Hacker News Reader

Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society. It's such a unfathomable complex system that most the time, I imagine we're probably only 'right' by accident. Like one of scott's prescriptions is higher taxes - sure maybe that could be good if paired with wiser government spending but realistically that may just get poured into unproductive subsidies, regulations, or healthcare and military-complexes. So maybe you just tax less and accept this will lead to wealth inequality but maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can.

View on HN

> I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society.

It’s not really a secret. That’s the entire purpose of our tax code, social security, Pell grants, and pretty much every government program out there.

> a benevolent billionaire class

This is called oligarchy. For the vast majority of people, an oligarchy is not a very nice place to live. Just look at Russia.

I should add there’s nothing about tax breaks for billionaires that will make them “benevolent”. Typically that kind of wishful thinking metastasizes as a trickle down economics myth, but time has shown that to be a myth.

> I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society.

That's certainly not a new from of arrogance, people without the WIS to match their INT have been trying to construct utopias for quite a while.

Yet psyops/marketing proof to be very effective, thus it does work to a certain extend. Both are currently engineering society at above cold war levels. How effective it is might even be relatively simple to measure because of various methods of the past being reintroduced.

This feels like a non sequitur apropos the parent comment. Could you elaborate?

The following ancient cold war era video will probably make you understand what i mean and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g History is repeating itself.

There's no modern eqivalent of Carnegie libraries. I'll take my chances with the government, at least we have some control of what they do

Khan Academy?

There’s a ton of kids in Africa who are not dead because the Gates Foundation made it so.

>maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can

1. they're literally not

2. theoretically, representatives are representative

if you're concerned about someone's choices, i think you have a better chance at influencing the choices of someone who is at least nominally and maybe actually accountable to you.

the talk is about material allocations. it's actually pretty easy to just deliberately change material allocations, we're doing it all the time. having an opinion on how we do that is not some kind of engineering.

the accountability within our current power structure is quite debatable, but you can change that too.

You know, your proposals are also engineering society. It’s just a society of the 1800s and before. It sucked. It sucked for the vast majority of people. Life may still suck, but it sucked a lot worse then.

To be completely clear here. When you say, “ accept this will lead to wealth inequality but maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can.” You’re advocating for authoritarian oligarchy.

Fuck. That. Shit. Fuck that in whatever they find the least desirable.

Edit: Jesus. I really the above comment. It’s not even internally consistent logic. It’s just dumb.

Do you use twitter? The rhetoric in this post has the exact cadence of someone who spends a lot of time on social media.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that a social media company owned by a billionaire would amplify such convenient talking points. He amplifies his own account there as well.

If you read through his retweets and “original” content it is a litany of things which don’t matter and are meant to invoke an emotional response to distract you from the things that do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com