reply on: Elites, the curse of recursion, and the half-life of policy \ stacker news ~mostly

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345 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 29 Mar \ on: Elites, the curse of recursion, and the half-life of policy mostly_harmless

The Lovecraft/Dali comparisons are spot-on. Love these things in fiction and art, but would appreciate not having them in the real world.

Despite this, most of the same people continue to run the show, even though they suck at it. And the longer they do, and the more things change, the worse the effects are. And yet these effects give rise to the next wave -- the system consumes the fruits of its own mindless grinding, and those fruits are malformed, and eating them warps the people who do the eating, making them even less fit for the challenges to come.

I think part of the issue here is that the elites start at such a high peak, that even as they get worse and make the world worse, they're feeling the impact to such a small degree. Trump lost a lot of his dad's money, and his kids will lose more of his, but it'll probably not be until their kids (even with inflation dovetailing with elitism) where they may legitimately lose their status. Same with most of the other elites.

the handbook for world domination gets increasingly outdated. It's like picking up an old book on software development from Goodwill for $1 - the process described to build a program doesn't work, you get all kinds of unparseable errors, the menu options don't correspond to what they show you in the figures. It's confusing and hard to take effective action.

Love this analogy a lot. And I especially love it because it felt like, not that long ago, you could pick up an older software development book and have it still mostly work, but as things moved more quickly, that rapidly became less and less true.

179 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 29 Mar

I think part of the issue here is that the elites start at such a high peak, that even as they get worse and make the world worse, they're feeling the impact to such a small degree. Trump lost a lot of his dad's money, and his kids will lose more of his, but it'll probably not be until their kids (even with inflation dovetailing with elitism) where they may legitimately lose their status.

Agreed. That's basically what @grayruby is wondering about, and I think you've got it right -- the financialization of everything means that, as unsavory as it may be, these dipshits are going to be living large even in a hyperbitcoinized future, unless they are truly, epically stupid.