Comment by bee_rider
11 days ago
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?
If you accept that the economy can be in disequilibrium, then it is very easy to see how this happens.
Rich people learn a habit that makes them consume less than their investment returns. The difference is reinvested, resulting in a net increase of their equity. Even if you say they spend 90% of their returns on consumption, the last 10% still grow in absolute terms. Since returns are paid proportionally based on the quantity of equity, you can clearly see that money is allocated from where it has high marginal utility to places where it has low marginal utility.
Of course this leads to a contradiction. If money is held by people who have a low marginal utility for consumption, why would investments pay high returns? Your equity is the latent demand that your investments need to pay you the returns in the first place. You'd increasingly be paying yourself. That is equivalent to investing into something that yields a 0% return which in turn is equivalent to doing nothing.
1 reply →
"in people who don't need it from a marginal consumption standpoint".
We need the rich to spend more money. There are plenty of cool ways to do this. Build a mile high pyramid on a Nevadan playa, a canal to the Sea of Cortez to re-flood the Salton Sea, humans on other planets, new city states a la Praxis, interstellar probes, etc.
Some billionaires are doing some of these things. Hope more do in the future.
Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding but a lot of people (ok, well, a few, but you know) make a lot of money on relatively mundane stuff. Technocapitalism’s Accursed Share is sacrificing wealth for myth making about its own future.
What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?
In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.
In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.
How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?
What’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?
7 replies →
> 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.
IMO, abolitionist made absolutist arguments like appeals to the common sense of inalienable rights, or Christian virtue. Their opponents would have to fight through the cognitive dissonance of arguing an unnatural or unchristian position.
That sounds a lot like saying slavey is obviously bad, and simultaneously also saying everyone else naturally already believes this.
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.
The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
20 replies →
> 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.
Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.
Just make it broad enough that we never get a candidate promoting themselves as “electable” again.
Polls aren't the end all be all of truth, and can be gamed. They are not a perfect measure, by a long shot.
> We really need a rule in politics
We really need a rule against proposing unenforceable rules.
That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.
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.
> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example),
For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has made, which has been used by Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) to prosecute people (and made it easier in some cases).
> 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.
There are remittance companies that deal in local currencies that tend to make this "easier" - crypto works for this WHEN you can exchange the crypto for the currencies you have and want, which is, in effect, the same.
3 replies →
Most bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble" keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher peak.
2 replies →