georgioz
2yr ago
The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.
This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people. This is standard metric in marketing as well and it is a reason why companies go for endorsements from popular athletes, celebrities or social media stars. I vaguely remember some taste tests between Pepsi and Coke with Pepsi being preferred in blind tests but Coke being preferred if brand was on display. One explanation that saves "meritocratic" concept is that the relevant product is not just the soda, but rather it is the whole experience that is influenced also by things like brand value and recognition. That is the relevant metric here.
Another similar dynamics is when it comes to inventions. You have many stories where some groundbreaking innovation was simultaneously invented by multiple people. And the story always goes that if one inventor was from some Bumfuck, Nowhere and another one was well networked guy from New York, everybody knows which one was successful. Again, one can argue also on merit that networking skills and connections are type of earned advantage - even if not by the person themselves, but maybe the advantage was created by their parents and ancestors.
I'd argue that demanding other people to use neopronouns or different pronouns or in general pushing for hate speech laws or pushing DEI trainings and initiatives is exactly opposite to your claim that left wants to "leave people alone". I do not think we need to rehash the whole CW discussion of left vs right that is discussed here every day.
Rather the point is that whatever the case - be it "leave trans people alone" or "go back to Roe v. Wade" - is automatically taken as natural and proper value to hold, everybody who argues against it is evil. Which would BTW mean that the SCOTUS members who struck down the law are somehow evil and they should not even be allowed to discuss ever weakening these "human rights".
Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way. This means that any left wins are to be enshrined in sacred text as unassailable rights? Why should the left have power to create this new holy book of human rights, which is then used to forcefully prescribe social values and that can never be questioned? Who defines what is a "right", what is the source of the legitimacy for it and who adjudicates in case when different rights are in conflict? Apparently it is not SCOTUS as the left went bonkers after the judgement, immediately questioning legitimacy of the ruling and rehashing all the possibilities like packing the court and so forth. Also what you say would basically guarantee that the Cthulhu can ever only move left or at worst stay in place. Why can we not say that conservatives are just "defending" a position that existed prior to Roe v. Wade? What made the year 1973 so special that we can never move before that in any shape or form?
I think that most people on the left do not even think about these issues - as the OP said, they just swim in the water of their own values and do not even consider them as such. They see them as something natural, as "a right" and enforcing those values as "doing good" and unlike religious people they are often unable to articulate source of those values. I think that it is a feature and not a bug. Every other value system is "ideology", our own value system is the default and correct one, and thus above even being included in ideology category.
georgioz
2yr ago
Many successful youtubers emulate this by having multiple channels even if all of them have basically the same type of content. They just advertise content on the other channel during the video and maybe with a link in description. Sometimes this secondary channel gets even more popular than the main one, so this crosspollinating definitely has some effect.
How does one explain how incredibly bad YouTube recommendations are? If I go to YouTube and just look for something interesting to watch, I have to scroll past dozens and dozens of videos to find something interesting. The most baffling thing is that it can't figure out that if it shows me a video every time I go to YouTube and I always scroll past it and don't click on anything until it has shown me about 40 videos, I probably don't want to watch that video and it shouldn't show it to me 20 times before giving up.
I actually like this feature. I watch different categories of videos ranging from various debates and podcasts, gaming videos, historical videos and documentaries, videos about technology from solar to new weapons and I also follow some channels due to them being entertaining or just cute to clean the palate with something wholesome such as some animal stuff. I often think something may be interesting but not right now as I am interested in different topic at the moment. But I like it if it remains in the feed for some time - even for a day or two - as I can return to it.
On the other hand I do use "not interested" feature for content I do not find interesting which helps. I am also blocking/unsubscribing whole channels a lot if the algorithm thinks for some reason that I should watch the content even if I find it uninteresting. One example is that I do watch League of Legends content from one youtuber/streamer when I am chilling in the evening or drinking my coffee as he has soothing voice and it helps me vent off stress. Of course as soon as I subscribed to his content and watched a few of his videos, I was slammed by other League content that I am not at all interested in. It took me weeks of religious blocking of random League stuff until the algorithm realized that no, I do not want to watch anything else from that category.
georgioz
2yr ago
I don't think you could underpin the concept of 'ideological capture' better that Goldberg does in her opening paragraphs of her opening statement. Not only does she demonstrate what it looks like, and that she is suffering from it. She also demonstrates that if blue journalists were fish, 'ideological capture' is the water they swim in. Lacking self-awareness to the point of absurdity.
