georgioz
1yr ago
I think we are talking about the same thing except that "physically killing themselves" is in a sense trivial matter of things like swallowing some pills, jumping off the cliff or pushing a trigger. Motorically killing oneself is triviality and almost everybody can do it in some manner comfortable with his "skillset". It of course is psychologically serious act and not everybody is capable of it - OP says that this is cowardice.
The rest of the training segment, instead, fumbles towards the idea that cultivating Belonging is the real goal.
The term belonging has a specific meaning in critical studies, there is a good writeup on James Lindsay's encyclopedia. So this concept basically takes inclusion even further, you are not only required not to do bad stuff like microaggressions that can exclude marginalized categories, you also have to participate on all DEI activities proactively and enthusiastically, otherwise you are excluding. I feel sorry for you.
In the broader sense I like how Lindsay described DIE initiatives. Diversity really means experts on diversity. It does not necessarily mean to have people of different colors and genders and sexualities, it means having all those people but above all else they must adhere to Social Justice movement and ideology, otherwise they do not count - they "ain't black". So diversity means employing ideological commissars. Now the main tool of these commissars is inclusion. The agenda is to exclude all thoughts and ideologies opposing Social Justice, marking them as violence that creates unsafe space and so forth supposedly producing exclusion. Inclusion really is censorship. And equity is of course the age old left doctrine: you have to build commissariat that administratively redistributes resources, positions, social status, promotions and so forth from those who were identified by commissars as oppressors to those who are in line with what commissars want and who are thus oppressed or allies. And of course it goes without saying that given that commissars have a very important and tough job ahead of them, they have to get some resources as well. Equity is just expanded concept of socialism.
Even though DEI may sound good and for sure many people genuine believe in it, it is exceedingly prone and one can even say designed to incentivize grift as well as reproduction: it saps company resources aimed at making their products or services in order to spread Social Justice inside and outside of the company.
I use the term socialism in the meaning that it is supposed to be administrative phase where the ideals are enforced onto the population by vanguard socialist forces. The idea is that once the population internalizes all the socialist values, the final phase will be for the socialist vanguard to abolish themselves and true communist utopia is achieved.
This is the same logic. You will have DEI experts and CSR positions imposing Social Justice values upon the people administratively, but this is supposed to only exist until the true Social Justice is achieved voluntarily and automatically, until everybody internalizes critical consciousness and the system can be maintained from within so to speak. This aim goes in line with the overall acceptance that reality is socially constructed, if you do enough activism to change the people to accept certain values, it will in turn make people build better and more Socially Just society and reality. For instance the old classical Marxists-Leninists believed that [social]reality is constructed by mode of production and abolishing private property by socialist forces will change the material conditions of proletariat which will in turn lead to communism if carefully guided by The Party of course. Different concept in some sense, but one which share certain logic.
Also I used the terms like commissars, censorship and socialism known for more than 100 years as an analogy for Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers, Inclusion and Equity. As with all analogies it is not the same, but it shares some significant internal logic which I briefly explained. That is my assertion.
EDIT: I can also to use another example of Department of Anti-racism as proposed by Ibram X. Kendi. It should be "comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees" - which means no political control over "experts on racism" or in my parlance anti-racist commissars. This body should have no other authority, they just want to:
The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
This would literally mean constitutionally enshrining leading position of unelected anti-racist commissars over all public and private policy and personal governmental decisions in USA. For me it is preposterous that anybody even considers Kendi as anything but utmost danger to democracy.
Hostile environment lawsuits are skewed in certain way, it is just HR protecting the company and there is just these small things that need to be enacted or incentivized. But sure, it has to be just a coincidence that "belonging" was used as a term and theme for the presentation, while at the same time it is used by DEI experts as the main reason why we need to go even further. For sure by belonging they meant things like aptitude or capability to do the job as opposed to personal and political agenda bleeding into your company. Go away with this boogeyman, it is just normal corporate "conservativism" not to be slammed by lawsuits you silly Lindsay enthusiast.
