Comment by aleph_minus_one
1 day ago
> The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.
Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.
A great deal of the supposed smartest people have fully sided with fascism, it's not about smarts
This is broadly the same people who bemoaned the idea that the "smartest people in a generation" were all just working on adtech without any reflection about maybe that's not actually an exclusive set of the smartest people... or that a lot of the people in that set were the same one who might, twenty years ago, otherwise be chasing money as middlemen in finance vs doing productivity-expanding things anyway...
You can be smart and chase the money, but it's crazy hubris to assume that only your peer set of money-chasers are smart.
It's a small leap from there to "since we're the only smart people, we should get to have the most influence."
I’ve heard people say variations of, “Clever people can easily convince themselves of just about anything, if they’re inclined to. And then it’s nearly impossible to talk them out of it.”
Kinda seems true. And the worst people in history often don’t seem super dumb, despite their various other defects.
I'm confused by this comment, can you explain?
"Supposed" is doing a lot of work there. Compare, say, Yudkowsky et al. to the people who actually changed the world with mRNA vaccines.
Yudkowsky is hardly an example of someone who has sided with the fascists.
In America anyways, we send the “responsible politicians” to hell every 2-6 years. People vote for this.
and yet... it feels like we are actually a one party state most of the time.
Maybe underneath it all we really do want the same thing…
1 reply →
The party of corporate interest?
Duverger's law. Any elected body with FPP voting will converge to a one-party body.
1 reply →
Democrats expanded SNAP, Republicans shrank it. Dems expanded Medicaid, Republican shrank it. Dems protected reproductive rights, Republicans repealed them. Dems expanded title IX protection to LGBTQ+, Replicans eliminated them. Republicans jailed 1,200 January 6th insurrectionists, Republicans pardoned them. Democrats provide non-partisan federal emergency aid, Republicans withhold federal aid from blue states. Dems establish tax credits for electric cars, increase automotive standards. Dems didn't kill of foreign aid to need countries.
If you aren't female (reproductive rights), LGBTQ+, an immigrant now hunted by ice, someone in need of SNAP, Medicaid, or emergency aid in a blue state, it might feel like both are the same I guess. If you are one of the above, and now suffer because so many voted based on 'both are the same', you very much feel a difference today than from the US under Biden. If you were one of America's allies but are now constantly attacked, you feel a difference today. If you are Ukraine, you feel a difference today.
been a while since ive see the real talk on hacker news. its refreshing. usually I feel like I'm the only one among nerds asking to hold people accountable.
so, how do you think we can do this?
> so, how do you think we can do this?
For a lack of deep knowledge in this area, I don't think I have answers for this, but if one is interested in working on this problem, my approach would be to start with diving deeply into scientific literature about psychology and sociology to find out
- what convinces people to change their opinions,
- what causes people to take action
etc.
yeah, sure. Do you think all scientific literature is the same though? I am skeptical of thinking to just look at them all equally. Clearly, if theres a class of people being held unaccountable who have been practicing imposing their will and power on the people, that has certainly been done in the scientific community and would show in the literature, too.
So when I think of going through any media like scientific publications, I wonder how to discern and point out the captured and biased media vs the more objective ones (or at least the ones that don't have a hidden financial motive behind them). I wish our scientific community had better disclaimers and traceability for financial influence in every paper we could read.
2 replies →
> Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.
People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.
People by and large don’t understand the second and third order effects of their policy preferences. It’s not that they don’t want those things, it’s that the world is more complicated than their mental model insists it is. Politicians could try harder to fix the fundamental problems but they don’t because the long-term solutions don’t manifest until after the next N (very expensive) election cycles.
Rent controls work if you go radical enough and enforce a max profit margin for the whole city, with rent limited to something like 30% over maintenance + debt repayment costs.
The amount of housing in the city won't grow but it will free up a big part of peoples income that would otherwise go to landlords. That helps the local economy with more consumer spending, and makes it easier to save up or apply for a loan so you can start a business.
You get a better economy and more money in the average persons wallet without raising taxes. The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints. And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
That policy would 1) fuck over younger generation, 2) result in total sclerosis and death of city. Prices are high because there's not enough housing, that's it. Rent control won't increase number of units so it wont solve real cause of the problem.
> The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints.
No, also people who would like to move into city would lose, because that would become literally impossible. You'd have like 15 years waiting lists for housing.
> And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
Why would anyone fix apartment that's under rent control? If you mean system like in Berlin, then I've got bad news - people there are actually frequently not allowed to renovate even THEIR OWN apartments.
The politicians are those who created the respecting laws.
"Convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell" is thus nearly isomorphic to making the masses hate politicians who create such laws, which at least very likely implies that by convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell, a different mindset emerges in the masses.
> The politicians are those who created the respecting laws.
Yes and general population LOVES these laws, even though they are harmful to them. But anyway - you've got your causality reversed - it's voting masses that incentivize rent controls and other shitty politics. Remember that to implement your policies you've got to actually win elections. And since people generally don't understand n-order effects for n>=2, it's really easy to win elections with populist policies.
1 reply →
There is no evidence that reducing rent makes the rent go up - only fearmongering. It's a stopgap measure, though, since there still won't be enough housing to meet demand unless you also fix that at the same time.
Which you can also do as a city by just... building! You don't need some developer to come in, you can just do that as a local government!
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only capital in Europe without a stifling rent or housing crisis.
There is lots of evidence for that, but before I provide it I need to know if you will update your beliefs based on that.
2 replies →
For that you might need the kind of geniuses who write stirring books about principles and values. Or whatever the modern equivalent of those books is. Maybe nobody would pay attention to that kind of advocacy in the present day, not sure why. But it's not tech geniuses, anyway. Much though tech has power as a catalyst.
I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.
> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell
I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.
What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"
There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.
I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.
When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.
Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.
It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."
> What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
That was not premise of fascism. Certainly not Hitlers one, he himself was self-taught and did not framed himself as highly educated. He considered himself better then educated people. The origin of his superiority was not "smart" it was "strong will and power itself".
It was not the original premise of feudalism either. That was was about military might, basically.
And origins of liberal democracy are not "smart based" either.