MarkPNeyer

If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.

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?

You make a great point. People had no hope. This is why Hope is an essential survival strategy.

Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

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'.

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article:

... 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?

I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain".

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.

We’re watching the Protestant reformation 2.0 play itself out. The role of the Catholic church is this time being played by the technocratic establishment of NGO’s, academia and mass media.

There are many Christians who would happily to get in long arguments over which values are “clearly Christian.”

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.

“Teams selecting leaders” or “randomly choosing the spokesperson” still gives rise to an explicit hierarchy, but in this case it’s not permanent and there’s a mechanism that prevents it from becoming permanent.

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.

Vivek Ramaswamy argues that these actions are still first amendment violations because the government pushed corporations to do this, under something called “state action in private enterprise.”

Can you give an example of a principle that isn’t made up?

For some reason this seems really hard for people to accept: That religious people actually think there are consequences for their choices, even if no human being ever knows.

That's not something done because zombie mothers will rise up to enforce anything.

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.

I can believe that being reminded of your convictions helps you abide by them, but this is only true if you really have convictions! If you think your being in power is more important than being honest, for example, then the oath your swear might just be one more example of saying the right thing to get into power.

Hi, thanks for sharing - do you mind explaining what DI and NK mean?

Thank you :)

My interpretation is that school is a not a great place to learn how to act in the real world. In particular, school is way more hierarchical and command-and-control than the real world.

What about people who own and operate their own small business?

Which country do you live in where you think they aren’t doing this?

Your government is torturing and killing people on your behalf.

Are you cool with that? Or is voting ineffective at stopping them?

What about a majority of people agreeing that adults should leave each other alone?

… which had an army bigger than Britain’s.

Replace “economic” with “political” and this is obviously a false equivalence.

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.

At the risk of saying something taboo here, it is the belief among lots of people that the system is totally fine except for one bad mechanism which has polluted everything. This bad mechanism is relative new, historically, as it came about around 150 years ago despite many people like President Andrew Jackson saying, “this is bad and I will stop this.”

That mechanism is printed money untethered from a hard-to-fake backing, aka hard Money. Hard money advocates say that printed money that loses its value over time screws up all kinds of incentives by more easily rewarding bad behavior like political corruption, and punishing good behavior like saving and not investing in things one doesn’t understand deeply.

It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer. I don’t think it should be controversial that most of us invest in things we don’t remotely understand, like businesses we are totally unqualified to operate and manage.

But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.

At what point did Wikileaks become the bad guys?

Was this a change in their behavior, or a change in American political attitudes towards the role of journalism?

Bitcoin is people striving for financial self sovereignty.

“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.

For someone who argues from principles

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.

How do you determine what does and doesn’t affect other people?

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.”

Any disagreement, if you pursue it long enough, reveals one of two things. :

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.

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

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...

We had a mouse problem once. The ended up being a small hole drilled in the side of the house to install a cat5 cable for a security camera. The hole couldn't have been more than 1.5 cm in diameter, and it had a cat 5 cable running through it - but apparently this was enough space for a mouse to squeeze through.

There’s always a trade off between “cost” and everything else. If you’re wealthy enough they cost doesn’t really matter to you, regulation is fine because it leads to higher quality experiences in general.

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.