Will abundance hurt motivation to create?

[Emlyn]

Hi all,

We keep seeing this assertion, that without incentive to create, our
society will stagnate as we all become hopeless lotus eaters, and no
one invents or creates or designs anything significant because they
can't get paid for it.

Now I think we all suspect that not only would this not be true in an
abundant society, it is not true now. In fact, it seems that all
people require to be creative is that they can easily interact with
like-minded others and that it doesn't cost them too much (never mind
being paid).

However, just saying it aint so doesn't really cut it. Does anyone
(Paul?) know of useful work in this area, ie: what it takes to
optimally foster innovation? Do someone need to put serious effort
into researching & writing something?

--
Emlyn

http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/4/09, Emlyn <emlyn...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We keep seeing this assertion, that without incentive to create, our
> society will stagnate as we all become hopeless lotus eaters, and no
> one invents or creates or designs anything significant because they
> can't get paid for it.
>
> Now I think we all suspect that not only would this not be true in an
> abundant society, it is not true now. In fact, it seems that all
> people require to be creative is that they can easily interact with
> like-minded others and that it doesn't cost them too much (never mind
> being paid).
>
> However, just saying it aint so doesn't really cut it. Does anyone
> (Paul?) know of useful work in this area, ie: what it takes to
> optimally foster innovation? Do someone need to put serious effort
> into researching & writing something?

Even assuming the business enterprise operating in the market as the
primary vehicle for innovation, rather than commons-based peer
production, patents are unnecessary. F. M. Scherer, in testimony
before the FTC in 1995, cited a survey of 91 companies in which only
seven "accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in
their R & D investments." Most of them described patents as "the least
important of considerations." Most companies considered their chief
motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining
competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to
expand and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no
negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing
of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would
have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles,
office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Competition. FTC, 29 November 1995.
www.ftc.gov/opp/global/gc120195.pdf

At the risk of oversimplifying, patents impede innovation by levying
tribute on the use of others' ideas. Absent patents, as Scherer
suggested, the natural incentive under market competition is to keep
innovating to stay competitive. Patents and copyrights, on the other
hand, skew business models toward living indefinitely off the rent
from one-hit wonders. Patents protect companies from having to
compete in building accessories and generic replacement parts for each
other's platforms, and thus act as a structural bulwark for planned
obsolescence and proprietary rents on accessories (e.g. cheap
glucometers with expensive testing strips, cheap printers with
expensive ink cartridges, cheap cell phones with expensive service
plans, etc.).

--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Emlyn wrote:
> We keep seeing this assertion, that without incentive to create, our
> society will stagnate as we all become hopeless lotus eaters, and no
> one invents or creates or designs anything significant because they
> can't get paid for it.
>
> Now I think we all suspect that not only would this not be true in an
> abundant society, it is not true now. In fact, it seems that all
> people require to be creative is that they can easily interact with
> like-minded others and that it doesn't cost them too much (never mind
> being paid).
>
> However, just saying it aint so doesn't really cut it. Does anyone
> (Paul?) know of useful work in this area, ie: what it takes to
> optimally foster innovation? Do someone need to put serious effort
> into researching & writing something?

That issue comes up too in Joseph Jackson's excellent presentation here:
(you need to download the 2/4/09 show, it is discussed about 3/4 way
through, where Joseph talks about the Fundamental Attribution error, as, in
that case, "We blog for free, but all those people out there are lazy." :-):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/blog/2009/02
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Alfie Kohn is a good source, because he has studied the literature:

"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator
Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" by
Alfie Kohn
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

"No Contest: The Case Against Competition "
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm

"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's,
Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

What I find interesting is that people's first objection to post-scarcity or
abundance or a basic income is always: "Nobody will work, and people will
all be bums, and society will collapse because no one will pick up the garbage."

But, the second objection is always the opposite: "If everyone has free
time, they'll make lots of free music, figure out ways to use robots to pick
up garbage for free, give free counseling and advice over the internet, and
thus put musicians, garbage collectors, and psychologists and doctors out of
work, and the economy will collapse." :-)

So, which is it? :-)

Try it. Next time someone talks about motivation, ask them how much current
businesses are under pressure from people doing stuff for free, or would be,
if everyone did not have to work. :-)

What I see happening, is that, as Bob Black suggests,
"The abolition of work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
based on the ideas of Charles Fourier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
that without economic wage-slaves to do the disagreeable tasks of the world,
we will either decide they don't need to be done, we will re-engineer them
to be fun (fun like blogging for some), or we will find some way to motivate
people to do them (status, a sense of ownership, whatever).

How many people like taking out the trash at home or cleaning their own
toilets? How many people like changing diapers on babies day after day? But
it gets done. So, some of this is also a perception of "ownership" or "duty"
or "love".

Debian GNU/Linux has *only* thousands of maintainers out of millions of
users, but that one out of a thousand is enough to make it all work.

So, another aspect is that, because technology is an amplifier, if a billion
people can use 3D printers to print out iPhones, you only need a few
motivated people to design them and everyone else benefits. In the end, we
really don't need that many good designs to supply basic human needs to
everyone. So, the few can, out of the joy of meaningful work, supply the many.

Naturally, once people have the free time, more people will design for fun.

This argument also often confuses two things: do people have the
*motivation* to be creative, or do they have the *time*, *tools*,
*resources*, *education*, and *community* to be creative? In a world where
everything was free or cheap, a lot of people would be able to be creative
when today they are just frustrated. Not everyone might want to be, say a
mechanical engineer designing free cars, as it does take some talent and
some interest, but lots and lots of people might want to, *if* they had the
time and resources to be generous.

Actually, the orange without the tree idea came up because the other day I
was talking with someone about these issues, and he objected that people
with orange plantations in Florida would just sell them because they weren't
profitable enough, especially if they could not get people to work for cheap
because everyone had a basic income and so no one wanted to pick oranges for
cheap. So, I said, well, let's really look at that problem. What would
really happen if, as a society, we could not get illegal immagrants to pick
oranges for cheap? Well, you'd either pay the people more, or you'd build
robots to do the picking, or you'd engineer the trees so they dropped their
oranges into troughs when they got ripe, or you'd figure out how to grow the
oranges without the trees. :-)

People say that one reason why the Greeks did not develop innovations like
the steam engine for pumping water, even though they had a version by Hero
of Alexandria, is that they had slaves. Well, we have "wage slaves" in the
USA (and China) which are much the same thing. And so, as a society, we have
not been that motivated :-) to re-engineer things so we don't need to do
them, or so that doing them is fun (even "hard fun" with a sense of "flow").
So, just think of all the new *motivation* we would have to redesign our
infrastructure more compassionately if no one would work for pay. :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Belva Plain <sockpu...@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: [wta-talk] Fwd: [Open Manufacturing] Re: Will abundance
hurt motivation to create?
To: wta-...@transhumanism.org




If you want to read about a vision of the future in which there was a
basic income guarantee and yet
people still worked--even doing hard tasks--just out of a sense of
sheer joy/creativity/desire to move
the muscles, read William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ (1890). It
tickles me to see future-thinkers
resurrecting the ideas of such nineteenth-century luminaries as Morris
and Charles Fourier.

Both Fourier and Edward Bellamy (_Looking Backward, 1888_) favored the
idea that if a task were so onerous
that no one could be found to do it, the time that an individual
worker had to spend doing it would be decreased
to as little as half an hour, with people rotating in and out of the
task, in order to get that task done. It's a short
step from there to getting robots to do it.

