site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.

I have upvoted / liked / thumbs up my share of WEF memes to the effect, "doesn't stakeholder capitalism sound quite much like dystopia" but not the overt conspiracy stuff. Call it mildly conspiratorial anti-WEF position and a form of protest.

hcnzosdu in a sibling thread argues otherwise, but I always assumed your take was correct: it was a message misinterpreted by some (incompetent / daft) social media manager for the WEF. Which was also the part I find troubling: that the WEF is (1) an important organization, (2) large enough to employ social media managers whose messages are seen by non-insignificant amount of people (3) the said managers think such visions are optimistic and utopian. It epitomizes the values and vision of those aligned with the WEF: I disagree with those values and vision.

I for one never believed the WEF is a dark Illuminati presided by Dark Lord Schwab who possesses detailed, itemized, decade-spanning agenda "how to take over the world". Nevertheless, it is not an insignificant thing either: many politicians go there, network which each other, discuss and share ideas ... and afterwards, those politicians tend to propose policy and legislation that is often more aligned with the WEF values than not. Some of those politicians have continue to have nice, elite careers if they lose elections and retire from political life. The WEF is not a conspiracy in the sense it is an instrumental coordinating nucleus, a critical piece of infrastructure without which nothing would exist. If Davos didn't exist, there would be other conferences and other networking opportunities that could be made appear equally sinister or equally banal and boring. Before the WEF, I recall the Bilderberg meeting was the famous conference that attracted attention of a conspiratorial mind. Everyone who attends such events has their boring informal professional networks which are probably much more important to each individual. However, the WEF exists.

I don't think it is a conspiracy theory to think conferences like the World Economic Forum have similar value as any other networking events and conferences attached to an agenda / set of ideas (I suppose you could call it a memeplex). Take NIPS/NeurIPS. It would be very weird to argue that NIPS is totally irrelevant or not worth looking at, especially would have been when it was the 2010s, it was still called NIPS, and neural networks were becoming an superbly interesting thing (again). It would be silly to claim that the NIPS Organizing Committee was a conspiratorial cabal with a project to install particular AI algorithm paradigm. But it was founded with the intention that the scientists interested in neural information processing systems could meet each other, share valuable ideas and knowledge, and have some prestigious fun (which may be more important than it sounds). All those people going to same place and talking to each other and having not-bad-time together is important: humans are social animals, it is how people organize themselves, and organized effort is more effective than one without organization.

I do think it makes sense to note that the WEF is an organization important enough to attract the members of "elite class" (point 1 and bit of 2) and it posts social media PR (Facebook posts, Instagram stories) about owning nothing, substituting meat with vegan products, the Great Reset like they are the most cheerful thing ever (points 2 to 3).

Speaking of the Great Reset, it sounds a bit more ambitious project / campaign / attempt to seed a memeplex (?) than a simple tax reform. Archival link

The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. To this end, governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.” At a time of diminishing tax bases and soaring public debt, governments have a powerful incentive to pursue such action.

Moreover, governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes. Depending on the country, these may include changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition.

The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress. The European Commission, for one, has unveiled plans for a €750 billion ($826 billion) recovery fund. The US, China, and Japan also have ambitious economic-stimulus plans.

Rather than using these funds, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to fill cracks in the old system, we should use them to create a new one that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.

The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. During the COVID-19 crisis, companies, universities, and others have joined forces to develop diagnostics, therapeutics, and possible vaccines; establish testing centers; create mechanisms for tracing infections; and deliver telemedicine. Imagine what could be possible if similar concerted efforts were made in every sector.

That is much more than a global minimum corporation tax. In fact, it is not explicitly mentioned at all, taxes are a throwaway line! However, most of the index funds I had invested to have turned to applying ESG indexes. Are ESG screened indexes dystopian? Not so sure, but some stakeholder capitalist somewhere has their thumb on the scales in a different place than previously.

The World Economic Forum is a conference but also a vision. it is a thing worth paying attention to and a thing one can disagree with. How one does disagree with a vision on the internet? One can write long posts arguing against it in obscure internet forum. But if one wants to be efficient and have impact, one should share funny memes against the WEF and the vision it represents.

I am genuinely unsure if the overtly conspiratorial stuff helps or not. (I have not met genuine conspiracy theorists in non-internet social sphere. I have had some success getting reactions like "WEF is a bit weird/tacky".)

Schwab also wrote a book, titled 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution', a poorly written text that says little and which argues for what is effectively globalized neoliberal "stakeholder capitalism".

I would like to draw a comparison to the standard multinational corporate bullshit jargon. This genre of writing should be familiar to most people (think of HR and PR departments of large Western companies and other organizations). Collections of banal, unsophisticated, trivial statements. Many a corporate document is like Schwab's book, "a poorly written text that says little." Generally co-workers will agree the jargon is often silly and sometimes difficult to take seriously. Nevertheless, such jargon-laden, poorly written documents are how the generic Western corporation function, and thus they have tremendous effect in yearly performance reviews, project launches, funding decisions, real stuff in the real world. Poorly written text that says little can be important.

Sure, the Communist Manifesto had an evocative opening and said much (not all of it good nor true), but our age is less romantic.

EDIT. This comment here puts it better than me.

The WEF rhetoric from the right is simply the latest example of the right getting upset about the PR billionaires do to make themselves seem normal, instead of the actual objectionable things they do.

