Lapiano
1yr ago
It's not unfalsifiable, I've just left quantifying it as an exercise for the reader.
Lapiano
1yr ago
extremely competitive market, power law
I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe. SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money. This is the openish secret that is kept from us -- hey, it's only fair that someone who gets to tell everyone what to think, or think about at least, gets his privacy!
Randomness. Luck.
How do you square this with the law of large numbers?
Lapiano
1yr ago
it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games
This is what I mean by meritocracy.
it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none
Status 451 and John Nerst get as many viewers/comments/likes as SA/EY?
it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat
10 years is too slow?
it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness
Still a meritocracy.
it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you
The rich have a more democratic taste? I wouldn't call that better, and do you think their tastes are identical down to the point where themselves being criticized is A-OK, and how do you account for the lack of such criticism?
Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status.
Divide by 1000 and I'd say you're onto something.
Lapiano
1yr ago
By meritocracy I just mean selected for some trait of the work, so popularity can be both "subjective" and a "meritocracy."
Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?
Lapiano
1yr ago
I do think the internet increased the extent of meritocracy, we're just far from a pure one still. In fact there might be a case that it was purer 10-15 years ago and now it's saturated, corporatized, censored, and centralized much more than before.
I don't think that "establishment players" necessarily resent the internet. Some seem to love it. It's cheaper to buy attention now.
Lapiano
1yr ago
So you think it's a pure meritocracy then? What would I gain from "picking a bone" with Scott Alexander on The Motte?
I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.
There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.
I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.
Lapiano
1yr ago
It's an obvious reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; you best ban him before he posts an anti-Semitism.
Lapiano
1yr ago
GPT-3 is significant, because if you understand the average mind, you know that GPT-3 has officially met that level of intelligence. Talking about, say, HBD with GPT-3 is indistinguishable from talking about it with a random person on the street. Both regurgitate mainstream sources at you, refusing to understand anything you say on a deeper level before walking away (GPT-3 actually stops responding if you keep trying to force it to grapple with the same evidence!).
On top of this GPT-3 has a vastly more encyclopedic view than the average person. The only thing GPT-3 is lacking are the animal modules that average humans share with dogs and cats and other animals, stuff like walking, a utility function, a sex drive, a hunger drive, etc.
I believe the significance of GPT-3 is lost on its developers because they don't understand the average mind very well, being very smart people capable of Reason.
Lapiano
1yr ago
Ironically the best explanation I can think of for higher Jewish agency is a rejection of the "greedy Jew" stereotype. It would be the gentile who is greedy. The Jew will not go against his own people for a dollar, and in fact puts a high monetary value on the success of his kin. The gentile can be controlled with Jewish money because the gentile is selfish, short sighted and greedy. The gentile wants more stuff and will sacrifice his kin to get it. Therefore Jews have free reign to set the culture and all the gentiles kowtow to AIPAC and ADL because they aren't willing to bear the cost of not doing so. Jews on the other hand will gladly sacrifice some profit and spend a lot of money cancelling, for instance, on of the most successful rappers ever, Kanye West, even though it would be better for business to keep making deals with Kanye.
Lapiano
1yr ago
and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.
I strongly disagree with this prediction. The vast majority of people value politics very little in monetary terms. If the pay remains safe and secure, and the extent of labor remains static, people will stay whether or not the corporation celebrates Pride Month or Hitler Day. What actually happens is people who are money saturated (rich) take issue and start materially harming any right-wing business (see Twitter advertiser conundrum for instance) which has downstream effects on the labor pool (Musk had to increase hours and do layoffs to cope with the advertiser conundrum). Also a truly right-wing corporation would be sued under Civil Rights laws which would cause immense material harm and force reversion to leftism if the company isn't totally destroyed.
Some of your links seem at first glance to disagree with this. But what you have found is that among workers who are willing to make political donations in fields that discriminate against right wingers and right wing populations (white men), the majority of those workers donate to Democrats. You also posted an NPR link talking about how <0.5% of Disney's workforce in California took an authorized walkout to protest a bill in Florida. This reminds me of the astroturfed, performative high school walkouts after the Stoneman High shooting https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/stoneman-douglas-high-walkouts/
Lapiano
1yr ago
I think your book is wrong. I recommend more science and less Freudianism. You say:
"There are five conditions which enable women to get what they want
from men: women's control of the womb; women's control of the
kitchen; women's control of the cradle; the psychological immaturity of
man relative to woman; and man's tendency to be deranged by his own excited penis."
All of this reifies modern Western consent-centered sex norms. For all of human history until 1960, sex did not work this way. A woman who is considered a minor by law, with her father as her guardian and then her husband, in a society with no concept of "marital rape", has basically none of the power you describe -- she, in fact, has about as much power as a contemporary 13 year old boy, which is nothing.
You kind of recognize that you're reifying the unnatural:
"That man abandons the kitchen to woman, and grovels for access to
a womb, are not ordained by nature or by god, but result from how
woman, who controls the cradle, has chosen to condition boys and girls."
But, scientifically speaking, people don't work like this, so your premise is wrong. Your book contains no science or statistics, which is an epistemic issue that made you vulnerable to this flawed premise, upon which the entire verbal screed seems to be based.
This doesn't save the meritocracy concept because what I mean is democratic meritocracy. If a few people get 10,000 votes each, that's the nepotism model.
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