I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war such as abortion or gay things that conservatives jin up constantly". When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth. His answer was something along the lines that these are not CW topics, they are matter of unalienable rights that are outside of any discussion. And to me it seemed that he really believed it, he could not probably comprehend that let's say abortion from the position of conservative can be also viewed as question of human rights and preventing genocide. It just did not click.
I think that the whole "justice" angle fried the brains of some people. Everything is now matter of justice, fairness and human rights: we have climate justice, racial justice up to mundane things like dental care justice. In a sense this is "genius" position: every topic and policy I am in favor of is domain of fairness, justice and basic human rights. These are nonnegotiable and there is no compromise possible here, these are topics outside of standard political process and all reasonable people already agree. If you disagree it means you are extremist and not worthy of engaging in a discussion.
georgioz
2yr ago
Alternative explanation is that these large corporations are also existing in kind of incestuous environment. CEOs of various companies know each other and are sitting on boards of various companies together, or they can influence these companies by different means - such as controlling access to technology or market etc. Everybody knows how huge corporations can get what they want from government regulators and other actors, I see no reason not to think that they use similar underhanded tactics against or together with each other. I can easily see a conversation between Cook and Iger along the lines of: "You hire my nephew for this position in Apple and in exchange we will contract company of your nephew for that project at Disney".
georgioz
2yr ago
12/20, as a note I was really overthinking at the beginning. In the second half I just went by my guts and had a little better results. But it really seems like a random chance.
The democrats aren't the real racists
Yale researchers would like to have a word. White liberals basically dumb down their language when talking to minorities. I think that this take that white liberals have "white savior" complex, and that they see minorities basically as pets to be taken care of is nothing new. In fact, I think it is one of the worst forms of racism as it hides behind façade of supposed compassion and caring. The true vitriol is shown when pets disobey and go against what their masters want - as with infamous Biden's you ain't black if you don't vote for me take. It could also support the OP's thesis that white liberals may not see minorities as true competition.
The issue here is that we are talking about competition inside PMC class, which would be around 35% of the population and, also for the top jobs inside that class which may be around 1-5%. And I do not think it is solely about official AA legislation, there is also a push for more women and minorities in these positions without any legal pressure. I think there may be some merit to this theory, I have observed similar phenomenon of managers hiring mediocre people to prevent a situation when they basically rise their own replacement. If doing so even increases your prestige as a fighter for DEI initiative and a good ally, it has a lot of upsides.
15/20 but i did take clothing into account but also things like hairstyle, jewelry etc - if somebody wears Christian cross on a necklace it is a hint. I do not understand the face constraint here - there is a meme about blue hair and other signifiers for allegiance.
In fact, there's not even a word describing the idea that Germans, French, Japanese or Polish people deserve their own state - it's so obvious you don't need to call it anything.