Example : Jeff Bezos is a criminal, and he should be in jail. The Sherman Act is a criminal statute. Amazon is a horrendous anti-trust serial offender, at his direction. Amazon has a terrible worker safety track record, and tries very hard to churn through as many employees as possible in order to ensure nobody forms a union or demands higher wages. Jeff Bezos is rich beyond the wildest imagination of the common man, and he utilizes that wealth for his own private benefit, and to the active detriment of the working class.

Are there any calls on the right to confiscate Jeff Bezos wealth? To nationalize Amazon? To give more of the profits of the enterprise to the workers?

No, it's the political programme of the right to minimize the taxes that Amazon and Bezos pay. To prevent his employees from unionizing. Not to require him to give sick pay, or benefits, or raises, or paid time off. Bezos should have unlimited ability to donate to politicans too - it's his free speech right, after all.

But he's not making the right noises about (immigrants/trans/culture_war_issue_here) says the right. That's what's objectionable. Not acting like Smaug whilst people suffer for his treasure. Look here, Amazon has a pride flag on their twitter! Amazon is a gay rights lobby! That's what's wrong with Jeff Bezos.

I'd be interested in you elaborating why jeff bezos should be in jail, or why the sherman act is criminal, if only because some left-wing rants would counterbalance the right-wing ones!

To register the standard objections,

Jeff Bezos's supposed criminality is incidental to his commercial empire. Nothing about delivery drivers, warehouses, online shops, or server farms essentially require crime, or even mild ethical lapses, like a few hundred extra workers dying. We can compare this to Uber - a company that, from its inception, blatantly broke local regulations across the country and trashed $X00M in value of taxi medallions, who survived only by pressuring politicians to ignore the law. As you'd expect, they systematically and intentionally deceived law enforcement, and the CEO was forced out over sexual harassment and discrimination, and had internal tools tracking users' live locations. Nationalize Uber! e: nice article about taxi medallion situation

Yet Uber lets me hail a car in 30 seconds in a random city, from one app, with no hassle and a live map. It nuked rent-seeking guilds that restricted supply and drove price up. The gain for consumers was comparable to 'having taxis in the first place'. The lawbreaking was necessary (legalizing it in a single city via the 'normal process' before the app was popular would be a pain, then try a hundred jurisdictions). And the CEO's misconduct, while sometimes significant, is more than made up for in aggregate by the millions of enabled cab rides. Crime or misconduct is not bad in a total sense - one has to, and does in practice, compare it to the other consequences. Uber (maybe) caused five taxi driver suicides, and destroyed countless livelihoods, but it should still exist.

The same goes for amazon. Pioneering usable cloud computing, and easy, centralized shopping and delivery to a billion people, is a massive boon to any participant of industrial society, both satisfying boring consumer desires and enabling many kinds of productive activity. I can order a bag of rice, a laptop, a battery-powered screwdriver, socks, or a hundred a1.xlarge instances on ec2. This is great! Creating such a company is an amazing feat of politics, logistics, connections, and execution. Worker mistreatment and union suppression are universal in business, and killing or nationalizing amazon over it only puts a small dent in the overall practice. And if those are necessary sacrifices to get amazon, anyone would take amazon - but since they aren't, targeted regulation is much better than putting him in jail. A lot of his wealth goes to charity - and given how competition pushes profits down, any economic quantification of consumer and producer surplu will find consumers gain much more from amazon existing than bezos does. Jailing bezos over that would massively discourage founding new large corporations - jack ma's position is less appealing now than it was in 2020.

The 'woke corporations' bit is dumb, of course.

Against all that - a lot of what amazon sells, constitutive of its business, is useless shit - fashion, cosmetics, "As Seen On TV" tier products, crap tv shows, and amazon (and every other corporation) aggressively markets them. I'd love state, or any, action against that, although I'm mostly alone there.

quote actually came from the relatively kooky Danish socialist politician Ida Auken, who used it in predicting a kind of utopian-dystopian society, in which people in wealthy communities were prosperous and able to rent whatever they needed (houses, cars, vacation homes) cheaply, with goods delivered by drone, while a great population of poor people would live 'outside the city', struggling to survive. This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.

That quote comes from an article by Auken published by the WEF themselves. The article is indeed intended to be a purely optimistic forecast. Judge by yourself: https://archive.ph/n28Ay

(I'm not trying to imply anything, it's just that your post is factually wrong there)

Okay, yes, it's not "purely" optimistic as I said, but it's still very optimistic overall. Her "better world" is my and many other people's extreme dystopia, and that's the actual issue. In fact, two of her three only downsides are to me the only upsides or hopes in the whole article if her vision were to become true.

Has anyone (in Denmark, perhaps) actually interviewed Auken to find out what she meant? Would seem the easiest way to get context.

Not that I know of. It would be good to see what she has to say, but I wouldn't fully trust her now: she has incentives to say she didn't mean it as a good thing (the same incentives that lead the WEF to delete the article). I think the conclusion of the article is not ambiguous at all, however: as I understand it, it's saying that while things in fictional 2030 aren't perfect, they are a huge improvement over the past and she's overall happy about it.

I agree with Scott on this one

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/conspiracies-of-cognition-conspiracies

If you hate "global elites" (or your image of them), it's convenient to have specific conspiracies at hand ("they want to force us to consume bugs and sleep in pods, while they eat expensive steaks and drink Chardonnay in their mansions and laugh at us!") instead of vague "they are evil neo-liberals who hate us!"