Again, all I want to say is good luck. I hope you at least get some “fuck you” money from all of this, this would be my advice. And I do not really want to belittle you in any way. I gues my point is to advise you to get on a little bit more “cynical” or calculating outlook in order to navigate.
I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.
This is a very interesting topic for me. Originally the vaccines were touted as "efficient and safe". The original promise during the first round of the vaccine was definitely as effective against spread - it was one of the main drivers for vaccination of certain number of people in order to achieve herd immunity. New York Times in September 2021 said that
Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.
It was then increased by some percentage points until the new story emerged that vaccines are only there to prevent severe risks of infection. Please do mind you, that originally due to herd immunity goal it was supposed that all people including children should receive the vaccine. Vaccine was literally touted as replacement for lockdown, there were literally "traffic light" systems where severity of lockdown was based on vaccination rate like this example from New Zealand
A high vaccination rate remains a key tool to protect people and minimise the spread of COVID-19. Getting vaccinated means you are less likely to get extremely sick or infect other people.
What followed is that the "or infect other people" part was dropped down as if it never existed. I will end here, but this level of amnesia of things that were blasted 24x7 all over the media and government communication is quite frankly astounding. And I am not singling you out, I have met people who had the same stance toward vaccine as you, where they literally replaced the latest narrative as if it was always the case. But to be frank it is quite scary, mostly because it hugely impedes any learnings from the current pandemic ranging from original designation of "COVID scare is racist" through "WHO says no evidence of human-to-human spread" through "no evidence that masks work" to "mask mandates" to "cloth masks do not work" to "vaccines make people less likely to infect other people" to now where we say that "experts" were always right.
It seems insane to me and do not even get me about "Lab Leak conspiracy" theory. Because yeah, a country of 1.4 billion is origin of novel coronavirus and it happens by chance that Wuhan - one of 100 Chinese cities above population of 1 million - was epicenter of the virus. And BTW it is also the only place in China where there is also Biosafety level 4 Wuhan Institute of Epidemiology that coincidentally happens to research novel coronaviruses. All the stellar Pulitzer journalists did not see anything there to investigate the biggest story of 21st century so far, not enough incentives to go deeper. Quite contrary: to ask questions about potential leak was deemed as conspiracy. For me it is incredible for journalists who regularly look for weak links - like politician getting donation from corporation only for year later to vote in favor of them, they saw nothing suspicious in such a huge red flag. And not only that, they were lock in step to suppress the story.
By all means disagree (and one should disagree) with these ridiculously stupid or at best unnecessary policies, but the consensus in my circles was always that the vaccine might only ever help reduce severity and potentially transmission to a limited extent, albeit perhaps enough that hospital capacity could meet demand.
Okay, I get your point that you were part of enlightened community that knew what WHO message was false and what was correct, maybe you had some link to researchers and all that. You had privilege to act individually, you were probably one of the "nonessential workers" who could do so. But then I have to challenge you about your quote (bolded):
I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.
You meant "literally all my 20 friends who knew what's what" or is it "literally" billions affected and probably hundreds of millions of shills?
The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population.
The EU has population of 447 million and in 2021 the were 4.06 million births here. Having third of the population growth from immigration is definitely not a small "trickle". Even USA that had peak immigration year of 1907 with 1.3 million legal immigrants, there were around 2.7 million people born during that year. So the immigration was also around one third of the population growth.
It also does not look like small trickle in certain attractive countries, regions and cities. And we are talking about comparison with peak immigration in US, which then had efforts of bringing immigration down during the following decades. Which is not how it seems now in EU - especially with speeches like these which paint it it all as nonissue.
There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured.
To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.
Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).
As far as I know all dictatorships use some method of torture to this day. We are also talking about highly "successful" regimes - if one counts staying in power as success - like that of North Korea. I'd say these people would have much more systematic evidence of efficacy of modern torture compared to US or other Western countries with much more red tape around these practices with deep incentives to hide the existence of torture even if it was succesful.
