On dignity of labor

Is one form of work superior or inferior to other?

When the question is put this way, the answer is obviously no; but with qualifications. This blog is about discussion those qualifications.

Since all form work that is available needs to be done and someone has to do it, inferior or superior is incorrect. Instead, the right words to use are enjoyable work vs boring work.

Let me try to articulate it and then we can see what forms of work are more enjoyable then others. All forms of work that have scope of improvement even after you have been at it for more than 10 years are more enjoyable than those that stagnate. Note that this is two class categorization, there is no ranking of jobs in terms of enjoyment here. Though I have not used the term "love your job" here, but my definition is driven by the idea that the jobs that are challenging enough to have scope of improvement are the most loveable jobs.

Let's try a few examples .

Is entrepreneurship better than working at a big corporate? Not necessarily, you could be innovating and learning in a big company and you could be regurgitating old ideas in a thriving market. Conventionally, jobs in a big corporate are considered not-loveable because it is easy to loose sight of your impact to the company and the society.

Is farming any worse than a job of a scientist? No. A curious farmer is also a scientist who experiments on his land to maximize the ways of crop production. Given the knowledge, resources and training, both scientists and farmer can be good or bad at their work.

Is software engineering worse than doing research? I have worked in IT role for 3.5 years and I can say that software design is an art that you can keep improving even after 10 years. Why am I clarifying this? Because I just heard someone using the term "code monkeys" for software engineering at a computer vision conference in Boston. Then I realized, how we as researchers condemn engineering as something that we should stay away from. There is a rationale behind that: specialization of skill set; not that engineering is inferior than research. I guess, we should try to train ourself in research and focus our energy on research because we aren't trained to do engineering that well. And whenever we get a grant to do research, someone else is going to re-engineer the system that we built, perhaps in a better way.

I guess, each community of workers who love their job will find some or other reason to despise others but we should remind ourselves that even inferior jobs need to be done, at least till the time they are automated. And till that time, we need to be thankful to those who take up such jobs.

Apart from this distinction we should also realize that some forms of skills are more respected by the society than others because of no particular reason. Most skilful gymnast wins a gold medal in Olympics, but most no one tries to find out the most skilful carpenter, mason or potter. A painter having access to art galleries and one who understands and communicates the issues that concerns rich minds can be a millionaire while a street side painter with limited knowledge of rich circles and mindset may fight poverty all his life.

All honest forms of jobs command my respect as long as they contribute to the society.

Arguments against free will

This post has been inspired by the following video, where Noam Chomsky expresses his opinion on free will. He just despises the idea of absence of free will. He quotes William James "if you don't believe in the idea of free will why even bother presenting an argument."

My stand is that humans are state machines, they gobble up input from senses, saves a part of them as memory and takes predictable actions based on that memory. There may be uncertainty in the Heisenberg sense in prediction, but overall there is no external force that helps humans take the "free" decision, it is just your past memory along will your genes/body that completely determines your every "free" decision which again determines the input to your senses and recursively your "free" decision.

I may be wrong and experiments may suggest otherwise in future, but for now no experiments suggest otherwise and the theory of state machines fits perfectly to evolution and psychological evidences and theories.

Noam Chomsky asserts that we can't explain free will, but it is central to our beliefs. I agree it is central to our beliefs, but I don't agree that we can't explain it. The explanation is just that belief of free will is just an illusion. I agree it is a pretty provocative statement but why else explains psychological diseases, concussions and experiments that show people justifying independent decision taken by their left and right brain.

Let's get back to the question that was initially asked to Noam Chomsky, "How does morality fits in the idea of determinism and materialism?" The answer lies in accepting morality not as a personal concept but as a social concept which trains people to think on a social level rather than personal level. The common counter argument is that isn't it unfair to punish a person who is not responsible for his own crimes. I would say it is unfair but who said that life is meant to be fair. We need to punish criminals to discourage future criminals because knowledge that you will be punished for your crimes is part of the deterministic decision machine that we so lovingly want to call free will.