Not quite a "global" elite, but sometimes they write the "conspiracies" themselves.

WEF Conspiracies Are An IQ Test

Doesn't this title break the charity rule, the test to write as if everyone is reading?

There are high-IQ and low-IQ subscribers to most if not all conspiracy theories. I would assume that most CTs are developed by high-IQ types, who might notice patterns or connections that are not clearly apparent and create theories based on them. The low-IQs are then likely to adopt crude versions of these theories. I highly doubt many conspiracy theories are initially developed by low-IQs.

On the specific topic of the WEF, I hear about them most from an extremely high-IQ friend who I think is wrong a lot but has a lot of thoughtful evidence to backup his wrongness. I see this same fallacy in your post: the assumption that high-IQ people are somehow often right or better at applying common sense than low-IQ people. I have no doubt, for example, that many of the attendees of the WEF Davos shindig are extremely intelligent while also being generally wrong about their proscriptions for an optimal future. IQ has nothing to do with it when values are non-optimal, and a big mistake made by those at Davos and downstream from them throughout blue tribe/progressives is the idea that one's intelligence is somehow correlated with good values, both of which are correlated directly to evincing blue tribe/progressive totems and memes.

Whether or not is a nefarious conspiracy, there is nothing low-IQ about being very wary of self-appointed billionaire thought leaders attempting to consolidate power in non-governmental bodies that are looking for ways to re-engineer society (and human nature) on a global scale. If they're not constantly asking themselves, "What could possibly go wrong?" their influence is worth fearing.

There's nothing low-IQ about being suspicious about the biological effects of ubiquitous, evolutionarily novel, and persistent environmental toxins. There is something low IQ about thinking the gubmint is fluoridating our tap water and making us eat bugs to make us feminine and compliant with the globalist agenda.

Similarly, there's nothing low IQ about trying to understand the way political ideas spread and gain traction among networks of 'elites'. There is something low IQ about thinking the WEF NWO is trying to mark of the beast chip population control.

The second and fourth positions are both genuine positions I've heard argued for at length by normal-intelligence people. They were chosen to illustrate that an argument of the type 'the elites are doing something bad' can be low iq without all arguments of that type being low iq, to argue against "there is nothing low-IQ about being very wary of self-appointed billionaire thought leaders attempting to consolidate power in non-governmental bodies" as relevant. (I agree, and said below, that plenty of high IQ people agree with wrong WEF ideas).

This really just strikes me as sneering. There is always going to be one or two humans that become figures of a thing when people perceive that thing to be against their interests. Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically. Most of the wild eye things they discuss at Davos will be mostly bad for most people if the Davos types get any of their policies pushed through before technology makes their preferences seem weird, outdates their ideas wholly, etc.

Take, for example, dishwashers. Almost everyone acknowledges that the new, Eco-friendly ones don't clean very well. Is this the machination of Klaus Schwab incarnate? No. But he, the WEF, etc are parts of the movement that floated the theories that led to crappy dishwashers being the norm. Does he argue for fiscal deregulation? Sure. This is a non-mover for the modern right. And basically everyone at Davos will eventually say something that embraces left-ish globohomo. Which is basically the enemy of the new right.

I think the fact that Scwab and Davos provide a platform is pretty important in of itself (after all, consider the whole SSC-sphere!), so maybe he actually is unimportant, but I think you could very much argue that the WEF acts as one hell of a Schelling Point for ideas.

EDIT: I should have posted this under the other comment below, this is basically saying the same thing, but shorter.

Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically.

That's a pretty contentious assertion to just plop down. I think you're mistaken, and my guess is that the source of the error is you considering people's "interests" quite narrowly. Are you following a logic of "decarbonisation will make many/most things more expensive while delivering equivalent/worse service, therefore it's against most people's interests?"

Are you following a logic of "decarbonisation will make many/most things more expensive while delivering equivalent/worse service, therefore it's against most people's interests?"

Yes. This will be true for every person in the world that doesn't have a specific decarbonization profit plan (your Al Gore, Tesla, etc). It will also be true for the descendants thereof. For all "crises" (of which atmospheric CO2 is a dubious one, see the work of David Friedman) typically the better approach is to just outgrow it. We did this with, for example, smog, vacuum tube tvs, leaded petrol, lemon cars, etc. We also have largely done it with incandescent lights and heavy coal. We have yet to do that with gas stoves/heat and ICEs.

We did this with, for example, smog, vacuum tube tvs, leaded petrol, lemon cars

Smog and leaded petrol both required government intervention because the pollution is an externality. Leaded petrol is still better than unleaded from the point of view of the engine, which is why Avgas is still leaded.

The same is true of CO2 - the reason why the worst-case scenarios associated with RCP8.5 (which people like David Friedman correctly point out won't happen, despite the amount of research funding going into working out just how bad they are and the media attention this attracts) will not, in fact, happen, is that governments saw the problem and acted to mitigate it - mostly by subsidising the R&D and early adoption of the technologies (PV cells, efficient wind turbines, electric cars etc.) that will support a lower-carbon society.

Achieving RCP4.5 instead of RCP8.5 is in everybody's interest (except for a few selfish Boomers) because it is the difference between your grandchildren thriving and (with an unacceptably high probability) frying. Fortunately, it doesn't require a Great Reset to achieve. But achieving it has required and will continue to require elites to talk to each other about decarbonisation at places like Davos, and COP meetings, and G20 summits. Going further to achieve RCP3.4 or RCP2.6 isn't in the interests of Red Tribe Americans who have large sunk investments in a high-carbon lifestyle, but it would be in the interest of a lot of people if the technology to do it at a reasonable cost exists. (Tip from a physicist - it does, it's called nuclear power).

