Hacker Remix

Tog's Paradox

212 points by adzicg 15 hours ago | 93 comments

nine_k 13 hours ago

It looks almost as if humans have a nearly infinite backlog of things they would do if they only had time and capability, and a limit on the amount of effort they are capable of exerting per day. Then, once new tools increase their productivity and free up a bit of resources, they pick more desiderata from the backlog, and try to also accomplish that. Naturally they seek more tools for the newly-possible activities, and the loop closes.

This applies to any activity, leisure emphatically included. Travel became simpler → more vacations now involve flying a plane and thus obtaining tickets online and thus comparison-shopping, aggregating reviews of faraway places, etc → omg, vacation travel is complex again. It just allows to fulfill more of a dream.

TheJoeMan 12 hours ago

I like to apply a similar lesson taught to me about content to consume - with the internet, there is a nearly infinite stream of entertainment and news, and it can feel overwhelming. In the past, our predecessors could read their 1 local printed newspaper and be "finished". So you have to change your thinking, to be we are able to curate a high-quality stream that constantly flows by, and when we desire, we can dip in and scoop up 1 serving.

To your comment about vacations, the issue is people subconsciously want to ensure their trip value is "maximized" - oh no, do I have time to see all 10 best spots in the city? Or some historical building is closed, and you read online how it's a lifechanging experience to see, and now you feel left out. So you have to push that aside, follow the 80/20 rule, and appreciate what you ARE able to do on your trip.

andai 5 hours ago

> In the past, our predecessors could read their 1 local printed newspaper and be "finished".

HN front page is almost slow-moving enough to replicate this experience! (This appears to be by design?)

kylebenzle 4 hours ago

Dang has mentioned that getting the front page refresh rate was one of the hardest things to get right!

bioxept 9 hours ago

How do you curate the content you consume? And how do you prevent yourself from consuming non-curated content and loosing yourself in it?

mfro 6 hours ago

Feed readers and self discipline I would guess. I don't want to pay or host a feed reader right now, and I'm bad at self discipline, so I just limit what social media I use to HN and some blogs.

MichaelZuo 10 hours ago

The interesting question is, why do so many people value spending time ‘maximizing’ with uncertain prospects more than extra time to enjoy the trip?

Eisenstein 9 hours ago

I think people are different that way. When I visit a city on my own, I tend to just wander around and find a nice spot or meet some interesting people and do whatever flows from that. Whereas when I am with certain friends or family, there is always a schedule and a destination.

gukov 8 hours ago

Well, travelling as a group of people almost always demands having a plan, otherwise “we’ll just wander around until we find something interesting” is a hard sell to get everyone on board.

Vedor 8 hours ago

Fair point. And that's why I prefer to travel alone or just with my fiancee. It's just much easier to, well, wander as you please.

Terr_ 7 hours ago

That makes me think of Dune:

> Mankind has ah only one mm-m-m science," the Count said as they picked up their parade of followers and emerged from the hall into the waiting room - a narrow space with high windows and floor of patterned white and purple tile.

> "And what science is that?" the Baron asked.

> "It's the um-m-m-ah-h science of ah-h-h discontent," the Count said.

There are various ways to interpret that, but I prefer a more Stoic or Buddhist view, where it's a bad habit but we can be better at it. (As opposed to a more god-worm-totalitarian one, where humans are dissatisfied cattle to be managed.)

xelxebar 36 minutes ago

That quote seems about right. Nice connection. Thanks for sharing.

Indeed, desire and dissatisfaction are quite productive forces! They don't necessarily entail dysphoria, though. Or more pithily if you prefer, "lack is a kind of abundance."

GP's "near infinite backlog" framing still implicitly hints at something like an underlying state of pure satisfaction if only we could address all the issues or whatnot. IMHO, desire actively functions in its own peculiar ways, and the personal narratives we attach to those functions can frame them as a helpful, collaborative things, rather than obstacles to be overcome.

stocknoob 10 hours ago

One trick is to hold your desires relatively constant (remind yourself that just X years ago, you dreamed of doing Y, which you can do now for much less effort). We somehow let the cost involved in a task influence how much we can enjoy it.

delichon 13 hours ago

The nearly infinite backlog also means that there is nearly infinite demand for labor and Luddite adjacent arguments that labor saving technology causes persistent underemployment are invalid.

falcor84 13 hours ago

Even if we shouldn't be concerned about "persistent" underemployment, I still think that rapid "transient" unemployment due to rapidly evolving tech over the coming decades may cause significant societal upheaval that we should be concerned about - even if it's "just luddites" coming to burn our data centers.

nine_k 13 hours ago

It mostly means that human desires are insatiable by construction, so humans always feel somehow missing out and wanting.

