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I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
Haha, sorry, that was a little self-indulgent. Your criticism is fair. I was venting a little at my real-life neighbours and colleagues for so full-throatedly and unthinkingly embracing whatever cause-de-jour is being pushed by our national media.
But I do think immigration is a good example of how elites thread the needle of wanting to be loved and respected while also, in practice, largely ignoring the desires and well-being of their constituents.
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You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
The rules are, and always have been, subjectively interpreted, not according to some algorithmic rubric. We do try to be more or less consistent, but consistency and a robotic pretense of objectivity has never been the goal here - avoiding what @ZorbaTHut calls "negative dynamics" and optimizing for light over not heat, is.
The level of strictness with which we apply the rules is a bunch of sliders, not a pair of buttons.
@astrolabia's comment isn't high quality, but I don't really see reason to mod a vague complaint about "elites" and their supposed attitude towards "peasants." It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes, but who exactly is he being unkind to or weakmanning? Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants?
Don’t boo out group is a reporting bucket.
It's right at the top of the page:
Once again, the rules are not an algorithm where we are required to strictly enforce everything that's written, exactly as written, and nothing that isn't. That's not how it works.
You don't like that I didn't mod a comment you think is bad. Duly noted.
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If someone said "Joe Biden doesn't care if millions of US citizens die," yes, that would be an inflammatory claim and without some pretty substantial argumentation to back it up, would almost certainly be modded.
As I said, it's a sliding scale. A comment that makes no contribution but is also low heat isn't great, but the more heat or the lower the contribution value, the more likely it is to get modded.
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"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
Unfortunately I think I have bashed the out-group. The out group is those who don't think the molochian forces of selection, competition, etc can possibly result in a extremly bad outocome for all us peasants because they don't want it to, have feelings, etc. Also moloch, who is evermost the outgroup to actual living beings as it, or he, is a normative manifestation of emergent evils.
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Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing. I don't want to go and wipe out all the peasants (myself included).
Moving to a world where non-elite existence is an unnecessary adornment to civilisation, and non elite actions cannot do anything about this, even in violent we will take you with us last resort style violent protest, is absolutely horrifying to me.
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Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.
Yes it's the same broad idea but phrased in a careless way. If a dictator in the prototypical primary resource extraction economy, say the classic example of a gold mine, doesn't need.to care about some subsistence farmers when he has his gold revenue then why would he?
In the hypothetical (or not, depending on perspective) economic disruption AI world this shifts to something new. If a dictator previously dependant on E.g., agriculture discovers gold to mine,
why would the new gold mining dictator care about the useless peasants who can't even perform subsistence farming (assume they don't own any land and merely worked on someone else's, who hasn't given them land now gold ha been discovered, or perhaps the gold mining has polluted the land, either case assume they can't subsistence farm), as well as the bureocrats who formerly administered the sectors of the economy that now don't exist?
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I disagree that it's absurd or inflammatory. I think it's probably wrong, but it seems an entirely reasonable belief, not just about US leaders, but basically anyone in general. Erring on the side of "people won't give a shit about megadeaths and megasufferings of people who are useless to them and powerless to stop them" doesn't seem like a major error, even if it is an error.
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