In a sane world, working out whether RCP3.4 is a good idea or not requires both elites talking to each other about what can be done and what it might cost, and voters talking to each other about whether it is a good idea or not given the facts that emerge from that conversation. In the world we actually live in, this won't happen, among other reasons because the culture war is making us stupid and US climate policy is going to be decided by whether ragetweets about Hunter Biden's laptop are more or less viral than ragetweets about George Santos' CV. Davos is selling (at an extremely high price) the idea that these conversations are happening and that business executives are valued participants in them.

The same is true of CO2 - the reason why the worst-case scenarios associated with RCP8.5 (which people like David Friedman correctly point out won't happen, despite the amount of research funding going into working out just how bad they are and the media attention this attracts) will not, in fact, happen, is that governments saw the problem and acted to mitigate it - mostly by subsidising the R&D and early adoption of the technologies (PV cells, efficient wind turbines, electric cars etc.) that will support a lower-carbon society.

Pardon me, but that's complete and utter nonsense.

Whatever lower carbon intensity is achieved in allegedely civilized regions places like 'Eu' or Canada is going to be completely swamped by Indians, Chinese and whomever is clever enough to build a coal-fired power plant.

Also please do not that countries that in the EU, the countries that most heavily adopted the technologies you name, generally have worse carbon emissions than countries that stuck to their legacy tech such as nuclear power plants.

Almost everyone acknowledges that the new, Eco-friendly ones don't clean very well.

The new ones are still much better than the very first ones we had back in the 90's still. And we saw those as huge improvements (and luxuries!) so there is some space between as good as it could possibly be and good enough. My new eco-friendly one cleans everything I throw at it. Sometimes I have to set it to heavy wash but that is about it. Whereas my first one 30 years ago needed pre-rinsing pretty often.

Yeah, you have a unique experience. My Grandma says her 1999 washer was the best. My mom was confused by the new washer she installed in 2016 to replace the one originally put in in 2000. My landlord has an explicit policy that grains shall not be put in the washer, and if maintenance is called and they find them, you are the one who pays for the call.

Are you using powder detergent (or possibly liquid detergent), or the packets? There's 2 or 3 videos from Technology Connections about how dishwashers suck not for intrinsic reasons, but because modern processes (i.e. the pods/packets) skip the pre-wash step where some of the soap is used to get the initial crud off.

I recently got a new mid range dishwasher and I was astonished by how silent it was. It was an immense improvement to anything we've had before and actually makes a fairly big difference to us. It's "eco friendly" as well.

I didn't think major improvements in stuff like this were still happening but apparently they are.

One of the weirdest ways of dividing people into two types is people who expect dishwashers to work and people who don't. It doesn't seem to be amenable to experience of your current dishwasher - I wonder if it is driven by the dishwasher in the house you grew up in.

John Bull was not a real person but the qualities he represented were real. He represented Britain.

Davos Man is not a real person, yet the qualities he represents are real. These are the people who decide where the world is headed. It's the heartland of the liberal economic consensus, of the stupid buzzwords like 'resilient dynamism' and 'Creating a shared future in a fractured world'. Xi Xinping gave the 2017 address, defending free trade. Nahrendra Modi gave the 2018 address. It's a high profile event, even if it's purely symbolic.

Schwab is Davos Man incarnate. He founded the WEF and is seen to be responsible for Davos. If you're against the liberal internationalist consensus, you're against Davos and Schwab. We like to personify things. See US caricatures of the Jap in WW2. It's a natural propagandistic tactic.

Thus we get artfully done videos like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrEUzKTt7j0

Leonardo attacks a lot of things - big tech, Snopes fact-checking, mask/muzzle-wearing, modern 'art', Chainlink smart contracts (which is a somewhat esoteric /biz/ meme), public transport, eating the bugs... But all of them are seen to come under the aegis of Davos Man, they are the policies of the elite. Or they will soon be policies of the elite. You're not supposed to interpret the idea literally - nobody genuinely thinks that you just need to perforate Schwab's head and decisively change the world. He's representative.

Chainlink smart contracts (which is a somewhat esoteric /biz/ meme)

What? Since when was Chainlink globohomo? I only really check /biz/ when crypto goes up or down for the fun doomer or smug posting so maybe there has been a change but link just seemed like a super meme.

Well the idea is that Chainlink oracles will allow automatic control mechanisms. The use-case is that it's supposed to convey information from off-chain securely to on-chain. If Alice bets 20 Eth that Biden wins the election, an oracle is needed to determine if he wins or not, so the Eth goes to the right person. The fear is that Chainlink will be used to take away the banking of wrongthinkers as in the video. It's firmly enmeshed into the crypto ecosystem at this point and all but dominates its niche.

Plus the price action has been very bad and people are very dissatisfied with it, often blaming Sergey for selling too much. Chainlink's strongest defenders have been effectively silenced. To be fair, supply has increased at a fairly moderate rate, FTM or MATIC have seen much more supply increase and much greater appreciation per token. There's also disquiet at how many women are in Chainlink's management and HR branch.

