Comment by nine_k
6 months ago
In a way, it's similar to the connection between "boredom" and creativity. When you don't have much to do, you can do anything, including novel and awesome things. It, of course, takes the right kind of person, or a right group of persons. Give such people a way to not think about the daily bread, and allow them to build what they want to build, study what they want to study, think about what they want to think about.
It feels anti-efficient. It looks wasteful. It requires faith in the power of reason and the creative spirit. All these things are hard to pull off in a public corporation, unless it's swimming in excess cash, like AT&T and Google did back in the day.
Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. Truth be told, not all of them advanced sciences and arts though.
OTOH the rational, orderly living, when every minute is filled with some predefined meaning, pre-assigned task, allows very little room for creativity, and gives relatively little incentive to invent new things. Some see it as a noble ideal, and, understandably, a fiscal ideal, too.
Maybe a society needs excess sometimes, needs to burn billions on weird stuff, because it gives a chance to to something genuinely new and revolutionary to be born and grow to a viable stage. In a funny way, the same monopolies that gouge prices for the common person also collect the resources necessary for such advances, that benefit that same common person (but not necessarily that same monopoly). It's an unsetllting thought to have.
This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing.
But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
I'm of the same belief. We're too antsy of creatures. I know in any long vacation I'll spend the first week, maybe even two (!), vegging out doing nothing. But after that I'm itching to do work. I spent 3 months unemployed before heading to college (laid off from work) and in that time taught myself programming, Linux, and other things that are critical to my career today. This seems like a fairly universal experience too! Maybe not the exact tasks, but people needing time to recover and then want to do things.
I'm not sure why we think everyone would just veg out WALL-E style and why the idea is so pervasive. Everyone says "well I wouldn't, but /they/ would". I think there's strong evidence that people would do things too. You only have to look at people who retire or the billionaire class. If the people with the greatest ability to check out and do nothing don't, why do we think so many would? People are people after all. And if there's a secret to why some still work, maybe we should really figure that out. Especially as we're now envisioning a future where robots do all the labor.
Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (housing costs are insane here) music has increasingly turned into the province of people who are more well-off because they have to worry less about their daily bread. As a result a lot of it gets a bit homogenised and predictable in my opinion.
I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
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UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue.
Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford.
Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble.
Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
This has been tried, very honestly, and it mostly sucked, then crashed. The calculation argument [1] kills it. The optimization problem which the market solves in a chaotic and decentralized way through price discovery and trading is intractable otherwise, not with all the computing power of the planet. It also requires prediction of people's needs (ignoring desires), and it's a problem more ill-posed than prediction of weather.
The market of course needs regulation, or, rather, stewardship: from protection of property rights all the way to limiting monopolies, dumping, etc. The market must remain free and varied in order to do its economic work for the benefit of the society. No better mechanism has been invented for last few millennia.
Redistribution to provide a safety net to those in trouble is usually a good thing to have, but it does not require to dismantle the market. It mostly requires an agreement in the society.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
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Concepts like this would definitely be in play and misguided UBI could result more in preservation of status quo than allowing abundance to spread.
That's why experiments need to be made.
Now with research pay Bell was right up there with other prestigious institutions, elite but not like the nobility of old.
I would say very much more like a "Gentleman" scientist of antiquity, whether they were patrons or patronized in some way, they could focus daily on the tasks at hand even when they are some of the most unlikely actions to yield miracles.
Simply because the breakthroughs that are needed are the same as it ever was, and almost no focused tasks lead in that direction ever, so you're going to have to do a lot of "seemingly pointless" stuff to even come up with one good thing. You better get started right away and don't lift your nose from the grindstone either ;)
> Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford.
In the same basic econ 101, you learn that real estate demand is localized. UBI allows folks to move to middle of nowhere Montana.
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UBI might work in the short-term, but as more and more people are having kids (and learning from parents on UBI, to also get UBI), we would run out of people actually working and paying the taxes to support it.