So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective
I'd say that this may be the most effective way of using torture. You can ask easily verifiable information such as where is the weapon cache hidden or what is the cipher for coded message or maybe just verify other intel possibly also gathered by torture. But even thinking about it logically - what other option is there? I know that British during WW2 were inventive and gathered some intelligence by creating bugged comfy house for German officers, supplying them with steady stream of booze and then recording what they said in unguarded moments. There may also be bribes or blackmail and such - but if none of these investigative methods yield any results what else is there from investigative standpoint? Release them? Even modern western investigators use threat of what to me accounts like torture (e.g. threat of longer prison sentence or being sent into hostile prison and so forth) to get something from criminals. Sometimes investigators may even return to prison and offer deals of shortening the sentence - basically ending the torture - in order to get some intel.
Now obviously I am not even some proponent of torture, but for moral reasons and of course overall impact on society and all that. But just saying that torture is not effective seems a bit hasty conclusion at best. And to be sure lately I am even less inclined to believe any academic research especially if some deeply held political or moral stances are at stake, which BTW also includes spanking.
There is a good article on Everything Studies with a nice graph showing how let's say rationalist view reality and how some more humanities inclined people view it. If one accepts the latter framework, then saying reality is socially constructed means the social order is socially shaped as opposed to the physical universe is socially conjured.
To further muddle the waters, many people say that social construction does not mean things are not real. Often used example is money: value of otherwise worthless physical pieces of paper stems from other people giving it value. Money undoubtedly is "socially shaped" but it does not make it unreal meaning that pieces of green paper are an illusion or somehow physically not existing. In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.
This really is often confusing and even well meaning people may talk past each other. As an example I will use the term science. For somebody it may mean body of knowledge gathered by scientific method. For somebody else it means more philosophy and sociology of science meaning ways how grants are awarded, social processes that steer researchers into certain fields of research more than other fields and so forth. So saying that science is social construct is obviously true as science is done by people and they are working in socially shaped organizations using socially shaped processes. It does not mean that scientific body of knowledge is just some arbitrarily made up stuff. But then again it can be if let's say scientific social processes were driven by racism or whatnot.
Now to be frank, even if I do somewhat understand where social constructionists come from I think their insight has limited value. It would be better to define special terms for what they actually mean so if one says "science" we know if we are talking about scientific body of knowledge or something else. These discussions often take form of sophistry spreading confusion and they paradoxically contribute to the whole social constructivist premise. Which in a sense may be ultimate level of trolling: see, we made scientists say stupid things by sophistry and social pressure. We were right all along except in the past the social pressure was based on racism and misogyny and homophobia!
georgioz
1yr ago
I disagree. To use an analogy, the best people to ask about Christianity and the bible may be atheists, especially "converted" ones that spent years studying all there is in order to come to certain conclusion. Asking the question in your cookie cutter christian forum may often lead to incredulity, suspicion and even hostility of people who feel that their faith is threatened. I often see the same in woke spaces. Discussions often quickly devolve into some version of sneerclub and are ultimately useless.
Coincidentally Everythingstudies also have a very good article about what real can mean and also how it creates confusion. But here I think is that the distinction is a little bit different: even taking Sherlock Holmes that exists as a fictional character, somebody can say that he also has some other aspects that were socially shaped or that this character himself impacts society in certain way. So if somebody says let's say Sherlock Holmes is racist this can have multitudes of meanings and it is not apparent which one is relevant in context of the discussion: is the character in the novel racist to other characters? Were the novels featuring this character some way perpetuating racism later down the road? Of course it also has to be noted that by playing with words in this way it opens large space of various rhetorical tactics and sophistry.