Tom D

>
> People say that one reason why the Greeks did not develop innovations like
> the steam engine for pumping water, even though they had a version by Hero
> of Alexandria, is that they had slaves. Well, we have "wage slaves" in the
> USA (and China) which are much the same thing. And so, as a society, we have
> not been that motivated :-) to re-engineer things so we don't need to do
> them, or so that doing them is fun (even "hard fun" with a sense of "flow").
> So, just think of all the new *motivation* we would have to redesign our
> infrastructure more compassionately if no one would work for pay. :-)
>
> --Paul Fernhout
> http://www.pdfernhout.net/
>
> >

> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
> _______________________________________________
> wta-talk mailing list
> wta-...@transhumanism.org
> http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk

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--
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Bryan Bishop wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Belva Plain <sockpu...@hotmail.com>
> Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:47 AM
> Subject: Re: [wta-talk] Fwd: [Open Manufacturing] Re: Will abundance
> hurt motivation to create?
> To: wta-...@transhumanism.org
>
> If you want to read about a vision of the future in which there was a
> basic income guarantee and yet
> people still worked--even doing hard tasks--just out of a sense of
> sheer joy/creativity/desire to move
> the muscles, read William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ (1890). It
> tickles me to see future-thinkers
> resurrecting the ideas of such nineteenth-century luminaries as Morris
> and Charles Fourier.
>
> Both Fourier and Edward Bellamy (_Looking Backward, 1888_) favored the
> idea that if a task were so onerous
> that no one could be found to do it, the time that an individual
> worker had to spend doing it would be decreased
> to as little as half an hour, with people rotating in and out of the
> task, in order to get that task done. It's a short
> step from there to getting robots to do it.
>
> Tom D

Link (which includes another link to the source):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere

I find other sci-fi, or scientific speculation of old days very interesting,
like "The Machine Stops" and "The World, The Flesh, and the Devil".

This page has some other recent sci-fi stories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity

This makes me wonder, unrelated, if we should as a group take to editing
some Wikipedia pages on related themes to open manufacturing?

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Marcos]

Its simple. Remember your childhood, or look at children playing.. I for one was much more creative, and I see this simply as the consequence of having all my needs supplied for me, so that it didnt even bogged down my mind and it was free to roam.. The human mind cant stop, you can occupy it with worries about needs, or with higher creativity. So my opinion is that its the exact opposite.

 

Cheers,

Mark.

2009/8/5 Paul D. Fernhout <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Marcos wrote:
> Its simple. Remember your childhood, or look at children playing.. I for one
> was much more creative, and I see this simply as the consequence of having
> all my needs supplied for me, so that it didnt even bogged down my mind and
> it was free to roam.. The human mind cant stop, you can occupy it with
> worries about needs, or with higher creativity. So my opinion is that its
> the exact opposite.

That's a brilliant example I've never heard anyone suggest before.

Thanks.

--Paul Fernhout

[Samantha Atkins]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Emlyn<emlyn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> We keep seeing this assertion, that without incentive to create, our
> society will stagnate as we all become hopeless lotus eaters, and no
> one invents or creates or designs anything significant because they
> can't get paid for it.

It is not an assertion, merely a question. It has no answer one way
or another at this time. Those who are brighter and fundamentally
interested in a lot of things will probably flourish with the freedom
to explore whatever they wish in depth. The majority of humanity is
not like that from what I see. Will the majority choose
transformation or simply party hardy or putter about doing not much of
anything for a very long time. I very much want to have the problem
of finding out but it is a curious question. The record of peoples
that have lived in natural paradises where very little was required to
survive easily is not encouraging.

>
> Now I think we all suspect that not only would this not be true in an
> abundant society, it is not true now. In fact, it seems that all
> people require to be creative is that they can easily interact with
> like-minded others and that it doesn't cost them too much (never mind
> being paid).

What creative smart people require to flower is not necessarily
conducive to the majority of the people being creative also or even
being particularly happy. Relatively few people are self-directed,
even very bright ones. A lot of us haven't had that much practice.
Whether people would develop this under conditions where they had very
few external incentives remains to be seen.

>
> However, just saying it aint so doesn't really cut it. Does anyone
> (Paul?) know of useful work in this area, ie: what it takes to
> optimally foster innovation? Do someone need to put serious effort
> into researching & writing something?

Now you are talking.

- samantha

[Emlyn]

2009/8/6 Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com>:

>
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Emlyn<emlyn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We keep seeing this assertion, that without incentive to create, our
>> society will stagnate as we all become hopeless lotus eaters, and no
>> one invents or creates or designs anything significant because they
>> can't get paid for it.
>
> It is not an assertion, merely a question.  It has no answer one way
> or another at this time.   Those who are brighter and fundamentally
> interested in a lot of things will probably flourish with the freedom
> to explore whatever they wish in depth.  The majority of humanity is
> not like that from what I see.   Will the majority choose
> transformation or simply party hardy or putter about doing not much of
> anything for a very long time.  I very much want to have the problem
> of finding out but it is a curious question.  The record of peoples
> that have lived in natural paradises where very little was required to
> survive easily is not encouraging.

I bet those people never lived in concentrated groups. Technological
change seems to be driven by density

High population density triggers cultural explosions
http://www.physorg.com/news163344562.html

Those people living in natural paradises would likely have been living
a pretty non-dense life. We, on the other hand, have 6+ billion people
and the internet (which I note because I suspect density is not the
cause, massive densely connected social graphs are the cause).

>>
>> Now I think we all suspect that not only would this not be true in an
>> abundant society, it is not true now. In fact, it seems that all
>> people require to be creative is that they can easily interact with
>> like-minded others and that it doesn't cost them too much (never mind
>> being paid).
>
>  What creative smart people require to flower is not necessarily
> conducive to the majority of the people being creative also or even
> being particularly happy.   Relatively few people are self-directed,
> even very bright ones.  A lot of us haven't had that much practice.
> Whether people would develop this under conditions where they had very
> few external incentives remains to be seen.

Say you are right about this. We live in a world where you need a
shrinking number of creative people to design enough for all, because
of the digital realm. Sans intellectual property regimes, do we really
need an endless stream of "knowledge workers"? Or just the best and
brightest?

I suspect you are wrong, however. There will still be a competitive
environment in an abundant future, and that will be the reputation
space. Even now it is very difficult to get ahead in what is becoming
a greatly faceted global meritocracy. I suspect, rather than too few
contributing, we might have the problem that people in general will
want to contribute but wont be able to usefully do so.

>
>>
>> However, just saying it aint so doesn't really cut it. Does anyone
>> (Paul?) know of useful work in this area, ie: what it takes to
>> optimally foster innovation? Do someone need to put serious effort
>> into researching & writing something?
>
> Now you are talking.
>
> - samantha
>

We are off to an awesome start in this thread. Let's keep it coming,
for and against.

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> What creative smart people require to flower is not necessarily
> conducive to the majority of the people being creative also or even
> being particularly happy. Relatively few people are self-directed,
> even very bright ones. A lot of us haven't had that much practice.
> Whether people would develop this under conditions where they had very
> few external incentives remains to be seen.

This is very insightful.

One missing piece of the puzzle is that children are intentionally dumbed
down through compulsory education not to be self-directed and not to have a
love of learning. Some few survive that anyway with those traits, but most
do not. If you look to the time before compulsory education as we currently
have it (so, the USA before 1850, or Europe even earlier) there is a lot of
self-directed activity. No one is more self-directed and loves learning than
a kid before they are sent to school -- learning to walk, learning to talk,
learning what happens when you pull on a dog's tail, and so on. It takes a
lot to stamp that love and freedom out of children.

From
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little
trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and
those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most
children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems
from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start
with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling
they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates — these
things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people
against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a
conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the
human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood,
self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get
launched.
"""

It literally costs *trillions* of US dollars a year to manufacture the
dumbness and inability-to-self-direct that appears to be inherent in
humanity these days in the industrialized Western world. Trillions. Go to a
country without much schooling if you want to see people learning and doing
stuff on their own (granted, many have little access to the internet or even
books, so they are *ignorant* but they are not dumb). It is true that the
school system produces some very *clever* *fact-stuffed* dumb people with
assignable curiosity and ideological discipline. (See the book, "Disciplined
Minds".) But clever fact-stuffed people are not the same as self-directed
people, or people who love learning, or people who have compassion.

