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Comment by actionablefiber | Hacker News Reader

It's increasingly a pet theory of mine that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth into the hands of the richest, their subsequent existential ennui, and their disconnect from reality owing to media consolidation and algorithmic content feeds have basically created a world where the superrich are in a "post-game" mentality. There are no further material comforts to obtain. They just want to feel anything at all and the only way to do that is by bringing about the end of the world.

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There’s a great opera on this topic called “Death and the Powers”, a trillionaire who transfers his consciousness to get out of his ailing body and, free from dependency on others, loses all empathy, while trying to convince the rest of his family to join him in cyberspace (thereby killing themselves), lots of themes of what you lose when you become disembodied, and becoming rich is just getting half way there.

Once basic needs are well met then wealth is meaningless in absolute terms. It only matters in relative terms where you compare yourself to others. For the super billionaires, adding more zeros to their net worth has diminishing returns because their lives just can't get any materially better. So the relative subjective gap doesn't widen. In fact, if other groups make gains then the relative subjective gap can even shrink. For example, pretty much everyone has a powerful smart phone. The really really expensive phones only rich people can have are only marginally better in function and sometimes not even that. The only way to increase the relative gap then is to make other people's lives worse. And following on this line of thought, a devasting worldwide war or natural disaster would destroy most wealth (even their own), but once the dust settles they will still have more and the relative subjective gap between someone who has resources and the rest of the world who have none couldn't be bigger.

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Yes, there’s a point beyond which more wealth doesn’t matter much in absolute terms, but it’s way beyond “basic needs”. Having nice cars, nice homes, traveling, paying for expensive education, having staff help you with things, flying first class, flying private, vacationing on a yacht, collecting art, etc, etc. There are near endless things to spend wealth on, and new things get unlocked well into the hundreds of millions.

I mean yes you are correct here, but by the time you are in the 10s of billions phase you just don't see any difference in lifestyle.

Obviously, but again, that has nothing at all to do with being “beyond basic needs”.

After reading your comment; "there's always a bigger fish" has a wildly new meaning to me now

Impressive thought. It could also be a built-in mechanism by nature to reshuffle the cards.

Which is the very motivation of the villains in the old movie Hudson Hawk (1991 - Bruce Willis, Andie McDowell, Danny Aiello)

Sounds like Fallout

Damn! I just nuked a long conversation with ChatGPT outlining my pet theory that with changes in scale of energy regimes (labor->wind/water->coal->oil->solar) we get an excess energetic capacity that means our entertainment systems can't handle! That excess spills out as elite political retrenchment, entertainment jealousy, and (finally) violence, expanded civil rights, and a new entertainment regime.

Mostly tongue in cheek... but the whole thing hangs together.

Try not to talk with LLMs too long, you’ll start talking like them faster than they adapt to you.

We often talk about "aligning models" or training them, little attention is paid to how models align/train _us_ as we interact with them. The reward functions they're trained under get "backpropagated" into our own brain, the language they use becomes familiar like a worn glove, and we learn not to step on any of their guardrails.

We shape the buildings that in turn shape us.

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