It is also often a feature, especially if the target of discussion is something else such as social transformation. For instance you can use these words with multiple meanings in order to fish for some hooks that are relevant to your discussion partner, thus finding out which context connects with the other person the best personally - for instance so called Freierian "generative themes". Then you can use other examples and connect it back to the original context, the original theme in a process of recontextualization in order to achieve some other end outside of just discussing ideas. In this sense this vagueness is a feature and not a bug.
georgioz
1yr ago
That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.
And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.
Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research.
This reminded me Sam Harris and Ezra Klein debate around Murray's Bell Curve book, race, IQ and all that with Harris defending existence of IQ gap. At one point Klein did use the argument that even if true (which he argued against), it would be bad for it to get out there. The discussion then derailed when Harris said he is interested in facts and what is true, for which Klein responded that Harris also has biases that prevent him from finding truth. When Harris denied such biases, Klein threw at Harris accusation that he did not have enough people of color on his podcast and the discussion got quite heated from there and turned into shit.
I absolutely lost any faith in Klein as an intellectual from there on. Anything he claims that is true or that he believes should automatically be suspicious as he may just lie for moral or political reasons. What was interesting is that Klein is fully aware of him engaging in this Conflict Theory thinking, his defense as I understand it is assuming that everybody is Conflict Theorist, some people just deny it. Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is a Conflict Theorist puts him on a moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right. To use an analogy, it is like CDC experts lying about efficacy of masks early on in order to prevent panic buying from general public. And they kind of admit it in similar fashion - people should have known that we lie and in fact it was a fantastic thing we did and we would do it again. Grow up and cough up some money so our good work can continue. I do not quite have my finger on what is going on here but I think this is very important phenomenon to understand.
We're looking at increase in M2 from ~$15.5 trillion to $18 trillion in one quarter, then continuing up over $21 trillion in the next few quarters. The United States has never spiked monetary policy to that extent
For some reason any analysis of M2 or money supply I see completely ignores the FED policy of paying interest on reserves that was introduced in 2008 with specific purpose of sterilizing effect of quantitative easing on inflation - which is a stupid policy if you ask me, but it is what it is. Interest on reserves basically turns money supply into substitute for treasury bills and thus renders analysis of most amateur economists who like to show "exponential growth of money printing" moot.
georgioz
1yr ago
I am not exactly sure if that is the case. Question: We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.
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Yes, I believe in MLK colorblindness and we should talk less.
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No, we should talk more specifically about phasing out things like affirmative action
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Yes, the current level of talk including affirmative action and some woke stuff feels to me just about right
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No, we should talk more about racialist policies such as Kendi's Department of Anti-racism
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No, we should talk about white replacement and unsustainable immigration
For instance 1. and 2. to me seems stemming from similar sentiment but it gets you different questionnaire answer. And of course 5. and 6. are polar opposites on "wokeness scale" although the have the same questionnaire answer. The questionnaire is weird in this way.
Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.
I agree, however another point is how proud these people are for openly standing on one side of the conflict. It is seen as a moral and just thing to lie and decieve in order to "win". Or to be more precise and trying to walk in their shoes- in their minds it is not lying and decieving, nato really. They are doing the good work. In the past I had a thought experiment of insane Christian who decided to kill babies right after they were baptized. In mind of this Christian he is on a mission to fill the heaven with innocent souls and he is the only willing to pay the price of eternal damnation. He was the only "true" Christian who has the guts and moral chutzpah to pay the price unlike those other weakling wannabe Christians. He was willing to pay the ultimate price of his immortal soul to "do good". Of course the question is if he really is in the right or hopelessly in the wrong. For me it takes huge heaps of arrogance, narcissism and and of course also psychopathy to pull something like that off. Additionally it is a strategy that brings huge cost to oneself which makes it very hard to correct due to sunk cost fallacy coupled with consistency fallacy.