If my mother had not bought me a Lego-like toy when I was a kid, and my
father had not bought me electronics when I was older, I shudder to think
what my future would have been, because that has been the basis of my
personal economic prosperity. Still, had both of them had more time to be
with me (both had to be working to pay the bills) I might have learned even
more from both of them. My father had traveled the oceans for years as a
Merchant Mariner and even been on the Great Wall of China; my mother had
survived the Jewish Holocaust happening all around her. But almost all that
learning was lost, and I spent my conscious time in public schools or on
homework, and much of the rest of the week was necessities (I might also
have learned more from neighbors and siblings and friends without school).
One ironic thing is, when I built computer-controlled robots at home in high
school, including for school-related science fairs to give school the most
credit, with my Dad's help on some of the mechanical stuff, the school took
the credit, with teachers getting their picture in the paper with me. It was
not my parents in that picture. With that said, the teachers did encourage
me outside of school in various ways: one teacher had a computer company I
worked at after school and on weekends, another ran the computer club after
school, another let me in before school to use the computers -- if their
pictures are deserved besides me and that robot it is because of what they
did besides school, not what they did in school (although, there were slight
aspects of that, as one teacher let me sit in a back room in the one
computer class I took and play with a computer unattended, although I think
now I actually could have learned more by helping the other students learn).
And I am thankful for them going that extra distance for me in various ways.
But, most kids don't get that, or are not in a position to take advantage of
it, and so don't have the chance to develop what talents they have in
whatever field they like, because school is in the way or turns them away
from learning. I was clever and talented in some ways, but I also got very
lucky -- including the fact that the military wanted those sorts of talents
after Sputnik and so there was funding for those resources. I did not have,
say, the problems faced by drama majors these days in a focus on "standards"
who might otherwise help people come up with ways to stop war (Lysistrata)
or transcend it altogether with humor at its ironies ("MASH"?). I was in an
after-school (but school-based) production of MASH (as Father Mulcahy) in
eight grade (never performed as a lead (Major Burns) dropped out after being
sick for a time) -- maybe I learned something from that experience? Again
though, it was an after school thing.

Is my situation "special"? John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the
Year of 1991, suggests it is actually quite typical. School was designed to
be *intentionally* wasteful of children's lives by things like trying to get
them to learn material they are not ready for, or already know, or are not
interested in -- *intentionally* wasteful. For example, why teach the
multiplication table to kids at age 12 when they can learn it in a few
presentations, when you can spend an entire *year* teaching it at age 8? By
wasting childrens' time, everyone looks busy, and you can blame the kid, and
you can so turn children away from numbers they will be easy to confuse on
economic issues for the rest of their lives. From a human perspective this
is a horror; from a hierarchical systems perspective, this is efficient.

So, one needs to look to the USA before 1850, or to countries without a
strong school system, to see self-directed people. To be clear, everyone
needs education including learning facts and having practice reasoning with
facts, so what you see in countries without any infrastructure at all is not
everything that is possible.

By the way, here are some facts on the drop in literacy in the USA as
schooling really took hold:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
"""
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and
Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the
United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered.
According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every
579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what
people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular
novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826,
sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million
copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a
dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography,
analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic
sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can
handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges
or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex
minds than our own?
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for
whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks
labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later,
at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and
the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and
17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy
doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in
regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much
real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago
virtually everyone, black or white, could read.
"""

Just as an open manufacturing parallel to the drop in literacy, in 1840,
most people could probably grow their own food, butcher their own meat, make
their own candles, sew their own clothes, plus make a lot of other things
they needed in their daily life from common local materials like wood and
clay. Now, most people can't do any of that (well, gardening remains
popular, true). Is, in that sense, "open manufacturing" needed also because
of schooling and industrialization? Or in other words, is "open
manufacturing" just one more thing we lost from compulsory schooling
designed for the benefit of industry and industrialists? Could there have
been a *different* way forward?

That itself would make an interesting historical study, to systematically
work forward from 1840 technologically to computers, the internet, a space
program, and 3D printing, but on a decentralized path. Maybe that was the
point in time when the USA most went wrong as a democracy? That could be an
interesting project, bringing in historians and historical-related funding.
It links with ideas I've mentioned before (the world of 1913 or so, or the
age of the Titanic), but it links it with a specific reason (the
introduction of compulsory education) for studying what might have been.
Might be a great "open manufacturing" project for homeschoolers to help
with. :-) We could even do related simulations of both paths, to see how the
motivation of simulated agents changes under either approach. (Although that
might be cruel to the data sprites in the schooling case. :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Marcos]

Thank you! Though I'm afraid our society is truly backwards ='( and it doesnt want to change, as in any relatively stable system it will actually fight for its survival, however wicked it may be.

 

Cheers,

Mark.

2009/8/5 Paul D. Fernhout <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>

[ben lipkowitz]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for
> whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks
> labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later,
> at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and
> the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and
> 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy
> doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in
> regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much
> real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago
> virtually everyone, black or white, could read.

I had a hard time believing these numbers so I went to the literacy survey
page; they don't actually list "literacy" anywhere, only "below basic
prose literacy" for the overall population, which was 14 percent.
http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_demographics.asp#2

I looked at some of the questions; 33% of people got this one right:

What is the poet trying to express in this poem?
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee
A clover, any time, to him
Is Aristocracy

(what is the answer anyway? does this mean i'm not fully literate?)
It is surprising how low the percentages are for most of the questions.

[Paul D. Fernhout]

The poet is trying to express the Bee's indifference to commercial branding
of pollen? :-)

I agree those numbers are shocking. It would not be the first time Gatto has
exaggerated to make a point, but still got the trend right. I guess part of
it is what people define as literacy or reading.

From:
http://literaryculture.suite101.com/article.cfm/declining_us_reading_rates
"""
Read a good book lately? A report released by the National Endowment for the
Arts (NEA) in November 2007 would suggest most of us probably haven't. As
reported in the NEA’s “To Read or Not to Read”, which gathered data from
more than forty sources studying reading habits and related reading testing,
the numbers of people reading in the United States has fallen steadily over
the past twenty years.
Falling Reading Rates
The study reports that, on average, the typical 15 – 24 year old watches
two hours of television a day while spending about seven minutes a day
reading for leisure. Only about a third of thirteen year olds read daily,
and the percentage of non-readers among seventeen year olds has doubled
since 1984. Some experts have gauged the “literary reading rate” in 2002
stood at about 47% of the public.
Reading patterns definitely follow education (and typically economic)
parallels. An earlier NEA report titled “Reading at Risk” suggests that only
14% of American adults with grade school educations read literature, while
74% of those with graduate school experience do.
Failing Test Scores
Not only are American reading less, they read poorly. Test results now
position American fifteen year olds in fifteenth place among thirty one
industrialized nations. And it’s not just youth. Reading scores among adults
with graduate school experience rated “proficient” in prose reading skills
posted a 20% decline between 1992 and 2003. Meanwhile, among employers who
rank reading proficiency as extremely important among their employees, 38%
say that high school graduates have deficient reading skills. ...
Of course there are many other consequences beyond lost jobs in book
printing and publishing as the numbers of those reading continues to slide.
There have long been correlations recognized between reading and literacy
rates and their impact on educational and financial success. Indeed, some
have posited that the very nature of democracy in an increasingly complex
and technologically advanced society is at risk if we lack educated,
adaptive, logical thinkers. And while reading alone cannot guarantee
flexible, energetic minds, the absence of such a fundamental cornerstone of
thought development and information gathering harkens towards sobering
predictions of intellectual decline.
"""

On the other hand, I've read that texting is improving literacy and writing?

Anyway, the main point is, for all the money and technology thrown at
schools, literacy in the USA is getting *worse*.

