suoduandao2

I think it's on of those 'ask three proponents get five answers' things, but here's my take:

Game b recognizes that much of the world is subject to coordination problems (more evocatively called 'Moloch traps' or 'Prisoner's dilemmas')[1]. Game b thinking also recognizes both that the best outcome for a competitor within the current system is less optimal than the default outcome for a participant in a better system, and that any attempt to reform the current system requires viability within it.

Game a is therefore the game of being successful in the current imperfect system. Game b is the game of reforming it to make good outcomes easier for everyone to achieve. In some sense, Game b includes Game a, since staying viable in Game a is required to participate in Game b. But prioritizing Game b often leads to a different strategy for Game a than seeking maximum success in Game a.

Like I said, that's my take and likely my take on a Tuesday morning alone - but I'd be happy to discuss it further with you if you're interested.

[1]https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It's not hard to make the argument that it's a cover for a nefarious plot. Given the timing of when these ideas rose to prominence, that it was a reaction to the 'occupy wall street' movement and the prospect of an underclass uniting against the ruling class is a parsimonious explanation. The US ruling class very effectively prevented poor white and poor black citizens from making common cause in the early twentieth century by telling one of them they were better than the other. It's no great leap of the imagination to suppose they'd try the same in the twenty-first.

I don't personally subscribe to that narrative - dividing the losers of the new economic reality might have been an incidental goal, but the idea that social justice is a solution to elite overproduction[1] makes more sense to me. And as a means of curbing elite overproduction I actually like it - just as Edwardian scandal culture selected for self-control, cancel culture selects for a lot of the qualities we'd want in a successful elite. But I've yet to hear a good argument why it's not a cynical play by the elite to divide the poorest citizens against each other. Most who subscribe to the tenets of the system refuse to acknowledge the argument at all.

It's very hard to argue that social justice isn't designed to divide the poorest people against each other, since intended or not that's an effect it has[2]. I imagine the best counterargument to the belief I put forth in my first paragraph would be an alternate explanation for why these ideas arose when they did - does anyone who doesn't believe it's a cover for a nefarious plot have one?

[1] as argued very eloquently by, I believe, Charles Eisenstein in an essay I wish I could locate.

[2] and it puts one in the position of arguing that Yale isn't a racist institution, which is a losing position from the outset.

I don't see it that way - I think of it as a linguistic challenge. Every group's thoughts are limited by the language the group adopts. Learning a group's language makes one more prone to think as that group does, but it also allows one to keep those ideas at arm's length. And if an idea is difficult to communicate in a group's language, that doesn't make it deceptive to hold it, especially if one makes good-faith attempts to communicate important ideas using the group's language.

And while it is true that some groups hold language and ideas that are both infectious and dangerous, arms-length exposure to many such ideas is much less likely to result in pathology than close exposure to one. Refusing to learn an enemy tribe's language is an uninformed bet that you lucked into the best tribe by default.

Everything handwaving freakoutery (it's a blog) publishes on egregores I found highly relevant and entertaining.

Actually, everything contemporary mentioning egregores is probably relevant - they're also called 'AI autocults', but the concept existed long before group communication became enmeshed with computer infrastructure - though the dynamics are different now than in enlightenment-era Europe, and the pre-Newtonian assumptions of the older publications throws most modern readers off.

'leapt on his charger' implies that he attacked very quickly, perhaps after the battle had officially started but both sides were still in fact glaring at each other and getting ready. I imagine it being a bit similar to a boxing match which begins when the bell rings, but opponents will typically touch gloves as a sign of respect before actually fighting. Sometimes a fighter will use this moment to sneak in an unexpected attack and catch his opponent off guard - well within the rules, but considered poor sportsmanship.

So The Wire is a subtle endorsement of the 'game B' idea?

I guess I'm asking "the value of everything will drop as measured by what"?

One of my hobbies is writing conspiracy theories that nobody wants to believe but that have just enough resonance with reality to be hard to ignore. I'm currently working on one that posits a rogue group of white supremacists within America's three letter agencies planning their own 'colour revolution' for America, with white being the colour of choice. Currently they'd be just using public propaganda to stoke resentment, but next economic downturn, who knows...

I believe Telegram is the private messaging app of choice within Iran.

I see. BTW, it looks like whatever caused your old account to be deleted carried over to this one, I'm only seeing your comments because I have my showdead on.

What sort of water tech do you predict we'll see, cheaper desalination? I thought sanitation was a pretty mature technology.

Well I'll go on record predicting the opposite. Meta is an advertising behemoth and has taken a very big bet on metaverse, they can ensure unlimited good press for their baby, especially if their real customers aren't buying as many ads as before.

I can see it now: "Life sucks because of the crash? Move to the Metaverse!"

Surely 'all asset classes' can only drop relative to some exception, where is everyone taking their money? I know we have significant inflation, are people going into cash despite it?

Regarding the question 'what specific thing is it hard to do without fossil fuels', the answer, from what I've seen of that side of the debate, is that the problem isn't technical but economic.