Which is exactly the thing they tested multiple times and found to be wrong.
People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community.
No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots.
But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
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This assumes that most people would be satisfied with UBI and not attempt to make more money.
I heard a recent interview with John Carmack (of DOOM fame) who described his current style of work as "citizen scientist", where he has enough money, but wants to do independent research on AI/ML. I am always surprised that we don't see more former/retired hackers (whom many got rich from a DotCom), decide to "return to the cave" to do something exciting with open source software. Good counterexamples: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto and his Ghostty, (2) Philip Hazel and his PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library. When I retire (early -- if all things go well), the only way to that I can possibly stave off a certain, early death from intellectual inactivity would be something similar. (Laughably: I don't have 1% of the talents that John Carmack has... but a person can try!)
It's not about excess.
Look at some of the most famous success stories in comedy, art, music, theatre, film, etc.
A good number of them did their best work when they were poor.
"Community" is a great example. Best show ever made, hands down. Yet they were all relatively broke and overworked during the whole thing.
It's because they believed in the vision.
Art is materially different from science and technology. Great art is known to emerge from limitations. Art is full of limitations that are self-imposed for that purpose, like the meter and rhyme in poetry, geometry and color in painting, etc. Art is primarily about processing and evoking emotions.
Science requires much more concentration on abstract thinking, loading a much larger context, if you will. It's counterproductive to do it while busy with something else. It overworks you all right, and it demands much more rigor than art.
All revolutionary new technology is initially inefficient, and requires spending a lot of time and money on finding efficient solutions. First electronic computers were terribly unwieldy, expensive, and unreliable. This equally applies to first printing presses, first steam engines, first aircraft, first jet engines, first lasers, first LLMs (arguably still applies). It's really hard to advance technology without spending large amounts of resources without any profit, or a guarantee thereof, for years and years. This requires a large cache of such resources, prepared to be burnt on R&D.
It's investment into far future vs predictable present, VC vs day trading.
Tell that to a professional in the arts.
That was a great show. The best show ever made, hands down though…is “Chuck”
Of all shows I might dare concede to, Chuck is not in the top 50.
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To some extent, the NSF did that. My graduate education was funded by the NSF, and my research didn't have an obvious practical purpose, except to enable further research.
Today, I'm in a corporate research role, and I'm still given a lot of freedom. I'm also genuinely interested in practical applications and I like developing things that people want to buy, but my ability to do those things owes a lot to the relatively freewheeling days of NSF funding 30+ years ago.
I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?
It's the statist idea. Socialism in practice usually involves regulating the market heavily, or into oblivion altogether, and giving the State a huge redistribution power. See my comment nearby on why such a setup fails to work.
A socialism where the only way to work is to own a part of an enterprise (so no "exploitation"is possible) would likely work much better, and not even require a huge state. It would be rather inflexible though, or mutate back into capitalism as some workers would accumulate larger shares of enterprises.
Having some kind of default steward for market developments that get so competitive and fundamental that they reach full market saturation is helpful. Under a market system, at that scale, the need for growth starts to motivate companies to cut corners or squeeze their customer base to keep the numbers going up. You either end up pricing everyone out (fixed supply case) or the profit margins get so slim that only a massive conglomerate can break even (insatiable demand case). This is why making fundamental needs and infrastructure into market commodities doesn't work either.
The problem with social democracy is that it still gives capitalists a seat at the table and doesn't address the fundamental issues of empowering market radicalism. Some balance would be nice, but I don't really see that happening.
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Sounds like distributism.
It depends. Socialism is one of the better alternatives for areas where markets function poorly, like healthcare.
Hardly. Socialism is about workers/communities owning the means of production. Research labs these days are mostly funded by the public. That's just about allocation of government resources.
This is what I wished academia would be. I'm finishing my PhD and despite loving teaching and research (I've been told I'd make a good professor, including from students) I just don't see the system doing what it should. Truthfully, I'm not aware of any such environment other than maybe a handful of small groups (both in academia and industry).