Still, TV and video games are no doubt part of that, taking up time that
otherwise might be spent reading. And it is not completely fair to discount
TV media literacy or video game literacy or other activities as valid forms
of literacy. For example, learning to read and use blueprints (including
Lego instructions) is a form of literacy, as is learning to read animal
tracks, or read emotions in faces, or introspect on ones own emotions, or
navigate the internet, or read mechanical objects like cars to fix and
maintain them, and so on. (In the book "The Mote in God's Eye", Larry Niven
and Jerry Pournelle describe an alien race where all adults are assumed to
operate any complex device instantaneously by casually examining how it
operates, so, an amazing degree of technical literacy is just assumed.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye

Gatto also blames some of this on specific educational strategies for
teaching reading. Other sources actually, blame, ironically, a push to early
reading as causing illiteracy (especially in boys) is it turns them off to
reading as confusing and frustrating.

More on African-American literacy rates (but they cite Gatto in part):
"Q: U.S. Black Literacy Rates Now and Then "
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=130002

But you are doing better than I to look to primary sources.

This one may be more definitive, split by race/ethnicity, and is related to
the source you cite:
http://nces.ed.gov/ssbr/pages/adultliteracy.asp?IndID=32

Gatto was writing that around 2001 or so. The figures there from 1992 for
prose literacy (first figure) are 30% of Blacks as "Below Basic" and 9% of
Whites as "Below Basic". Well, that would be 30% instead of 40% for Blacks.
So, close, but still wrong. And 9% instead of 14%, so also wrong. He's in
the ballpark, but not precisely right.

Those improved in 2003 to 24% of Blacks as "Below Basic" and 7% of Whites as
"Below Basic". But that was after he was writing (he copyrighted a revised
edition of the book in that year).

Hispanics are listed as 44% "Below Basic", by the way. (I don't know if that
includes reading in Spanish, too?)

Please note, this is not meant to pick on anyone's intelligence or race. For
example, literacy in Spain itself is claimed to be: 97.9%.
http://www.indexmundi.com/spain/literacy.html

So, this is about culture and institutions.

The point here is the drop from higher levels in the same racial category
according to Gatto (from 80% of Blacks earlier to 60% he claims, but 70%
according to NAAL). So, clearly, there are discrepancies in these figures
from Gatto's. But, the trends are still shocking.

I can wonder if, for the 40% figure, maybe it is an error and he meant
"Hispanics"? Also, maybe he confused general population illiteracy (higher)
with white illiteracy (lower)? On the page you linked, it says 14% "Below
Basic" in Prose overall:
http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_demographics.asp
Actually, that would fit the numbers, he should have said, "According to the
NAAL, 14% of US Americans (and 44% of Hispanics) cannot read at all."
But, that is not what he said, or what I quoted, sorry. Guess both he and I
would make poor CIA analysts. :-)

So, we file off some rough edges you pointed out and see if the argument
still fits. :-)

Just to note, in that NCES figure on the page linked above, only about 17%
of Whites are listed as "Proficient" at reading prose, and only 2% of Blacks
are listed as "Proficient". (Proficient is the top category.) Other ethnic
groups are also low.

In any case, with "Proficient" literacy that low, it any surprise the USA is
an empire and the population can not bring it back into line with literacy
figures like these?

On the other hand, maybe only illiterates can resist the written propaganda?
:-)

I know, that's why TV advertising is so important, as well as Youtube.

Which makes me realize, I've just plain never, in my entire life, realized,
most US Americans really just can not read what I write, even if they tried.
Yes, I know my posts are often too long, awkward, hastily written,
redundant, have typos, awkward grammar sometimes, etc., and there are plenty
of reasons people might skip them for all those reasons. But I'm saying, I'm
just realizing most US Americans can not even read my short things even if
they tried, or perhaps read most of the writings of almost *anyone* here on
the open manufacturing list.

So, that argues for me eventually moving more efforts towards YouTube. :-)
Like cartoon stuff like "Money As Debt", "Trusted Computing", or "The Story
of Stuff". Even a humourously subtitled "The Downfall" parody may be too
sophisticated apparently for a much of the USA?

On the other hand, maybe Open Manufacturing software needs to have built in
reading tutorials? Here is one: :-)
http://www.starfall.com/

Anyway, as even just the lesser figures about literacy in the USA sink in,
my mind begins to spin as I think of the implications. Including recent
historical implications.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Samantha Atkins]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:56 AM, Paul D.
Fernhout<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>>  What creative smart people require to flower is not necessarily
>> conducive to the majority of the people being creative also or even
>> being particularly happy.   Relatively few people are self-directed,
>> even very bright ones.  A lot of us haven't had that much practice.
>> Whether people would develop this under conditions where they had very
>> few external incentives remains to be seen.
>
> This is very insightful.
>
> One missing piece of the puzzle is that children are intentionally dumbed
> down through compulsory education not to be self-directed and not to have a
> love of learning. Some few survive that anyway with those traits, but most
> do not. If you look to the time before compulsory education as we currently
> have it (so, the USA before 1850, or Europe even earlier) there is a lot of
> self-directed activity. No one is more self-directed and loves learning than
> a kid before they are sent to school -- learning to walk, learning to talk,
> learning what happens when you pull on a dog's tail, and so on. It takes a
> lot to stamp that love and freedom out of children.
>

Ooh, Ooh, one of my favorite topics! Until the 10th grade I thought
that I was rather stupid. The reason was that I couldn't find what
the interconnecting pattern was for all those factoids and subjects in
school. I automatically presumed there had to be one, that it was not
truly all random and counter what seemed to me to have any real
organization, symmetry or system. I thought it must be apparent to
others, at least to the teachers. Else why on earth do it that way?
It finally dawned on me in the 10th grade that that presumption was
much too generous of me and utterly flawed! In fact, all the
systemization and integration I had managed to eek out was largely my
own invention. School was actually not being taught they way! A
bit of digging took me to George Leonard and others and eventually
showed me that John Dewey in particular was one of the designers of
the modern public school system. He was utterly against any sort of
"system-building" in education. He considered the primary purpose of
education to be "socialization" not learning to think well. A bit
more digging took me back the the Prussian routes of our public
education system. Prussian school systems were designed for 90+% of
the population to be pretty much drones - followers, footsoldiers,
assembly line workers and only a very small elite educated to rule
and even smaller elite to actually think well and deeply.

One of the reasons all that did not work so well on me is that I was a
total book-a-holic. Books were my escape from things I want go into
and my refuge. I lived in and through books and ideas. From sci-fi
I learned to love math and be very futuristic. One the school got
around to teaching algebra (after 7 years of miserable rote math
tables and fundamental concrete operations!) I excelled rapidly in
that area. But the teaching was still rote. So I would sit in the
back of the class reading science fiction. Now and then I would look
up to see what the teacher was trying to stuff into our heads. If it
was somewhat new then I would put the book down, abstract out the
principles, see how to derive it or how it might have been originally
discovered or derived and then play with it see what else I could
derive from it or what other interesting things it might lead to.
After a while I would derive what would be taught next month or some
of what would be taught next semester. It wasn't long before I came
up with avenues of exploration my teachers new nothing of and some
that I could not find in the books I had access to. I did well in
school in those course I found interesting. The rest I just muddled
through with a B or even C.

What needed to happen was to send myself and several others I knew of
off to a local university for part of the day. But that was not very
common then. I saw many really bright kids in early puberty drop out
and/or become criminals because they were utterly bored out of their
minds and would do anything for some excitement. I knew a highschool
dropouts who didn't leave because they were dumb but because they were
too bright for the public schools to do anything really for them.
That is really a tragedy.

