison to our current nation, where everyone barely struggles to hang on financially as citizens of the wealthiest empire in the history of civilization.

I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system. If you read through other comments on other chains in this thread, people are trying to explain to me that I could never convince someone to work half-time at a white collar job (where they endlessly produce code and then clock out) and half-time at a blue-collar job (where they endlessly shovel asphalt and then clock out), while at the same time I'm trying to convince them that it's possible to create an equilibrium of demand with output by simultaneously reducing aggregate demand and moving around aggregate output. If there's an end goal to your labor- produce this much and then stop producing until repairs or new units are needed- you don't have to work all the time at these horrible jobs.

Right now, people work in white collar jobs in order to justify their right to the results of the blue collar jobs. If you don't write code, you can't afford the berries that Driscoll's ships to your grocery store, so you write code and make $150k/year, and you buy your $6 carton of berries, and the migrant berry pickers make $18k/year, and the truck driver makes $80k/year. But you're the end user of the berries; if you instead knew how to pick or knew how to drive, you might have a chance at getting the berries to your table without needing quasi-slave labor.

I don't want to live in a country where I get stuff- materials, goods, etc.- from people who are always struggling. We can't just UBI our way to luxury space communism, because then no one will pick the berries, because right now the "berry-picking job" is defined as "12 hours per day in and out of the hot sun".

This is what I'm trying to say- find some way to make sure that I can provide myself with shelter and see a doctor when I need to, and I'll go pick the damn berries and drive them back myself. Many seem to be responding with "no, that's impossible."

[jimbokun]

I am very skeptical of any utopian-sounding scheme.

"I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system."

Look past it all you want. But once you start using the power of the state to make it come about, the potential for devastating unintended consequences are very high.

If you want to be a well rounded human who picks berries and also writes code, knock yourself out. If you want to write Medium articles advocating for this lifestyle, knock yourself out.

But if the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.

As for the berry pickers, the UBI-like effect of the Covid stimulus programs in the US showed that giving people an income floor is very effective at raising wages rapidly, as people can turn down jobs that they don't think adequately compensates them for their labor.

[quacked]

Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of lifestyle"?

In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people?

I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?

[nradov]

Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.

[quacked]

Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment? They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.

You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that.

I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".

[zozbot234]

> They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.

That's not really fixing the potholes, they're basically putting a band-aid on it and calling it a day. "Fixing" a pot-holed street in a long-term sense may require literally rebuilding that piece of the street from the ground up.

[dragonwriter]

I've done manual labor. If I could work in software despite only by not making any more than I would in manual labor, I’d still work in software.

And that's even before considering the way management and coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical safety threat rather than an irritation.

[AnimalMuppet]

It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount of money.

[quacked]

But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them.

How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?

[brippalcharrid]

They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work in the cicumstances, seeing as they have previously delayed a lot of gratification by spending time and money developing skills that now enable them to do work in an air-conditioned office in a field that they find intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.

[s1artibartfast]

>How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?

I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.

[quacked]

Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job" is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in, day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock options.

It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by?

I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator).

My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor.

The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is.

(I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)

[s1artibartfast]

So I 100% agree with everything you said, but don't see how it connects to the points you raise above.

As you say, people should think long and hard about their life goals, and in my opinion, would probably be happier with a different work life balance where they can afford it.

However, I don't see a world in which I would work part time at a job less enjoyable with worse pay than my current one. I would rather optimize to work the minimum hours at the best compensated job I can find. (e.g. why work 50-50% at white collar job and terrible job, when I can just work 51% at the white collar job).

Sure, there are major challenges to most people doing this, but removing those barriers is a lot more realistic that introducing job swapping that people don't even want. The simple place to fix the problem is uncouple health and other benefits from employers. The current system discourages part time work because employers have fixed costs per employee. Once you break this link, more people will work part time.

[AnimalMuppet]

How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"?

And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?

[quacked]

Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs.

My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy.

If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be.

I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.

[jimbokun]

> but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside"

I had a part time job planting trees in high school. I knew I got into a good university and part of me was feeling like I was privileged to be able to go to college when the other people I was working with might not have the same opportunity.

But then I heard one of them say "thank God I'll be graduating soon and won't have to do school work anymore."

And realized they had zero interest in pursuing the path I was on.

[AnimalMuppet]

So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up.

But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful.

In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good.

So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat.

And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm.

If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.

[jimbokun]

Why is his/her job not open to "them"?

[quacked]

IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take your pick. Take an average programmer and an average backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a more suitable replacement for the other?

As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."

[jimbokun]

Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120 hours of training to do that job.

But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.