
Redefining Work - ingve
https://medium.com/@EskoKilpi/redefining-work-447bff8a6547
======
camelNotation
People will disagree, but this is the sociological purpose of religion.
Religious communities bring diverse people together, elevate the weakest, and
promote societies that are competitive, but tempered by the empathy which
comes from a shared identity.

Is religion the answer to questions of inequality? Historically speaking,
probably not on its own. However, it certainly informed most of the larger
solutions we have today.

~~~
anon4
The one thing I'll disagree is with you calling it "purpose", rather than
"function". One of the _functions_ of religion is indeed better community
cooperation. However, the _purpose_ for which a particular religion was
envisioned by its creator(s) is not necessarily the _function_ it came to
fulfill for some part of its existence.

~~~
marcosdumay
No religion was simply created from nothing nor has a single identified
creator.

Arguing about the distinction between "purpose" and "function" of evolved
features is a useless game of word semantics.

------
arturhoo
The article does a good job of shining some fresh ideas in the discussion. The
most interesting part for me is this paragraph:

 _As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The
divide between winners and losers grows constantly. Losers multiply as winning
behaviors are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviors
are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles. This is why, in the end, the
winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the
divide of inequality, the bigger the price that finally has to be paid. The
winners end up having to take care of the losers. Before that two totally
different cultures are formed in society, as is happening in many places
today._

I believe the issue that needs to be tackled is not _income inequality_ but
_access to resources inequality_ , resources being health, education and so
on. As long as a part of society doesn’t have reasonable access to those
resources they’ll never be able to contribute to a bigger wealth pie.

This is important because I do agree that some people prefer to take risks on
their careers and that those should get a bigger reward. Not necessarily in
terms of money, but IT IS OK if it is in terms of money. After all,
entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to make an impact on society.

The next part of the article distills the idea that a good way to reduce
inequality is to promote cooperation and relationships over individuals and
companies racing for a single prize. It’s a nice concept but difficult to
translate into a series of real steps that we can take now.

Again, I think a less ideological first step is ensuring everyone in a society
has reasonable access to resources, allowing them to make conscious decisions
of how to drive their professional careers and have a minimum understanding of
how those with political and economical relevance use their influence.

Naturally, achieving such a thing isn’t easy as governments are corrupt and a
big chunk of those with economical and political relevance _now_ don’t way
their “free” wealth pie to end (and those are not startup entrepreneurs). But
to complement what Esko said, there is still a middle fragment of society (we
here on HN for example) that has power to drive this change, especially with
the advent of technology and means to easily talk about it.

~~~
rewqfdsa
What happens after we guarantee all access to learning resources and
inequality persists? At what point will you accept the science that tells us
how intelligence is mostly hereditary, immutable, and important?

The dream of stamping out inequality is built on the factually incorrect
notion that we are all born with equal abilities. It's much easier to explain
outcome differences as ability differences than to come up with increasingly
unlikely forms of oppression.

As technology improves, low-IQ contributions become increasingly less valuable
relative to machines, increasing inequality.

~~~
digikata
If anything science tends to point more to the fact that there isn't a single
metric of intelligence that is somehow the most important. Maybe the most
important factor isn't intelligence at all and is some combination of
intelligence, communication and charisma? Even if there some set of human
dominating factors, there's no guarantee that the order of the world in that
moment would consistently value that factor without changing to another. There
isn't even a guarantee that at the same point in time the same fitness tests
are applied consistently - in one corner of the world one set of
characteristics if favored, and and in another it's a different set. Heck, in
the same city there's a huge variation...

In this environment the best we can to is provide somewhat consistent access
to resources to encourage the development human ability in all its varied
forms.

~~~
rewqfdsa
That's a nice fantasy --- oh, everyone's smart, just as different things. It
just ain't true.

Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be
more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to
all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income,
accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.

Try again.

~~~
dang
Please stop using HN to beat the same ideological dead hobby-horses over and
over again. It is not what this site is for.