>
> It literally costs *trillions* of US dollars a year to manufacture the
> dumbness and inability-to-self-direct that appears to be inherent in
> humanity these days in the industrialized Western world. Trillions. Go to a
> country without much schooling if you want to see people learning and doing
> stuff on their own (granted, many have little access to the internet or even
> books, so they are *ignorant* but they are not dumb). It is true that the
> school system produces some very *clever* *fact-stuffed* dumb people with
> assignable curiosity and ideological discipline. (See the book, "Disciplined
> Minds".) But clever fact-stuffed people are not the same as self-directed
> people, or people who love learning, or people who have compassion.
>

Yes. We actually spend iirc 2 - 3x the amount spent per student in
many countries that trounce us in academic testing.

> Is my situation "special"? John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the
> Year of 1991, suggests it is actually quite typical. School was designed to
> be *intentionally* wasteful of children's lives by things like trying to get
> them to learn material they are not ready for, or already know, or are not
> interested in -- *intentionally* wasteful. For example, why teach the
> multiplication table to kids at age 12 when they can learn it in a few
> presentations, when you can spend an entire *year* teaching it at age 8? By
> wasting childrens' time, everyone looks busy, and you can blame the kid, and
> you can so turn children away from numbers they will be easy to confuse on
> economic issues for the rest of their lives. From a human perspective this
> is a horror; from a hierarchical systems perspective, this is efficient.
>

Of course now we, even the elite "rulers" or equivalent, know that the
wealth of everyone including the elite is dependent on how much
intelligence is maximized in as many as possible. Don't we? I
mean it is too obvious to be missed now, isn't it?

> So, one needs to look to the USA before 1850, or to countries without a
> strong school system, to see self-directed people. To be clear, everyone
> needs education including learning facts and having practice reasoning with
> facts, so what you see in countries without any infrastructure at all is not
> everything that is possible.

Actually until about the turn of the 20th century America was known
for high literacy among its citizens. Public mandatory schooling for
12 years did not become the nationwide norm until much later. It was
present in some but not all states before that.

I know. Public education as practiced on us in the US has been a very
dismal failure. Even among those than can read the first
undergraduate year of college is largely consumed by remedial courses
for far too many. After college the vast majority of graduates never
ever read a full book! It is small wonder that many full professors
want as little to do with undergraduates as possible. Yet all the
relatively illiterate, undermotivated, unthinking and generally
intellectually turned-off get the exact same vote that you and I do.
This is very convenient to those that know how to manipulate such
masses.

> Just as an open manufacturing parallel to the drop in literacy, in 1840,
> most people could probably grow their own food, butcher their own meat, make
> their own candles, sew their own clothes, plus make a lot of other things
> they needed in their daily life from common local materials like wood and
> clay. Now, most people can't do any of that (well, gardening remains
> popular, true). Is, in that sense, "open manufacturing" needed also because
> of schooling and industrialization? Or in other words, is "open
> manufacturing" just one more thing we lost from compulsory schooling
> designed for the benefit of industry and industrialists? Could there have
> been a *different* way forward?

I doubt it. Economies of scale and specialization do matter and
matter very much. They matter less only as more powerful tools can
be personally owned and the distribution and communication grid is
vastly improved as it largely is today. But those improvements
depend on many subcomponents that cannot to date be produced in this
decentralized manner. Perhaps over time.

- samantha

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Samantha Atkins wrote:

>> [Stuff on schooling]

Samantha-

Thanks for the heartfelt personal story of escaping the clutches of
schooling, along with the glimpses into the lives of classmates who fell by
the wayside on your collective forced march through years of schooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

Schooling was designed in part to prepare children to be Prussian soldiers,
and in that sense, schooling is already set up like like a warzone (rank,
competition, punishments, uniforms, platoons, inter-school rivalries).
Survivors sometimes even have to deal with "survivor guilt" as my mother had
from surviving the Hunger Winter in Rotterdam. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
"Survivor guilt was first diagnosed during the 1960s. Several therapists
recognized similar if not identical conditions among Holocaust survivors.
Similar signs and symptoms have been recognized in survivors of traumatic
situations including combat, natural disasters, and wide-ranging job layoffs."

Maybe someone should add compulsory schooling to that list? :-) I look back
at some good kids who fell by the wayside (including suicides) and wish now
I could have done more to help, or at the very least, understood the terrain
we were all marching through better. Even now, seeing children (and
families) being damaged by schooling all around me and not being able to
help much is frustrating.
"[p2p-research] Towards a post-scarcity New York State of mind"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/003940.html
Still, just like a direct confrontation with the state about various issues
would be counter-productive (except in the context of a Gandhi like national
campaign), a direct confrontation with a specific parent about compulsory
schooling seems an almost certain disaster. So, I just make a few broadly
directed posts here and there. Kids can use Google these days. Even a Google
on "school survival" gets someplace like here:
http://www.school-survival.net/
"""
If you hate school, parents and teachers may be quick to label you as
'troubled' or 'defiant' or diagnose you with a bunch of disorders. Nothing
could be further from the truth. There is nothing wrong with hating school,
there is nothing wrong with hating being forced to go someplace you don't
want to and being "taught" things that don't interest you in ways that would
kill you if boredom were lethal. You're not worthless if you don't get good
grades, and you're not mentally ill if the mere thought of school scares
you. In fact, you're probably perfectly sane. They say school is for
learning? Well, being bored is hardly any way to learn anything! No wonder
hardly anyone remembers what they were forced to memorize at school. School
isn't about learning, it's about training people to be obedient to those
with authority over them.
"""

With that said, by the time people leave "compulsory schooling" and get to
college on a voluntary basis, things begin to change. So, I see one way
forward for schooling in the USA is for it to become a lot more like college
in feel. I started college as soon as I could when I turned sixteen. That
was made feasible both from financial aid issues (it was go then or lose
social security benefits under Reaganism changes, so other kids were going
too in that specific year) and from having a caring sister who was a
residence hall director at the university (what are the odds?). Another
friend started community college math courses around then too, and I knew
some kids I gamed with from two years ahead who had started college, so some
positive peer influence. Grad school may be more about professional
discipline ("Disciplined Minds"), but, even I have to admit, there are many
aspects of college that really are wonderful for many young people (ignoring
being shackled by debt afterwards, or some other serious issues with most
colleges, like most places counting on a 50% dropout rate to fleece the
freshman and sophomores about housing and classes, and then cater to juniors
and seniors as if that was more than 1/3 the college experience taken across
all enrollees, or in general, the disempowering aspect of thinking you need
to pay an authority in the internet age to teach you other than for reasons
of convenience.)
"We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: REVISITING THE IDEA OF COLLEGE"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html

For many people either with affluent parents or who are eligible for grants
and scholarships, college is the only socially acceptable way to get four
years of a basic income. As Marco pointed to childhood as a time of
motivation, one might also point to all the extra-curricular stuff going on
at college campuses as examples of people having motivation when given a
basic income.

>> Just as an open manufacturing parallel to the drop in literacy, in 1840,
>> most people could probably grow their own food, butcher their own meat, make
>> their own candles, sew their own clothes, plus make a lot of other things
>> they needed in their daily life from common local materials like wood and
>> clay. Now, most people can't do any of that (well, gardening remains
>> popular, true). Is, in that sense, "open manufacturing" needed also because
>> of schooling and industrialization? Or in other words, is "open
>> manufacturing" just one more thing we lost from compulsory schooling
>> designed for the benefit of industry and industrialists? Could there have
>> been a *different* way forward?
>
> I doubt it. Economies of scale and specialization do matter and
> matter very much. They matter less only as more powerful tools can
> be personally owned and the distribution and communication grid is
> vastly improved as it largely is today. But those improvements
> depend on many subcomponents that cannot to date be produced in this
> decentralized manner. Perhaps over time.

