Comment by CalRobert

6 months ago

And you are a collection of cells, but individual cells (mostly) don’t have the ability to dictate your actions

20 comments

CalRobert

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suddenlybananas  6 months ago

Yeah, but Jeff Bezos does actually have control over Amazon and can make decisions.

  • TeMPOraL  6 months ago

    Sort of, kind of. Most decisions you'd see him make would quickly cause his control over Amazon to disappear, without actually improving anything for Amazon workers.

    That's one part of the bad mental model of organizations and markets (and thus societies) people have. The people at the top may be richer and more powerful, but they're not actually free to do whatever. They have a role to play in the system they ostensibly "control", but when they deviate too far from what the system expects them to do, they get ejected.

    Never mistake the finger pointing at the Moon for the Moon itself. Also, never mistake the person barking orders for the source from which those orders originate.

    • psychoslave  6 months ago

      There is nothing like "the" system though. When a government launch some genocide, sure it's an expression of the system in a sense, but it didn't need to respect a majority of actor opinions, and it doesn't mean that "the behavior of the system" is a mere and direct outcome of all the social values at stake which would presumably have great safeguard against any significant deviation.

      Virus can kill their hosts, and a bunch of individuals can have significant harmful impact on societies.

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    • suddenlybananas  6 months ago

      Yeah, these decisions just appear out of the aether, there absolutely not the result of capitalists acting in their self-interest. It's nice to claim, oh poor little me couldn't possibly have done anything else, I guess I just have to benefit from all this money my decisions give me.

      2 replies →

  • TheOtherHobbes  6 months ago

    Jeff Bezos is a product of the system, not a driver of it. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc, are outputs, not inputs.

    Their decisions are absolutely constrained by the system's values. They have zero agency in this, and are literally unable to imagine anything different.

    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2  6 months ago

      It is a fascinating take. One way to measure agency is whether Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have the power to destroy their creations. With exception of Bezos ( and only because he no longer has full control of his company ), the rest could easily topple their creations suggesting that system values you refer to are wide enough to allow for actions greater than 'zero agency'.

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    • jon-wood  6 months ago

      What are you talking about? Of course they have agency. They're using that agency to funnel as much money as possible into their pockets, and away from other people, it's not that they can't imagine anything different, it's that when they do what they see is a world in which they're not as well off.

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