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> The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays. >> I have a foreboding of an America in my ch

> The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays. >> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness… Not really. His prediction actually seems pretty off-base, with only some bits that are coincidentally correct. For instance, he seems to attributing the cause of that decline to superstition, when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on pursing their narrow self-interest. I don't know the full context of that passage, but my read comports with my understanding of Sagan's biases.

xhkkffbf 9mo ago
I kind of agree. I find that almost everyone I meet has a firm grasp on tech topics affect their lives. From social media to privacy, they seem to understand the fundamental questions even though they aren't programmers or CISOs or whatever.
krapp 9mo ago
> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest. That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism. For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.
- palmotea 9mo ago
  >> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest. > That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism. I think you (and Sagan) are getting the causality backwards. Unrestrained capitalism doesn't serve people, it serves money. "Widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism" is a reaction to an economic system that doesn't serve the common person and is very resistant to change.
  - akramachamarei 9mo ago
    Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values. I think it's also worth dilating on this notion of "unrestrained capitalism". Capitalism is after all a product of restraints, namely the enforcement of property, contracts, and the validity of money.
    - palmotea 9mo ago
      > Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values. Capitalism doesn't work to satisfy the wants and needs of the people in a society, generally. It works to satisfy the wants and needs of the people who have money, in proportion to the amount of money they have. If you don't have money but need something, Capitalism says "kindly FOAD." If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more. So as inequality increases and wealth gets concentrated, a capitalist ceremony (without more restraints that we have) will increasingly neglect the needs of a large fraction of the people in society. A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs, generally (usually just lazily generalizing from US vs. USSR circa 1980), but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
pjmorris 9mo ago
> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.
- palmotea 9mo ago
  >> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization > For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions. Come on, they are not. One is a value system, the other is a technology/practice.
  - pjmorris 9mo ago
    Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else. As economist Stevie Wonder once said, "When you believe in things that you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way"
    - palmotea 9mo ago
      > Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. I think it's too much of a stretch to label anything "irrational" as superstition. I think both the purported benefits of the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization rely on plausible-but-false belief in the outcomes created by the 'invisible hand'/selfishness-at-scale, but I wouldn't call it superstition, just wrong. Also, I think the connotations of words are pretty important, and there are a lot of words that for the most part mean the same thing with different connotations. If I had to describe the connotation of superstition, its an action believed to have an effect, but that effect is a total non-sequitur. At least with what we're talking about, there's at least a plausible basis for believing the effect will happen, even it that basis is wrong.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

xhkkffbf 9mo ago

I kind of agree. I find that almost everyone I meet has a firm grasp on tech topics affect their lives. From social media to privacy, they seem to understand the fundamental questions even though they aren't programmers or CISOs or whatever.

krapp 9mo ago

> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest. That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism. For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.

palmotea 9mo ago
>> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest. > That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism. I think you (and Sagan) are getting the causality backwards. Unrestrained capitalism doesn't serve people, it serves money. "Widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism" is a reaction to an economic system that doesn't serve the common person and is very resistant to change.
- akramachamarei 9mo ago
  Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values. I think it's also worth dilating on this notion of "unrestrained capitalism". Capitalism is after all a product of restraints, namely the enforcement of property, contracts, and the validity of money.
  - palmotea 9mo ago
    > Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values. Capitalism doesn't work to satisfy the wants and needs of the people in a society, generally. It works to satisfy the wants and needs of the people who have money, in proportion to the amount of money they have. If you don't have money but need something, Capitalism says "kindly FOAD." If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more. So as inequality increases and wealth gets concentrated, a capitalist ceremony (without more restraints that we have) will increasingly neglect the needs of a large fraction of the people in society. A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs, generally (usually just lazily generalizing from US vs. USSR circa 1980), but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.

pjmorris 9mo ago

> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.

palmotea 9mo ago
>> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization > For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions. Come on, they are not. One is a value system, the other is a technology/practice.
- pjmorris 9mo ago
  Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else. As economist Stevie Wonder once said, "When you believe in things that you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way"
  - palmotea 9mo ago
    > Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. I think it's too much of a stretch to label anything "irrational" as superstition. I think both the purported benefits of the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization rely on plausible-but-false belief in the outcomes created by the 'invisible hand'/selfishness-at-scale, but I wouldn't call it superstition, just wrong. Also, I think the connotations of words are pretty important, and there are a lot of words that for the most part mean the same thing with different connotations. If I had to describe the connotation of superstition, its an action believed to have an effect, but that effect is a total non-sequitur. At least with what we're talking about, there's at least a plausible basis for believing the effect will happen, even it that basis is wrong.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]