> * 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.
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?
What’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?
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?
>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?
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
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.
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.
> We really need a rule in politics
We really need a rule against proposing unenforceable rules.
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
People vote for people they don't agree with.
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)
Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...
Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote.
Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable.
If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.
Combined with the quirk in Australia’s preferential voting system that enable a government to form despite 65% of voters having voted 1 for something else.
As a result, Australia tends to end up with governments formed by the runner up, because no one party actually ‘won’ as such.
That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
And minor parties receive funding from the Australian Electoral Commission if they receive over certain percentage of votes.
It was 5% last time I cared to be informed by may be different now, and they would receive $x for each vote, or what ever it is now.
Currently minimum 4% of formal first preference votes, which gets you $3.499 per a first preference vote (indexed to inflation every six months)
Then you automatically get paid the first $12,791, and the rest of the funding is by reimbursement of substantiated election expenses.
This is per a candidate (lower house) or per a group (upper house). And this is just federal elections - state election funding is up to each state, but I believe the states have broadly similar funding systems.
https://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/public_fu...
https://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/public_fu...
Note the US also has public financing for presidential campaigns, which is available to minor parties once they get 5% or more of the vote. But in the 2024 election, Jill Stein (Green Party) came third on 0.56% of the popular vote. The only third party to ever qualify for general election public funding was the Reform Party due to Ross Perot getting 18.9% in the 1992 election and 8.4% in the 1996 election. There is also FEC funding for primary campaigns, and I believe that’s easier for third parties to access, but also less impactful.
Also, there is nothing centre-right about Susan Ley.
She is the leftest left leaning leader of the Liberal party I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to live through.
She was absolutely on board with this recent Hitlerian “anti-hate” legislation that was rammed through with no public consultation.
Okay, that’s a bit uncharitable. We had 48 hours.
And the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security definitely gave the literal thousands of submissions due consultation before recommending the original, un-split bill pass.
I don’t recall the circumstances under which Morrison ended up Prime Minister.
Like most Australians, I’m in denial any of that episode ever happened.
But, using the current circumstances as an example, Australia has a voting system that enables a party to form government even though 65% of voting Australia’s didn’t vote for that party as their first preference.
If the other party and some of the smaller parties could have got their shit together Australia could have a slightly different flavour of complete fucking disaster of a Government, rather than whatever the fuck Anthony Albanese thinks he’s trying to be.
Then there’s Susan Ley. The least preferred leader of the two major parties in a generation.
Susan Ley is Anthony Albanese in a skirt.
I would have preferred Potato Head, to be honest.
Hmm. Actually, I think the suggestion of a law puts this whole thing on bad footing where we need to draw an otherwise unnecessary line (to denote where this type of rhetoric should be legal). I suspect XorNot just put the line there because the idea that true statements should be illegal just seems silly.
Really it just ought to be a thing that we identify as a thought-terminating cliche. No laws needed, let’s just not fall for a lazy trick. Whether or not it is true that lots of people agreed, that isn’t a good argument that they are right.
The case of Nixon really brings that out. The “Silent Majority” was used to refer to people who didn’t protest the Vietnam War. Of course, in retrospect the Vietnam War was pretty bad. Arguing that it was secretly popular should have not been accepted as a substitute for an argument that it was good.
> 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.
That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.
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.
Most bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble" keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher peak.
Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards.
Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
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?
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