HN user
Mirror neurons.
They see everyone else who behaves acting like clown but they’re less socially aware of which clown like behavior they should broadcast.
They conflate acting and mockery.
Politics does not exist to resolve social problems. It exists to resolve headlines.
So, yeah, it is a straw man. It’s framed as a general problem of society, but it’s a feel good solution that again waves off any conversation about raising taxes in response to their behavior.
Senators are tackling this very serious problem, to be immediately gamed given billionaires financial resources.
It’s not a tax on money, it’s a tax on agency. Fiat and macro economics is a euphemism for “what are people doing and how do we make them do this instead?”
It’s not about perfect mind control, but inflating their value to deflate our agency (or buying power, whatever trips your trigger).
We get debate protecting one concept or principle or another, but think a bit more literally and it starts to take on a whole new perspective.
Which is a side effect of educated workers demanding higher wages. Trickle down is purposely built into the political economy.
Carmack was recently highlighted for saying it’s easier to educate a doer than motivate the educated.
Frankly that almost feels like a nice of way of saying less educated have questionable negotiating skills.
I can be busy collecting fractions of cents or lazy and earn more in an office doing data entry, not unstopping toilets.
History has shown us a whole lot of those “get er done” programmers and projects just made fragile messes we had to babysit later.
If we’re busy “doing” we aren’t negotiating social progress. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, just to persuade folks to move along.
Good, we don’t need AI.
I’d be more interested in augmented human intelligence. Growing neuron structures to speed the acquisition of skill and knowledge.
AI as we know it now is for empowering aristocrats. Here’s Googles data center empowering Google to make business choices that involve extracting effort from us.
I’d rather science and technology empower individuals uniquely and not be ground down to the fiscally prudent efforts.
Yep it’s not an interesting idea, the hard problem. We can never see outside our universe. We can’t know all states of matter ever. We can’t peek beyond the speed of light. We can solve a lot of problems we actually have without an answer (42, but what…)
Humans have a willingness to see truth in metaphor and analogy, and invent them to avoid accepting we’re just meat bags.
That’s what the hard problem of consciousness is to me; biological ideation run amok.
It has useful political effects, it can be used to disabuse the self righteous because it’s a purposeful thought ending monolith, nothing more.
We’ll keep iterating on our theories of the interaction of fields and matter and stop caring about the hard problem like we quit discussing luminiferous aether. We’ll stop seeing the literal edge of reality as a boundary on experience in the first place.
The hard problem will be solved in time.
My reasoning is that the people that defined it did so in a time when our science was less developed, so of course the problem seemed much harder.
Information theory makes even the hard problem a matter of understanding interaction fields of physics, with the chemistry of biology. Relativity and sensory network effects explain relative experience elegantly enough.
A lot of theories from back in the day are built on outdated understanding. Unfortunately their authors did not get to see our achievements in engineering unravel a lot of their over baked theories due to a need to fill in gaps without hard evidence. Same as we won’t see technology in the future have no need of all this software we wrote. It won’t literally be handed on.
Luminiferous Aether was once a thing to many even though it’s not one discrete thing. One might consider it was a poetic initial take on field theory, which we now rely on sets of glyphs of shares meaning. Which artistically could also be imagined as flowing sets of matrix code that glow like a luminous field.
If there’s a hard problem to consciousness it’s an unwillingness to consider there is no Valhalla. Is there a hard problem? Or do we hope for an answer that suggests we’re not just meatbags?
Interesting. I was working on an app that would let users scan logos and return company data; carbon footprint other industrial impact metrics, individual investors, board, C-suite… into a shared repo of oligarchs who have chosen celebrity and visibility by “leading” us with our own data.
I was going to send images to Google to pull objects and text from, but if I could just send text to search for, that would be great.
Let’s not devolve into thought ending reactionaries. I’m aware of the negotiated reality.
My point is it’s not a law of physics, but a social contract to be negotiated.
We owed pensions to people and took those away, so it’s not as if society has a very good track record of paying what it’s owed, so don’t get too hung up on those words meaning something forever.
You might take continuous iteration of our social contract as seriously as code; as we can see letting it accrue technical debt and bit rot is not so great.
Of course a full stop of social norms today would have consequences.
My point is it’s a social contract not a law of physics we cannot hope to bend.
Our embedded memory and experience need not be the one we pass on.
What’s great is fiscal debt is just a meme we talked ourselves into believing matters.
Economics of real property is one thing, but fiat economics can be ad hoc manipulated in whatever direction the politi-sphere needs.
Debt at this point is used to put economic uncertainty in the masses.
Cheney even said the quiet part out loud; “Deficits don’t matter.”
It’s impossible to prove a negative; all future people need to do is ask “What debt?” and legislate it away.
