Our activities split into work and play. And positive and negative extremes are described as heavens and hells. So there are four possible work-play extremes: work heaven, work hell, play heaven, and play hell.
I'd just like to point out that much (sometimes most) of people's "free" time consists of work.
When people get home from their "formal" work, they usually need to cook for themselves or their family, do laundry, pay bills, clean, take care of their children, shop for groceries, etc. This is household work, not play.
The time people spend travelling to and from work is equivalent to work, since it's necessary in order to make a living. This can easily consume 30 minutes to 3 hours per day, or 2,5 to 15 hours per week, depending on your circumstances.
If we subtract the time needed for sleep, formal work, travel to and from formal work, and household work, from the number of hours in a week, there's not that much left.
The main reason to be wary of tearing apart the world to remake it is uncertainty about if we could really do better.
Oh, that's what he's proposing? I had thought the heroic corrective consisted of teaching social skills to nerds. Isn't that the actual program being pursued?
At least that's superior authority to Yudkovsky's grandparent comment, which (one assumes) relies only upon his own experiences (and his fantasies concerning their role).
Or superior to yours, which is to issue the standard "rationalist" type caveat--that tells no one anything they didn't already know.
What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to *maximize* a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, *must* drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus but which is a central and concrete concern for both the maker and the user of the thing itself."
A modern paraphrase of the thesis in Karl Marx's early writings, "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts." AT least an important aspect of Marx's thesis.
Reading _Shop Class as Soul Craft_, Matthew Crawford 2009, I ran into a relevant bit on pg136-137:
"My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty-eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflects the contents of that article. So the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation.
...It will be objected: Wasn’t there any quality control? My manager would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was once or twice corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.
It will further be objected that if the abstracts produced by Information Access Company were no good, then “the market” would punish it; the company should have been beaten out by one with a higher regard for quality. The company has been bought and sold several times since I worked there, but appears to still be in business. Maybe things are better there now, and quality has improved. I honestly don’t know. In any case, the time scale on which the market administers its omniscient justice may be quite a bit longer than crucial episodes in the working life of a mortal human being. Being an early entrant into the market for electronically distributed abstracts, IAC enjoyed a temporary quasi-monopoly. I suppose it was fairly free to set standards as it pleased, and may have calibrated the production quota, and corresponding quality, to some threshold of “good enough,” beneath which the user walks away in disgust.8 Recurring purchases, after all, may continue even when the alignment of interests between producer and consumer is only partial, or even accompanied by a felt antagonism. Frequently we come to hate things that we nonetheless continue to depend on (like Windows). Further, a product made under conditions of harried intellectual carelessness, such as InfoTrac circa 1992, may generate its own demand by corrupting our standards in the same direction, and our initial harsh judgment of it will come to seem reactionary. The very existence of the product makes the lower standards suddenly seem respectable or inevitable.
In writing abstracts of academic journal articles, I thought I would learn a lot. Quite apart from the pay, the job seemed to promise an intrinsic good to me as a worker: satisfying my desire to know. This satisfaction is in perfect harmony with the good of the user of InfoTrac, who also desires to know, and the good of the author of an article, who wants to be understood. The standard internal to the job, properly conceived, was the very one that presumably animated both parties I served: intellectual excellence. But this good was nowhere accommodated by the metric to which I answered, which was purely quantitative. The metric was conceived by another party to the labor process, a middleman hovering about with a purpose of his own that had no inherent tie to the one shared by the principals. This purpose, of course, was that of realizing a profit from my labor.
As I have said elsewhere in this book, work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest. That’s why you get paid. But, again, if I had been serving the user of the database directly, his interest in high-quality abstracts would have aligned with my own interest in experiencing the pleasures of comprehension. It may or may not be the case that selling my labor directly to the user would have given him a high-quality product at an attractive price and have provided me a comfortable livelihood; one would have to calculate whether such a transaction makes sense or not. And let it not be forgotten that my work would need to be marketed and distributed, as IAC did, and its technical bugs worked out, and this would contribute to the cost. Let it further be conceded that I never would have undertaken to launch such a product as InfoTrac on my own, and that the entrepreneurs who did so took risks. I have no beef with them. They made something, then sold it to others (the media conglomerate Ziff) who seem to be in the business of owning things. What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to *maximize* a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, *must* drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus but which is a central and concrete concern for both the maker and the user of the thing itself."
