The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?
Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.
You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. Similarly, the most intelligent people will consider the arrangement unfair and unsustainable and instead of devoting their intelligence toward economically productive ventures, they will devote their abilities toward dismantling the system. This is the groundwork of a revolution. The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.
So, overall, UBI will probably be implemented, and it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries.
> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI.
This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table.
> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate.
In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.
> When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.
Source?
Even if that's true though, who cares if AI and robots are doing the work?
What's so bad about allowing people leisure, time to do whatever they want? What are you afraid of?
There are two things bothering me here. The first bit where you're talking about motivations and income driving it seems either very reductive or implying of something that ought to be profoundly upsetting:
- that intelligent people will see that the work they do is pointless if they're paid enough to survive and care for themselves, and not see work as another source of income for better financial security
- that most intelligent people will see it as exploitation and then choose to focus on dismantling the system that levels the playing field
Which sort of doesn't add up. So there are intelligent people who are working right now because they need money and don't have it, while the other intelligent people who are working and employing other people are only doing it to make money and will rebel if they lose some of the money they make.
But then, why doesn't the latter group of intelligent people just stop working if they have enough money? Are they less/more/differently intelligent than the former group? Are we thinking about other, more narrow forms of intelligence when describing either?
Also
> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old.
I don't want to come off as mocking here - it's hard to take these points seriously. The whole point of civilization is to rise above these behaviours and establish a strong foundation for humanity as a whole. The end goal of social progress and the image of how society should be structured cannot be modeled on systems that existed in the past solely because those failure modes are familiar and we're fine with losing people as long as we know how our systems fail them. That evolutionary drive may be millions of years old, but industrial society has been around for a few centuries, and look at what it's done to the rest of the world.
> Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.
Yeah, I don't know what you're getting at with this metaphor. If you're talking predatory behaviour, we have plenty of that going around as things are right now. You don't think something like UBI will help more people "defend their status"?
> it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries
I don't think human civilization has ever been close to this massive or complex or dysfunctional in the past, so this sentence seems meaningless, but I'm no historian.
I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.
I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.
It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?
This is a good read. I remember first using eventlet for writing concurrent code, and then having to do a bit of mental adjustment when moving to asyncio.
Another piece of writing I found useful for perspective at the time was What Color is Your Function?[1], which I bumped into after looking at the Node.js model of concurrency and being confused.
Looking up the domain shows that OP's write-up was posted on reddit by a similarly named account with relatively little activity, but history going back a good 8 years. Sometimes people just haven't gotten around to setting up a full website with a portfolio, which is fine.
This whole piece reeks a little bit of a certain sort of spite - forgive me for a misjudgement if I've made one, but it's almost like the author took that one person's reluctance to participate as a personal affront and treated the "I am not an extrovert" line as a flimsy excuse from someone with an ego problem. It's essentially just a setup to frame introversion as a social problem of some sort and very gently implies that introverted folks have a superiority complex about it.
I can't take the whole thing seriously because it's such an odd case to make - what is the end goal? To address anyone who may experience social anxiety or just a reluctance to join in a completely new social situation, and say, "No, whatever you might have going on in your head is completely untrue, dude, trust me"? I mean, there's not a morsel of objectivity or grace anywhere in the whole thing, just an admonishment for people who aren't wired the same way the author is.
The feeling I get here is essentially that the author wanted to feel like they're in the right about how they see a social event should go, decided to write it up in a way that sounds very serious and selfless and in the best interest of all the introverts out there, and share it so that they... maybe get a good debate going? I don't know.
When it comes to individual behavior in group settings, it's hard to really say where a particular person may be coming from in terms of how they perceive psychological safety and comfort, or if they are misjudging their decision to participate for a reason that has nothing to do with the situation itself. People may participate in different ways, people may drop off or leave for different reasons. Which is fine, it's part of the social contract we have with each other. It might hurt sometimes, but it's a part of the thing.
And there are already quite a few workarounds for this sort of thing too? The whole notion of plus-ones in social affairs is partly so that you're not left feeling isolated once the event is rolling. Large organizations have onboarding buddies and pair work sessions to get folks up to speed. Some clubs have chaperones or one-on-one buddies for new joiners. These are all patterns that exist. There's no evidence of any of this in the anecdote or the rest of the write-up. And again, this is subjective, but to me it all reads like it's dripping with condescension.
If "introversion is not an excuse, you need to work on it for your own good, trust me because I know better and have read a few books" is the takeaway here, then yeesh, maybe the author hasn't given the matter of introversion or extraversion any real thought beyond "phew, I'm so glad I know better because I'm doing so good" and "I wish those introverts tried harder instead of sitting around thinking they know better".
