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Comment by anthony_romeo | Hacker News Reader

Who is "they"? Some article in a newspaper? A handful of researchers and futurists?

Edit: Got it. It's from a list of unsurprising predictions from [at least] the marketing department of the World Economic Forum. Thanks.

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It was from a series of predictions made by the WEF in 2016 about life in 2030[0].

The claim of many is that the WEF wants to bring about a world in which the vast majority of people don't have ownership.

Reuters "fact checks"[1] this claim by saying that it was merely a prediction, and that it isn't actually a goal listed on their website.

I find the fact check unpersuasive. The WEF says "you will be happy" about not owning anything. That they would even think that reveals something about the values of that organization. If that is part of what they would consider to be a happier world, why would they not push for it (in private, if not in public)?

[0]https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/101539205... [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-wef-idUSL1N2MR1UU

It feels like this analysis is missing something, ex. have you had any property rights taken away in the ensuing 5 years? If discourse hinges on a 2 minute YouTube video and refusing to accept any downplaying of it, what hope does discourse have? There's approximately infinite two minute YouTube videos

edit: -4 in 7 minutes, anyone have tips on exactly how you are allowed to discuss any of this without wholesale accepting it?

> edit: -4 in 7 minutes, anyone have tips on exactly how you are allowed to discuss any of this without wholesale accepting it?

It is against the rules to complain about downvotes.

Someone else disagreed without receiving similar downvotes.

Your downvotes are probably because of statements like "and refusing to accept any downplaying of it". It's not that I would refuse to accept any downplaying, just that I don't find the ones offered to be persuasive.

If you focus on attacking the argument at hand, rather than on the mental state or character of those you are arguing with, you will have more success.

it's not against the rules to complain about downvotes, common misconception! I know you didn't know and this isn't a commentary, or question of, or related to, your mental state or character.

I'm genuinely unaware what part of the unedited tweet includes the factors you mention, namely questioning mental state or character. Reproduced here, I can't find anything, I'm trying really hard:

I recognize that the edits include the factor you mention, those edits occurred enough after an unusually high number of downvotes, and the scored has rebounded since. Note this has nothing to do with anyone else's mental state or character, nor questioning it, or in anyway intended to relate to it.

Let me quote[0]:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

As to your question:

> I'm genuinely unaware what part of the unedited tweet includes the factors you mention, namely questioning mental state or character.

For clarification: by mental state, I mean simply another person's state of mind (beliefs, intentions, etc) not mental health (sanity or intelligence).

In this case, saying that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement presumes knowledge about the beliefs of others. As Scott Adam's would say, it's "mind reading". Frankly, you don't know whether I or anyone else would refuse any downplaying. You only know that we refuse the ones provided.

Now, we all have to model the beliefs and intentions of others, but we are often a lot worse at it than we think, and even more so in online communication. Therefore it is best to avoid such "mind reading" language.

Of course, I am making assumptions about the intentions of the WEF! But I'm careful to separate what they actually said from what I infer about their intentions.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

What part of that says its "against the rules", as claimed?

> For clarification: by mental state, I mean simply another person's state of mind (beliefs, intentions, etc) not mental health (sanity or intelligence).

Sounds right.

> In this case, saying that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement presumes knowledge about the beliefs of others. As Scott Adam's would say, it's "mind reading". Frankly, you don't know whether I or anyone else would refuse any downplaying. You only know that we refuse the ones provided.

What would Scott Adams say about you recasting any questioning as downplaying, then invoking a general statement from him in service of furthering recasting questioning as "mind reading", then self-assuredly letting me know that you're being frank, not glib, when you tell me I don't know what you'll accept.

All of this, btw, not responding to the question you claim you're answering, quoted as if you were answering, and now you've burdened with further broad claims about _my_ state of mind and what you believe I _think_ I'm arguing

Give me some rope here, let me redirect: you're claiming that the set of following words, bounded by " marks:

"It feels like this analysis is missing something, ex. have you had any property rights taken away in the ensuing 5 years? If discourse hinges on a 2 minute YouTube video and refusing to accept any downplaying of it, what hope does discourse have? There's approximately infinite two minute YouTube videos"

contains:

- questioning a person's mental state (as in beliefs, intetions)

- questioning a person's character

- a statement that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement

- mind reading

Unfortunately, giving you charity here also reads as mind-reading under the extremely broad definition you've given it, so forgive me if what I perceive as normal conversational banter is yet another violation of the rules I missed: I believe you got in over your skis and tried to rope in a discussion of your readings of Scott Adams and what you think he said as an answer to "what's the best way to talk about this so I don't get downvoted?", and you've unintentionally tripled down on explaining that the downvotes are a result of the edit that came after the downvotes.

