[robocat]

> Transfers of wealth from productive to unproductive industries arent risks worth rewarding

Down that path lies authoritarianism: who decides what is productive?

Is art productive? Is your comment on HN productive? Is beer productive? Is Haskell productive? Are you productive? It isn’t hard to argue most everything is non-productive. Remove all non-productive uses of money or time, and what is left?

[erulabs]

It's not surprising to me whatsoever that within that same sentence that as you said, "leads to authoritarianism", is a reference to absolute morality and sin.

The scariest part of this line of thinking being so common is that it has happened! We've bench-marked humanity towards productivity before: dosed drinking water with amphetamines instead of fluoride and outlawed art and mandated labor at tank factories. Productivity!

Down that path lies authoritarianism, but more than that: down that path lies mass murder. What could be more productive than removing those who block productivity?

I appreciate your comment but I am always blown away by how kindly people respond to that idea of "unworthy activity", as if its not one of the cruelest ideas a person can possibly have. It's more common here because it's a community of engineers - we work with complex automations all the time - so it's only a natural mistake to see humanity as a complex automation too, and want to engineer it. But I still can't forgive the callousness.

[robocat]

Thanks: I hadn’t thought of it as say Puritan echos; but yes, telling others what they should and shouldn’t do with their time and resources definitely has religious (any kind) and political (both left and right) facets.

There is not an equivalent 1st amendment “right” to spend our time and money as we will. Too many people just spout an opinion on what we should be “allowed” to do: without thinking of how that could be used against them.

It drives me crazy how willing so many people are to decide what is best for others: the rich, the poor, the disabled, the foreign. And how little insight people have that their own choices are definitely pure waste in the eyes of others.

When did liberty get debased?

[erulabs]

I always try to imagine a really reasonable reason for why people believe things like that. One that I can imagine is that humans are extremely biased towards seeing inefficiency. We seem to have a much easier time spotting problems than recognizing the product of years of slow labor. It makes sense: if we were able to appreciate the slow accumulation of value, we'd just stare at any living creature all day, totally enthralled. Instead we see suffering, the parts of the world life hasn't conquered totally yet. As an evolved creature that perspective seems very reasonable.

It's why it's much easier to walk around a city and spot an empty balcony, high up in the sunset, than to appreciate the city itself.

"Someone should be enjoying that balcony! Why is the rich owner somewhere else, and there are thousands of us pedestrians wishing we could spend just a moment up there? Inefficiency!"

is a much more viral thought than being completely overwhelmed by the amount of human effort your eyes are looking at. If we could properly understand it we'd all just be weeping with gratitude and humility all the time, and that wouldn't be productive at all! Being biased towards negative emotion should be assumed to be the default. So liberty didn't have to be devalued - it just hasn't been properly valued yet! Much more optimistic :)

Sorry for long reply!

[robocat]

The irony of saying sorry (to yourself?): why are wasting time thinking instead of working??

One underlying cause for complaining about the waste of others is status seeking, of which virtue signalling is a part of.

People don’t have to be reasonable, but your effort is admirable.

I think engineers look at the world with different eyes, as you say. I find our infrastructure systems as profound - and also the beauty of how our interfaces with those systems hide deep complexity. The average person doesn’t see flushing a toilet as amazing technology, nor understand the vast number of lives saved by civil engineering (doctors are window dressing on society).

[zelphirkalt]

There is a difference though. People, who produce art or any other kind of entertainment of thought provoking things, mostly at least partially do it to add something to society, or to make us think. Putting money into energy intensive speculation, which does have no real world value behind it is not in the same league as those activities and is definitely not productive. Even counter-productive, as it is using up energy, which could be used for useful things. At the end as in any such speculative endavour, one person's gain is another person's loss, no matter how many abstraction layers and smoke screens are put up.

[mrzimmerman]

I think you may be confusing economics terms with moral and ethical distinctions. I’ll grant that the idea of productive and unproductive labor is an outdated economic concept.

Regardless, academically defining something as more or less productive than something else is not authoritarian. Nor is deciding personally if something is “good” or “bad”.

Now if someone in government decided to create and pass legislation based on their personal academic or philosophical beliefs, and not based on some factual usefulness of the legislation, than I think that would fall under the definition of authoritarian.

[robocat]

> I think you may be confusing economics terms with moral and ethical distinctions

mjburgess’ comment appears to be using virtuous, religiously worded, moral arguments against the “waste” of cryptocurrencies. I am not making an economic argument and neither was mjburgess: my argument is about liberty and I am against people that imply that our personal choices or values are unworthy, because by their morals the choices of others are waste. I personally might agree that cryptocurrencies appear to be negative value for the economy, and I might see them bring negative value to some of my acquaintances. That is not the issue. We should aim for the ideal of being as free as practical to make wasteful choices: the waste of having a child, breathing, thinking, or doing absolutely anything, really. As you say, that freedom needs careful balancing against how our personal liberties affect others.

I am looking at that comment as an single example within a wider milieu: one dangerous opinion dressed up in what superficially appears to be a sensible economic argument.

> is not authoritarian

Strawman words in my mouth. I never said it was authoritarian, I said: “down that path lies authoritarianism”.