To attempt to steelman the argument AIUI: If we replace the EROI of fossil fuels with the EROI of renewables, a much larger portion of the economy will have to be dedicated to generating energy. This will make everything more expensive, and a lot of activity we take for granted today will be too expensive to be maintained, even though it might still be technically feasible. Even the leisure time to invent new and better energy sources will be displaced by people needing more time to chop their own firewood etc[1], and free capital to invest in new inventions will similarly be much harder to come by than when we were all comparatively rich due to the fossil subsidy. There will be knock-on effects in the complexity of society, which is currently able to maintain a high level of complexity and specialization because the high costs of complexity (e.g. longer supply chains) is being subsidized by the low cost of energy.

It's not a terrible argument, though it clearly is making a doomer assumption at every turn. Currently, google tells me that the EROI of crude oil and solar PV are ~20 and ~10 respectively - which does represent a significant tightening of the total wealth available if we contemplated switching everything today. The more optimistic counterpoint, is that the current EROI of fossils is diminishing, and will meet the EROI of renewables at some point, where by this logic the maintainable complexity of society would stabilize. Hopefully that still allows us to have a microchip foundry somewhere, though I haven't seen anyone reliably crunch the numbers one way or another.

[1]pointing out that Nikola Tesla invented a lot of things while employed digging ditches is not part of a proper steelman.

But not political stance? Seems a glaring oversight. Unless the people who wrote the regulations like being able to request a payment processor shut off campaign donations to any newcomer with better ideas than them. But that would make them beholden to the business interests that actually control the money, and leave them helpless to enforce any real regulations on the same. Surely no elected representative would be so shortsighted ;o)

antifragility. Regulation through a central authority can only make big mistakes, the harder it clamps down to avoid smaller mistakes, the bigger the mistakes that eventually get made. Much harder to learn when you have full control, etc.

>If you live in western Europe that is a point in favor of the government.

Maybe if history started in 1947 it would. Righteousness tends to do much better at the ballot box than the stock market. And self-righteous as American tech is for advertising purposes, I'd still say it has an order of magnitude more self-awareness than American politics for advertising purposes.

honestly, amorality seems less scary than self-righteousness to me at this point in history.

clear rules that decide who's in and who's out seem acceptable to most... if credit card providers had decided that only certain types of porn were banned, that would have caused an outcry as well.

There's no reason it couldn't be employing a local, but there are an awful lot of reasons it wouldn't. No locals applying chief among them. If the company was explicitly not hiring anyone from Costa Rica, sure, that would be one thing. If the best candidate happened to not be Costa Rican, that's something else entirely.

No, because our culture holds that truth is not held by the culture, but by the individual's instinct for rightness. Clothes may be a cultural construct, but no amount of collective lying can cover the emperor's nudity.

The sci-fi seried Buck Godot proposed an entertaining solution - allow only a limited number of journalists to exist, and let the aspiring journalists sort it out between themselves.

The one living journalist in that story was completely amoral, but boy was she willing to go to great lengths to get the story!

>Especially once they finish the pipeline to ship LNG to Asia

I have my doubts that the US will allow that to happen. The resource curse is real.

I saw a commentary on education - I think on HN actually - where the writer was suggesting that the prime directive for each student should be 'know thyself'. Advertisers know me in a shallow way only, and they aren't really served by knowing me in a deep way - they need to know me well enough to know if I might buy a given product, the why of that is immaterial to them (and they have no direct access to it anyway).

There is an ideal world where everyone spends a lot of time getting to know themselves on an intimate level and then broadcasts their very personal desires to an advertising industrial complex, which finds the solutions to these deep and difficult-to-articulate drives. But the advertiser can't realistically get that kind of information on anyone. I know that's not what advertisers claim, but I'm confident in calling bullshit on what they say about knowing their customers. They can't even tell when they're irritating someone to the point of installing an adblock, and they're supposed to know what self-actualization looks like to each of their many customers? I ain't even renting that.

I agree with the basic premise that advertising can be a force for good. But the advertisee has to be an active participant, else the advertiser will reliably determine that the target's telos is 'maximize shareholder value for <advertiser>'.

No idea why this comment was flagged. It seems a commonsense take.

HN not being indie would certainly explain it... which begs the question, where's the indie hacker crowd now?

There's a glaring difference between a digital nomad working remotely and someone on an H1B or an illegal immigrant - the digital nomad isn't participating in the local labour market. Increasing the labour supply (which most assume would decrease the price) is the major complaint people who dislike H1Bs/illegal immigrants. A digital nomad isn't competing with the people he lives near for scarce jobs, so that complaint doesn't apply.

Our current understanding of entropy is probably about as accurate as Newton's understanding of gravity, not something we want to get dogmatic about.

>Replaced by STEM

I cannot let this go because my Engineering undergrad is the one place I encountered a decent course on ethics; studying the subject is necessary for licensure. We didn't displace ethics, Philosophy departments got lost in their own rhetorical devices and don't talk about the 'how then should we live?' question enough to interest the general public.

>My experience has been that the value people see in crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much they believe in their government

That's an interesting thesis and 'feels' true, but I have a hard time reconciling HN's (seeming) indie ethos with it's cryptoskepticism if that's the overriding factor. Have you any theories to explain the seeming disconnect?