The typical internet autist has limited understanding of how power brokering, innovation & the general spread of ideas actually happens at the highest levels. They view it from their salaried man's lens. This is where money, work and power are assets in a zero-sum transactional relationships. Your manager pays you money to gain power on you and extract work. An activist gives you free food to hold their posters. That sort of low-level thinking stops scaling pretty quickly.

First, power is never owned. Power merely flows through you like water. You wield it as a custodian by guiding it's path, but if you try to obstruct it or grab on it, you'll lose it just as quickly. Second, narrow scientific innovation can be done in a lab with sweaty dudes dark spaces. But, innovation at the grand scale often comes out organically from random physical interactions in a space. Actually, even sweaty science dudes know this. That's why the big-tier-1 conference is their favorite time of the year. Lastly, the transactional costs of work are not fixed. Will power allows you to change the cost of work. But, willpower can't be brought and it can't be hammered into you. It has to be felt in the air and built environment around you. WEF conferences organizers understand this better than most.

To normies, conference organizers can seem like low-IQ bunch to internet nerds. They don't do anything, just organize, get the logistics in order and let the smart & powerful people do smart & powerful people things, right ? Of course not. Any person on theMotte or HN can appreciate how invisible moderators who don't generate content, are still the most important people to facilitating an invisible sense of culture within a community. I'd like to think that I ended up on here organically. But, I am also certain that the mods have been careful in how their message goes out, which led to a series of mod-approved internet hops which ended with me reaching here.

The power of organic collisions cannot be replaced with something else. At the same time, it is incredibly difficult to create an environment that forces collisions, while making it seem completely organic. Your favorite bar worked really hard to make it seem like you just 'ran into it'. In the same vein, WEF has managed to sustain something really difficult : a place for the world's most important people to congregate, have organic collisions and not have every conversation leak out to the press. By slapping their face on everything, they also protect their participants. The news headline goes "WEF endorses XYZ crazy idea. Subtitle : by abc person" instead of "ABC person champions crazy XYZ idea in public. Subtitle : at wef."

What the average person fails to understand is how throwing a big party every year is any way useful towards getting work done. But, that's exactly how big decisions have been made for centuries and centuries. Even today, world leaders have video calls all the time, but physical G20 summits is where a lot of breakthroughs happen.

The WEF markets itself as a place for the important people of the world to have organic collisions. The most important people in the world find it to be valuable, so they keep coming every year. The self-fulfilling prophecy propagates itself. But, do not let the appearance of an organic meet mislead you into thinking that the WEF doesn't carefully utilize the little power that flows through them to divert it in a certain direction. It is a light touch, but on a huge base, it can have large impacts. I am personally of the opinion, that more communication among people who easily get siloed (top billionaires) is always a good thing. The WEF is far more a reflection of the content that the powerful want to consume than any agenda they might have. But somewhere in there, they are able to plant seeds that add up over the years. It is effectively run for what it is. But, a grand operation in prescriptive consensus building it is not.

edit: I guess I need to put a disclaimer here. I have a huge conflict of interest. Someone I have positive feelings towards presently works for the WEF (in a foot soldier role, but still). What limited things I hear sound fairly innocuous.

I don't mean to defend the zanier ideas of the rump right. Q-anon, 2020 election truthers, anti-vaxxers who ascribe every death of a previously vaccinated person to the vaccine, people who jump at globalist pedophiles under every rock and behind every tree -- it's nuts. There's a great deal of ruin in a party. So it goes.

THAT SAID, normies are quite right to worry about the loyalties of their local elite. Culturally, an American titan of industry likely has more in common with a French titan of industry than with his fellow Americans. Is it so hard to imagine the industrial, governmental and cultural elites of the world collectively furthering their interests as a class to the exclusion of their individual countries' interests?

In a season of Survivor, members of an alliance start to worry when a few of their members go off into the woods to meet with a few members of the opposing alliance. Maybe they're reconsidering their allegiance. Often they're right to worry.

Viewed through that lens, the WEF is a venue for defection against one's own country. They acknowledge it! They're globalists. The first letter of their acronym stands for it. Klaus Schwab seems to be the guy in charge. He may not have much power in his own right, by elite standards he's doubtless a midwit mediocrity as you describe, but however it came to be, he is the facilitator and proximate cause of an event that probably should be looked at askance by those concerned about whose side their own country's companies and government is really on. Obsessing over the social media ephemera of the conference is barking up the wrong tree, and ascribing personal agency to Klaus as though he can direct the tides of the illuminati via his keynote address is going too far, but it's forgivable, because the whole enterprise is a venue for collusion by the world's elite against everyone and everything else -- not in explicit drawing up of plans and executing plans of oppression, but in formation of shared norms and culture to the exclusion of those not there.

Viewed through that lens, the WEF is a venue for defection against one's own country. They acknowledge it! They're globalists.

They don't acknowledge it. They claim that globalism is good for their countries. That may not be true and they may not be being honest, but they are certainly not acknowledging that they are defecting against their own countries.

I think your post seriously understates the influence upon international institutional power that the WEF excercises by organizing the Davos Conferences, if only using the straightforward power of playing host. The wealthy and powerful are going to rub elbows regardless, but Schwabb gets to set the agenda and the guest list, at least for a few days. He's somewhat constrained in both, of course - high-level elites in good standing better be admitted if they wish to attend, and they better be fed from an ideologically palatable trough - but this is still wildly disproportionate power for (as you note) someone as generally insignificant as Schwabb. This is in contrast to most of the 'really powerful' attendees, who are more or less fully constrained in their actions by some combination of economics or politics.