Please also edit the incivility out of your comments. There's no need for a
nasty swipe like "Try again."

~~~
rewqfdsa
> Please stop using HN to beat the same ideological dead hobby-horses over and
> over again

Which specific facts are inappropriate to mention on HN?

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berryg
Esko Kilpi is my favourite author on Medium at the moment. His articles on the
redefinition of work are very inspirational to me. And although cooperative
interaction is above all a human action, I have high hopes that technologies
like the blockchain can help to ease these interactions between humans. Or at
least to make these interactions more transparent and insightful.

~~~
keithb-
This article may be inspirational to you, but it's not very well written or
well argued. Is the California gold rush really an example of "sudden
discovery of underutilized resources"? And isn't the subject of that sentence
actually the technological changes that inspired the "major changes in
economic patterns"?

Okay, so zero-sum games and scarcity economics are based on the idea that
resources/valuables are limited and I'm all in favor of agreeing that there is
no end to resources, creativity, or human sympathy. And I would even be
willing to take that a step further and say that, no matter what the problem,
there will be people willing to devote their time to it.

But the crux is not available resource: the key is defining something as a
problem. Are schools the problem, or poverty? Are broken windows the problem,
or mandatory minimums? Take away the assumptions from this article, and you
aren't left with much more than a half-reasoned book report. I would be much
more inspired if the conclusion of this article was something like "nuanced
solutions are the only option" rather than what was presented: "be excellent
to each other".

------
jerf
"In games that were paradoxically competitive and cooperative at the same
time, losers would not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to
learn from the winners."

This is, in practice, what we already have.

Two companies in the same space, A and B, compete. Initially, both grow into
their space. Eventually, one does better than the other, and B fails. B dies.
What happens? A goes and hires the best parts of B, or acquires them, or many
variations on that theme. Most of the remainder go find a job somewhere else,
perhaps in an entirely different economic sector. The employees of B are not
cast into the outer darkness never to compete again, to starve and die.

Capitalism competes at the level of _companies_ , and _companies_ live in a
highly Darwinian live-or-die environment. But the people _making up_ those
companies actually live on a different level.

Combine that with ensuring that your business environment makes it easy to
start a new company, and the process continues. (Meaning that one of the key
things to worry about is ensuring that we do not accidentally destroy that
property.)

In fact that's the core brilliance of a limited liability company; _all_
societies and cultures, whether they like it or not, are Darwinian, because we
live in a rather harsh Darwinian universe of limited knowledge and resources.
Many other social structures have been developed to directly cover it up or
deny it, and in the process, fail miserably. It can not be covered up or
denied. Since it isn't even caused by a human process, it doesn't care if you
vilify it, and it is not amenable to politicking. You can't shame Darwinian
competition into not existing any more.

But you can _move_ it. You can move it into entities that are not human. You
can move it into things that, when they die, mean a lot of people may _feel
really bad_ , but then they by and large go get another job or perhaps retire
or worst case live on the largesse of the social safety net that a
capitalistic society is wealthy enough to provide, but they don't actually
_die_. You can get the Darwinian benefits of competition increasing fitness,
while not actually killing the components of the system. Removing the
Darwinian benefits from the system...

... well, actually, it's not like we need to hypothesize about what happens.
Have we not already witnessed entities that are so large that they internally
function without effective competition and, hypothetically, nothing but
"cooperation" inside them, transcending the "system"? Old-school IBM. Many
governments. We do not associate these systems with producing paradisaical
cornucopias of happiness and resources. We associate them with massive
resource wastage, favoritism, law-breaking, and extensive internal infighting.
"Cooperation" unconstrained by competition has a _concrete historical track
record_ of ceasing to be "cooperation".

If you just "cooperate", you need a mechanism to remove those cooperatives
that aren't working properly. People living under the shield of the current
system and mistakenly diagnose what the system is actually shielding you from
as being caused by the system will always find these methods distasteful. But
they are necessary lest the whole system dissolve into useless, wasteful flab.
As in biology, so in economic life.

