Comment by nine_k
10 days ago
> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*
Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".
A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.
A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.
I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.
If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.
>If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps.
What if profit is dead because wealth is all concentrating in people who don't need it from a marginal consumption standpoint, which means asset prices blow up because everyone rich believes that they need to "invest" that money somewhere... but demand shrivels outside of interestingly-subsidized areas like healthcare because nobody else is making enough to even keep up with the asset price rises?
And without demand, where would innovation come from?
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Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.
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What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?
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> If outsiders could plausibly invest in China
But they can and they do.
Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Manipulating the The Keynesian Beauty Contest is the metagame, especially after the era of /r/Wall-street bets swelled up. What do you think Jim Kramer gets paid to do, report facts?
By 2017 teenagers were running quantitative trading algorithms and semantic analysis trading bots they found from influencers and github. Around that time private subscription fee telegram and discord "whale" insider trading groups often had multiple levels of insider trading market manipulation running pump and dump schemes. Marks would pay to join the private chat group and at a certain time of day a ticket symbol would be released for "insiders" to buy before it's promoted in public channels. The outer circle was just providing liquidity for the deeper insiders to exit with easy profit.
Most VC gambits are not much different. Sell the news. Unleash the rumors.
On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.
I don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.
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Slavery used to be seen as a good thing by those who benefited from it (or thought they did).
Slavery itself required the belief in lesser humans to absolve its beneficiaries. Guilt is one hell of a party pooper.
The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969
"Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
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You could say that AI has become the new religion. Plus the concomitant opiate for the masses.
It's not just exhausting, it's a huge problem. Even if everyone is a complete saint all the time and has the best of intentions, going by beliefs about beliefs can trap us in situations where we're all unhappy.
The classic situation is the two lovers who both want to do what they think makes their partner happy, to the extent that they don't tell what they actually want, and end up doing something neither wants.
I think the goal of all sorts of cooperative planning should be to avoid such situations like the plague.
Ultimately it all comes back to the collective action problem doesn't it?
I believe that is solvable.
Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?
err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?
Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
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Refined 1.01 authoritarian form: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because it's become a habit and because dissenters seem to have "accidents" falling out of high windows.
V 1.02: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because they believe that the others believe that you have enough power to crush the dissent. The moment this belief fades, you fall.
Is that not the "Emperor's New Clothes" form? That would be like version 0.0.1
it's a sad state these days that we can't be sure which country you're alluding to
Ontological version is even more interesting, especially if we're talking about a singularity (which may be in the past rather than future if you believe in simulation argument).
Crude form: winning is metaphysically guaranteed because it probably happened or probably will
Refined: It's metaphysically impossible to tell whether or not it has or will have happened, so the distinction is meaningless, it has happened.
So... I guess Weir's Egg falls out of that particular line of thought?
The refined form is unstable, a hair from an objective reality observation fluke collapsing it.
The system that persists in practice is where everybody knows how things are, but still everybody pleads to a fictional status quo, because if they did not, the others would obliterate them.
Searching on Kagi the keywords "epistemic takeover" only shows your HN comment, and an AI-generated blog post created the next day with a whole article about it.
The Internet died on a Tuesday.
You ever get into logic puzzles? The sort where the asker has to specify that everybody in the puzzle will act in a "perfectly logical" way. This feels like that sort of logic.
Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the interrogator knows they are lying