Check out the works of S. Gautama on the topic; it's enlightening! :)

Epa095 13 hours ago

Friendly reminder that things ended up quite shit for the actuall ludites, and the advantages only 'trickled down' after a generation or two. So I will keep being worried for everyone who works now, and their kids.

bluGill 1 hour ago

The ludlites needed to learn new jobs. I know many old people who are unwilling to try anything new. I try to not be one, but sometimes I've already seen that in some different form - I'm not sure if I'm right to be cynical about new things or not.

delichon 12 hours ago

I don't know anyone who disputes that economic progress necessarily has winners and losers in the near term. Or that there is much we can do to cushion the blow to the losers. But to prevent the blow altogether would mean preventing the rise of powered looms and other machines that have done much for those later generations. It would be an example of ruinous empathy.

asoneth 9 hours ago

> It would be an example of ruinous empathy.

Setting aside empathy, giving some thought about how we can slow the rate of change and/or cushion the fall for those affected is also in our self-interest.

As the number of people who have little left to lose grows, it destabilizes society and sets the stage for populism and revolution. Are cheap goods really so important that we're willing to leave our children to deal with another round of communism vs fascism?

pixl97 5 hours ago

Ya the point you make is one the so many of the 'only the strong survive' type miss. Maybe that person would be employed and fine, but the person that just lost everything may be willing to burn down the world.

lupire 12 hours ago

Indeed. People who use Luddite as a slur are ignorant of history and (possibly unwittingly) repeating capitalist propaganda.

mrguyorama 8 hours ago

It's just classic "Ends justify the means" thinking. It doesn't matter that 60k people will be jobless and eventually homeless because we are not "limiting" the "advancement" of society. It's okay if people suffer today because we are reducing the global suffering of tomorrow!

Nevermind that there does not have to be any cross purposes in those two sides! We don't have to get our clogs out and beat up the AI machines, we just have to "take care of" the people who's jobs the AI machines made redundant!

Adequate social welfare and safety nets, significant opportunities to retrain in new (and otherwise expensive) fields, funding for re-homing people and entire towns that have been made redundant.

And also a willingness to agree that "tech advancement" isn't morally neutral by default.

posix86 14 hours ago

Tog's paradox is the main reason why I suspect that generative AI will never destroy art, it will enhance it. It allows you to create artworks within minutes that until recently required hours to create and years to master. This will cause new art to emerge that pushes these new tools to the limit, again with years of study and mastery, and they will look like nothing we've been able to produce so far.

rifty 7 hours ago

My opinion, art meant to capture and communicate the emotions and truth of an exact moment will always have a place. But also, as the time cost to represent a single frame of an idea becomes achievable in fractions of a second, what it unlocks is the ability to represent ideas that are best expressed through longer time sequences. What we wait on is tools that better allows us to constrain, guide and sculpt the generated sequence as it evolves.

As someone who has always loved fractal and Mandelbrot zooms, infinite AI zooms are already cool new art experience made possible in terms of feasible time cost to make. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1vrPpM4eyM

Drakim 13 hours ago

This is exactly what happened when digital tools like Photoshop became mainstream, where you can copy-paste, recolor, adjust, stretch and transform. It didn't obsolete the manual creation of art, but instead enhanced it. It's common for artists to sketch on paper (or tablet) and later digitize and color on their computer, achieving results faster and better than what was possible in the past.

psd1 12 hours ago

I agree but also don't.

I crave authenticity. I recognise the creativity and talent in digital painting, but it lacks authenticity. I hardly feel I'll like AI art more.

Not all art needs to be high art, of course. I've bought prints of digital paintings and woodblock prints. Nonetheless, /r/ArtPorn today is like going to the cinema and being shown a compilation of TV adverts. AI art is probably not going to improve that.

Drakim 11 hours ago

I totally get that, but do consider that there were probably people in the past who felt that non-analog art wasn't authentic. That it's not a real piece of art on a real piece of paper or canvas, but a mocking grid of pixels digitized to mimic the authentic but with a jagged plastic aftertaste.

Personally, I love pixel art and think it a very legitimate medium to create art in. I can understand why somebody wants art to be something physical and real, unique and non-digital, but I feel much more strongly that the advent of digital art gave more than it took.

My hopes is that the same will be true for AI art.

