bogus! I was there, and let me tell you, I get so much more done each day, it's shocking:
- cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea.
- remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500 (in today-dollars) a month to sit on the Long Island Railroad and read books. Now I work when I'm ready to be productive. I listen-in on zoom calls, whisper questions to people, read docs, all "soaking up" information. Recently, I got tons of work done while on a grand jury - 21 cases in 8 days and no problem interleaving work, thanks to excellent WiFi and work-from-anywhere.
- e-commerce and youtube = no more repeated trips to the store for stupid shit. I've got a dozen major home improvement projects going at once, with ecomm orders every which way, from lumber to jigsaws, electrical to plumbing. Easy returns means I can experiment more. YouTube means fewer mistakes and far fewer disasters.
- globalization = variety = better tools for the job. No seriously, you have no idea how limited and shitty products used to be. In software, we had no source control let alone CI/CD - reproducibility was not a thing, let alone distributed computing. IRL, I remember trying to buy stuff at Sears and Service Merchandise and the only review system was the store clerk on commission. You can't imagine the BS we put up with, simply for a lack of variety.
(I could go on... you can't imagine healthcare back then... in the starkest definition of "productivity," cancer was often a death sentence even caught early, and now people routine survive stage 4 cancers... also everybody knew people who died young in car accidents, it was tragic but normalized, and then DUI laws and education, crumple zones and airbags all made this rare...)
Now it's true, we "waste" our newfound freedoms binge-watching Netflix, wasting time here on HN, going to the gym, and so on. Put another way, I dunno about you, but my daily/weekly "productivity limit" is not based on output, but on my brain maxxing out, from too many projects, too many names, too many details.
It's also true that many upgrades are "trivial" - vacuums with lights and on/off buttons on the handle; better quality audio and video; 1000s of streaming shows. Back in the day, we had maybe a dozen channels and the quality was often terrible, from mediocre writing and acting, to hilariously simple production values that even pre-dated the demands of 4K. Historical fiction wasn't popular because it sucked. Sci-fi and horror weren't much of a thing because the special effects sucked. And and and.
These don't make you productive, and they don't even make you happier unless you remember to appreciate them.
Which is why I'm taking the time to write this comment. I just had another amazing day that my older self simply couldn't imagine, let alone someone from mid-century or before computers.
I am not convinced by this lengthy rebuttal, in fact it just solidified OP's point.
OP/Thiel's point: It's not that we haven't made any progress, but rather the progress since the cold war has been disappointing.
I'm a bit ambivalent about Globalisation and whether that can be considered progress. We globalized several times (Early trade routes, 14th century, British empire and then again in post-modern era).
thiel gave us a payments company, a shitty hedge fund and a government contractor doing consulting work. not to be reductionist, but his complaining doesn't register for me at all. for god's sake he tries to get people to quit Stanford to start businesses that necessarily can only coast on previous achievements, instead of doing science.
I never understood this kind of vitriol against Thiel. The media has been smearing his image because he didn’t fit into the mold of their political agenda.
I suggest listening to his interviews with a completely open mind and thinking on your own. I sometimes disagree with him but in no way he is evil/satanic as media portrays him. Sad.
I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.
I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago
Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.
And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.
Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.
Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.
The home improvement stuff is huge. I just recently bought a home and talking to my parents about how they did home maintenance using printed materials was incredible. Compare even basic information like "learn to recaulk a shower" via a black and white book with grainy photos and 10,000 high definition videos of people doing it. Let alone a job of higher complexity.
- cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea.
- remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500 (in today-dollars) a month to sit on the Long Island Railroad and read books. Now I work when I'm ready to be productive. I listen-in on zoom calls, whisper questions to people, read docs, all "soaking up" information. Recently, I got tons of work done while on a grand jury - 21 cases in 8 days and no problem interleaving work, thanks to excellent WiFi and work-from-anywhere.
- e-commerce and youtube = no more repeated trips to the store for stupid shit. I've got a dozen major home improvement projects going at once, with ecomm orders every which way, from lumber to jigsaws, electrical to plumbing. Easy returns means I can experiment more. YouTube means fewer mistakes and far fewer disasters.
- globalization = variety = better tools for the job. No seriously, you have no idea how limited and shitty products used to be. In software, we had no source control let alone CI/CD - reproducibility was not a thing, let alone distributed computing. IRL, I remember trying to buy stuff at Sears and Service Merchandise and the only review system was the store clerk on commission. You can't imagine the BS we put up with, simply for a lack of variety.
(I could go on... you can't imagine healthcare back then... in the starkest definition of "productivity," cancer was often a death sentence even caught early, and now people routine survive stage 4 cancers... also everybody knew people who died young in car accidents, it was tragic but normalized, and then DUI laws and education, crumple zones and airbags all made this rare...)
Now it's true, we "waste" our newfound freedoms binge-watching Netflix, wasting time here on HN, going to the gym, and so on. Put another way, I dunno about you, but my daily/weekly "productivity limit" is not based on output, but on my brain maxxing out, from too many projects, too many names, too many details.
It's also true that many upgrades are "trivial" - vacuums with lights and on/off buttons on the handle; better quality audio and video; 1000s of streaming shows. Back in the day, we had maybe a dozen channels and the quality was often terrible, from mediocre writing and acting, to hilariously simple production values that even pre-dated the demands of 4K. Historical fiction wasn't popular because it sucked. Sci-fi and horror weren't much of a thing because the special effects sucked. And and and.
These don't make you productive, and they don't even make you happier unless you remember to appreciate them.
Which is why I'm taking the time to write this comment. I just had another amazing day that my older self simply couldn't imagine, let alone someone from mid-century or before computers.