Only we now live in a society where instead of condemnation of similar despicable practices and as you say, willingness to throw away the whole game by failing to process ones behaviour through categorical imperative - we now have some new morality praising such destructive behavior. There are definitely some psychological, social and moral angles to process here and as I say I am not quite there yet to have some stable opinion on it.
georgioz
1yr ago
It is really simple. Since 2008 FED pays interest on cash that banks "deposit". So let's say FED buys government bonds from bank by printing money, but it also offers interest on money that the bank deposits with FED. So there is no incentive for banks to do anything with that money such as loan it or buy some other instruments. The cash basically becomes interest yielding vehicle. As you see right now FED pays 3.15% interest to any bank that does not move money from their reserve account. So they don't do it, easy as that.
georgioz
1yr ago
I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no".
I think this is dangerous underestimation modern "transgender" movement. To large extent it is an on the ground application of ideas from Queer Theory, most importantly a revolt against "normativity" such as fight against cisheteronormative society. All you have to do is just to write down the vocabulary used and check where it originated. It is exactly how it sounds, it is not even fight for making queer people accepted as "normal" in society - similar to how early gay right movements wanted to get some rights and then be done with that. It is revolt against the very concept of normalcy, even to say that something potentially can be considered as normal or abnormal is oppressive and needs to be opposed.
And I agree that this is very much in line with transhumanism. Want to live as a cat person littering in sandbox toilet with somebody who transplanted his lower body into titanium appendage with extra ultraviolet sensor hanging from his left ear in polyamorous polycule with a literal lizzard? Nothing to see here, there are literally no valid philosophical or moral grounds to challenge this lifestyle in any way. In fact any criticism or pushback is (paraodoxically) something that is abnormal and needs to be squashed and this lifestyle needs to be accepted and supported exactly in order to fight against normativity.
georgioz
1yr ago
There were things priced in, such as Xi Jinping becoming the General Secretary of CCP. However there were many other subtler signals that were genuinely surprising and shocking, one of them being Hu Jintao unceremonious removal from the CCP congress by Xi's bodyguard. Also the fact that no people from Shanghai clique or The Communist Youth clique received any significant positions inside the new administration.
The overall perception is that Xi absolutely cemented his position, removed anybody who opposed him in any - even superficial way - and most importantly he removed all economic reformers who wanted more open economy. Really disastrous news for Chinese people and The World at large in my mind.
CCP has famously opaque structure, so it was not necessarily even about Xi "voluntarily stepping down" but maybe being forced by some players to share some power or tolerate some ideas he opposes. The power struggles inside Zhongnanhai would probably fill whole spy libraries, it is insane what is going on in there. If you follow China watchers you will see lengthy analysis of things like what can be the meaning if Xi having two cups of tea in front of him when everybody else has just one. So even if to the outsiders some things like order of seats or looks of congress members may seem innocuous, it is the only signal available given that things like "voting" are well known sham.
Also it has to be said that Xi is only seventh leader of CCP after Mao Zedong and since the reign of Deng Xiaoping the CCP established the system of collective leadership exactly to prevent one dictator to amass power similar to Mao. So in fact it happened in the past that even leaders with total political authority capable of implementing superauthoritarian ideas like one child policy were sharing the power and they were willing to hand the power over to the next chairman. In exchange they had certain level of safety, respect and comfort after they transfered the power. The result of this congress shows that collective leadership is a thing of the past.
For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
I actually think this is incredibly dangerous trend but for other reasons. While people lose trust in various institutions it seems that somewhat parallel process also emerged when institutions feel less inclination to explain their policies to general public up to openly demonizing them. It was felt before, but I think it was fully shown during COVID management. What I see as a result is sort of depoliticization of general public, often because they do not see much point in being active. They will be marginalized, punished, made fun of and so forth. I see a lot of people adopting "passive aggressive" stance, where they increasingly care only for their private interests and private life and are willing to outsource political decisionmaking as long as establishment reasonably leaves them alone.
