This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don’t see why mathematicians would be so upset. 99% of professional mathematicians have never contributed to the field of mathematics in any real way.
There are two arguments about AI and employment.
The first and primary one is about mass unemployment. This is a real issue but people obsessed by it also need to understand, as I think @self_made_human increasingly does, that basically all of the surge in white collar labor since 1970 consists of fake make-work very thinly disguised by the laws of classical economics. The invention of the computer literally automated almost all white collar labor as it existed in, say, 1920, and yet instead of an unemployment crisis we just gave ourselves fake titles and decided to spend all day having meetings and making PowerPoint slides. The format in engineering and medicine was very slightly different but vast amounts of both professions, their demand and their provision were and are make-work too. I go to the doctors office and a GP diagnoses the way AI can in 20 seconds or a competent and cheap nobody who could use a search engine could do in 5 minutes even 25 years ago. If society survives the AI X-risk, we will emerge into a world of such unfathomable abundance that it will be trivial to provide every human, certainly in the rich world but eventually the whole world, with a comfortable material life. Dying from an AI engineered virus or a drone war or something is far more likely than starving because AI replaced all jobs and the owners of capital are too tightfisted to share.
The second and more interesting one is about meaning. The mathematician, even though he never meaningfully contributes to the field, imagines that he might. This is why AI makes him depressed. It’s the lack of hope that kills you, but is it? I mean, is it really? Meaning is invented, we’ve spent thousands of years inventing rather arbitrary forms of meaning. We can invent more. We can have kids. We can touch grass. We can compete against each other, if we want to, in games and competitions. Academia is already one such game. If mathematicians still want to play it, all they have to do is change the rules.
I guess I’m more sanguine on this than most. I increasingly converge on one observation, which is that it’s extinction or utopia. Other scenarios (weird AI hell) are plausible but increasingly unlikely. Compute always wins, the bitter lesson is always true, so the only question is whether it destroys us entirely (or someone uses it to) - accidentally or deliberately are really irrelevant - or whether it liberates us from material want entirely.
Eh? I'm skeptical of the majority of white collar labor being "bullshit jobs", for reasonably standard arguments. Especially before 2023.
Which laws of classical economics?
If anything, the classical tradition predicts the opposite: firms carrying dead weight get undercut by firms that don't.
Computers didn't automate jobs so much as they automated tasks, and the freed-up labor went into tasks that had previously been too expensive to bother with.
IMO, a lot of nominally "bullshit" jobs aren't. Plenty of HR and compliance roles are a rational response to entirely real regulatory and legal burdens. If firing your DEI manager means you're exposed to more expected liability in litigation than you spend on their salary, you pay them. You may think the regulation itself is dumb, and you may well be right, but then your complaint is with the legislature.
The firm is responding correctly to the incentives in front of it! A fire extinguisher that never gets used hasn't failed at its job!
I am not going to posit a precise fraction, but I will die on the hill that before LLMs, truly net-negative employees were not the majority. "Less productive than they could be" is a long way from "fake." Imagining some alternative universe where companies and economies run ruthlessly rational as the baseline, and then measuring reality against it, is bonkers.
Please note that I am not the kind of doctor who puts the profession on a pedestal. I've been loudly predicting medicine's eventual obsolescence for years (and saying it's late in the queue, after all the other poor bastards), and I think the Nolla Health acne approval is the canary in the coal mine. But this claim is remarkably incorrect.
Any donkey with WebMD could diagnose the common cold. Similarly simple issues might account for >80% of the problems attended to by all doctors. It's the other 20% where the additional expertise and clinical experience draws a premium. The numbers are approximate, of course, but the distribution has a long and expensive tail, and that tail is where people die.