On the point quoted above of whether there is a path from 1840 to here
technologically without going through mass production (and compulsory
schooling that Gatto suggests was a "conspiracy against ourselves" to get
the benefits of state industrialization despite the social costs), well, I
still think it is an interesting question. A challenge as it were, to get
the cheese without having the trap spring shut. Maybe you are right. But it
would be interesting if it was possible as an alternative history. Might
even make a good sci-fi novel. :-) People from such a world trapped in ours
and trying to make sense of all the craziness (where did it go so wrong?).
James P. Hogan in "Paths to Otherwhere" has some aspects of this -- and
that's where I got the term "financial obesity" in the context of a
university that was so awash with grant money they kept turning down
donations from prosperous local companies. :-)
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=22
"A universe more vast than anything previously known, where all possible
pasts and futures are equally real, provides a group of young, maverick
scientists with their escape from a world that has no future."

Gatto suggests:
http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/columnists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml
"""
When J.P. Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a cooperating
world of trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he was creating a
business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of
government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate
every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each
step of it was purchased with coin and a keen understanding of human nature.
Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the
destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families,
individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren’t aware they were
trading for a regular corporate paycheck. A huge price had to be paid for
business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of
our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to
read very well, an historic part of the American genius. School had instead
to train them for their role in the new over-arching social system. But
spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is
a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered
by a group of honorable men, all honorable men. The real conspirators were
ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of security, we became
like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire
against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing
vats of compulsory state factory-schooling.
"""

What a J.P. Morgan of today is doing today (someone I worked with on organic
agriculture), writing enlightening children's books:
http://www.universestories.com/
"""
International speaker and award winning author, Jennifer [P. :-)] Morgan has
wowed audiences of all ages with her books, lectures and dramatic
storytelling. Her books began as bedtime stories for her very curious son,
then six years old. She holds a degree in theology from the University of
San Franscisco and an MBA from Rutgers University. To write her books, she
took courses at Princeton University and consulted with many scientists. Her
books have been endorsed by world renowned scientists, philosophers and
educators including Jane Goodall, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Leon Lederman
(Nobel Prize winning physicist), and Judith Bauerlein (former president,
American Montessori Society), and many others.
"""

So, there are little green shoots of hope, here and there.
http://www.blessedunrest.com/

But, what if there had been a different way forward technologically, a way
forward from 1840 that reflected a different social consciousness? A truly
US American circa 1840s way forward(*), and not one borrowed from Prussia?
It could also be useful for socially advanced but technologically backward
places in the South, places that could perhaps, even just on their own,
realized the promise of US America that we collectively through away for
whatever reasons?

Of course, it is a bit of cheating to use what we know now to look backward.
In the sci-fi novel by Victor Vinge, "A Fire Upon the Deep",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
using an advance understanding of physics contributed by an outsider, a
medieval people are able to leap directly to an advanced radio system. It
would be harder to go step by step from what such people in 1840 might know
or could reasonable learn if they had wanted to keep technology
decentralized. Still, here and there I've see mentions that industrial
revolution factories were set up the way they were in part for political
reasons. So, there may be aspects still of our artifacts having politics.

Still, in any case, as you imply, with technological advances, we seem to be
moving past the point where long industrial supply chains for some things
make as much sense. I expect, over time, our supply chains might shift in
various ways from continual innovation (solar panels, DIYBio, 3D printing,
new materials that are easily produced or recycled locally like synthetic
wood, redesign for things that last longer, are easier to repurpose or
disassemble, or are easier to make, etc.). And in turn, the change in our
supply chains changes the training one would expect for the people who have
to deal with them. :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

(*) Without the slavery bit, and the discrimination against women bit, and
the using children as motors bit, and so on.

[Marcos]

I foresaw those issues would rise...

 

I think we all have a very prejudiced vision for being developed in a "world of lack" that it makes pretty hard for us to even imagine what it would be like. I will just to try to raise the awareness to this prejudice by considering the following possibilities:

 

- People tend to party at every possibility because their vision of the world is that there is a shortage of it (the "artificial lack"), so it will be like candy to little children, every time they will have the opportunity, they will jump at it and see being a millionare as a very desirable situation so they could "party everyday", though i think  we see many cases of said "millionaries" that will get even more miserable, because they now, not only dont have what they were intrinsically looking for psychologically, but now they dont have where to run! they cant think, which -- paradoxically -- is a very conforting thought: "when i get rich then.. so & so..." ... they cant blame on lack anymore.  What they lack(!) is the 'neural' nourishing of a truly creative environment.

 

- Speaking of truly creative environments, most children ARE NOT raised in such an environment, so they DO NOT develop the skills that will allow them to interact in such a manner. They grow then to become adults that cant even imagine that possibility! WE DO, though, recognize it when we see it.. we may not be able to explain what it was.. maybe the "magnetism" of someone you just met.. and will probably crave more of that.. again because its so lacking around the world in any explicit form. this is real lacking though.. though it happens everyday everywhere, its real in the sense thats inconstant and ad-hoc or random.. like an untrained basket ball player shooting a 3 pointer.

 

- by the way, this includes poor nutrition and correct data input and stimulus needed during the different stages of brain development, which should account for 99.7% of all those abnormal behavior (which are NOT seen as abnormal to us, since we are IN IT, thats what im trying to raise awareness to here).. I talk about those exceptions at the end (and how EVEN THEN one should not worry), since I know people wont be convinced by all those arguments, so stuck they are, they will think of this as "flowery", ingenuous/naive mentality, which can actually be designed to be the smart reaction to have, see below:

 

- Most hard to imagine is the ACTUAL activities that will evolve from that, since we dont have a stable ecosystem that supports it, darwinism cant work properly. Its a random 'bonus', like a slot machine we try to get it again and again but it kills the process after a short while.. its like trying to get a coherent image out of in-between TV stations.. you may even get ONE frame of something(not =D), but you will never get a whole movie, let alone a good one. =) Entropy.. you cant get the gas to fill only half of a recipient again. But why I say this? Because what we will find as proper activity WILL NOT BE! Party every day will get old...  Creativity, by definition, can not. One of the hardest things to imagine is that ARTIFICIAL LACK WILL BE ONE of those activities, though a by-choice activity. Think about it, what a game is? Game-theory, its just a set of rules.. HENCE games are only fun BECAUSE of this, how fun is to play a soccer game and take the ball with your hand and get to the adversary goal(it may be fun from time to time hehe)... we would even call it "stupid".. right? because it is! why its "stupid"? because it breaks the rules? which by definition DESTROYS the FUN, HENCE "STUPID". Thats MY definition of stupid.  And THAT -- By-Choice Artificial Lack -- is what keeps me from discarding the possibility that we are ALREADY doing it, matrix-like philosophies, since a game is only fun to the extend that it immerses you in its universe (rule-set), hence the ultimate game will make you believe SO STRONGLY in its universe, that you WILL NOT EVEN CONSIDER otherwise, you would even laugh at it, discredit those that support that idea, even burn them at stakes, and, from a top-down view, that WOULD BE THE SMART THING TO DO.. since breaking the rules of the game, as we've seen is STUPID. Immersion being one of them. (dont burn me for killing it for you now, hehehehe, i guess i should have written "spoiler" at the top of the email =D).. you would probably even design systems to prevent the truth from arising, which is quite hard to truly smart people, right? so you WILL make yourself DUMBER (could you imagine that after the singularity? hahaha, thats why we cant imagine what will happen in that exponential), which will ALSO allow a  whole sleeve of new games to be experienced.. after all, can you play tic tac toe for long time anymore  with a little child? you are too smart for that, (you think.. mwahaha).. having all the answers actually make things BORING! So .paradoxically, in the long run, getting "smarter" is getting "dumber" (breaking fun).. All of this im writting are excerpts from my "how to make a universe" tome, only to be released "during" the singularity =)

 

Then you would say "but what about death?!", maybe it IS unavoidable! Decay may actually BE a system to pervent arrogance and indolence to set a foot hold on consciousness; Death, a system to return to the Tabula Rasa state; and Suffering a way to augment the possibilities and tools to creative production (check songs and poetry, where would they be?!), and to allow every possible experience available to consciousness to exist. ;-) Buddha was right though, it can be eliminated through reducing ignorance, he just forgot to mention you may not want to =) by the way, the elimination of it might be more fun than not having it.. Will to power, as Nietzsche would put it.. ;)

 

- Now to the abnormalities.. At the very minimum (one may even see this as the transitional phase between lack mentality and abundant mentality, so its not only interesting but productive to talk about it), INSTEAD of worrying about the obcessive behavior (by that you should see that CANT happen ;-]), of "partying everyday", worry then about the INFINITELY MORE INGRAINED behavior (since we are "social" monkeys, right?), quest for social status most monkeys go every second. In a world of abundancy, with a lot of  people creating, you would almost be forced to do it, which is bad, just as its bad to be forced to work nowadays, but since we are considering abnormal behavior here hehehe.. My thesis though is that growing in such an environment will eliminate this kind of behavior, thats why I consider this case as a transient one, at most!