France did this once before. We don’t owe the dead.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Isn’t that just a nice way of saying “less educated people are more easily manipulated”?
If industrialist feedback loops are destroying the planet, are more doers engaging grand scale industrialism doing an ideal objective?
Maybe we should educate people so they’re less inclined to chase the coin of mere mortals RP’ing grandads emotional memes
Advertising as we know it emerged as a melding of government propaganda research and behavioral economics during world wars, so of course it’s often scammy.
It sounds “deep state” but it’s actually plainly documented in government files and written about by reliable sources.
Remember we’re still emerging from an era of whispering the same old story of morality and obligation to each other.
I am not at all interested in helping someone build a fertilizer empire or pillow brand. Politically my hands are tied to doing so if I want a life.
Poor people effectively live a life of quota and state sanctioned limits on their access to material support by cutting social programs with public support.
Advertising America as anything but a sanctimonious police state is a scam.
Yep. That was around the time I worked with those folks.
I would not be surprised if the topic came up because of that comic.
The problem you’re highlighting is a simple design issue.
My problem with progress bars is they are usually nonsense estimates based upon random programmer choices.
I know former MSers who worked on progress bars for old Windows versions. Specifically I remember them saying the progress bar for copying files to USB was estimating how long until a USB hardware buffer was clear, without any idea how much more data there was intended to be jammed into the buffer once it cleared. Buffer would immediately refill and increase the wait time.
Given how slowly Windows deprecates code, who knows what subroutines any given progress bar is relying on.
They’re nonsense features meant to soothe users who seek progress. They don’t need to be interesting visually. I’d accept a simple countdown that made sense.
I’m hoping manufacture of application specific chips takes off. That we embed a 3D engine into silicon and this “software engineering is life” mind virus can go away.
We simply did not do it that way before because we lacked the manufacturing capabilities.
If manufacturing hopes and dreams of colleagues in the chip biz come to fruition, software is on its way out as a routine part of developing new technology. But I mean they’re biased; attention on hardware versus software makes them more valuable.
It’s because our society has been trained to be risk averse so we don’t challenge traditional power memes. “Keep calm, carry on.” Thought ending slogans are what we’re weened on.
Mens biology predisposes them to anxious rage and we avoid it to avoid making daddy mad.
We won’t do anything to avoid the cost impact to the poor because it will cost the rich.
The biology of our politics is really well understood.
But I get it; it’s more fun to pretend you live in your own multiverse conjuring ad hoc explanations for everything.
This has nothing to do with abstract constructs you can’t name. That’s just a byproduct of you not having embedded muscle memory to announce one.
This forum really enjoys thinking it’s onto something millions of humans that came before have never considered while conjuring ideas within very similar social constraints as the last generation (especially in typical office life). Same old biology + new words != new insights.
I’m not one for tradition, and believing there’s something more to it all is a human tradition going back to our beginning.
In a political context, it’s always humans doing human stuff and that should be constrained to protect the freedom of humans being human.
It’s only in the abstract sciences are new ideas being created. I’m really tired of these articles about economics when “political capture by aristocrats” is enough to explain most of the issues.
Sometimes you really do want to do all three of those things. But often you want to do some subset of them instead. So the language should give you ways to do parts of that without doing all of that, and then "extends" should be at most lightweight syntax sugar over that.
Sounds like you’re describing something like C.
Leverage individual header files to implement a specific behavior rather than features concretized in a spec we don’t always want.
Making everything a class, monoid, etc. feels like the programmer equivalent of making 9 Star Wars movies where each is comprised of lightsaber fights from open to close. That’s a cool still image but … really 9 movies huh?
It’s centralized in that the developers are now bankers; we have to trust and empower them with a Byzantine abstraction to do daily routine?
We’ve already seen how that worked with bankers. Nope.
I’m really looking forward to the day computer science folks finally accept if it involves human participation it will come along with human bias.
Biology has not gone anywhere, folks. We cannot decouple ourselves from this existence and be information; yet? Maybe. For sure not now.
And networks like Ethereum are not going to enable that.
It may be a nice and clean abstract in their head, but everyone has that privilege. Bringing people aboard Ethereum is putting a new cognitive burden on people. But the goal is to not do that?
Environment issues aside, blockchain is like nuclear powered rocket car hype and not anywhere near as cool.
I’ll stick to a Wireguard tunnel between people I trust literally before running this stuff for a bunch of randos profiting big off my effort.
Perhaps the cost to be concerned with is not fiat currency but more literal.
The up front costs could wipe out the routine costs and maybe we could also dispose of the “ make money selling blades not handles” monopoly fossil fuel monopolies rely on for political relevance.