We don't even have to speculate about the "competent nobody with a search engine." Someone measured it, and not 25 years ago either. A 2015 BMJ audit ran standardized patient vignettes through 23 online symptom checkers, which is about as good as "algorithm plus internet" got in the pre-LLM era. They listed the correct diagnosis first in 34% of cases, and gave appropriate triage advice in 57%. The follow-up in JAMA Internal Medicine pitted physicians against the same vignettes, and physicians listed the correct diagnosis first 72.1% of the time versus 34% for the checkers. bmj healio
Breaking it down further: physicians did better on high-acuity and uncommon cases, while the symptom checkers did better on low-acuity, common ones (when compared to how they did on the difficult ones, the doctors beat them in all scenarios). That's the 80/20 split, showing up in the data. And those vignettes included medical history but no physical exam, lab results or blood tests, which strips out a good chunk of what a clinician actually brings, so if anything the gap is understated.
Also:
A 2021 JAMA Network Open study asked 5,000 US adults to assess clinical vignettes before and after internet searching. Diagnostic accuracy improved from 49.8% to 54.0%, with an average search time of 12.1 minutes. Triage accuracy did not improve significantly.
I gain real value as a doctor by referring a patient to another doctor of a different specialty.
Because they know something I don't.
If medicine were mostly lookup, referrals would be mostly theatre. They aren't. Specialists rely on knowledge built from thousands of patients, and before 2023 or so, nothing you could type into Google came close to replicating it.
This is still not entirely wrong today, because AI suffers from a lack of embodiment. A model can't palpate an abdomen, notice that the patient who says he's fine is grey and clammy, or smell the ketones. What has changed is that you can now absolutely use ChatGPT to let less-trained medical staff sub in for doctors, with the nurse or PA acting as hands and eyes and the model supplying much of the knowledge. I expect that to eat a large share of what I do. But that is a 2024-onwards development, and it's the reverse of your claim: the reason LLMs threaten doctors is that they finally replicate expertise that search engines never could.
(You can find me on record saying all of this years ago. It represents a catastrophic risk to me even without 100% unemployment. 90% of us ending up unemployed is about 90% as bad. Even paycuts would hurt too.)
More options
Context Copy link
While AI continuing to be exceptional at mathematics doesn't particularly make me think that it's more likely that most/all labour is imminently automatable, I do agree with your point that if this is truly the case, there's really no point in trying to get rich to avoid dying on the streets when the 0.01% decide to mass unemploy the entire population or whatever. Coordination issues amongst the powers that be aside, it is obviously just not a stable equilibrium for the middle class to be unemployed and starving, while some dude who happened to own the right stocks at the right time is allowed to enjoy a nice lifestyle in perpetuity.
Either most everyone manages to secure material abundance via some combination of make-work and redistribution, which honestly already describes significant swathes of modern economies as you say, and having been rich perhaps confers some marginal status advantages and nothing more, or Something Happens that having a bunch of cash doesn't meaningfully insulate you from: e.g communist overthrow of the state (for real this time), violent state repression and expropriation of most the population, or AI loss of control where everyone dies.
I don't think I'm really all that sanguine re: the question of meaning though. The middle-class in developed countries are already mostly post-scarcity relative to a pre-industrial and a pre-computing basis in nearly all ways (the big exceptions would probably be in zero-sum usage of land and the decay of the body). Yet despite this, most people in the middle class are various flavors of miserable, generally aren't able to generate their own meaning ex nihilo, and mostly drive themselves mad via status comparison and/or the culture war.
If you thought hyper-partisan politics and status competition was bad in 2026, just wait until it's impossible to better your position via actual economic contribution, and the only way to access more resources, status and positional goods is to take it via the political process out of the arms of another. Even if the "utopian" world pans out, I frankly can't see this leading to anything but mass misery even if material needs are met in abundance.
Yeah, this whole "permanent underclass" thing is a load of baloney. You aren't being saved from the permanent underclass if your net worth today is $10m or even $25m vs $1m or $10k. If that very specific scenario plays out, having a moderate amount of assets doesn't insulate you, instead it makes you juicy food worth concentrating on for the real big multi billion dollar players.
I'm decently well off and I've come to the (very sensible, I think) conclusion that in the unlikely event of rich oligarch AI dystopia, my lot lies with the ordinary man rather than the centimillionaire+ class.
