confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The idea that you work for 40 years and then stop and do nothing for the last 15-20, spending all your accumulated wealth (which in this case gets sucked out by the service economy and healthcare costs), or in perhaps more welfare minded countries, by the taxpayer, is a historical anomaly. At some point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that people will have to keep working much longer (or maybe that they ought to want to work longer).
Is this behavior actually unsustainable, though? A large group of people retiring for a long time is historically unusual, but so are many other things about today. The amount of work required to produce many necessities is historically unusual. The amount of workers we have now in service roles or in roles doing intellectual labor is extremely historically unusual.
While I share your disdain for the current model of retirement, I don't see the current model becoming unsustainable any time soon. The vast majority of modern economies seems to go towards making luxuries or money pits like healthcare, not the necessities for life. In these areas it is far more possible for quality to drop without disrupting the status quo.
Where and how do you see the current model breaking down?
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
Nobody is immune to info-chaff.
The internet is already full of info-chaff (otherwise known as spam) and things are, for the most part, working fine. If AI is going to change that then it needs to do a lot better than fooling people for a couple of sentences. Spammers can already do better than that.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
Speaking primarily about video games, because that's where I'm most familiar:
I think your item 3 is a big part of the puzzle, possibly the biggest. Reviewers nowadays seem less interested in games and much more likely to have undue incentives then they used to be. However, since that's been discussed by other replies a lot I'm going to focus on an element I think is relevant that hasn't been mentioned yet.
I think a part of the decline in review usefulness is the shift away from reviews being a product of a single person and towards reviews being the product of large publications.
I've found the most useful reviews focus on how an individual saw the game and how much or how little fun they had with it. If the reviewer decides to rate the game lower because of some minor element that seriously detracted from their game experience, that's perfectly okay as long as the reviewer makes it clear so readers who might care less about that element can take the score with an appropriately-sized grain of salt.
Nowadays, at least for the bigger names in games reviews, it seems like the intent is to put out an objective score. I think that has led reviewers to stop looking so much at their level of enjoyment with the game, and instead focus on non-opinion criticisms. This way of reviewing games feels like reviewers start with a default of a perfect score and take points off for flaws, and "I didn't have much fun" needs to be translated into an objective flaw or it can't be used.
This kind of review tends to favor big companies that produce technically well-done games that are lacking something hard to define over ambitious smaller studios whose games have significant flaws but really nail the critical part of their product.
If healthcare doubles in price do people start working longer to afford healthcare in their old age? Or do they just consume less of it and accept sacrifices to the quality of it?
I think the latter, which is why I put healthcare with luxury goods as an item where a decline in quality won't kill retirement.
Healthcare in particular is also not a great example of hitting limits on what is possible. I'm informed that in many western countries a large part of the scarcity is from strict limitations on how many people can head into the profession rather than from a lack of people who could do the work (after necessary training).
If this is the case then the issue is not that a large retirement population is unsustainable, but that a gross mismanagement of resources is occurring in healthcare.
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