 

Kindly,

Mark.

 

PS.: Oops, I just now realized I should have used scarcity instead of lack.. =) sorry

 

[Samantha Atkins]

An interesting and though provoking post, Marcos.

On Aug 10, 2009, at 1:45 PM, Marcos wrote:

> I foresaw those issues would rise...
>
> I think we all have a very prejudiced vision for being developed in
> a "world of lack" that it makes pretty hard for us to even imagine
> what it would be like. I will just to try to raise the awareness to
> this prejudice by considering the following possibilities:
>
> - People tend to party at every possibility because their vision of
> the world is that there is a shortage of it (the "artificial lack"),
> so it will be like candy to little children, every time they will
> have the opportunity, they will jump at it and see being a
> millionare as a very desirable situation so they could "party
> everyday", though i think we see many cases of said "millionaries"
> that will get even more miserable, because they now, not only dont
> have what they were intrinsically looking for psychologically, but
> now they dont have where to run! they cant think, which --
> paradoxically -- is a very conforting thought: "when i get rich
> then.. so & so..." ... they cant blame on lack anymore. What they
> lack(!) is the 'neural' nourishing of a truly creative environment.

That is is an interesting theory. But in truth we simply do not know
yet how people will react to having no incentive from need and having
most things they require and many that they simply want. It is not
clear (remember some of the paradisiacal island cultures) that
eventually people become creative and energetic. It is also not
clear that millionaires are or would become sad sacks when such a
change took place.

But you are right that many people blame anything in their life that
isn't as they wish it on various circumstances, including but not
limited to lack of sufficient funds.

>
> - Speaking of truly creative environments, most children ARE NOT
> raised in such an environment, so they DO NOT develop the skills
> that will allow them to interact in such a manner. They grow then to
> become adults that cant even imagine that possibility! WE DO,
> though, recognize it when we see it.. we may not be able to explain
> what it was.. maybe the "magnetism" of someone you just met.. and
> will probably crave more of that.. again because its so lacking
> around the world in any explicit form. this is real lacking though..
> though it happens everyday everywhere, its real in the sense thats
> inconstant and ad-hoc or random.. like an untrained basket ball
> player shooting a 3 pointer.
>

Even more troublesome, human beings have not evolved in such an
environment. Our innate programming is not wired for it. But we most
certainly do imagine the possibility. There is too much evidence from
human aspirations and dreams encoding in too much religion / myth and
too many texts to say we can't imagine it. Or do we? Perhaps you
are talking more about the hypothetical nature of a person who could
take maximal advantage of such?

> - by the way, this includes poor nutrition and correct data input
> and stimulus needed during the different stages of brain
> development, which should account for 99.7% of all those abnormal
> behavior (which are NOT seen as abnormal to us, since we are IN IT,
> thats what im trying to raise awareness to here).. I talk about
> those exceptions at the end (and how EVEN THEN one should not
> worry), since I know people wont be convinced by all those
> arguments, so stuck they are, they will think of this as "flowery",
> ingenuous/naive mentality, which can actually be designed to be the
> smart reaction to have, see below:

What is "normal" and not is a pretty hairy subject. But it is a bit
of a worry to imagine that if you create the proper environment that
people will pretty soon adapt to it. It is even more worrying if we
begin to think that some people are too routed in the past conditions
and warped therefrom and thus will never fit in. The worry is because
this has led historically to radical attempts to mold human beings and
to weed out the purportedly hopeless bourgeoise. Some of the
bloodies episodes of the 20th century resulted. Claims that human
nature is such as to change its stripes a great deal in different
conditions need careful examination and vetting. Part of this is
the perennial nature vs nurture question.

>
> - Most hard to imagine is the ACTUAL activities that will evolve
> from that, since we dont have a stable ecosystem that supports it,
> darwinism cant work properly.

Hmm? Not sure what you are referring to.

> Its a random 'bonus', like a slot machine we try to get it again and
> again but it kills the process after a short while.. its like trying
> to get a coherent image out of in-between TV stations.. you may even
> get ONE frame of something(not =D), but you will never get a whole
> movie, let alone a good one. =) Entropy.. you cant get the gas to
> fill only half of a recipient again. But why I say this? Because
> what we will find as proper activity WILL NOT BE! Party every day
> will get old... Creativity, by definition, can not.

How many will be creative? How many will wire-head into more and more
engaging fantasies? How many will make today's couch potatoes look
positively dynamic in comparison? The Web is an incredibly
entertaining place for a very long time. What is the difference
between being creative and exploring all the branching knowledge and
information and entertainment one wishes forever? Would you even
know the difference except by examining overall pace of progress some
time later? The story of retirees, even those that retired young
with good income sources, is not that encouraging.

> One of the hardest things to imagine is that ARTIFICIAL LACK WILL BE
> ONE of those activities, though a by-choice activity.

Some might do it as a game or adventure. But likely not many. They
may how ever seek out areas where there is more challenge. I think
many will come to crave that. Even if it is artificial.

Uh. This part a bit of an indecipherable rant. It is accusing the
world as I understand it of only playing a game of scarcity because
somehow or other it chose to or doesn't know how to do anything else.
Is that the gist of it? If so you are mistaken. Until very
recently lack, real not to be denied lack, was the norm even in what
are now 1st world countries. The level of prosperity we have today
is very recent historically and as many have pointed out is not shared
by large segments of humanity. I don't see how that supports
scarcity today being just a game.

> Then you would say "but what about death?!", maybe it IS
> unavoidable! Decay may actually BE a system to pervent arrogance and
> indolence to set a foot hold on consciousness; Death, a system to
> return to the Tabula Rasa state; and Suffering a way to augment the
> possibilities and tools to creative production (check songs and
> poetry, where would they be?!), and to allow every possible
> experience available to consciousness to exist. ;-) Buddha was right
> though, it can be eliminated through reducing ignorance, he just
> forgot to mention you may not want to =) by the way, the elimination
> of it might be more fun than not having it.. Will to power, as
> Nietzsche would put it.. ;)

It is not just death. It is aging. It is disease. It is not having
enough or enough wisdom for everyone to have enough today. It is
resource and method and energy constraints that for now are very real
and not the least make believe. It is constraints on how resources
should be allocated and what is and is not achievable with how much
resource used how. We are not yet in the abundance level we wish
for. And it is certainly not just because we don't wish to be or
can't picture it. It is true that our expectations and worldview are
not conducive even given the means. But as of yet we have much work
to do to get those means.

>
> - Now to the abnormalities.. At the very minimum (one may even see
> this as the transitional phase between lack mentality and abundant
> mentality, so its not only interesting but productive to talk about
> it), INSTEAD of worrying about the obcessive behavior (by that you
> should see that CANT happen ;-]), of "partying everyday", worry then
> about the INFINITELY MORE INGRAINED behavior (since we are "social"
> monkeys, right?), quest for social status most monkeys go every
> second. In a world of abundancy, with a lot of people creating, you
> would almost be forced to do it, which is bad, just as its bad to be
> forced to work nowadays, but since we are considering abnormal
> behavior here hehehe.. My thesis though is that growing in such an
> environment will eliminate this kind of behavior, thats why I
> consider this case as a transient one, at most!
>

Creating because you wish to to keep up or gain status is not a
particularly horrible problem at all. For that matter neither is
trading the value you produce for the values that others produce.

