I've always found Stephen Wolfram's thoughts to be overly self indulgent, and this is no exception. But it is illuminating since it reveals what I most loathe: the productive life.
Being productive is not a good. It leads to wanting to attach a computer to oneself while going on a walk outdoors!
This is a common sentiment on the Internet. But when I look around at the people I know, none of the people who are anti-productivity are people I admire. In fact, the pro-productivity people do much more of everything with better outcomes.
- The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and family members
- The pro-productivity people are more involved in hobbies
- The pro-productivity people create many more things
- The pro-productivity people lift more, go outdoors more, travel more
It appears, empirically from my sample set, that being pro-productivity correlates with spending one's life meaningfully. Having chosen to model myself on those I know like this, my life has gotten better.
This class of advice (anti-productivity) therefore appears to me to be in the same class of advice as other Internet advice: "kick your kids out at 18 to teach them personal responsibility", "don't take on debt", etc.
To make it worse, you only have to scroll approx 1 page down before you have a picture of Stephen Wolfram outdoors.
The separation of work and play that so many online commenters form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
Having read that blog post as well as others like [1], I'm not convinced Wolfram has the time to fulfill those bullet points in a fully engaged manner. He appears to be constantly working (or at least be available for calls and meetings) from waking up at 11am to going to bed at 3am, with a 2-hour dinner break.
I dunno, he's clearly not your average Joe. I also enjoy my work but it's more stressful than going for a walk or playing the guitar. At work there are expectations and deadlines, and I have to plan and manage my time, and update the right people when there are delays or scope changes etc etc. Going for a walk you can just be whatever you are in the moment, you don't have to do or be anything that's asked of you for a few hours.
> The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and family members
I haven't seen this amongst several people I know as pro-productivity. The productivity tends to be hyper-focused on work and side hustles/creative, and family/parental duties seemed to be neglected as a result. But I couldn't find any data on this with a quick search, so it's just conflicting anecdata to your anecdata.
Your other bullet points do align more with my experience, but not this one.
> But when I look around at the people I know, none of the people who are anti-productivity are people I admire.
It's interesting to me that you think the opposite of "pro-productivity"--which I define as people who are constantly engaging in life hacks to increase their perceived "productivity", and thus treat productivity as some kind of end unto itself--is "anti-productivity".
Could we agree that the healthy thing lies somewhere in the middle?
> Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
I really wish I could get into this mindset instead of dreading work. I find no fulfillment from work, in fact the most fulfilled i've felt was when I had no obligations to anyone or anything (taking a break from work)
When you’re like Wolfram, where you are head of a 800-employee organisation, profitable from real users, and have a long road map of where you want to take your product, then work is essentially infinite and energising.
When you get to lead the vision of your “baby”, with support from 800 people, work is completely different from your typical middle manager of individual contributor.
> The separation of work and play that so many online commenters form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
That's not "online commenters". It's like 95+% of people who work for a paycheck.
This. I felt an almost cringe-like reaction from reading the article. It reminds me of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. At some point being productive becomes the end goal and no longer a means to an end, and you've lost touch with the beauty of just going on a walk in nature.
Being productive is good but only as a means to an end. If you're using your productivity to get more done then that can be dangerous. But if you're using it to get your work done faster then it's actually quite useful.
Perhaps you mean that being maximally productive -- that is, seeking productivity over all other goals in life -- is not a good? Because productivity is definitely a good. Without it, all crumbles away to the natural state, which is chaotic and for human purposes "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
I find that you’re projecting your thoughts and lifestyle onto his lifestyle choice. Just stop as it does nobody any good.
What’s wrong with attaching a computer to oneself while walking outdoors? Does he have the same intrinsic motivators as you? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not.
What about people that go outside and just read? Is that not a good life?
He's the one who posted it online. Fine if others post that they think it's bad, and why. Laudable, even, if you suppose he posted it to communicate some message and others find that message to be harmful or misleading or otherwise bad. They ought to post what they think is wrong with it.
Most people don't have his potential. Yeah, I'm aware he pushes a lot of crackpot science, but he is still exceedingly brilliant. For the average folk, this is a horrible way to live.