The main reason to be wary of tearing apart the world to remake it is uncertainty about if we could really do better. If we are really sure a post-tear world will have a lot less personal hells, and if we can reasonably bound the cost of tearing and remaking, then sure we should go for it.
I have serious questions about how y’all are framing the concept of play. To me Play Hell is an oxymoron. If it’s hell, it ain’t play. If you are referring to what happens when you can’t actually arrive at the play state, well one could either consider that work or part of the game typically known as strategizing.
So in the first case, this Play Hell is actually related to the work required to arrive at play, which of course is what WORK itself is... Why else work other than to be ABLE to play??
Beyond the obvious rituals, contests, and role playing... Isn’t Play a state of mind? And isn’t play by necessity something we enjoy? So how can there be a Play Hell? No child would understand the concept except perhaps as the frustration of being sidelined in a game. But then at that given moment, they are not playing, merely hoping to play! And anyhow, that is the price you pay to play, and if you can’t accept that, you’re in the wrong game. Same goes for dating I would guess. Look, and here’s the second case, there’s a whole strategy component to contests, and dating is a contest, right? And if you don’t dig the strategizing part of the process, then again, get out of the game. You can always find someone to take you to bed, after all. You can always find someone to marry you if you get so exasperated.
Of course then there is the issue of losing. Perhaps that is the actual Play Hell... but then if you're not enjoying the game itself, and all you care about is the endgame, then you're a loser from the start:)
Work is voluntary only to the extent that *eating* is voluntary. (And I can easily point to examples of people who have proven that eating is voluntary - hunger strikers and anorexics.) And, by that standard, even the labor performed by slaves is voluntary; they still have the option to endure whatever punishment their owner will inflict upon them for refusing to work.
I also agree with the commenters who think that because something is technically voluntary - where having to work is something that most people know better than to think is voluntary, but having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.If neither work or play are particularly voluntary, then there is no basis for moral judgement in either case, let alone comparatively.
Moral statements, judgements and behavior must presuppose voluntary action, just as the law (with rare exceptions) must presuppose that actions with legal implications are voluntary.
Once behavior is deemed to be deterministic, or mostly deterministic, then all moral bets are off. For some commenters here, i would replace the phrase 'moral bets' with 'moral posing'.
Since we devote far more time to play than work, I’d guess that most of the actual hells around us are play hells.
I'd be very interested to know what "formal work" means in this context - how it's been distinguished from the time that's spent at work - but even if one assumes it's true, once you've subtracted time for sleep, commuting, cooking, washing, shopping, preparing for bed or coming round after awakening, laundry, housekeeping and, if you're a parent, doing chores on behalf of your kids the time spent on "play" is massively reduced.
Still - it's an intriguing concept. A feature of "play hell" that separates it from "work hell" is that most people actively dislike labouring. The full horrors of "play hell" only tend to be obvious in retrospect, when you're getting older and realise all of the things you could have done instead of watching episodes of Friends...
having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.
For most young people, "working at dating" is thoroughly enjoyable. The hunt is as much the purpose as the booty. I recall thoroughly enjoying myself while being unsuccessful at singles bars.
The one who goes to the singles bar night after night, never succeeding in going home with anyone they desire - those who are virgins at 30, and the sort of psychological damage that does to someone
Having worked as a clinical psychologist for some 12 years (years ago), I would dispute these are important causes of "psychological damage." Even among those who think that was how they were damaged. The real damage was done long before.
Reaction to title: I expected this article to be about "Why are our videogames set in hell?", i.e., why do we deliberately play in fictional hells?
