Comment by roenxi
16 hours ago
Yes and no, there is a bit more to it. When dealing with democracies hypocrisy tends to actually harm the people practising it to some extent. If a polity insists on living in a fantasy rather than reality the political process will start optimising for outcomes in that fantasy world rather than reality. It is quite funny watching US politics where the voter base are unprincipled and opportunistic in how they vote then get hoist on their own petard when they get leadership that reflects their voting patterns. It is also interesting to think how effective a country could be if the voter base tended to be honest and forthright.
With enough power people would rather accept bad in-practice results rather than have to confront the fact that they screwed up. So in practice the people in power don't usually care about hypocrisy. But they would be materially better off if they had actually cared about it. It is a bit like the oligarchs in some traditional communist country. Living the lie got them lifestyles of unbelievable wealth and luxury - but the oligarchs in the capitalist countries got lifestyles of even more unbelievable wealth and luxury, and passed on a much more impressive legacy. Not to say they weren't still hypocritical, but the degree of the disconnect from reality matters.
If you keep your eye on the places where hyper-competent people gather and accumulate power they tend to actually be quite honest. Organised groups of talented people tend to have the easiest time securing a social advantage when honesty and straightfowardness are abundant. The people who would naturally be socially weak are the ones who rely on saying one thing and doing the opposite.
For individuals, there's often a strong incentive to display certain beliefs, and the easiest way to do that consistently is to internalise them. The cost of voting for a bad party to you personally is zero. In other words, the government is a commons, and anyone can abuse it without consequence, but when we all do it...
> If you keep your eye on the places where hyper-competent people gather and accumulate power they tend to actually be quite honest. Organised groups of talented people tend to have the easiest time securing a social advantage when honesty and straightfowardness are abundant. The people who would naturally be socially weak are the ones who rely on saying one thing and doing the opposite.
I think its also about the moral ambiguity itself and perhaps even the meaning of life in my opinion.
Because like, I really think that world has its flaws but at the end of the day, this is perhaps still the most rarest moments in the whole universe when we think about it
So I'd much rather do work which benefits other humans that I enjoy (although I sometimes think of it from, I would probably want to do something after retirement, maybe I get retire early or not suppose, but if I can already make the thing I want to do as retirement as job [computer related] and they pay really nicely, why not just do them right now)
It's a shame to me that tech right now feels so inhumane. I don't want really a billion trillion dollars. I just want "enough" and I want to perhaps help people once I get that "enough" not this hyper growth-focused almost will sell you snake-oil kind of tech
Perhaps most people don't have that definition of "enough" or they have materialistic desires or fame desires which one wants to get through money but I don't have many of such desires but I don't really know why people want to be so materialistic.
Like take Elon Musk, richest man in the world, Man, his ego is really fragile. Donald Trump feels like having a really fragile ego to me as well.
I really don't understand what's the point of having all these billions of dollars? Yes nobody is offering me a billion dollars but I'd rather just take "enough" and then give others to some projects I want to help smh
Also logically, it doesn't make sense to lie to me that much. To me trust seems the most valuable resource and the easiest way of generating and securing trust for a long time is being honest. And this helps me grow into a better person (who has his flaws) but still honesty mostly helps I guess idk.
I think we all just want our lives to have meaning in one way or another but it would be so much better if the sources of generation of meaning were human and not inhumane stuff as I was saying