Yeah, rich people also aren’t coordinated, most don’t have bunkers, they’re highly divided by ideology, and most have some loyalty to some non-super-rich groups (for reasons of tribe, faith, nation, ethnicity, political belief and so on). This plus the speed of the true singularity will make the requisite coordination almost impossible.
The ‘permanent underclass’ thing is a legacy of Great Recession (‘Humans Need Not Apply’; Elysium) or even dotcom bust era (as in the case of Marshall Brain’s Manna which I think was 2002) AI fiction where self driving cars and self checkouts and robotic nurses and cashier screens at McDonalds automate low paying service jobs while the rich and upper middle class prosper, without overall productivity seemingly increasing much, which means the poor basically live off worse-than-section-8 level welfare forever. This was nonsensical even if one agreed with those predictions (automating a lot of these low level service jobs would be a huge productivity uplift that would make things like welfare much cheaper to provide and afford those on it a much higher quality of life), but of course it turned out that actually white collar work was the easiest thing to automate (before truckers in many cases, even!).
It also features impossibly misaligned incentives, since the ‘bottom of the rich’ would know they were next in line for the permanent underclass at any time, something that eventually cascades until there’s what, only one man left out of the permanent underclass? That doesn’t really make sense.
I don’t think democracy or what now passes for it can really survive AI, and I question whether that’s a particularly bad thing anyway, but I expect that any non-extinction scenario eventually plays out as abundance almost impossible for us to imagine today (like a wild animal subject to constant hunger, thirst, sickness, fear, predation, injury, etc ‘imagining’ life in a nice Northern European zoo), such that twenty first century distinctions become irrelevant. I also think AI plays the role of the zookeeper in this scenario, and so the idea that it lets Elon Musk control star systems just because he happened to be very rich and powerful in the years before it took control seems about as likely as the zookeepers letting the big elephant eat all the others’ food just because it happens sometimes in the wild.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn't we expect competition to have optimized this away? This is at the heart of the worldview disagreement between "capitalism is just the invisible hand in action" versus "capitalism is a conspiracy by the powerful to remain in power."
the argument is that markets are more efficient at resource allocation than central planning, not that they’re very efficient.
When Musk bought Twitter and now operates it with 20% of the staff it had, or when Google increases headcount by 1000% in a decade despite operating primarily the same product, this isn’t maximum efficiency. Managers establish fiefdoms. Individual employees care more about themselves than maximizing shareholder returns. Incentives are not fully aligned.
Twitter and Google both had relatively low labor-to-capital ratios to begin with. So, if true, they were increasing headcount by x% from a low base, meaning it might not have been very consequential for their bottom lines. The examples could be cherrypicked anyways, and do not necessarily have bearing on overall patterns. Overall, we've seen the economy restructure itself from a primarily agrarian one, towards a manufacturing one, towards a retail and service based one across the past century or so, and all of that indicates a responsiveness to actual economic demand.
In fact, we've not only seen a shift in employment patterns towards human-necessary roles, but we've also see a rise in economic dominance by companies with relatively small labor footprints. Tech companies, in general, as mentioned, do not employ many people in relation to how much money they rake in, and they've been dominating economic growth and market indices for the past few decades. If they were insensitive to the costs of employing unnecessary labor, and if this was the basis by which the entire economy was organized, we might see them gradually becoming as labor-heavy as other, previous market leaders.
But we don't see that. We see them maintaining unprecedentedly lean workforces. That's consummate with a representation of the economy where humans in data-organizing roles are increasingly automated away. These humans don't disappear, but fill in gaps elsewhere, such as in retail and healthcare, providing tangible physical services. Pet grooming has seen a boom in employment.
Some of them do apparently move into roles which are of dubious practical value, but which have been necessitated in large part because of regulation and bureaucracy, such as consultants. However, these regulation regimes have led to decreases in pollution and other harmful things, so the consultants and such can be said to be necessary components of these overall systems' functioning and thus their benefits. Furthermore, they do plausibly provide value in the expertise they are able to provide as well.
Overall, I do not see a basis for thinking the economy is unresponsive to actual supply and demand inputs when it comes to labor organization. The level of its efficiency may be up for debate, but it does appear to shift over time in relation to observable developments.