Here in Canada, we had our (lightweight) PM namedropping the Great Reset in his speeches. Probably not all global leaders are as impressionable as Trudeau Jr, but people do get influenced by their peer group.

If my personal goal was to nudge the global ruling-class eregore into line with my values, I'd trade Elon Musk's fortune for Klaus Schwabb's little Swiss teaparty in a heartbeat.

Do the shoe on other foot test.

Imagine powerful right wingers from around the world, many in government, were attending an annual conference together at an exclusive resort in Montana run by a wealthy conservative with extreme ideas and a Nazi father.

Would blue collar lefties really think it was NBD?

There's a famous quote,

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

In this case it's not raising prices exactly, but various schemes to increase the wealth and power of the attendees.

Isn't this already just Bohemian Grove?

Would blue collar lefties really think it was NBD?

Of course they wouldn't, but they'd be wrong and stupid to think that. Since when is "blue collar lefty" the standard to hold people against? I want the right to have higher standards than that.

Imagine powerful right wingers from around the world, many in government

Some powerful right wing leaders attend Davos though (like Morawiecki), so it's not an exclusively neo-liberal coven. And there were conventions sort-of like what you are describing (e.g. CPAC Hungary) — left wingers were losing their minds over it, but I don't think there were any conspiracy theories around it (though Orban said some controversial race-related things).

WEF

The WEF and these leaders are overblown and their power is greatly overestimated by the twitter-punditry. The Covid restrictions as far as the US was concerned were enacted voluntarily by businesses and local/state governments, and enforced by police, not one-world elites.

Per pound, beef, chicken are cheaper than bugs anyway. As japan shows, people voluntarily choose to live in small accommodations, almost pod like, for the convenience. There are cheaper and more spacious alternatives elsewhere but father from jobs and less stuff to do. You don't need a police state for what is often choice.

Although I broadly agree that falling for Illuminati-Esque conspiracies is rather embarrassing. You must correct for the fact that right-wing coded conspiracies are lower status for a variety of reasons. By all means, was it just as ridiculous and IMO just as embarrassing to believe that Russia was stuffing ballots in 2016. But believing in that didn't elicit the "what a fucking uneducated hillbilly dumbass" reaction from just about everyone.

I do think the rights biggest mistake pertaining to this specific weakness is their descent into anti-intellectualism. In response to the fact that Universities and Schools are ideologically captured, the right-wing response to that is some variation of "Stop going to school, you'll be brainwashed". Instead of "Don't go to school for the humanities but do go to school for STEM where ideological capture is significantly harder if not impossible.". They threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Similarly to their sentiment towards the scientific establishment. As a response to the fact the scientific establishment is used as a propaganda tool by the left sometimes, they assume an anti-science rhetoric, instead of learning how to parse science better. Throughout covid the right had a tendency of saying "we can't trust these mathematical models to predict complex outcomes of policy in the real world".. Well yes we can't but that's a weakness of the interpreter not the tool of mathematical models themselves. Mathematical models were also the very thing that helped us realize that covid policy was suboptimal. Instead of signal boosting good science why did you have to antagonize science itself?

I don't blame them (right wingers). The layman can't learn experimental design and advanced statistics just to parse the news. They are fighting against significant headwinds as the left is hostile towards them in just about all levels of Academia from middle-school to post-doc applications to what research gets published. It's just a shame that we are here.

ideologically captured, the right-wing response to that is some variation of "Stop going to school, you'll be brainwashed". Instead of "Don't go to school for the humanities but do go to school for STEM where ideological capture is significantly harder if not impossible."

I'm afraid you are mistaken. Ideological capture in STEM has in fact happened, as one can tell though "feminist vulcanology", various Nature editorials, and AI-alignment.

I haven’t witnessed anyone on the right (or otherwise) demonizing the Scientific Method, but rather criticizing the new definition of “Science (tm)” being utilized as a consensus-building weapon against any who would question the mainstream narrative.

It’s the bastardization of “science” that invokes revulsion, not true scientific inquiry itself.

It's not just an IQ test - Elon Musk, replying to @disclosetv: WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want. Elon is clearly very smart and competent, and yet ... It's possible he's playing to right-wing ideas for some reason, but I don't think that fits with his broader persona or twitter posting. Even incredibly intelligent people in one context can be plain dumb in others (for an example with reversed partisan alignment, Terence Tao on trump).

he's playing to the crowd but at the same time he's probably actually concerned too

Terence Tao on trump

Scott Aaronson especially. He thought that in Jan 2017 that Muslims would be totally barred entry due to Trump's executive order. I think maybe 2 people total were inconvenienced .

If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".

Lobsters are crustaceans while "bugs" is usually used to refer to insects (Insecta) - not even allowing for the fact that true bugs (Hemiptera) make up an even smaller order. Crustaceans aren't even that close to insects phylogenetically, things like springtails are a lot closer to insects than them.

Otherwise yeah I agree completely.

Crustaceans aren't even that close to insects phylogenetically

Hyperpedantry time: Insecta is, technically, included in Crustacea, so that some crustaceans are closer relatives of insects that of other crustaceans, and so that cladistically insects are crustaceans in the same sense that birds are reptiles. (Springtails are indeed still closer to insects than to any non-hexapod crustacean, though.) This of course has no relevance whatsoever to any cultural or gastronomic considerations, but I figured someone might want to know.