Infinitely big little numbers let economists iterate forever in whatever direction they want. Physical reality has constraints their academic models omit.
We need to redefine the perimeter not iterate within the area of a well known boundary. Who cares how much it costs aristocrats in profits if the result ends up what is believed possible? I don’t have to believe any given solution or CEO is owed a market.
This feels easily related to lack of unified physical theories.
We seem to find structure all over but no idea why it ended up just this way.
My guess is a link between field effects and information coming off cells. Cells emit information instigating a field reaction but only to a certain point as a survival mechanism.
Once an equilibrium is reached the cells radiate new information to inhibit the field effect?
Which makes me wonder if cells not being able to inhibit field effects is related to aging.
I picked the wrong field in college. Math was fun but the kind of abstract that almost feels useless a lot of the time, and biotech really feels like the final frontier anymore.
You sound like you’re alarmed the world might change without your permission.
A brand is a mind virus used by aristocrats to capture worker effort for aristocrats.
Go ahead and wave it off with a vague alarmist reaction yourself. I’ll let my real world experience with billionaires who goto Davos, and have plainly discussed with me their goal of leveraging technology to manage the agency of the masses for their gain, they’ll be dead before the environment is an issue or society decides its a problem because society is full of rubes…
Pretend hundreds who don’t know you exist care about your existence specifically.
Sit in your filter bubble and wag fingers at anything that might try to poke through.
Language changes meaning over time. Anchoring ourselves to past meaning is the opposite of disruptive.
Facebook is not the only organization that has mastered copying bits between users machines.
The technology matters. The brand does not.
Depressed dads can share bird pics with dozens of protocols.
When a technology forum conflates a brand and a technology, one can feel confident their society is a clueless joke.
Adam Smith was right to warn about the extreme division of labor creating humans dumber than the lowliest animal.
If they’d demand higher wages and healthcare collectively or force austerity on the stock market, they’d have those things. It works for teachers unions, and the like when they strike.
But like you said, we demonize working people instead of empowering them, for a reason.
The goal isn’t perfect mind control, but to avoid thinking in alternatives and enabling the self made nonsense. Convincing everyone they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Implant reasons to ignore alternatives and hammer on them; it’s not how it works for tradition, for country… one reason after another why we can’t politically just be decent.
It works not because people are lazy but mirror neurons. Biology. The public must be the one to do different so the public sees itself do different. Knows different is doable.
Relativity has some deep network effects we don’t often think about. We can’t experience otherwise doing the same all day.
It’s not intentionally built to fail
It’s intentionally built to empower people who die, and the baton gets fumbled around once they do
Frankly it’s working peoples fault. Aristocrats financial hegemony would vanish tomorrow if workers became independent agents rather than work for them.
Only 5% of the US hunts anymore. Everyone is dependent on industrialized economic distribution.
Let the bankers in NY and London try to collect mortgages across the world when we stop paying. Let the 800,000 sworn officers in the US police 300 million+ for no pay.
The system is too small to handle the reality. It’s not designed to fail, it’s not designed to scale. We see similar planning effort in the logistics pipeline problems; no slack. Militant efficiency.
Just like with religion, it’s the belief of the masses that enable the co-opting of our agency for their profit. Our belief enables them.
Unions need to stop collecting dues from members and start charging employers subscription fees, or similar changes to social norms. But that’s all politically babysat and everyone is happy to look away from the lack of disruption in that context, while disrupting the shit out of lives dependent on business that is now extracted from the community.
My fellow Americans ended up being a bunch of Daniel Plainviews… I drink your milkshake. But the financial wealth is all a mirage, made up to serve the old ways. Good luck when the masses realize very smart people took away their American dream.
Android phones are free like speech, not free like beer.
Launch the waste into space.
We sure as hell will never use the rockets for human panspermia if we keep expecting to power all this crap we throw out
Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement).
What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy.
The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big.
Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before.
Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
The other commenter summed it up.
Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade.
We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis)
We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return.
Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing).
Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy
It would be immoral to redistribute the real property someone worked on.
I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to be monopolized to prop up the value of a minority rich, to let millions starve, or die of preventable disease is immoral and violent.
I don’t believe Elon Musk is worth billions. I just can’t take his real stuff.
Letting our social value store be co-opted by a handful of memes isn’t exactly free agency, speech, or market of ideas. When “get job, buy stuff” is the one true sentence, why believe ideas like freedom matter?
Relative network effects are what an MBA is for.
The actual education is over generalized to make it easy for Lord Fontleroy, who is to have a degree to insulate them from work (no joke the degree system started as a payola scheme to provide secular credentials to rich kids the rubes would be too dumb to invalidate, as belief in the churches central authority fell apart).