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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   36274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I don’t see a new deal working. The elephant in the room is AI which can easily replace the bulk of the workforce in most industries. We simply don’t need the people anymore and unless we can grow ourselves into needing the tens of thousands of new college graduates on top of the displaced workers also looking for the same jobs. I would expect the demand for white collar workers to decline by half within a generation. We’re going to be shedding those jobs at the same time we’re training people to be essentially useless because we’re training them for a job that won’t exist.

What we really need is a worker sink. One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else. Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony. There would be need for construction as well, as you’d be building the New New World. This would be something like what happened in Europe. The extra people went to America, Australia, or some colonial conquest elsewhere thus giving the elites fairly secure positions.

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

If anything, space colonization is a sphere extremely amendable to automatization. Extreme temperatures, pressures, lack of gravity — robots will perform any work in those conditions better than any man in a space suit. Then all the food, amenities for colonists — they weight a lot, and take a lot of space. No, I think if mass scale space exploration will happen — it will be through Von Neumann probes.

What we really need is a worker sink.

What we have now suffices. More prolonged and more useless "education" and "training", more sinecures and bullshit jobs, more generous disability, more early retirement, in extremis even universal basic income. No need for upturning whole society.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

When this was the case, priests and monastics were tiny part of population, recruited from elite classes, not from losers and rejects.

Classic article

The Clerical Population of Medieval England

If the total population was about 2,200,000 in 1377, the combined numbers of the

religious (10,600) and seculars (24,900) should have been about 35,500 or 1.6 per

cent of the total population. Omitting the nuns, the total is about 33,500 men

or about three per cent of the male population.

...

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

This will provide jobs for few highly skilled and well paid professionals, equivalents of today deep sea divers and offshore oil platform workers.

You do not want on space station someone who was fired from minimum wage McDonald job because robot can flip burgers cheaper and better.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else.

This more or less describes the conditions among traditionalist Catholics today, and they have not really ironed out the kinks. Particularly already-difficult courting norms find it difficult to cope with the gender imbalance from girls being more status conscious, and the norms surrounding entrance to a monastery or seminary result in a large fraction of the most talented young men doing... more or less nothing because they're trying to decide whether to go to a monastery as a full time job(that is, deciding as a full time job. Obviously being a monk is a full time commitment.).

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

That worked well for grain-farming civilizations; I don't know if there was a celibate class of priests/shamans/full-time religious people in pastoral societies. Space colonization could work, but conditions up there are a good deal more hostile than Antarctica and as such it's going to be expensive as all hell. Not like you can load a boat with a bunch of convicts and send it over to Australia or something.

Being expensive and difficult might be a good thing. It would thus require more minds working to make it successful and efficient.

I s'pose you could have a bunch of high-status maybe-celibate people working on the space program as support staff for the space colonists? But that too is expensive as hell. Monasteries used to be at least theoretically self-supporting; the monks brewed beer or made cheese or whatever. Can that space mining program pay for itself by bringing back a bunch of gold or something?

Yes.

There's incredible mineral wealth floating around up there. A bit hard to get it down though.

Yeah, the space mining has to turn a profit. And not become a victim of its own success by crashing the price of gold or whatever it is they're mining.

I'd argue that we already have a large priesthood in government (15% of all jobs in the U.S.) and non-profits (10% of all jobs – nearly all of which have been created since 1970).

I have no doubt these categories of work will continue to mushroom.

But I'm not sure a larger priesthood will solve the problem. For one, look how many people have bullshit jobs who still have sucky lives. They are overwhelmed with pointless meetings and have a great deal of stress about their "job" which if it ceased to exist no one would even notice. And of course, no matter how many bullshit jobs are created, there will still only be a finite amount of status to go around.

When it comes to space, I'm not sure that gets us where we need to go either. When space exploration does happen, it will be the machines to do it. Sending bags of meat into space is incredibly difficult and expensive, so it's not likely to solve our problem of having too many bags of meat.

Status is zero sum. But is it really? I agree that you can't make say, 10 more "POTUS" positions. Being the leader of a global superpower isn't something you can print, and neither are many other relative positions.

But you can split large ponds into small ponds. You can get people to be happy with being treated as high status by their peers instead of needing to be treated as high status by their underlings. There will always be that guy who has a million followers when someone else has only a hundred, but there's no reason the guy with only a hundred has to actually feel less self worth. It seems largely psychological to me.

I do agree that- more bullshit jobs alone wouldn't be the solution here. Since I'm describing a more cultural and perceptive shift.

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