EDIT: Lordy I didn't realize you were the original person I replied to. You haven't engaged with a single comment I've made in this thread, just meta-explained why you don't need to engage with anything ever. Scott would have your head on a platter for invoking him in defense of this post-modern argumentation style

It's pretty clearly just a provocative list of predictions and not a call to action. It's like a commercial from 1995 saying "You'll have a phone in your pocket everywhere you go". They're predicting it will be a major trend that consumers adopt because it will makes sense when it comes. It's not even that crazy of a prediction. There's loads of shit in my house that I use maybe once a year and I wouldn't mind sharing with others via drone.

An NGO comprised of the world's wealthiest corporations telling the rest of us that we will "own nothing and be happy" is a bit cheeky, to say the least.

WEF also still has a 'the great reset' section on their official website https://www.weforum.org/focus/the-great-reset. WEF is essentially all those billionaires that meetup in davos every year

WEF's official video [1]. They took down the article they had on this topic, probably due to backlash [2].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBBxWtKKQiA [2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real...

No offense, and I'll take the downvotes for being blunt, but this is political nonsense that doesn't belong on HN: people aren't going to to buy into a particular group's Proper Noun'd Concept off _obvious_ hyperbole (who actually thinks property, as a concept, is going away) that was apparently erased once it was used to hyperbole and wish a Proper Noun political concept into being.

They likely believe they don't need our buy in.

To be clear, that framing was chosen to _politely_ continue discussion.

I like walking in and out with a clear head from threads, voting behavior changed, and you're always going to get downvoted through the floor for disagreeing. Might as well know it was because of that, than because you were incurious or impolite.

I didn't downvote you if that's what you're implying. I don't downvote anything.

Generally speaking, I think it's a reference to this video with predictions of the future. Whether or not it was advocacy for that outcome is the subject of debate, but it does appear to be an actual WEF video. https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/101539205...

Here is a link to the since-deleted Tweet from the World Economic Forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20200919112906/https://twitter.c...

They pulled the Tweet, and they pulled the video, but here, you can read the Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

Right in that first paragraph: "I don't own a car. I don't own a house." The title is "Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better."

Frankly, I don't care if the people noticing this lounge around in period-authentic SS uniforms at night, what's true is true, no matter who picks up on it.

And it's a trend along with the "hey, those bugs, you should try eating them!" articles that are so breathlessly hyped.

Now, it says "You WILL own nothing and you WILL be happy." This wasn't just some rando blogpost, it went through a lot of editorial eyes and hands. Will is very interesting. It's not optional. There's no choice involved.

It was a social media video put out by some of those "researchers and futurists," namely the World Economic Forum. You can find copies of the original video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztvWxRKqDQ The thing that makes this more than just a crackpot futurist's prediction is that the World Economic Forum actually does gather together government and business leaders from around the world and serves as a site for networking among them. This is the sort of networking that Assange called "conspiracy" in his early essays: powerful people exist in connected graphs that allow them, whether well-meaning or conscious of ill intent, to act to prop up authoritarian power structures and repress freedoms. And so you end up with world leaders repeating the World Economic Forum's discourse of a "great reset." Here is Justin Trudeau via Global News explaining how the COVID pandemic provides "an opportunity for a reset" that is primarily economic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2fp0Jeyjvw . Trudeau is an "Agenda Contributor" at the WEF: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/justin-trudeau . So, when the WEF puts out a social media clip claiming that society is changing to replace ownership with rental, a fundamental change to the existing wealth distribution in favor of corporations over individuals, you know that world leaders like Trudeau are heavily involved with those same futurists. That's what separates their predictions from those of, say, Robert X Cringely.

World Economic Forum had a tweet with about 2 min long video describing the near future this way. I believe the tweet was deleted last year.

WEF said it themselves, then deleted it after backlash.

I believe it was a video that the World Economic Forum put out on their YouTube in 2020. I am not sure if they took it down or not since then.

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