Eisenstein 8 hours ago

A.I. will not create 'art' because art is at its essence an expression of the human condition. However, it will create a lot of what is now commoditized craft that resembles certain kinds of art, like advertising, corporate design, a lot of architecture, and graphic design.

psychoslave 13 hours ago

We don’t align completely with the part on mastering, at least as stated here.

That is, yes, we can make large amount of images/videos/texts with generative AI that we would never have been able to produce otherwise, because we didn’t dedicated enough time in mastering corresponding arts. But mastering an art is only marginally about the objects you can craft. The main change it brings is how we perceive objects and how we imagine that we can transform the world (well at least a tiny peace of it) through that new perspective.

Of course "mastering generative AI" can be an interesting journey of it’s own.

k__ 9 hours ago

Fair.

However, it seems to me that most people just think they are some kind of Rick Rubin, who just need the right tools ato be finally appreciated for their taste and I don't think even a fraction of them has taste.

jodacola 14 hours ago

First I've seen this, but also: this feels like a slightly long-winded explanation of what we're actually trying to achieve through improving efficiency and such through software, right?

Make things easier and improve productivity, because we humans can do more with technology. Especially relevant in the current AI dialogue around what it's going to do to different industries.

> Consider an HR platform that automates payroll and performance management, freeing up HR staff from routine tasks. HR teams will need to justify what they do the rest of the time...

This quote, though, is one I'd like to further mull: added software complexity that is the result of job justification.

ChrisMarshallNY 14 hours ago

> added software complexity that is the result of job justification.

I have found that some folks like to be "high priest gatekeepers." They want to be The Only One That Understands The System, so they are indispensable, and it also strokes their own ego.

If possible, they might customize the system, so they are the only ones that can comprehend it, and they can often be extremely rude to folks that don't have their prowess.

I suspect that we've all run into this, at one time or another. It's fairly prevalent, in tech.

jodacola 13 hours ago

> high priest gatekeepers

I like that! I'll be adding that to my back pocket for an appropriate conversation in the future.

I've absolutely experienced this, and, to a degree, I'm dealing with it now in supporting a huge enterprise platform that's a few decades old.

The really interesting (frustrating?) piece is that the "high priest gatekeepers" are on both sides of the equation - the people who have used the system for years and know the appropriate incantations and the people who have developed it for years and understand the convoluted systems on the backend.

This dynamic (along with other things, because organizations are complex) has led to a very bureaucratic organization that could be far more efficient.

ChrisMarshallNY 13 hours ago

I remember an xkcd, that was talking about releasing a version that fixes a keyboard mapping bug, and a user complaining, because they had learned to compensate for the mapping error.

You can't please everyone.

psd1 13 hours ago

Worse than that: https://xkcd.com/1172/

ChrisMarshallNY 13 hours ago

I think that's the one I had in mind.

Suppafly 10 hours ago

>I have found that some folks like to be "high priest gatekeepers." They want to be The Only One That Understands The System, so they are indispensable, and it also strokes their own ego.

I agree that that happens, but I suspect a lot of times it's not a conscious decision by the person who is doing the gatekeeping. The end result is more or less the same, but often those people feel like they are the only one that understands, not that they intentionally want to be the only one that understands.

It seems like a trivial difference, but having some empathy for these people and finding out which is which makes it possible to deal with at least a subset of these people.

Terr_ 7 hours ago

> I suspect a lot of times it's not a conscious decision by the person who is doing the gatekeeping

Also, it might not always/only be about seeking status but also a safety/trauma situation, where the high-priest has a lonely duty to prevent some danger that others don't truly understand.

ChrisMarshallNY 7 hours ago

That’s a really good point, and I’ll try to keep that PoV in mind, the next time I run into it.

psychoslave 14 hours ago

I don’t know, I tend to prefer honing my skill at crafting simpler solutions. And if some colleague come with something simpler than my proposal, I will rather be pleased and honored to be able to work with bright minds that can cast more lights for me on path to more elegant patterns.

lupire 12 hours ago

Considering your choice of metaphor, it's clear that the phenomenon existed long before "tech". It is a hallmark of bureaucracy through the ages.

ChrisMarshallNY 12 hours ago

Oh, yeah. Basic human nature.

oersted 13 hours ago

There's a flip side to this that I think is quite positive.

When you build a tool that improves efficiency, the users either do more with the same effort or do the same with less effort. The former might be more constructive, both are good.

When the tool is particularly effective, it enables use cases that were not even considered before because they just took too much effort. That's fantastic, but I suppose that's the paradox described here, the new use case will come with new requirements, now there's new things to make more efficient. That's what progress is all about isn't it?

thuridas 8 hours ago

As a developer, that is heart warming thought.