Yes, the term is called German/French/Polish nationalism. Prussians and their other German allies had to fight two wars, first with Austria in 1866 and later with France in 1871 in order to secure the the new state as homeland for Germans in form of Keiserreich. The formation of French identity as a state was also fraught: France was in the past basically something like Holy Roman Empire. For instance even in 1806 only around 58% of people living in France spoke French with large minority in the south speaking Occitan, a language in similar family as Catalan. With one exception being that Occitan nationalism was nowhere near as successful even compared to Catalan nationalism that fuels separatist movements up until today. Also there is huge complication with French Guayana being territory of France
When it comes to Jews and Israel, the major difference is that Israel as home of the Jews was carved by invasion and conquest. In 1800 Jews was small minority of around 2.5% in Palestine, it increased to around 10% by 1890 as Zionism picked up steam - also "thanks" to pogroms on Jews inside many new states that were fueled by nationalist identities and who considered Jews as foreign elements. In 1947 before the Israeli war of Independence, Jews consisted of around 32% of population of Palestine. Zionism is the Jewish form of nationalism with all the usual steps: creation of new language of Hebrew out of basically dead religious language, a solution that was necessary in order to integrate Jews comming to Palestine from all over the world and a solution that prevailed over some suggestions such as using Yiddish in that way. However the extra step of invasion and conquest is something that in eyes of many people make the state of Israel having less legitimacy over let's say Germany or France. Heck, there are many people now questioning the legitimacy of USA due to the fact of conquest of native population. The very fact that questioning the legitimacy of state of Israel is not taken as a joke but as something that has to be squashed by force points to this inherent weakness. This is a similar phenomenon in Spain where Catalans and Basque peoples are questioning the legitimacy of Spain as a state and they are met with similarly strong response.
georgioz
2yr ago
Look, in my eyes it is the same. Pickpocket gangs are basically organized as snatchers. If you detect a pickpocket suddenly 4 people around you turn aggressive and it turns to snatching/attempted snatching.
So my argument is that pickpocketing is just a developed version of snatching. But no worries, we are going to get there at least in Europe.
Congo has more land mass than France, Spain, Italy and Germany put together. This proclamation of yours would be as if you said that you were to Paris and prefer it to Madrid which somehow impacts on how Germans live.
georgioz
2yr ago
It does not necessarily have to be some high-skill job of slicing the purse and removing the wallet silently. My "pickpocketing" experience from Barcelona with my friends was once somebody attempted to steal a phone from the restaurant table, the other time somebody wanted to take my backpack in similar situation. It is apparently so prevalent that all waiters politely reminded us to safeguard all our belongings - and supposedly the situation got worse after COVID. In Latin America it is "popular" to have people on motorcycle running around and stealing shit from people on the sidewalk. This type of crime is not exactly something that requires high skill.
georgioz
2yr ago
Talking to some poor people from Romani community, this is not always the case. Poor families often organize themselves around clans. If one of them "makes it" there is implicit expectation of support for wider family/clan supposedly in exchange for higher status but also higher pressure and responsibility. Shit is complicated.
Coincidentally I have just recently listened to the latest episode of The Redline podcast related to cobalt mining in Congo. It is an episode within wider miniseries regarding green topics, but it can very well be considered as a standalone episode. I really highly recommend the podcast in general to anyone who wants to keep tabs on what is going on around the world. It has a unique format of interviewing 3-4 experts on any given topic (e.g. civil war in Jemen or what are Private Military Companies about in today's world).
There is fair share of geopolitics of Congo in that podcast episode. Sadly one thing that stuck with me is how bad the situation is there with various warlords. There are apparently over 100 different armed groups in this vast country of 92 million people - a country larger than Mexico. And apparently all these armed groups created a new equilibrium where they basically depend on constant conflict to make money. Additionaly, attention paid to green minerals of the future from developed markets have potential to push Congo even more into some kind of "green minerals" version of petrostate, where the government gets all the profit from resource extraction which gives them no incentive to create healthy economy and tax base to draw power from. I see very bleak future for the country given that it would be extremely challenging to overcome myriads of other obstacles even under the best of circumstances. Listen to it if you want to know more.
georgioz
2yr ago
That MartyrMade thread you linked originally had a podcast episode associated with it, discussing the Pizzagate conspiracy, that I don't see on the Substack anymore. Hmmm...
I can see it on my Apple Podcast app, released on June 27th and named BONUS The Jeffrey Epstein Series, pts. 1 & 2 (of 3) He released the third episode on October 17th. I do have his substack subscription so I do have access to extra episodes but these are from his free podcasts.
georgioz
2yr ago
I agree and see it as manifestation of iron law of beurocracy. Many fields you mentioned are ossified and require external financing. Hence the need to serve their own respective beurocracies. An ideal example is let's say intelligence communities: did we prevent some terrorist attack? See, it is working we need to do more. Did we not prevent a terrorist attack? We are underfunded and we need more resources. It also explains creeping of activism into sciences and by activism I mean one-sided single issue analysis of a given topic without any consideration given to any counterargument that can weaken the ultimate goal of getting more funds. Every study ends with "further research into this groundbreaking and important insight is needed".