More options
Context Copy link
Also even maximizing shareholder returns =/= maximizing productivity in every case. A company can make a very share-price friendly move to invest in something unlikely to succeed that is the current recipient of market hype, even if it's unlikely to actually work out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We shouldn't have mocked the people from the "What's your job on the leftist commune?" Twitter thread. Seems like they might've been right after all. If we survive as a civilization and do not get made redundant via a BNW-like transition to a tiny humanity.
There's no "we" when you and all your children didn't make it through the cull.
I'm sorry, I don't get it.
Wrong reply, my mistake.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think mass automation AI future proves communists correct. Not only because the timely invention of AI required capitalism (yes we don’t have the counterfactual, but I’d say it seems likely) but even more importantly because the only way any kind of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ economy can work is if unlimited ‘ability’ is provided by AI and unlimited ‘need’ can be absorbed by it.
Well, communists did often say that capitalism would bring about its own destruction. Communists also often said that far from capitalism being useless, it is in fact the necessary precursor for communism.
It's hard to give them full props for these ideas given that originally these ideas did not envision something like AI being the mechanism.
However, communists did think that increases in production would play a major role in the transition, and they were aware that technology is key in increases in production.
Marx: "This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced;".
Engels: "Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception".
Right, they envisioned it being because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - ie capitalism being so maximally efficient that it turns in on itself - which is actually untrue (capitalism is more efficient than the alternatives but not maximally so; rates of profit ie margins are actually quite high in historical terms right now).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not saying it proves communists correct. I'm saying the jobs the kumbaya-adjacent leftists envisioned themselves having might be the only source of meaning left in a post-singularity utopia.
I don't think that any kind of work is necessary for meaning. There are other sources of meaning, such as curiosity, philosophical exploration, and social connection.
The supposed connection between work and meaning is, I think, largely just humanity making the best (meaning) of a bad thing (work).
People of the ruling class in societies like Classical Athens would have been shocked by the idea that productive work is necessary for meaning. They thought of work as something for defeated people, slaves, inferiors. Yet they did not lack a sense of meaning in life. But AI is coming for some of their sources of meaning, too, such as the feeling of being on top compared to other Earthly beings.
There is meaning in a sense of pride and accomplishment, but as that infamous post suggests, that can be fully simulated.
More options
Context Copy link
'Work has meaning' is a coverup for simian greed. People who say they get meaning from their work really mean they enjoy the power it affords them as measured in wealth and status, and that it would sadden them to see their dreams torn to bits owing to a turning of Fortuna's wheel. That is at the heart of what I see in all these salarymen, men who boast about their portfolios and talk in big, drunken voices about their vaunted careers. The reddit normies. Underlying all their grown-up chatter is nothing more than the humblebragging of narcissists who thought they were winning the darwinian game.
If you have a device which allows you to read the minds of other men, by all means, share it with us so we can all use such a useful tool. But for my part at least, you are wrong. I derive meaning from my work because of the satisfaction of a job well done and making the world around me a tiny bit better, not because I'm a narcissist who secretly glories in being better than others.
More options
Context Copy link
What do you draw meaning from that cannot be sneeringly explained away in unflattering terms?
Nothing. I've evaluated my own goals, values, and notions of what I'd like to accomplish and realized they all came down to either direct egotistical buttressing or else buttressing for secondary layers. @SubstantialFrivolity above notes he gains satisfaction from making the world around him a tiny bit better, but that reeks of a secondary layer of buttressing, while even his talk of jobs well done sounds like he's glorifying perfectionist urges latent in certain 'engineering-minded' individuals rather than, necessarily, true results.
True results would reveal that, for instance, slop-programmers earn more not only in commercial terms but also in terms of social praise in many cases than perfectionists, so that external signals would seem to validate their proclivities to a greater degree. Many of the world's most successful people operate on a haphazard basis. The proclaimed principle of doing a job well done would seem to be entirely removed from objective measurements, and so its validity can only be attested by its own proponent, whose benefits in promoting social acclaim for urges he inherently possesses cannot escape notice.
