MarkPNeyer
But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?
Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.
The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.
> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.
For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.
In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!
What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.
If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
Maybe try asking people why they think it’s bad?
Here’s people arguing it’s doing all kinds of destructive behavior, - like setting up a fake vaccine clinic for the CIA.
https://youtu.be/wtgT_u2rWs0?si=bFX476_JgC81vJuM
I haven’t seen anyone arguing against these claims. They just say “oh but it’s helping poor people” without answering whether or not it’s been doing covert work for the CIA under the pretense that it’s aid.
If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging. And that’s what stops people who don’t understand it. Try chatting with an LLM sometime about what it looks like from their perspective. Knowing it’s not a human makes it easier to avoid getting upset.
The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.
This was done in cultures where people really believed their deceased ancestors were watching them and judging their every move, and that in the future they’d either see their ancestors in paradise, or they wouldn’t.
We just kept doing it long after those beliefs became uncool, like a lot of other vestiges of our religious past.
Thank you :)
Are you cool with that? Or is voting ineffective at stopping them?
Historically, everyone dies. The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” and there’s a clear obvious winner there: private ownership and free trade.
That mechanism is printed money untethered from a non-political base.
It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer.
But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.
Was this a change in their behavior, or a change in American political attitudes towards the role of journalism?
“Crypto” is a bunch of people trying to get rich using some cool new technology they nobody understands.
See how much bigger the second is than the first.
I think this is actually what makes the last seen non-political to some people.
In lots of cases, I think people don’t have abstract principles that guide their thinking. Their political ideals are a collection of specific beliefs without a unifying set of abstractions that links the beliefs together into a coherent thesis about what is good.
At some level, everything anyone does affects everyone they interact with. You and I are affecting each other right now, in some small way.
It seems like what lots of people do is say, “some of these causal effects are unimportant to me, and so I can approximate them as being zero.”
If participants are skilled communicators and can stay calm and listen to each other, what gets revealed is a different set of lives experiences. This is rare and exremwlr valuable.
If participants are not skilled and do not stay calm (as is most often the case when talking about things we care deeply about, cannot experience directly, and cannot control, ie most of the world), what gets revealed is a bunch of anger and hurt feelings.
Yeah, maybe the Satan worshipping thing is off the rocker. But a known pedophile ran a pedophole tape party island that lots of wealthy powerful men were at, somehow none of them got charged and the guy died in jail with video cameras blanked out.
Are they really ~crazy~ for thinking that maybe something is up there? Or are they just going overboard when diagnosing a real problem, like the half of democrats who supported COVID internment camps?
Source: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...
But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.