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> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive mi
by roenxi 3y ago
> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that.
Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively.
Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt.
> go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.
- mycologos 3y ago> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. I believe that there are genuine skills separating billionaires from normal people, but I'm not sure that the primary one is reliably "[being] better than average at doing the rational thing". Being OK at logic, starting with some money, and having an enormous tolerance for risk seems to be a common formula for becoming billion-scale rich (and also, in most cases, much poorer than that). I'd argue that this kind of appetite for risk, and volatility in general, makes such people questionable managers of society's resources, though I guess there are more "steward-style" billionaires like Buffett that might be more palatable.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. I call BS. First, Musk is all about the irrational. Second, being a billionaire doesn't mean you have some super power. It's luck and rich parents (usually). Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO!
- roenxi 3y ago> Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO! Amazon has ~1.5 million workers. If Jeff Bezos donated his entire fortune to them, that would be a one-off payment of $11,000 each. That is quite substantial, but it isn't enough to be a political issue - for example the US wasted an order of magnitude more money on the Afghanistan war (completely pointless) and about order of magnitude people were displaced. We should be more worried about allowing people like Bush having influence. And the yacht is a rounding error in all that.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> Amazon has ~1.5 million workers. If Jeff Bezos donated his entire fortune to them, that would be a one-off payment of $11,000 each. That's not even what I said. Not even close to what I said.
- roenxi 3y agoDo you expect to be typing my comments for me? Of course it isn't what you said! It is what I said. You're focusing on the rounding error. Focus on the big issues. Bezos is making great use of those resources compared to the next-best non-billionaire institution, which is the US government.