So far as the actual observation goes, I agree with the commenters who note that play hells are sometimes (though not always, maybe even not often) mitigated by being able to walk away, relative to work hells. I also agree with the commenters who think that because something is technically voluntary - where having to work is something that most people know better than to think is voluntary, but having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.
With all that said, so far as my own commitment to heroism goes, I find this kind of silent suffering both horrifying and motivating-to-action; "The vast majority of people are quietly unhappy" is something that I do, and would have before reading this, listed as one of my top battle cries. The one who goes to the singles bar night after night, never succeeding in going home with anyone they desire - those who are virgins at 30, and the sort of psychological damage that does to someone - those who have rumors spread about them, so that all their social interactions are made of dolors and not hedons - for their sake, and for their sake alone, would be sufficient reason to tear apart and remake this world. Maybe it wouldn't really, actually be consequentialistically proper to tear down a world that had only one personal hell, but a realistic number is probably more like 30% to 90% of the population. My bounds are wide because I have little personal experience of most experiential clusters of Earth, and economists do not yet measure or report such things. But anything over 10% seems like clearly sufficient cause to reject a world.
"Foragers have many rules about fights, hunts, and sharing the product of work, but far fewer rules on romance and friends."
This seems a bit overstated. Rules on courtship were often highly elaborate. Kinship relations were often extremely detailed compared to now. Some groups of clans had marriage patterns that defined who could marry whom. Initiation into adulthood was a bigger division then, and the transition into adulthood was a big set of rules around a lot of things, especially including courtships and appropriate relations to the rest of the community. And as status went up, the rules about both courtship and friendship got more elaborate.
But play is not the opposite of work. A relationship for example is neither play nor work but both. Perhaps at any given time it is more one than the other, and at other times it may be impossible to say if one is working or playing. Likewise there are moments of play at work, and there is nothing to say these moments cannot qualify as work just as much as moments of drudgery. The work/play dichotomy is one of several that are not helping you to analyse human lives as they are actually experienced.
I'd just like to point out that much (sometimes most) of people's "free" time consists of work.
When people get home from their "formal" work, they usually need to cook for themselves or their family, do laundry, pay bills, clean, take care of their children, shop for groceries, etc. This is household work, not play.
The time people spend travelling to and from work is equivalent to work, since it's necessary in order to make a living. This can easily consume 30 minutes to 3 hours per day, or 2,5 to 15 hours per week, depending on your circumstances.
If we subtract the time needed for sleep, formal work, travel to and from formal work, and household work, from the number of hours in a week, there's not that much left.
The main reason to be wary of tearing apart the world to remake it is uncertainty about if we could really do better.
Oh, that's what he's proposing? I had thought the heroic corrective consisted of teaching social skills to nerds. Isn't that the actual program being pursued?
At least that's superior authority to Yudkovsky's grandparent comment, which (one assumes) relies only upon his own experiences (and his fantasies concerning their role).
Or superior to yours, which is to issue the standard "rationalist" type caveat--that tells no one anything they didn't already know.
Aah, a clinical psychologist. I'll have to take your word on it then LOL
What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to *maximize* a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, *must* drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus but which is a central and concrete concern for both the maker and the user of the thing itself."
A modern paraphrase of the thesis in Karl Marx's early writings, "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts." AT least an important aspect of Marx's thesis.
Reading _Shop Class as Soul Craft_, Matthew Crawford 2009, I ran into a relevant bit on pg136-137:
"My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty-eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflects the contents of that article. So the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation.
...It will be objected: Wasn’t there any quality control? My manager would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was once or twice corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.
