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This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about
by bee_rider 9mo ago
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.
I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoOr just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
- nosuchthing 9mo agoManipulating the The Keynesian Beauty Contest is the metagame, especially after the era of /r/Wall-street bets swelled up. What do you think Jim Kramer gets paid to do, report facts? By 2017 teenagers were running quantitative trading algorithms and semantic analysis trading bots they found from influencers and github. Around that time private subscription fee telegram and discord "whale" insider trading groups often had multiple levels of insider trading market manipulation running pump and dump schemes. Marks would pay to join the private chat group and at a certain time of day a ticket symbol would be released for "insiders" to buy before it's promoted in public channels. The outer circle was just providing liquidity for the deeper insiders to exit with easy profit. Most VC gambits are not much different. Sell the news. Unleash the rumors.
- ElevenLathe 9mo agoIMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire. If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.
- measurablefunc 9mo agoWhat percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?
- nosuchthing 9mo agoIn a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor. In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable. How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?
- andsoitis 9mo agoWhat’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?
- measurablefunc 9mo agoOnline influencers, podcasters, advertisers, social media product managers, political lobbyists, cryptocurrency protocol programmers, digital/NFT artists, most of the media production industry, those people w/ leaf blowers moving dust around, political commentators (e.g. fox & friends), super PACs, most NGOs, "professional" sports, various 3 letter agencies & their associated online "influence" campaigns, think tanks about machine consciousness, autonomous weapon manufacturers, & so on. Just a few off the top of my head but anything to do w/ shuffling numbers in databases is in that category as well. I haven't read "Bullshit Jobs" yet but it's on the list & I'll get to it eventually so I'm sure I can come up w/ a few more after reading it.
- mlrtime 9mo agoLol, you just listed things you don't like from a very privileged urban (my assumption) living space.
- 9mo ago
- nakedneuron 9mo agoIsn't that how Bitcoin "works"?
- achenet 9mo agoerr... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked? Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of. The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
- tim333 9mo agoMost bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble" keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher peak.
- measurablefunc 9mo agoMining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards. Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
- mlrtime 9mo agoAre you lumping in all blockchains here or just bitcoin? Because other networks don't have this problem.
- awesome_dude 9mo agoThe "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969 "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
- XorNot 9mo agoWe really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality. Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
- bee_rider 9mo agoJust make it broad enough that we never get a candidate promoting themselves as “electable” again.
- skissane 9mo agoThe thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
- Nevermark 9mo agoPeople vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
- albumen 9mo agoTwo options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference) Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose. https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/1541549-spoiled-votes-analysis/ https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...
- legulere 9mo agoOn the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.
- bee_rider 9mo agoI don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.
- true_religion 9mo agoIMO, abolitionist made absolutist arguments like appeals to the common sense of inalienable rights, or Christian virtue. Their opponents would have to fight through the cognitive dissonance of arguing an unnatural or unchristian position. That sounds a lot like saying slavey is obviously bad, and simultaneously also saying everyone else naturally already believes this.
- jibal 9mo agoSlavery used to be seen as a good thing by those who benefited from it (or thought they did).
- mekoka 9mo agoSlavery itself required the belief in lesser humans to absolve its beneficiaries. Guilt is one hell of a party pooper.
- vintermann 9mo agoIt's not just exhausting, it's a huge problem. Even if everyone is a complete saint all the time and has the best of intentions, going by beliefs about beliefs can trap us in situations where we're all unhappy. The classic situation is the two lovers who both want to do what they think makes their partner happy, to the extent that they don't tell what they actually want, and end up doing something neither wants. I think the goal of all sorts of cooperative planning should be to avoid such situations like the plague.
- worldsayshi 9mo agoUltimately it all comes back to the collective action problem doesn't it? I believe that is solvable.
- zombot 9mo agoYou could say that AI has become the new religion. Plus the concomitant opiate for the masses.