Note : Noma (supposedly the world's best restaurant) has been surprising people with how delicious ants are for a good decade now. Credit where it is due, tribals in many parts of the world have known this for centuries. But, now people with 'sophisticated palates' can also approve.

I've eaten un-seasoned plain thai-water-beetles(big cockroaches) and they surprisingly taste more like pickle juice than anything.

Hey, if it is nutritious, doesn't trigger my disgust response, is delicious and cheap......then why not ?

I spent a good year creeped out the 'blood' leaking from raw (medium rare) steak. A few years later, I love it.

Bugs are repulsive because they are tiny, munching on bugs feels like you are living in most desperate famine time.

Genetically engineer bugs to be size of cattle and everyone would love bugsteak and bugburger, everyone would admire tough and manly bugboys driving bug herds across endless grassy plains ;-)

Bugs are repulsive because they are tiny, munching on bugs feels like you are living in most desperate famine time.

Actually, most bugs are gross because they've evolved anti-mammal predatory secretions. Crickets smell gross because its intentional. They want to be the meal of last resort of mammals. Its just like a weak version of the acacia trees' Giraffe defense mechanism.

Bugs cannot be engineered to be bigger than they currently are because their internal biology is designed for being small. They don't have lungs, or blood as we think of it, or complex nervous systems, or a hundred other things necessary for larger animals. In addition, part of what makes insects an 'efficient' food source is precisely their small size and short life cycle.

I don't see the bother even to try. When there are countless mammals and birds and fish around which are already delicious and great food, why choose to try and make perfect future food out of bugs? Why not start with something that is already great and just needs some tweaking?

Bugs cannot be engineered to be bigger than they currently are because their internal biology is designed for being small.

Oh ye of little faith...

It’s interesting because the main constraint on insect size is oxygen concentration. During the Carboniferous, when the oxygen concentration was nearly 35%, bugs were huge! https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/carboniferous-giant-insects/

High oxygen is useful but not sufficient -- arthropods have to molt their cuticle periodically, and when they have freshly molted they are short on mechanical support. You can get by with hydraulic pressure if you are very small or live in water, but if you weigh a ton and live on land you will be extremely vulnerable in many occasions. Also, there's the issue of competition with vertebrates, which are generally more efficient in large-sized niches. The giant arthropods of the Carboniferous owed their existence to the fact that large vertebrates were still few and sparse as much as high oxygen concentration.

We can fairly easily engineer high-oxygen environments..

🤔

Bugs look horrific under a microscope. Likely because their features are so different from mammals, and in less asthetically pleasing ways than most fish or birds. Scale that up to cow size and people would call for the abomimation to be excised.

in less asthetically pleasing ways than most fish

Maybe due to familiarity bias? People see fish rostrums every now and then, but those of insects only in documentaries and books, usually in relatively late childhood.

Flounder are nightmare fuel and we still eat them. Because they're delicious nightmare fuel.

I don't find flounder that tasty and it's nothing to do with their faces. The flipside is I know several people who seem incapable of eating any fish if served with the head still attached (and do not know the delicious truth of cheek/collar cuts in general).

On the flip side is I know lots of people who will happily eat fish eyeballs and exotic pig parts, but would not eat bugs.

people would call for the abomimation to be excised.

yes, excised on a grill ;-)

Thanks for the write up. It’s definitely a welcome steelman of the case against WEF conspiracies(and for that matter coming from a perspective that’s fairly rare; most of them are from the perspective that the WEF is a good thing). From the perspective you’ve laid out, the real question would be more along the ‘why is everything liberal’ line. I mean a conference of corporate interests in Switzerland is obviously pro-globalist, but the climate doomerism and culture war stuff just doesn’t make any sense. I think the steelman of WEF conspiracy theories is more that it’s a node in the cathedral, and klaus Schwab looking like a Star Wars villain makes it really easy to call attention to that.

In the most famous case, Schwab was alleged to have told the public that, in the future "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"

...

Instead, the WEF posted a video on its Facebook page

If you're going to deboonk the embarrassing rightoid conspiracy theorists, who lack baseline critical thinking ability, can you at least look up Know Your Meme? I have no idea what you're talking about, I never heard anything about a sinister announcement. The first I heard of it was literally from the Facebook video, and it was embarrassing enough to the WEF all on it's own, that they ended up taking it down, as well as the original article.

Other examples are myriad, but include in many cases phrases about 'eating bugs' and 'living in pods'. The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs

Yes, us embarrassing conspiracy theorists absolutely did not look up things like Novel Food or Food 2030 research policies. We are guided like sheep by Mother Jones.

If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".

This, and the bit about pods just sounds like "it's not happening, and if it's happening it's a good thing".

The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing.

No. Business, and government leaders aren't spending millions on this conference for fun, and public figures around the world are not simultaneously chanting the same slogans like "Build Back Better" by coincidence.

food 2030

I didn't see anything about bugs here. Did I miss it or is it unrelated?