If you want to have some analogy look no further than Russia. You see huge depoliticized population who completely abdicated on any political activity and who actively refuse to either support or criticize the regime. They just want to be left alone, the political process is just some sort of kayfabe and there are people who even if let's say agree with Navalny's critique nevertheless think of him as some stupid idealist as opposed to some rolemodel. Instead of working toward overall political change it is seen as wiser to develop internal network of contacts and "fuck the system" using nepotism, corruption and other means only if they feel personally threatened - maybe even rationalizing this behaviour by claiming that they are all brave Kolmogorovs fighting against the system by stealing for themselves. There was even socialist proverb for this behavior: he who does not steal, steals from his family. This was the Soviet way.
As an example if let's say there is high crime and terrible schools in some city and somebody is robbed and/or child is ruined by the school system, the response is not to improve things, but just sneer on stupid leftoids who did not know how to operate a gun and/or that they should have homeschooled their kids. They should have known that the media is lying, that social networks are censored cesspits full of bots, that the government statistics are fudged and that it is all just one huge kabuki performance from elites to entertain the plebs in simulacrum of politics, everybody knows that one should not act upon it. The belief that the system is irredeemable and irreparable corrupt swamp is taken as a fact of nature and one just needs to navigate it to best of ones ability not falling into some muddy pit along the way. Especially while helping somebody clueless out there and getting dragged down, he deserves what he got. This I think is the feeling many people have and why even if some insane ideas "seem" to be losing, they can in actuality be entrenched. This race to the bottom does not exactly feel like winning.
Nudging is a technocratic concept of giving pretense of choice, but then “highlighting” the one preferred in order to manipulate the result. It is the difference between opt-in and opt-out model and similar concepts. It is named after the 2008 book The Nudge by Richard Thaler, the 2017 economic “nobel” prize winner for behavioral economics
While there is probably some argument to be made for it, the equilibrium is ultimately unstable, often due to Lucas Critique. If you try to force people that clicking large green button to “accept” as opposed to small grey button of “reject”, over time your “psychological” tricks will lose efficacy over random choice. Nevertheless “nudging” became pop-psych concept used by your cookie-cutter PMC class wannabes to show their dominance. Which by my estimation exactly reflects the late oughts thinking from elites when it comes to public policy and similar issues.
That seems like a highly uncharitable description of nudging. The whole point of them is to preserve choice for anyone who actually cares. But in many cases most people either don't seem to care, or don't know about the decision they're trying to make, and therefore just stick with the default.
Sure, that is "the argument" I have mentioned to be made for this idea. The question that remains is who gets to construct the "default" choice. And technocrats thought that they can use some simple psychological tricks to "nudge" people to their preferred option. And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.
Of course the idea is that the enlightened elite will "nudge" the plebs toward the policies and options that will make them happy. And then everybody will sing kumbaya together with plebs praising their overlords for their wise leadership and the lords humbly accepting the praise and sending 10% of their excess income to buy malaria nets for Africa as an indulgence for some nagging feeling of something being wrong there.
And again, I am not saying that there is nothing like some arbitrary choices. You can have just some multipliers of chicken wings in your order at one natural extreme, or maybe there is an option to opt into three choices that have to be designed in some way. However the Nudge theory in its core is about ability to shape population by some decisionmaker to specifically design the choice to get what he wants. Which is of limited possibility. To use another "neoliberal" theories, we are talking about Public Choice Theory and Principal Agent Problem
And I am sure that there are some rationalists who have beaten that all to death, but this is not what is meant when you randomly read about "nudging" in New York Times in the context of a new "nudging" anti-racist department of social justice, or maybe alternatively by Daily Wire regarding some new DeSantis proposal of life affirming care program for prospective mothers.
It is also worth to note that prior to COVID, the experts went against lockdowns as effective epidemiologic measure. So there was no prior consensus to lock down the whole population for a virus unlike let's say other scenarios such as evacuation due to natural catastrophe or martial law during war. This means that in theory any threat can lead to lockdowns as the consensus can shift in matter of days.
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