Do humans have to figure out the Truth for it to exist? Words cannot mean nothing or they would not be used. A word has meaning. That is what a word is.
Except few engage in this sort of work. If left to their own devices, most people would simply consume content produced by the 10-20% of people who would actually do anything useful.
This is my observation. People are so weirded out when I tell them all the stuff I want to do. Most people just laze if left to their own devices and provided food. People have this image of hunter gatherer tribes doing interesting things in their free time, but the data show that, unless they're hunting, gathering, cooking, or doing other biological imperatives, most of their time is spent lazing.
That's fine, but if your argument about not working is that humans are going to engage in 'dream work'... well I think that's just silly.
Ultimately, from what I've seen, people with this mentality, often end up becoming quite well off. Those who want to engage in 'dream work' often have the self-motivating spirit that almost inevitably leads to material success.
"And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us."
There is a danger in focusing all our attention on utility. I am not disagreeing that humans can be lazy but don't think we should put the useful above the good, which is what I see this argument doing. Not that I know what the good is but I favor questioning or probing possibilities more than doing something "useful"
Advertising is, in a sense, lying. The question of advertisers has always been, how do I engage a person with my product in a way that seems natural to him/her, i.e. so that he/she doesn't see the lie. Necessities don't need advertising. Therefore, in a sense, everything advertised is based on desire rather than need and, as such, requires targeting what the consumer already desires in some way.
In re this article: preferences based on gender are encouraged by a society of individuals who want to excuse their desire as worthy. AI only picks up on what already exists and therefore the root of the problem is much deeper than Facebook can remedy by a simple patch.
Philosophy is precisely what is needed to question what we mean by progress. I think the interpretation of what Plato meant is an eternally foundational question for one who seeks to know.
It begs the question of what philosophy is. If it is "love of wisdom", as the Ancient Greeks suggested, then it seeks to know all things. That is, it seeks knowledge of what is, not of what is most likely, which is the domain of modern science.
I normally wouldn’t be pedantic about this but because this is a discussion about philosophy I have to point out that it doesn’t “beg the question”. “Begging the question” is an informal logical fallacy where an argument’s premises assume that its conclusion is true so it ends up being circular. I think you mean it “raises the question”.
The problem is 'begs the question' is not an intuitive phrase to describe the formal definition, so we're going to be stuck with this correction forever.
At this point I feel it has only survived as a form of shibboleth.
>The problem is 'begs the question' is not an intuitive phrase to describe the formal definition
it does if you look at the etymology; beg comes begging off i.e. asking for exemption from something. it's archaic at this point of course but still fairly intelligible in that use; "he begged off doing his chores".
It was clear from the context that "begs the question" here essentially means "raises the question," as is often the case. If there is no confusion, there should be no need for clarification.
"it seeks knowledge of what is, not of what is most likely, which is the domain of modern science"
Physics, arguably the bedrock and most "certain" of the sciences, has long struggled with what the phenomena it studies actually are, leading to a "shut up and calculate" attitude popularized by Feynman, where physicists just throw their hands up and focus on the mathematics and abstractions rather than engaging with the ultimate what and why questions, which they leave (rightly) to philosophy.
The boundary questions (for example, what is physics, what is chemistry, what are their proper objects of study, and so on) are also philosophical questions, and not anything any amount of empirical study, hypothesizing, predicting, or model-making can solve.
Questions about what humanity as a whole, any subgroup of humans, or any individual one of us should do are also not amenable to scientific inquiry. Neither are questions of what is right and wrong. Science can only ever be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Postmodernist's would disagree with you heavily that the two domains intersect.
Philosophy goal is uncover truth where science is restricted mostly to the realm of facts and empirical truths.
An example would be the question of the meaning of life, science has little ability to answer this question other that to claim it doesn't actually exist or it's just a complex expression of atoms working together where with philosophy there are countless ways to answer this age old question.
This is an acceptable tutorial but it could use a bit of editing to make the English more idiomatic. Also, except for the bit on plugins, I don't think it adds to or simplifies the man page.
Being productive is not a good. It leads to wanting to attach a computer to oneself while going on a walk outdoors!