My guess is that it may be viewed as a general thrust against multiculturalism and the idea of peaceful coexistence and co-development of different cultures, religions and ethnicities voluntarily living next to each other and enriching one another.
The thing is that many of these stories over the centuries began as cooperation first: often the outside peoples were used by indigenous population in certain manner be it trade or even mercenaries. Once the other culture learned about the domestic population and its riches and strong/weak points, the invasion commenced. Think of stories like apocryphal story of Germanic people invited to England in order to fight Picts or Turkic Mamluks in Egypt or even in 19th/20th century story of Jews in Palestine. Not exactly poster cases for more immigration and multiculturalism.
georgioz
2yr ago
So, to those of you who have read my message this long, I pose you a question: suppose you are Tim Pool. You tell Kanye that there's no reason to group together Jewish individuals as a collective, when they're all individuals who happen to be Jewish. Kanye points out that you have previously discussed "the black vote," a concept that involves black people making electoral decisions because they're black. You now have to explain how this is different from talking about "the Jews" who control record labels and movie studios.
What do you tell Kanye?
I would respond that this is not necessarily a tribal acknowledgement. We can talk about let's say "first time voters" vote without necessary implication that they all band together in some tribal way although they may naturally put more importance to certain topics such as college debt, housing being too expensive and so forth compared to let's say retired veteran voters. Even for black voters there are shifts and splits among them, for instance black men turned to republicans significantly so in that sense talking about "black vote" is at least not as significant as it was in the past. But using race or ethnicity or educational status or rural/urban split or income and any number of other categories as well as finding intersections among them can definitely be used for analysis of voter sentiment and their policy preferences to engage in dialog and crafting political program. It does not have to be used to fuel tribal wars dividing people as allies/enemies based on those characteristics.
The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors.
I'd argue that it is hard to underestimate significance of even small fraction of protesters demanding Xi Jinping or CCP being replaced. This NEVER happens in China, never. There was a precedent to this in form of famous bannerman protest in Beijing calling for end of Covid restrictions and calling for free elections as the National Congress of CCP was in sitting. This was immediately suppressed and censored and the bannerman AKA Bridge Man was promptly disappeared - probably with his larger network of friends and family also severely punished up to three generations. But his message still spread out in various forms including Apple Airdrop campaign, for which Apple caved in to CCP. That is the reason why you normally never see these things in China, and yet here we are.
Again, even if it is a small portion of the crowd demanding a change it cannot be compared to the Western protests. This is huge shift in sentiment of the population. If you actually have vocal voices willing to take such an incredible risk, there are bound to be much more people silently sympathizing but scared to voice their opinion.
Any time anything like this happens in China or Ukraine or whatever, it's always "foreign operatives" or whatever. The locals never have any agency of course.
I observed this as well. I follow Daryl Cooper and he goes on and on how everything that happened in Russia since downfall of Soviet Union has imprint of USA. Russian economy was ruined by US corporations, their peaceful attempts such as Partnership for Peace was dashed by the likes of Allbright and Kissinger and their pawns like Václav Havel or Lech Wałęsa. Expansion of NATO basically forced Russia into hot wars, they had no other choice. Even recent analysis like Nordstream 2 pipeline explosion - Cooper's theory is that Biden was blackmailed by intelligence community to blow up the pipeline - because there is no possible explanation for why Putin or anybody else would ever do it, there is quite a remarkable absence of imagination regarding Putin and his convoluted gang of goons, given what convoluted stories Cooper can create when it comes to US actions. And my speculation is that even if Putin actually ordered it a new narrative would be created how it is ultimately just result of America's shady plays behind the curtain.
