View source for Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q53,73/hard-way-531

<pre>"Why would I (not) go to the effort to become good at something over a long period of time when I already have access to a simulation such as ChatGPT or a game or a recorded broadcast that was made by someone else?"
I'll decisively answer that with another question. Why don't people openly post readings of fan fiction?
Because society harshly punishes people for trying to do the same thing that other people are already doing. Somebody does a thing, and asks society to be protected, and then whenever anyone else tries to do the same thing, they throw the second person a lawsuit, claiming that if two people separately went to all the effort to create the same category of thing, with neither one copying the final creation directly from the other, then society would be ruined.

People's actions take place in a timeline of history where today is permanently changed by yesterday. The biography of one person influences not just the biographies of the next generation, but the biography of all other surrounding people, removing possibilities from other people's biographies. One person's exercise of free will takes away another person's free will. With enough people exercising free will a lot of people will have lost almost all their remaining choices and are left doing basically nothing.
But this paradox is not really something you can simply interrupt in the middle, because ask any of the people who are currently eating up all the free will to do anything differently (at all) and they will quickly get angry at you and say they want to do things the way they want to do them, even if it ends up making their rivals mad and both of those people have to fight each other over what each of them does and doesn't get to do. Even if they waste thousands of dollars on a lawsuit they will see no problem with it and think that's the natural way things have to be.
So, each time somebody thinks about going through the effort to learn to do something, they're actually in an active struggle against all the people currently doing it. If they are any less good at it than the people who are currently designated experts on it or hired to do it or making money on it in any event, _there is a real possibility those people will get offended_ and tell that person to not even try and go do something else so they can do their job better. This is the problem. It's not the people giving up, it's the people who are really actually better at the thing and who really actually make doing it pointless. It's not the principle of "convenience". It's _people_ physically standing in the way.
Have you ever thought about what would happen if a group of people looked at a democratic republic, decided they didn't like it, and went to a lot of effort to learn how to make countries to create an entirely new republic over the top of it? The existing government would be furious. It would think of all of them as traitors to their country even though none of them is lawless and all they want to do is build another republic with laws, representatives of some sort, and everything. It's the exact same problem. Whenever people have already done something they defend it from anybody else interfering in it, and they stratify society, purely through dividing it horizontally. Expertise and knowing how to do something before somebody else are forms of hierarchy, regardless of what anyone says about that. There will never be another Benjamin Franklin, and it's not because people are lazy or defeatist, but actually because Benjamin Franklin snatched up and completely exhausted the role of Benjamin Franklin. What does that mean? Think about that for a while.
What I think it means is that history is more or less a big to-do list on which some items are crossed off, and for good or bad reasons the only actions you can practically take are the uncrossed items. The question isn't "how do I learn the craft I want to", the question is "out of the big heap of things people have already done, how do I sort through every single one of them that might conceivably be relevant to what I'm doing and efficiently make use of all of them even as people will have not Already Done things the way _I_ wanted them to be done?" Before long, you'll realize that it's the entire concept of jobs and products and businesses and "going to a lot of effort" personally to supposedly help others in society that wastes everyone's time. It's the assumption that "going to a lot of effort" today actually helps anyone else tomorrow, rather than fundamentally being the wrong choice.

If you think about this same problem for enough years, and think about the results of it _practically_ , you're eventually going to become a Communist. Because you'll realize that history and biographies aren't just whatever we want them to be, biographies run away from everyone and become what they causally want themselves to be. It takes a _whole lot_ of work to understand how to fix that. But it's conceivably possible if you _are_ willing to put in an absurd amount of effort.
So the question is, will people realize that the actual "hard path" is diagramming the entire set of rules for how society works and using those to fix it, or will they look for a simulation somebody already made to solve their problems?</pre>