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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer

If the official government (PCE) inflation figures are correct, my daughter should be indifferent between earning $100,000 today and $12,500 back in 1959. But I don’t even know whether she’d prefer $100,000 today or $100,000 in 1959! She might ask me for some additional information, to make a more informed choice. “So Dad, how much did it cost back in 1959 to have DoorDash deliver a poke bowl to my apartment?” Who’s going to tell her there were no iPhones to order food on, no DoorDash to deliver the food, and no poke bowls even if a restaurant were willing to deliver food.

Your $100,000 salary back then would have meant you were rich, which means you could have called a restaurant with your rotary phone to see if it was open, and then gotten in your “luxury” Cadillac with its plastic seats (a car which in Wisconsin would rust out in 4 or 5 years from road salt) and drive to a “supper club” where you could order bland steak, potatoes and veggies. Or you could stay home and watch I Love Lucy on your little B&W TV set with a fuzzy picture. So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?

I think this is a good counterpart to the AGI questions below. There is a massive conceptual gap in defining welfare across vastly different levels of technological mastery.

It also highlights that some of the analysis misses the largest factor here -- that AGI (if it happens, sadly not if it doesn't pan out) will greatly increase the quality and personalization of a large set of goods & services. If that does happen, it will dwarf the distributional aspects.

I think the question seems ignorant of what actually produces quality of life, happiness, meaning in life and so on. It's not the temporary pleasures of tasty junk food, quickly delivered, that actually makes you value being alive. Sure, you can keep pushing that button like a Skinner rat, but if you have any sort of human level consciousness you'll also sense the emptiness and fleeting nature of that life. What use is sense pleasure if you don't have meaningful social connections, wisdom, skillful living? It has some use, or else people wouldn't bother, but it's not the food that brings you from a 5/10 life satisfaction self-report to something higher.

Human beings start seriously malfunctioning if all their wants are satisfied immediately and with little effort. There are many things we need that we have no evolved drive to seek out, because those things simply were inevitable consequences of living in a world of danger and scarcity. We evolved drives to get the things that were scarce in the ancestral environment, not the things that just happened anyway. Modernity is more or less blind to those things we need but don't want, and so those things are sacrificed and destroyed to get more and more of what we want. This is not healthy. It's resulting in perhaps the most significant die off of bloodlines since the great plagues. Future humans will not be like past humans by the time it shakes out. The only way out is through.

What are some of these things we need but don't feel a want for?

A) Taking a piss

Unless it’s on someone I don’t like. Then I want to.

B) Paying bills

Self-explanatory.

C) Doing homework.

Self-explanatory.

D) Going to work

Self-explanatory.

Infant mortality.

Challenging situations that force us to learn, adapt, and act on the world, with real consequences.

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