Mine is a criticism of the actual article. The reply to mine is a personal attack against me, a member of this site. This is generally understood to be a violation of the site guidelines, though they don't explicitly say "no ad hominems."
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Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
No it wasn't. You literally claimed the author had a mental break down. That's not an attack on the article, it was a direct attack on him. I literally formed my comment exactly as you did to relay that point.
You seemed to have taken such issue with the idea that the guy is lucky, you attacked him personally rather than attack his point. I don't entirely agree with the author. I don't entirely disagree with him. But if you want to make a point, attack his conclusions, not him.
Existential crisis and mental break down are not remotely the same thing. And noting that he seems to simply feel he somehow doesn't deserve this or feels guilty and his article is also not really well backed is a valid criticism. This piece looks to me like someone venting emotionally about their guilt at feeling they don't really deserve more than others. This is not really a good argument for creating basic income. Many people feel guilty for being born into wealth and privilege. That guilt is not some kind of objective evidence that basic income will solve the problems we currently face where we generally expect automation to eliminate certain jobs.
It's fine for people to think basic income will be a good solution to the situation before us. I don't happen to agree with that position. But personal guilt and appealing to some just world fallacy is not a substantive argument for why we should try to make this happen.
> And noting that he seems to simply feel he somehow doesn't deserve this
At no point in the article does he say that. He simply stated he was lucky. He was born in a country that made it such that he would NEVER be able to end up like the workers he encountered. Thats absolutely true. That makes him (and you) lucky and certainly more successful relative to them.
> his article is also not really well backed is a valid criticism
This is a story about something personal, its not a scientific piece. His "backing" is simply that being born where he was, in part, is the reason he is where he is. That's not subjective, that's an absolute fact.
> This piece looks to me like someone venting emotionally about their guilt at feeling they don't really deserve more than others.
You are free to interpret it that way, but he never actually indicated anything you took from it. It seems your own perspective on basic income highly skewed your perspective before you started to read it, and everything he said was used to justify your preconceived notion.
> Many people feel guilty for being born into wealth and privilege.
I would imagine the majority don't.
> That guilt is not some kind of objective evidence that basic income will solve the problems we currently face
No, studies (some of which have recently began) will indicate whether or not basic income will work. This is an article about someones personal experience, once again, not a scholarly article or study.
> It's fine for people to think basic income will be a good solution to the situation before us. I don't happen to agree with that position.
Unlike you I think it's something that needs to be studied before I draw any conclusions. The irony here is your just as guilty as what you accuse the author of: you emotionally respond to something with zero evidence for (or in your case against) it.
Look, I read the article and inferred that he feels guilty. There isn't really any substance there and it is full of ridiculous assertions indicating that his labor, willingness to live in Qatar and stewardship of capital all have essentially zero real value and, thus, do not justify his cushy existence. This is a bad path forward for how to make the world a better place. If no one is doing any labor and no one is acting as a good steward, the world rapidly goes to hell. Even if you posit that all our jobs will be replaced by robots, we will need good stewards if we want good quality of life generally for all people. Someone will have to make decisions about the robot factories, etc. Given how widespread an impact those things would have, these would need to be wise to a very high standard in order to not be disastrous.
Then you come in and mirror my language and start off with "guy..." I am an active participant on HN and open about my gender. You referring to me as a guy tells me you don't actually recognize me or know who I am. It also tells me you didn't so much as click through to my profile. It is trivially easy to determine my gender and you didn't do that much. That means you know literally NOTHING about me, thus all statements that follow your description of me as a guy are made up out of thin air. They aren't any kind of valid criticism with any kind of basis in actual facts.
As for UBI, I am not closed minded about it. I am willing to consider a good argument for it. In fact, I would love to see a good argument for it. But I don't think an experiment like the one being done by Sam Altman tells us anything useful. It is obvious on the face of it that if a small subset of people get extra funds for a specified period or time, they will tend to do better than most people around them. This is not real world conditions for what will happen if UBI becomes a reality.
I think there are much better proxies to look at for trying to infer what will happen with UBI and these are real world examples. This includes things like what happens when someone wins the lottery (2/3s are bankrupt within 5 years) and actual historical efforts to share and share alike (communism, which was supposed to be a peasant paradise, but was a disaster). I have had pertinent classes in things like Social Psychology for trying to gauge what is likely to work with actual human beings in actual reality, not some experiment. I also write about my thoughts on UBI and related matters here:
Isn't yours? (The first one)
He used your comment as a framework.