It will further be objected that if the abstracts produced by Information Access Company were no good, then “the market” would punish it; the company should have been beaten out by one with a higher regard for quality. The company has been bought and sold several times since I worked there, but appears to still be in business. Maybe things are better there now, and quality has improved. I honestly don’t know. In any case, the time scale on which the market administers its omniscient justice may be quite a bit longer than crucial episodes in the working life of a mortal human being. Being an early entrant into the market for electronically distributed abstracts, IAC enjoyed a temporary quasi-monopoly. I suppose it was fairly free to set standards as it pleased, and may have calibrated the production quota, and corresponding quality, to some threshold of “good enough,” beneath which the user walks away in disgust.8 Recurring purchases, after all, may continue even when the alignment of interests between producer and consumer is only partial, or even accompanied by a felt antagonism. Frequently we come to hate things that we nonetheless continue to depend on (like Windows). Further, a product made under conditions of harried intellectual carelessness, such as InfoTrac circa 1992, may generate its own demand by corrupting our standards in the same direction, and our initial harsh judgment of it will come to seem reactionary. The very existence of the product makes the lower standards suddenly seem respectable or inevitable.
In writing abstracts of academic journal articles, I thought I would learn a lot. Quite apart from the pay, the job seemed to promise an intrinsic good to me as a worker: satisfying my desire to know. This satisfaction is in perfect harmony with the good of the user of InfoTrac, who also desires to know, and the good of the author of an article, who wants to be understood. The standard internal to the job, properly conceived, was the very one that presumably animated both parties I served: intellectual excellence. But this good was nowhere accommodated by the metric to which I answered, which was purely quantitative. The metric was conceived by another party to the labor process, a middleman hovering about with a purpose of his own that had no inherent tie to the one shared by the principals. This purpose, of course, was that of realizing a profit from my labor.
As I have said elsewhere in this book, work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest. That’s why you get paid. But, again, if I had been serving the user of the database directly, his interest in high-quality abstracts would have aligned with my own interest in experiencing the pleasures of comprehension. It may or may not be the case that selling my labor directly to the user would have given him a high-quality product at an attractive price and have provided me a comfortable livelihood; one would have to calculate whether such a transaction makes sense or not. And let it not be forgotten that my work would need to be marketed and distributed, as IAC did, and its technical bugs worked out, and this would contribute to the cost. Let it further be conceded that I never would have undertaken to launch such a product as InfoTrac on my own, and that the entrepreneurs who did so took risks. I have no beef with them. They made something, then sold it to others (the media conglomerate Ziff) who seem to be in the business of owning things. What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to *maximize* a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, *must* drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus but which is a central and concrete concern for both the maker and the user of the thing itself."
Even if you must work, you needn't work for any particular employer. Even if you must date, you needn't date any particular person.
The main reason to be wary of tearing apart the world to remake it is uncertainty about if we could really do better. If we are really sure a post-tear world will have a lot less personal hells, and if we can reasonably bound the cost of tearing and remaking, then sure we should go for it.
I have serious questions about how y’all are framing the concept of play. To me Play Hell is an oxymoron. If it’s hell, it ain’t play. If you are referring to what happens when you can’t actually arrive at the play state, well one could either consider that work or part of the game typically known as strategizing.
So in the first case, this Play Hell is actually related to the work required to arrive at play, which of course is what WORK itself is... Why else work other than to be ABLE to play??
Beyond the obvious rituals, contests, and role playing... Isn’t Play a state of mind? And isn’t play by necessity something we enjoy? So how can there be a Play Hell? No child would understand the concept except perhaps as the frustration of being sidelined in a game. But then at that given moment, they are not playing, merely hoping to play! And anyhow, that is the price you pay to play, and if you can’t accept that, you’re in the wrong game. Same goes for dating I would guess. Look, and here’s the second case, there’s a whole strategy component to contests, and dating is a contest, right? And if you don’t dig the strategizing part of the process, then again, get out of the game. You can always find someone to take you to bed, after all. You can always find someone to marry you if you get so exasperated.
Of course then there is the issue of losing. Perhaps that is the actual Play Hell... but then if you're not enjoying the game itself, and all you care about is the endgame, then you're a loser from the start:)
Work is voluntary only to the extent that *eating* is voluntary. (And I can easily point to examples of people who have proven that eating is voluntary - hunger strikers and anorexics.) And, by that standard, even the labor performed by slaves is voluntary; they still have the option to endure whatever punishment their owner will inflict upon them for refusing to work.
