I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble. A lot people are hard to convince to even show up to work consistently, let alone do things no one is telling them to do. And then even if they are self-motivated, you run into problems with whether their ideas are good or not.
Individual companies can solve this by heavily filtering applicants (and paying enough to attract good ones), but you probably don’t want to filter and pay your shelf-stockers like software engineers. Plus if you did it at across all of society, you’d leave a lot of your workers permanently unemployed.
That probably applies to at least half of all the sociological/governance stuff posted on LW… Plus no existing literature search beyond the first page of google scholar, or sometimes even at all.
Well if the question is “If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?” the answer is “That question assumes some false things”
Yeah, that’s part of the problem with the hypothetical, but even in a world where the premises of Wentworld/ “What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” were true, I’d still contest the idea that bureaucracy would be unnecessary, primarily due to both coordination reasons and the fact that verification would still be massively easier than generation for a lot of natural problems, so I still don’t buy the logical implication.
There would probably be less bureaucracy, but not none in his world.
But that premise falls apart as soon as a large fraction of those (currently) highly motivated (relatively) smart tech workers can only get jobs in retail or middle management.
I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble. A lot people are hard to convince to even show up to work consistently, let alone do things no one is telling them to do. And then even if they are self-motivated, you run into problems with whether their ideas are good or not.
Individual companies can solve this by heavily filtering applicants (and paying enough to attract good ones), but you probably don’t want to filter and pay your shelf-stockers like software engineers. Plus if you did it at across all of society, you’d leave a lot of your workers permanently unemployed.
“What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” is the entire premise here.
That probably applies to at least half of all the sociological/governance stuff posted on LW… Plus no existing literature search beyond the first page of google scholar, or sometimes even at all.
Well if the question is “If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?” the answer is “That question assumes some false things”
Yeah, that’s part of the problem with the hypothetical, but even in a world where the premises of Wentworld/ “What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” were true, I’d still contest the idea that bureaucracy would be unnecessary, primarily due to both coordination reasons and the fact that verification would still be massively easier than generation for a lot of natural problems, so I still don’t buy the logical implication.
There would probably be less bureaucracy, but not none in his world.
But that premise falls apart as soon as a large fraction of those (currently) highly motivated (relatively) smart tech workers can only get jobs in retail or middle management.