Comment by balamatom

2 days ago

I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.

Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.

Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?

And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.

To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.

For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students

See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.

17 comments

balamatom

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ghurtado  2 days ago

why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?

It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.

  • Karrot_Kream  2 days ago

    This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.

    • ghurtado  2 days ago

      Thank you.

      I find this type of thing really interesting from a psychological perspective.

      A bit like watching videos of perpetual motion machines and the like. Probably says more about me than it does about them, though.

      5 replies →

  • JumpCrisscross  2 days ago

    Between “presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about,” before going on and sharing an opinion on that subject, and “even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped,” I think it may just be AI slop.

    • balamatom  1 day ago

      Literacy barrier. One of the reason the invisible foot of the market decided to walk in the direction of language machines is to discourage people from playing with language, because that's doodoo.

      2 replies →