Unflattering terms cannot be avoided because the underlying human animal is unflatteringly conceived. A species born of darwinian struggle, embedded in social structures encouraging egotistical self delusions and self-promotion of their own worth and validity, all the while chasing means to further darwinian success. The instincts for biological selflessness and charity, in comparison, are very little.
In this case, we can write off the category of "coverup for simian greed" as useless, as all categories that include everything are, and proceed to categories that are useful for more than nihilistic grandstanding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I suspect that the main sources of meaning will continue to be things like religion and family / childrearing / marriage that code as trad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm less sanguine than you. The utopia AI will offer us does have advantages, the biggest being significantly healthier throughout a (neverending?) lifespan. And I, personally, am very excited for the knowledge and discoveries it will have about the universe.
But beyond that, the utopia won't fundamentally change that much. Even today, no one (at least in the USA) is starving for lack of food. The deprivations most people feel are positional and status-related: most people can get a house somewhere, but when people complain about not having access to housing, what they mean is they can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope.
Before AI, society could, at least in part, use merit and economic contribution as a way to allocate those inherently exclusionary goods; that's going away in the utopia. I'm lucky enough to have a almost two-decade-long career during a time where I could convert my intellectual capabilities into something that lets me acquire those resources, but that path won't exist for people like me. I don't have faith that whatever way society decides to allocate status resources will allocate them in a way I like (though I expect I personally am positioned in a place to have the level of exclusionary goods I want; it's more what I'm imagining for future generations).
That's following the optimistic utopia branch. The extinction branch is also quite likely (though I'd guess on the order of decades, not months or years) and much worse.
One reason that matters, though, is because opportunity clusters. If you can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope (wherever that is), that's a problem because you then can't access the high-paying job/networking/cultural opportunities in Park Slope. There is a plausible downward spiral of
couldn't quite afford Park Slope -> moved to the boonies -> could only find low-paying local jobs -> could never even think of moving to Park Slope -> can't even afford the boonies any more
which doesn't quite hold in a utopian society.
Park Slope is a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn. A brownstone in Park Slope is roughly a Victorian in Noe Valley.
In the utopia, how does someone not in Park Slope get their brownstone in Park Slope?
I think the idea is that while some people value a brownstone in Park Slope for its own sake, some value it because it puts them near the job opportunities of NYC and otherwise wouldn't want one.
If the job opportunities of NYC don't matter anymore, that second group no longer wants to be in Park Slope, so while there probably still won't be enough brownstones to go around, there may be less of a gap than there currently is.
We're also seeing some significant declines in fertility rates, and I think more so in the demographics that want to be in Park Slope. So if that trend continues in utopia (which seems reasonable, material abundance if anything seems to get people less interested in children if we look at the modern era), over time there will be fewer people looking for them and the gap might shrink further.
If we get infinite life extension that might be a different matter, but I expect eternal youth will also lead to "eh, I'll get around to making kids later" for some very long definitions of later, and the city-seeking crowd also seems to have a problem with depression that might lead to disinterest in infinite lifespans.
Thanks @wraelk!
@ThenElection, this is what I was trying to say, but much better put. Currently, the area you live in affects the trajectory of your life: moving to... Idaho? (forgive the Brit please) doesn't just mean you have shelter in a less prestigious place, it means that your income and future life opportunities are going to shrink.
That means that the number of people who want a brownstone in Park Slope is currently
whereas in utopia it's just
Idaho is actually very expensive, like many western rural states.
'Move to Ohio' is a reasonable answer to those who can't afford New York, though- the purchasing power will actually be higher, even given lower average salaries.
More options
Context Copy link
That works for what you're trying to say, Idaho is a super empty and rural place. 44th in population density.
This was something I was really hoping would happen with all the remote work from COVID, businesses would realize they could have employees from all over the states and people could move wherever made the most sense for them independent of their job, reducing a lot of the housing pressure in major cities and letting smaller towns build up more. Unfortunately, while there are still more remote jobs than there used to be, a lot of that dried up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link