There are two groups of people. They’re each given a magic/alien/divine trinket.
Group A’s trinket can instantly produce any raw resource. A raw resource is anything that could exist without a humor labor process (cooking, blacksmithing, woodworking, etc). If something absolutely requires human labor to be put into it to exist, it can’t be made by the magic box.
Group B’s trinket can make one gain a hypothetically “perfect” theoretical understanding of everything. Essentially, if there was a Universal PhD in Everything (medicine, engineering, etc.), they would obtain it without any effort. It works on anyone, and this knowledge is implanted instantly.
If given all the time in the universe, which group would survive the test of time or come out on top of the other? This has been stirring in my brain for a while, and I want to hear your thoughts.
I personally lean Group B because they wouldn’t have to discover or painstakingly engineer anything, and could immediately set their sails for technologies they know to exist. But at the same time, Group A would never have to worry about scarcity, so they could dedicate all of their time to infrastructure and research unlike Group B which still has to deal with scarcity.
Knowledge.
You’re not getting anything that has to be mined out of the ground, who mined it? You’re not getting anything related to agriculture and a very limited subset of “wild” food, who developed it or harvested it?
The video game ass concept of “resources” devalues the labor required to produce them.
If you want to put it to a game, the only reasonable context in which these circumstances could exist, use civ or something and see what happens.
Perfect knowledge means perfect prediction. Group B can build a device to perturb the state of the universe in such a way that an asteroid made of cotton candy enters perfect geostationary orbit, if that’s what they’re into. Infinite raw resources only matter if you’ve got something to do with them. Knowing more means doing more with less.
Disagree. Perfect knowledge doesn’t mean you know how to do anything and everything, it just means that you know the extent of knowledge and all physical limitations. Technology is not actually magical. If you cannot physically muster the resources to place an asteroid made of cotton candy into geostationary orbit, then the knowledge of how to do it is pointless in a competitive setting.
Group A literally breaks those physical limitations, meaning that they have all the time in the world to develop that technology, if they wanted, which to be honest they wouldn’t have to.
They’re not putting the asteroid in orbit, they’re using their perfect knowledge to point a laser at some specific point in space such that the cotton candy asteroid just does that (because they can predict the position and velocity of every particle in the universe). If we’re gonna be perfect science dorks about the magic-device-driven hypothetical, group A has to fail because they violate conservation of mass unless the resource generator is actually teleporting those resources from somewhere else, and then they’re breaking c (plus they’re probably also colonizers, now).
As far as we are aware, that isn’t how matter works, and perfect knowledge would have to operate within the confines of existing physics. You don’t just magically have lasers, and lasers don’t magically realign atoms into carbohydrates.
As well, perfect knowledge only means perfect foresight if you think the world is completely deterministic. Otherwise it only gives you perfect knowledge of the percentages. Which is far more likely given the way quantum mechanics appears to work at the moment. Still incredibly powerful, I grant you.
Correct, that is the whole point of the thought exercise, does the ability to have perfect knowledge defeat the ability to literally break conservation of energy and elimination of opportunity costs. In my opinion, it does not.
Idk why you are bringing concepts such as ‘colonization’ into it. It is a game scenario, where they are both likely to become colonizers.There is no larger morality of genocide at play here. This isn’t real. You could just as likely say that Group B perfectly knows how to psychologically manipulate Group A, and uses that to farm them for unlimited resources. That would at least be a more compelling game outcome than ‘cotton candy asteroids’.
I’m just gonna posit the underlying thesis of an understanding of human cultural development too in the case the labor theory of value koan didn’t make you lapse into a meditative calm: if you have infinite gatherable food supply then what will pressure you to develop more complex social and labor structures to make up for your lack of resources?
This is backwards ass libertarian thinking. Complex social and labor structures are clearly historically born out of surplus, not scarcity.
May I see the historical examples of surplus that bore complex labor and social structures without intensified productive forces?
Literally look at any river civilization. Hell, even basic potlatch societies. It’s literally not even worth listing the examples, this is anthro 101.