I think we've become overly metricized. In an effort to reduce waste we created more. Some things are incredibly hard to measure and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that one of those things is research. Especially low level research. You're pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Creating things that did not previously exist! Not only are there lots of "failures", but how do you measure something that doesn't exist?
I write "failure" in quotes because I don't see it that way, and feel like the common framing of failure is even anti scientific. In science we don't often (or ever) directly prove some result but instead disprove other things and narrow down our options. In the same way every unsuccessful result decreases your search space for understanding where the truth is. But the problem is that the solution space is so large and in such a high dimension that you can't effectively measure this. You're exactly right, it looks like waste. But in an effort to "save money" we created a publish or perish paradigm, which has obviously led to many perverse incentives.
I think the biggest crime is that it severely limits creativity. You can't take on risky or even unpopular ideas because you need to publish and that means passing "peer review". This process is relatively new to science though. It didn't exist in the days of old scientists you reference[0]. The peer review process has always been the open conversation about publications, not the publications themselves nor a few random people reading it who have no interest and every reason to dismiss. Those are just a means to communicate, something that is trivial with today's technologies. We should obviously reject works with plagiarism and obvious factual errors, but there's no reason to not publish the rest. Theres no reason we shouldn't be more open than ever[1]. But we can't do this in a world where we're in competition with another. It only works in a world where we're united by the shared pursuit of more knowledge. Otherwise you "lose credit" or some "edge".
And we're really bad at figuring out what's impactful. Critically, the system makes it hard to make paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift requires a significant rethinking of the current process. It's hard to challenge what we know. It's even harder to convince others. Every major shift we've seen first receives major pushback and that makes it extremely difficult to publish in the current environment. I've heard many times "good luck publishing, even if you can prove it". I've also seen many ideas be put on the infinite back burner because despite being confident in the idea and confident in impact it's known that in the time it'd take to get the necessary results you could have several other works published, which matters far more to your career.
Ironically, I think removing these systems will save more money and create more efficient work (you're exactly right!). We have people dedicating their lives to studying certain topics in depth. The truth is that their curiosity highly aligns with what are critical problems. Sometimes you just know and can't articulate it well until you get a bit more into the problem. I'm sure this is something a lot of people here have experienced when writing programs or elsewhere. There's many things that no one gets why you'd do until after it's done, and frequently many will say it's so obvious after seeing it.
I can tell you that I (and a large number of people) would take massive pay cuts if I could just be paid to do unconditional research. I don't care about money, I care about learning more and solving these hard puzzles.
I'd also make a large wager that this would generate a lot of wealth for a company big enough to do such a program and a lot of value to the world if academia supported this.
(I also do not think the core ideas here are unique to academia. I think we've done similar things in industry. But given the specific topic it makes more sense to discuss the academic side)
[0] I know someone is going to google oldest journal and find an example. The thing is that this was not the normal procedure. Many journals, even in the 20th century, would publish anything void of obvious error.
[1] put on open review. Include code, data, and anything else. Make comments public. Show revisions. Don't let those that plagiarize just silently get rejected and try their luck elsewhere (a surprisingly common problem)
Currently the OECD average spending on R&D is ~2%. Let's say half of that is government spending.
The OECD's total GDP per year is ~50 trillion. So 1 percent is roughly 500 Bn on research.
So there clearly has to be some accountability. But no doubt it could be improved. As you say publishing everything these days makes more sense with platforms like arXiv.
With taking pay cuts to do research, have you ever seen places offer part time work for something and then allow people to research what they want in the other time ?
Or researchers just doing this with other jobs ?
Ha. Hmm. I just realised I have a cousin who does this.
Is the number big because percent or absolute value? I'm just trying to figure out what you were trying to communicate here.
This is what academia is sold as. I mean I can go make 3x as much money in industry as academia. I'm saying I'm not going to take that pay cut to not have the freedom. I would though if it gave the freedom.
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