- samantha

[Marcos]

>An interesting and though provoking post, Marcos

 

Thanks Samantha =) I will try to get my point across, I dont think Im very eloquent as you guys =) here we go:

 

>  It is not clear (remember some of the paradisiacal island cultures) that

>eventually people become creative and energetic.  

sorry, i dont remember, could you please point me to some wikipedia articles or something?

 

>   It is also not clear that millionaires are or would become sad sacks when such a
> change took place.

 

But its not so. Its not getting millionaire that makes one a sad sack, is the lack of excuses =) and rationalizations.. actually this is a good analogy with getting abundance in a more general form, hence there  is your answer, it will not be abundancy per se that will be the problem. What lacks is something deeper, I advocate what moves us is a nourishing (which includes creativity, which is under freedom) environment. (which includes the freedom to create scarcity, as paradoxal as this may sound)

 

>Even more troublesome, human beings have not evolved in such an
>environment.  Our innate programming is not wired for it. 

 

We are wired for intelligence, as I see it, and intelligence needs freedom to create.

 

> But we mostcertainly do imagine the possibility.  There is too much evidence from

>human aspirations and dreams encoding in too much religion / myth and
>too  many texts to say we can't imagine it.    Or do we? 

 

Let me remind you that philosophers and visionaries are just a few. Recorded history is just a drop in the ocean of human existance, and im not talking about what went previously but actually concurrently(let alone previously!), only what/who was thought to be noteworthy to record was recorded, hence it leaves 99% out, who may or may not aspire so much. From those that do, how many only considered it after reading or being told about, probably by some visionare or priest or myth. Thats what Im saying, we sure CAN imagine it, as i said, we can recognize it. But how many will look to the world and this situation as complete alien? not many. most think thats just the way it is and never go past that point in conjectures. The max I see around is the INTELECTUAL grant to "how nice it would be", not anything with intent. This is a learned/indocrinated 'point of view', not imagination.

 

> Perhaps you
>are talking more about the hypothetical nature of a person who could
>take maximal advantage of such?

 

I dont quite got that, but i believe the answer would be like: "i believe all of them are able to, if you take into account proper nutrition years earlier of gestation, and throughout its life"

 

> Claims that human
>nature is such as to change its stripes a great deal in different
>conditions need careful examination and vetting.  

 

I dont advocate changing it, just maximizing its potential by providing everything it needs, so IT itself is the limiting factor, not a nutrient, or some data, or motor stimulation or any input required for the full development of it. What I advocate is that given this environment, of what we could call abundance, abnormal behavior would be completely eliminated since its just a symptom of something deeper, and by abnormal i refer mostly (though indirectly to most psychological problems) to the question at hand, obcessive compulsive behavior over any kind of "resource", being it food, or pleasure.

 

>Hmm?  Not sure what you are referring to.

 

We dont have the abundace environment we are talking about, hence we dont have a natural selection process over the activities that would be considered desirable to humans living in that environment, so its pretty hard to predict, and my post was mostly to say we are in a specially bad position to do so.

 

>and entertainment one wishes forever?   Would you even

 

What I tried to convey is that this is equivalent to a worry about becoming obcessive, and I advocate an environment like this will not produce obcessive minds. If it does, it doesnt fall under my definition of abundance, you may have material abundance, but lacks "psychological" abundance.

 

>know the difference except by examining overall pace of progress some
>time later? 

 

Progress will also have a complete different meaning, I dont think we are qualified to assess.

 

>   The story of retirees, even those that retired young
>with good income sources, is not that encouraging

 

As I said, I believe this kind of behavior comes from an indocrinated mind. Specially an old one, that seen this way of doing things for ever and have long stopped "aspiring" anything else if it ever did.

 

>Some might do it as a game or adventure.  But likely not many.  They
>may how ever seek out areas where there is more challenge.  I think
>many will come to crave that.  Even if it is artificial.

 

Exactly. Challenge, and it will always grow, as with everything, specially human created, and most importantly, humans require it to be ever more REAL, immersive...

 

>It is accusing the
>world as I understand it of only playing a game of scarcity because
>somehow or other it chose to or doesn't know how to do anything else.
>Is that the gist of it?   If so you are mistaken.   Until very
>recently lack, real not to be denied lack, was the norm even in what
>are now 1st world countries.   The level of prosperity we have today
>is very recent historically and as many have pointed out is not shared
>by large segments of humanity.   I don't see how that supports
>scarcity today being just a game.

 

See what I mean? ;-)

 

>Uh.  This part a bit of an indecipherable rant.    

 

Its more of a philosophical rant =) And before replying further, let me assure you that we wont get anywhere =) its probably designed to (not)do so mwahaha...

 

>It is not just death.  It is aging.  It is disease.

 

Thats what I called 'decay'.

 

>   We are not yet in the abundance level we wish for. 

 

And if Im right we will never be, or will for a short (exponencial) period.

 

> And it is certainly not just because we don't wish to be

 

Will to power.

 

> or can't picture it. 

 

How else would you experience and express your will to power?

 

>  It is true that our expectations and worldview are
> not conducive even given the means.  But as of yet we have much work
> to do to get those means.

Wouldnt that be boring? =)

 

>Creating because you wish to to keep up or gain status is not a
>particularly horrible problem at all.  For that matter neither is
>trading the value you produce for the values that others produce.

 

Thats why I said in the beginning of the email that even then is not something to worry about.

Though i must disagree with the trading issue, since its the same pathology that leads to aberrations such as "copyright". Which could only arise in a mind developed under those (perhaps "less desirable") conditions, a condition of scarcity where you have to "protect" your 'produce', defend your 'intelectual property', like it is an intelligent thing to do. It isnt, it is an aberration to human learning and hence creativity, we learn by copying and then varying on it, thats what mirror neurons are for.

 

Kindly,

Marcos

 

 

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/6/09, Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It is not an assertion, merely a question. It has no answer one way
> or another at this time. Those who are brighter and fundamentally
> interested in a lot of things will probably flourish with the freedom
> to explore whatever they wish in depth. The majority of humanity is
> not like that from what I see. Will the majority choose
> transformation or simply party hardy or putter about doing not much of
> anything for a very long time. I very much want to have the problem
> of finding out but it is a curious question. The record of peoples
> that have lived in natural paradises where very little was required to
> survive easily is not encouraging.

Part of the answer is that people's natural creativity and curiosity
has been stamped out by twelve or sixteen or more years of schooling,
followed by a "job culture," that treats both the subject matter for
learning and work tasks as valid only if assigned by authority figures
behind desks. Anything pursued out of individual interest is demeaned
or patronized as a "hobby," something to kill time while awaiting
something important to do, or to 'recharge batteries" as a means to
the end of performing tasks assigned by hierarchical organizations.

You're right that most people in natural paradises didn't direct much
effort into improviing the efficiency of food production or of tools
and artifacts, until they were forced to do so by reaching the limit
to carrying capacity. But I think this just means that, in a
pre-industrial and pre-technological society, their creativity and
ingenuity were directed toward efforts other than economic
productivity. Given the lack of pressure to increase productivity,
and the sufficiency of the local environnment for their material
needs, their creativity was directed toward the making of stories and
myths, play, etc.

But once the technological genie has been let of the bottle, the
technological artifacts surrounding us that are involved in making our
houses and daily bread are as much an object of creativity and play as
were the daily activities of hunter-gather society. Once the
technological milieu exists as an accepted part of daily life, I
think free people will naturally gravitate toward "playing" with it in
creative ways that just wouldn't have occurred to them before the
technological threshold was crossed.