I also agree with the commenters who think that because something is technically voluntary - where having to work is something that most people know better than to think is voluntary, but having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.If neither work or play are particularly voluntary, then there is no basis for moral judgement in either case, let alone comparatively.
Moral statements, judgements and behavior must presuppose voluntary action, just as the law (with rare exceptions) must presuppose that actions with legal implications are voluntary.
Once behavior is deemed to be deterministic, or mostly deterministic, then all moral bets are off. For some commenters here, i would replace the phrase 'moral bets' with 'moral posing'.
Since we devote far more time to play than work, I’d guess that most of the actual hells around us are play hells.
I'd be very interested to know what "formal work" means in this context - how it's been distinguished from the time that's spent at work - but even if one assumes it's true, once you've subtracted time for sleep, commuting, cooking, washing, shopping, preparing for bed or coming round after awakening, laundry, housekeeping and, if you're a parent, doing chores on behalf of your kids the time spent on "play" is massively reduced.
Still - it's an intriguing concept. A feature of "play hell" that separates it from "work hell" is that most people actively dislike labouring. The full horrors of "play hell" only tend to be obvious in retrospect, when you're getting older and realise all of the things you could have done instead of watching episodes of Friends...
Or, indeed, writing comments on the Internet.
having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.
For most young people, "working at dating" is thoroughly enjoyable. The hunt is as much the purpose as the booty. I recall thoroughly enjoying myself while being unsuccessful at singles bars.
The one who goes to the singles bar night after night, never succeeding in going home with anyone they desire - those who are virgins at 30, and the sort of psychological damage that does to someone
Having worked as a clinical psychologist for some 12 years (years ago), I would dispute these are important causes of "psychological damage." Even among those who think that was how they were damaged. The real damage was done long before.
Reaction to title: I expected this article to be about "Why are our videogames set in hell?", i.e., why do we deliberately play in fictional hells?
So far as the actual observation goes, I agree with the commenters who note that play hells are sometimes (though not always, maybe even not often) mitigated by being able to walk away, relative to work hells. I also agree with the commenters who think that because something is technically voluntary - where having to work is something that most people know better than to think is voluntary, but having to work at dating is processed as voluntary, for some reason - is what accounts for the moral difference. You could then ask what's the difference between work and unsuccessful dating when your brain drives you to keep trying both - I think that would be the key next question accounting for the difference.
With all that said, so far as my own commitment to heroism goes, I find this kind of silent suffering both horrifying and motivating-to-action; "The vast majority of people are quietly unhappy" is something that I do, and would have before reading this, listed as one of my top battle cries. The one who goes to the singles bar night after night, never succeeding in going home with anyone they desire - those who are virgins at 30, and the sort of psychological damage that does to someone - those who have rumors spread about them, so that all their social interactions are made of dolors and not hedons - for their sake, and for their sake alone, would be sufficient reason to tear apart and remake this world. Maybe it wouldn't really, actually be consequentialistically proper to tear down a world that had only one personal hell, but a realistic number is probably more like 30% to 90% of the population. My bounds are wide because I have little personal experience of most experiential clusters of Earth, and economists do not yet measure or report such things. But anything over 10% seems like clearly sufficient cause to reject a world.
"Foragers have many rules about fights, hunts, and sharing the product of work, but far fewer rules on romance and friends."
This seems a bit overstated. Rules on courtship were often highly elaborate. Kinship relations were often extremely detailed compared to now. Some groups of clans had marriage patterns that defined who could marry whom. Initiation into adulthood was a bigger division then, and the transition into adulthood was a big set of rules around a lot of things, especially including courtships and appropriate relations to the rest of the community. And as status went up, the rules about both courtship and friendship got more elaborate.
Max
But play is not the opposite of work. A relationship for example is neither play nor work but both. Perhaps at any given time it is more one than the other, and at other times it may be impossible to say if one is working or playing. Likewise there are moments of play at work, and there is nothing to say these moments cannot qualify as work just as much as moments of drudgery. The work/play dichotomy is one of several that are not helping you to analyse human lives as they are actually experienced.