> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*

Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".

A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.

A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

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bee_rider 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.

I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.

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ElevenLathe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.

If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.

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huslage an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.

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measurablefunc 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?

	▲	nosuchthing 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor. In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable. How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?

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kelseyfrog 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

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legulere 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

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awesome_dude 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969

"Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019

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XorNot 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.

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skissane 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election

So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won

	▲	Nevermark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.

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palmotea an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.

I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.

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bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just make it broad enough that we never get a candidate promoting themselves as “electable” again.

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chrisrogers an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.

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nakedneuron 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?

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achenet 2 hours ago | parent [-]

err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?

Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.

The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.

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tim333 an hour ago | parent [-]

Most bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble" keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher peak.

	▲	measurablefunc 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards. Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.

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Terr_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Refined 1.01 authoritarian form: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because it's become a habit and because dissenters seem to have "accidents" falling out of high windows.

	▲	demosito666 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		V 1.02: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because they believe that the others believe that you have enough power to crush the dissent. The moment this belief fades, you fall.
	▲	dclowd9901 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Is that not the "Emperor's New Clothes" form? That would be like version 0.0.1
	▲	infinitewars 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		it's a sad state these days that we can't be sure which country you're alluding to

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CobrastanJorji 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You ever get into logic puzzles? The sort where the asker has to specify that everybody in the puzzle will act in a "perfectly logical" way. This feels like that sort of logic.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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bodge5000 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the interrogator knows they are lying

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]