Natural surplus allows for complex social structures to develop, as more time can be spent socializing than on simple survival. In some cases, the environment this social complexity develops in lends itself to more complex segregation of labor, which leads to more surplus, which leads to more social complexity. The river builds the city, which creates the canals that grow the city.
Social complexity precedes labor segregation, but labor segregation has a tendency to reinforce social segregation. Societies that collapse are mostly those that run themselves out of surplus, and are therefore unable to sustain social complexity which leads to a swift degradation of labor complexity.
The belief that scarcity is the mother of invention directly comes out of neoliberal austerity politics. Most of the time invention comes from those who already benefit from the surplus, but are compelled through some social complexity to want more. Which of course, they know because they give all the resources to ‘productive individuals’, but they for some reason believe that if they limit the surplus, people will be spontaneously inventive.
In this scenario, Group B is always under a state of natural surplus.
So straight out of the gate, any unintelligible screeching at the liberals hiding in the walls should be directed at the op for positing a labor-reductive video game brained ass question, not me who made two replies each intended to gently turn the op away from that line of thinking using different assumptions about their priors in each one.
Second, as long as we’re out here reducing, what you said is pretty reductive. Metalworkers in Central America got so good at using native metals like copper and gold because it was relatively common and they never fucked with alloying to the degree that groups who went through a Bronze Age did because they never needed to make their limited sources of metals go farther.
Not all of human history and development reflects this one pull where a scarcity can be directly linked to development or widespread practice but it’s absurd to say that only scarcity or excess drive development.
E: I just want to reiterate that we don’t need to be fighting each other and instead should be bullying the op for spending too much time playing paradox games.
Lol fair enough.
I will say that your metalworking example proves my point, it’s just that what the metalworkers in Bronze Age Europe had different surpluses in different amounts to work with than those in Central America. It’s not like they knew about each other and were working towards some idealized goal. They were able to screw around with the existing surpluses they had access to. Like working with pure copper is cool unless you are looking for something that has the property of bronze or know that it exists, and unless you have created large surpluses of tin in your excavation of copper there is no reason to experiment with that kind of alloying.
Agreed, it is reductionist. But my point wasn’t that all things are born out of surplus, just the vast, vast, majority and certainly the majority of social structures.
And agreed, the major problem with games like Civ, Paradox, D&D etc is that you do technically have perfect knowledge of what is supposed to come next on the tech or level up tree. You have a level of accurate mathematical foresight that just doesn’t actually exist within real life experimentation. It is 100% gamer brain.
Another thing that I didn’t even think to bitch at the op about is that having some amount of surplus or not as a driver of human development is not even supported by evidence and all the shit we’re talking about is wild ass speculation.
Tbh 10/10 great post and thread, would get all worked up again.
If we were to ‘game’ this out, the only way Group A loses is there is some sort of extremely early game or mid game conflict wherein Group B annihilates all of group Group A with like, a nuke or bioweapon.
In every other scenario, Group A wins simply because they can expand their population exponentially to the point that Group B literally has to expend all of their limited resources attempting to contain group A. More hands means more laborers and researchers than group B can ever actually muster.
Basically, Group A never has opportunity cost, while Group B does.
Group A’s trinket can instantly produce any raw resource. A raw resource is anything that could exist without a humor labor process (cooking, blacksmithing, woodworking, etc). If something absolutely requires human labor to be put into it to exist, it can’t be made by the magic box.
What can group A even create? They can’t make metals but they can maybe makes ores? They can’t make any food except for what can be found in the wild? They can’t even make domesticated animals, they have to summon wild deer or something. They might be able to make stone dwellings if they can summon raw resources in any shape. They wouldn’t be able to make lumber or even timber but could make trees? They could make rain water in any quantity so that’s pretty nice.
Group A would probably fuck up and try to make a new sun (so it isn’t so dark at night) and accidentally destroy the planet because they made it only 1000 miles away.
Infinite knowledge can be acquired, infinite resources cannot, so I’d take the resources.
