> Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
Any examples where it's not preferable?
Wisdom-of-Crowds coin-jar experiment: independent guesses are noisy, but their average reliably approximates the true count, showing group aggregation beats most individuals.
I'm drawing a moral analogy to mass murder, so the whole thing is going to tend towards the unhinged. But I'll stand by it. There is something sad in ordinary people bending to banal evil. Monsters being monsters is just horrific.
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.
The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.
Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
The characterization of “us” as “assailants” is an acknowledgment of the sorrowful fate that we as a society inflict on nearly every whistleblower despite the fact that we as a society encourage people to be whistleblowers.
Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?
(You forgot to use logic or explain a point of view and instead just made a random moral judgement and expressed the emotion it made you feel, so I had to make some assumptions about your intentions and depth of thought)
I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.
And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.
No obviously not. Lots of machines replace workers.
Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?
If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment.
But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
If you're so sure that new jobs will appear (and -- critical omission -- that they will be any good), surely you would be willing to ask the capital interests for whom these arguments are self-serving to put money where their mouth is and backstop a guarantee?
I suspect that the reason might be that the Industrial Revolution happened over 200 years ago. That provides a lot of time for 97% of jobs to progressively disappear without disrupting society too much (except for all the revolutions and world wars). That would be quite different than if AI caused any significant percentage of jobs to disappear in a much shorter period of time.
This analogy happens a lot, and it might be true, but it's not clear to me that they're comparable.
The Industrial Revolution mostly ate mechanical labor and created more 'thinking' and knowledge worker jobs closer to the top of the stack. AGI goes after the information / decision-making layer itself. And it's unclear how much remains once those are automated.
I consider the Industrial Revolution to still be ongoing, since jobs have constantly been automated away by technology for 250 years. Some like to split that time into separate eras. In that paradigm we're now in the Fifth Industrial Revolution (Industry 5.0).
Whatever you call it, jobs keep getting "stolen" by technology, and yet employment rates stay high and average living standard keeps rising.
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this keeps happening, decade after decade, and yet most people are convinced the opposite is happening. I'm old enough to remember this exact discussion from 50 years ago.
We all see and interact with jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, and many of us work those jobs. And yet... this knowledge is somehow compartmentalized away from future expectations.
If you want a theoretical framework for why this keeps happening, my thought is that unemployed humans are an unused resource. And capitalism is really good at finding ways to use those.
I have two ways to think of it, and both give similar numbers.
A: 250 years ago, 98% worked in farming. Today it's 2% (who produce more food!). Assume that the other 2% are at least twice as productive, and you get that 3% of the population now produces as much as 100% back then.
B: It's hard to directly estimate how much GDP per person has increased in 250 years. But the typical number economists get when trying is that it's 30x as big. Which means 3.3% of today's workforce produces as much (per person) as the whole workforce did back then.
Both A and B can be critiqued, but the precise numbers don't really matter for the argument.
According to the economic notion of value, which is unique among definitions of "value" in being wealth-weighted, enshrining "mega gainz in brokerage accounts" as the ultimate social good while shrugging its shoulders at the plight of the ahem low-weight individual.
Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.
If you have lots of money, you can spend lots of money. If you have no money, you can spend no money. Your demand is indeed wealth-weighted in the objective function of the market.
That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up.
Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up.
Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it.
> bofadeez
Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.
Only if it’s not an electric car. Electric cars need to start paying somehow, too. I’m open to many options, especially including weight * miles driven or similar.
In most states electric cars are paying via registration surcharges. For me, it’s a lot more than I would have paid via WA state’s gas tax since I don’t drive much. Miles driven would work out better.
I mean this is how all welfare works, isn't it? If as a society we think it's important to reallocate some resources so that people can get food in bread lines, we generally do that.
What a bigoted remark. Someone flag it!! (lol)... You're not being gaslit, no no, you're just a crazy person whose perception of reality is flawed. Epstein never existed at all, it's just your imagination, okay? Yes or yes? So do you agree with my opinion - or do you disagree with your opinion? This is not sloppy strategic gaslighting designed for boomers, it's journalism, and you need to let it influence you.
Wow, great point. Video games encourage heterodoxical thinking rather than blindly following the narrative. So you're saying we should develop and promote more Assassin's Creed type games to reduce overall gullibility, as a public service.
E.g. Being skeptical of "facts" reported by Judith Miller in NY Times that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that US troops would be welcomed as liberators in 2003. I'm sure players of Assassin's Creed would not have fallen for that.
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