There is never any agency of 7.7 billion people in the World, everything that ever happens is orchestrated by this one nation of 300 million. It seems like a sort of strange and perverse version of American exceptionalism - yes we are the most powerful nation that ever was and we are behind everything, only we are the bad guys. Which is BTW a strangely common thread with the wokes, only they see immense power of Western White Males everywhere in the world throughout whole history. It is quite a weird fetish.
Also for everybody else, I follow The China Show podcast of two expats who lived in China for over a decade and who have a lot of contacts still in there. They covered the topic extensively during last episode, it is worth a watch.
I don't think it works this way. Cozying with Tim Cook is not just about having a dinner and a few beers and cracking some jokes. I'd guess that it would involve concessions probably around censorship or letting some actors inside the company to guarantee compliance with Apple's interests or something like that.
Just an interesting sidenote, Tim Cook's net worth is apparently around 1.8 billion which is hundred times less than what Elon Musk has. But of course Cook is in control of company thousand times more valuable than his wealth. This is the problem I see in these top echelons of PMC. You have hired CEOs who enforce their own culture and habits that may be largely orthogonal to interests of companies and shareholders they manage. This is even more pronounced when we are talking about large financial corporations like Vanguard (managing $8.1 trillion) or Blackrock (managing $8.5 trillion) with their CEOs of Mortimer J. Buckley and Larry Fink net worth of probably in hundreds of millions up to a billion at high end. I am absolutely unsurprised if at certain points these professional workers kind of stop caring about money and may smell too much of their own farts, gathering in various exclusive locations like at Davos and coming up with ideas like ESG or other initiatives to basically utilize the company's power and resources they are hired to manage to leave larger imprint on society to satisfy their power trips.
I think there may be something rotten when it comes to modern corporate structure, it starts to resemble a government with quite a large difference between interest of managers (politicians) and shareholders (electorate). To me it resembles more and more structure of the past where kids of nobility got plucky jobs as governors of provinces or as army officers exactly to get status and power in order implement their own personal or family or wider network interests.
I agree, however there is also something to be said about arbitrary selection of the reference class. For instance in doomsday argument it is just assumed that humanity is a reference class. Why not all hominids? Why not just all accounts that are subscribed to The Motte including bots? Using the latter example both bots and human users have something in common - they are subscribed to The Motte. But there is not much else to be said for it or infer from it. It may be the case that even if two concepts are overlapping in certain category, it is erroneous to assume that there may be some meaningful knowledge gained by projecting information you have from one well researched concept (let's say in this case well known human users) onto other concept (in this case bots). Including basic information regarding how many are there to be in the future or some such.
The origin story of doomsday argument is supposed to be WW2 Allied intelligence operation, where they observed number painted on German tanks and ascertained how many of them were likely produced using statistics. But in that case the reference class was well defined and grounded. For instance intelligence agencies were interested in all German tanks already produced - they were not interested in tanks produced in WW1 or Leopard tanks produced in 2020. They probably had some hard intelligence regarding how the numbers were assigned - e.g. that they were assigned sequentially and not randomly as is the case for instance with certain countries/states vehicle license plates. They also had additional data, for instance if they observed a tank numbered 1,000,000,000 they would have known that their methodology is flawed as it was not physically possible for Germans to have one billion tanks.
This may not be the case, Chinese nuclear arsenal is shrouded in mystery and nobody knows how many they have. The estimates range from just couple dozens to high hundreds. Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept. You have a lot of nepotism - like Mao's grandson who is clearly borderline mentally challenged holding position of Major General and being in charge of thousands of soldiers. Chinese general Guo Boxiong who was sentenced for corruption was charged with openly selling promotions inside army en masse. If somebody thinks that Russian Army is corrupt, Russians are playing child's game next to the status of PLA. So who knows how many of the nuclear weapons are actually functional. Nukes require very sophisticated and expensive maintenance and calibration. And these are exactly ideal targets of corruption as they are existing only on paper with low chance of them ever being used. Similar situation as when Russian suddenly realized that supposed 1.5 million uniforms in warehouses actually do not exist. It is similar situation as when within weeks of declared inspection of grain reserves in China many grain silos mysteriously caught on fire.
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