3 ms·

If you agree with the premise that people will spend money for what will make them better off instead of worse (following their own judgements criteria, which c

• AlexandrB 6y ago
  > This means they became rich as a consequence of everyone being made better off. So I would personally value their insights. This is, frankly, libertarian bullshit. Many capitalists have gotten rich off of making weapons, enslaving others, exploiting loopholes in the legal system, or generally rent collecting. The examples are too many to list but IBM in Nazi Germany and Enron come to mind. It's a grave error in judgement to confuse wealth with knowledge, wisdom, or ethics.
• kennywinker 6y ago
  So explain: 1. The cutting of research into a vaccine for the original sars coronavirus. I think a lot of us would be happier if we had that basic research done right now. Clear failure of market-based solutions / forward thinking. Same vein: lack of real change on global warming. 2. Social media companies optimizing their algorithms to make people unhappy, so they spend more time on the site. Basically, no I do not accept your original premise.
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    But Peter Thiel specifically did none of these things. He initially got rich via PayPal, which simplified safe online payments, which is clearly something people wanted at that time and not particularly immoral. You might say it was progress.
    • kennywinker 6y ago
      A decent portion of his wealth came from his early investment in facebook. Literally the second example I gave of capitalism rewarding harm.
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        Is Facebook purely harmful though, or is there also progress made in connecting people together? And in any case Thiel doesn’t need to have a 100% perfectly “focused-on-your-definition-of-progress-only” track record to be worth listening to. Just apply that standard consistently and see how many people can fulfill it. OTOH, building something like PayPal alone will make a lot of other people interested in what you’ve got to say. You cannot deny that someone who achieves such a feat when no one else does (besides Elon Musk) has some special insight. But the fact that you do deny that seems like it’s rooted in some form of subjective dislike. Edit: just read your reply to sibling comment, confirmed my suspicion here.
  • 1996 6y ago
    For 1: most people do not care about diseases that do not matter. Most people consider the common cold normal and acceptable. I was very sad such research never went very far, for I believe viruses are way more deadly that we think: as we know now that the EBV can cause many bad things long term, there is no reason to think other viruses can do the same. The fact that these 2 separate diseases are called the "kissing disease" (EBV) and the "common cold" (coronaviruses) gives a fake sense of safety. SARS was the perfect scare to get research started! HOWEVER, most people do not care about viruses, and problems in general besides imminent danger. If you too care, realize we are in the minority. Before covid19, most people though the wearing of masks when one has a cold in asia was overkill. Even now, in the midst of a pandemic, the wearing of masks is a hard sell. I fully expect all basic precaution like transparent plastic sheets in front of the checkout to be gone as soon as the pandemic is over, because we are in the minority. For most people, the experience of directly seeing the person doing their checkout is preferable to the alternatives. It makes them happier. It is not hard to expand that to other issues: even for a virus like Ebola, research doesn't get much money. Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care. 2. Have you noticed how people play various games like Zynga, which accomplishes nothing? Just like videogames in general: unless you are being paid for playing (professional player), you are getting nothing out of it, except maybe better reflexes - but you could achieve the same result in much less time. Social networks are the same. What am I accomplishing here? Nothing. You could even say, as I often talk to people who reject my premises, HN makes me unhappy. Yet I post here? So you must consider that what we consider make people, you or me unhappy is an oversimplification. We must gain something else out of this - maybe a dopamine hit? Social networks are all in competition with eachother. You will prefer the one that gives you the best overall experience, the largest dopamine hit with the lowest unhappiness. This social network increase overall happiness. There may be more than one: facebook for regular people, HN for hackers, Twitch for gamers, etc. It's hard to overcome the fallacy of composition (the tendancy to extrapolate from our own experience to the population level): what makes us happy make make 50% of the people miserable, and vice-versa.
    • kennywinker 6y ago
      > Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care. You are right in both of these descriptions. What we want (are willing to spend money on) and what is going to make us happiest, are different things. And capitalism rewards finding things that we will spend money on. Not things that will make us happier. But can you imagine a world where we didn’t make billionaires out of people for making us unhappy? For destroying the environment through resource extraction? Imagine we took all that money and funded and rewarded the scientists who had the forethought to develop a coronavirus vaccine. We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now. Since capitalism rewards the opposite of that, the only way we get to that world or closer to it is by abandoning capitalism as the gold standard for social organization. One small step towards that is to stop idolizing billionaires like Thiel