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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the vast majority of people have very few root values that they won’t betray for a little more pleasure or power.

People very quickly adopt a “if you can’t beat them join them” attitude when facing resistance or throw their hands up and say “I’m just trying to live” or “that’s not my problem” when encountering a moral dilemma.

So no wonder that when faced with a moral dilemma most people put themselves in the position to say “I can see myself doing that and wouldn’t want to feel judged for it, so I’ll defend the practice because maybe I’ll need to do that later.”

I’m trying to figure out how to build the structure of society to promote the opposite of that - to make it trivially easy to say no to unethical behavior instead of just going along with the crowd. I’m coming up short with how to do that.

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Part of the problem is that most human beings are fairly wired through various selection criteria and conditioning to accept even maladaptive behaviors through mimetics. The people that seem to quickly go against societal rules for whatever reasons they may be tend to be viewed as "anti-social" and quickly judged harshly by at least roughly 40% of the population at large. After all, "criminal" behavior and "protest" is mostly distinguished in terms of defining the current social contract as not valid or inconsistent and how many people overall agree, not whether something is simply written down and codified.

A lot of the people who quickly go against societal rules are anti-social, so the stereotype is not undeserved. The two primary personality types are "always-go-with-the-herd" and "always-go-against-the-herd", it takes a lot of attention to detail and strong will to only buck the trends that are actually bad; so nuanced rule-cutters are pretty rare and easily lumped into the anti-social camp by the common rule-followers...

Concur completely. Having the capacity to differentiate or make an explicit distinction for why one set of actions is preferable over the other in any type of way that has a epistemological grounding, is not something the vast majority people have the time, patience, training, personality type, etc. to be able to do.

So then we have a problem don’t we? Either the expectation is that some plurality of humans have the ability to coherently manage this kind of epistemological chain reasoning. Or it is untenable for that level of coherency to be able to drive functional assumptions that are generalizable across all human communities.

And us, we’re back to where all moral philosophers have always gotten stuck, which is to say, we have no objective epistemological grounding for any particular type of moral reasoning chain - making every single, moral debate impossible to agree on generalized first principles.

So how do you structure society in a way such that the default behaviors diffuse power and increase pro social responsibility, given the fact that the current social structures demonstrate infinite examples of anti-social behaviors leading to power and wealth.

That is to say, how do you create a society where nobody even wants to be a millionaire because that level of relative over-consumption relative to others would just feel too bad.

There is a huge difference between the arguments I'm seeing for large groups of people disagreeing completely upon what people have control over, which very quickly devolves into what control and rules we should exert upon others. There seem to be thankfully some general ideas about consent that seem pretty obvious like for the most part people don't want to be murdered and dismembered, but the hardest part of the human species IMO is basically cat herding - how do we get collective action performed when both its strengths for evolution (ability to splinter off and form separate groups) is precisely the evolutionary biases that keeps it from achieving higher aggregate functions as a species.

It seems kind of unfathomable to me how people do not understand that privatized tyranny is still tyranny by a system that is socially reinforced - it doesn't have to be a government that does it whatsoever and the general rules of power kind of matters more for first principles than some arbitrary definition of "capitalism" or "socialism" or whatnot that may be irrelevant in another thousand years. It's always been about how to organize collective actions compatible with the context of human social development.

In my experience the vast majority of people do not understand how monetary policy affects inflation. People very quickly adopt a “if you see prices rising, it's corporate greed" attitude when facing resistance or throw their hands up and say “We need price controls and limits on corporate profits."

Economists don’t even know how monetary policy affects inflation if for no other reason than because they can’t predict forward demand and exogenous supply shocks are always random.

This is why nobody called the effects of QE I and II correctly - if you recall it was supposed to cause widespread hyperinflation overnight when it was unwound.

Welp that was totally wrong because the financial system isn’t some deterministic mathematical function. It’s a political and human organization that will twist itself into doing whatever it needs to do to maintain the current power structure - up to and including breaking any rule that Mises, Rothbard or Jefferson could think of that would restrain the use of signoriage as political power.

"if you recall it was supposed to cause widespread hyperinflation overnight when it was unwound"

According to which economists? Did you ignore the economists who vouched for them and said they wouldn't lead to hyperinflation? Regardless, inflation did happen because of QE I and II but it wasn't hyperinflation as many economists predicted beforehand.

A very brief search will yield thousands of results including this book:

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8797#t...

Here is FT using examples from places that specifically policy makers read, which is where it makes a difference:

https://financialpost.com/news/economy/stubborn-inflation-ha...

We had hyperinflation of:

1) stock market 2) company valuations 3) startup funding 4) housing

Basically the fact that Google, Facebook, Twitter blew up in user growth during the start of QE lead to all the QE money going into startup/tech investments rather than inflating commodities.

You name and shame them, the louder the better. Most people don't want to be, you know, known for being a snake (if nothing else, it removes their ability to virtue signal at a later date).

Of course you don't get to do this without some amount of risk of retaliation and collateral damage. But there is no conflict averse solution. The problem with the "structure" of society is that it has become too conflict averse.

Unfortunately at some point you gotta live. Fighting the fight for morality and tye such is great. But you also need to have an enjoyable life. At some point you realize the massive qol you get from being morally flexible even a little. It's pragmatic.

It sucks. It feels bad. But in the end it may be the only option you have.

It really is not even remotely the only option.

Living with integrity brings about the most robust and beautiful experiences I've ever had. Significantly more happiness in this state than with a lot of money and all the things most people lie and cheat to have, and while I have never lied and cheated (much), my priorities were different.

Try living for a year where you don't care about money, you volunteer your time for people, and you operate in service -- where everything you build is purely for others, every encounter is a genuine exploration and interest in others, and service is rooted in a desire to uplift people. This is the opposite of most conventional action rooted in trying to take as much money from everyone as possible, or "what can you do for ME?"

This pattern makes dreams come true.

Well said

No amount of wealth and fame can counterbalance the depression you’ll live with by playing the game all the way to the top.

Unless you have a narcissistic personality in which case you’re not even able to read this without contempt for the whole concept.

If I lived without care for money, I would make zero money. And then die.

If you lived without a care for money, focused on discovering yourself and living in service of your fell kind, you will enter in an unimaginable abundance and thrive beyond anything you'd dream. That is living.

When you are on your deathbed someday, I wonder if you'll have a wish like "I wish I worked even harder and made even more money." You might be the only one ever in mankind's history if so!

I am not sure most people think that far ahead. I think a lot of it comes down identity. People start identifying with "free market capitalism / freedom" (whatever that is) and then you try to rationalize their thinking / support / actions around that.

That used to be accomplished by the fear of a deity

It isn't a morality issue.

It's an issue of our system of controls: likely we should implement price control during times of high inflation.

Imagine if the following happened during covid:

- used car prices were locked/limited

- housing prices were locked/limited

- certain foods were locked/limited

Inflation would have not been an issue.

Price controls is an outdated idea that has been proven time and time again to not work

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