Er... I should have gotten better links. Don't remember where I originally heard about the connection of the program to bugs, but curious_straight_CA found one mention. They also bring it up in this report:

Also future research should focus more on food from insects, e.g. by using food waste as source, but consumer acceptability still has to be improved in Europe; consumer studies and food safety studies could help to make better use of this protein source

It's a couple links in: the "10 Areas known as pathways to action" is a shell for this document, where :

As further explained by Fit4Food2030, humans need to consume sufficient amounts of protein for muscle-mass maintenance and overall health. Many sources of proteins other than meat (e.g. alternative proteins) already exist within the current assortment of food products (e.g. plant-based products). Still, investing in identifying and introducing other alternative protein sources into the human diet (e.g. edible insects, cultured meat, fungi and microalgae) could deliver the needed protein dietary intake without the potential negative health effects associated with the consumption of red meat and processed meat foods.

And later:

Within Horizon 2020, approximately 15 projects have been supported representing an investment of around EUR 70 million (116). Some key projects include:...

NEXTGENPROTEINS (2019-2023), IA, EUR 7.9 M.

Bioconversion of underutilised resources into next-generation proteins for food and feed. The project will address key barriers that limit the use of microalgae, single cell protein and insects in food/feed. It will, among other things, find means to improve consumers’ acceptability and trust.

SUSINCHAIN (2019-2023), IA, EUR 7.9 M.

Sustainable Insect Chain. The project contributes to novel protein provision for feed/food in Europe by overcoming the barriers to increasing the economic viability of the insect value chain and opening markets.

Thanks for digging. Doesn't seem like eating ze bugs is exactly a top priority shouted from the rooftops. Novel proteins can come from plants, algae, cell cultures, etc which I assume most people are fine eating.

FWIW I think of myself as pretty keyed into the "alternative protein space". I'm vegetarian and have donated to the good food institute for years. I don't see people talking about eating bugs. I don't see it in GFI's yearly review pamphlets. I don't see it in grocery stores or in /r/wheresthebeef or in startups that get press in the media.

Talking about eating bugs seems to be almost exclusively the province of WEF cinematic universe enjoyers and EU documents buried three links deep.

Talking about eating bugs seems to be almost exclusively the province of WEF cinematic universe enjoyers and EU documents buried three links deep.

Fair enough, though the thing that frustrates me in the whole conversation is the slippery slope fallacy fallacy. If 30 years down the line chicken is a luxury item, and you can only afford a bug schnitzel, are you going to say "shit, I guess the conspiracy theorists were right" or "what are you talking about you lunatic?! There was no conspiracy, it was all written in public documents"?

I guess I'd say they'd be right about the rise of eating bugs but I don't know if you can call it a conspiracy.

deleted

Novel proteins can come from plants, algae, cell cultures, etc which I assume most people are fine eating.

Most people prefer meat to all of those things -- "you vill eat ze algae" does not sound much better.

People prefer meat because it's much better tasting. Algae is not inherently gross the way bugs are, and people already eat it without disgust or culture war.

People like nori on their sushi -- this does not mean that they want nori to be all that they can afford to eat.

My point is that the disgust reaction isn't the real problem with this agenda -- "You vill not eat ze schnitzel" is just a bit less punchy.

The disgust reaction is a really big part of it. There's much more vitriol towards bugs than towards plant based schnitzel.

The eu novel food regulation is a broad system for regulating "food that had not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU before 15 May 1997, when the first Regulation on novel food came into force.". More "central" examples, from that page:

Examples of Novel Food include new sources of vitamin K (menaquinone) or extracts from existing food (Antarctic Krill oil rich in phospholipids from Euphausia superba), agricultural products from third countries (chia seeds, noni fruit juice), or food derived from new production processes (UV-treated food (milk, bread, mushrooms and yeast).

The novel food catalogue has several hundred items! A few insect products were approved along with hundreds of plants, and someone tweeted about it.

That Food 2030 link sets out "10 areas known as pathways for action":

Governance and systems change, Urban food system transformation, Food from the oceans and freshwater resources, Alternative proteins and dietary shift, Food waste and resource efficiency, The microbiome world, Healthy, sustainable and personalised nutrition, Food safety systems of the future, Food systems Africa, Food systems and data

This is a variety of goals, and 'eating bugs' only fits into one (dietary shift).

From a WEF opinion called What will we eat in 2030?:

One can imagine a different food system. If we lived in a world where demand was different – perhaps because people wanted to eat healthily and sustainably – it is possible to imagine a much greater mix of big and small farms, producing a larger range of produce, employing more people and creating a more local and circular economy. So what might we eat in 2030? I think demand will be shifting and more people will want to eat a healthy diet, one that is less intensive (and wasteful) of resources. The increasing emergence of localism, wholefoods, organic, artisanal and “real food” movements is a sign of this – at least for the rich and dedicated. So our diets may be more veg and fruit, whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives (soya products, or perhaps insects or artificial meat), and less fried and sugary things. We’ll still eat meat, but, perhaps more like our parents and grandparents, see it as a treat to savour every few days.

Sure, it mentions insects, and meat reduction ... but along with 'organic, whole foods' and 'small farms, local economy'. This isn't an 'elite planning to force people to replace meat with insects', it's just vague vibes about Creating A Better World.

I think the real question then becomes why insects and meat reduction is seen as creating a better world.

Meat has a large environmental impact. Reducing our environmental impact "is seen as creating a better world". Modus ponens.

If it were truly for our benefit, our leaders would be leading by example. I will never, ever, ever, follow the words of a hypocrite who does not also live by the creed they would demand of me.

I assume there are also super elite places where you can be beaten with sticks for $500, or even $5000. When everyone only has stick beatings as a choice of entertainment, it's a different situation.

Why should I take the stated goals on their face value if the entire claim is they're circumventing the democratic process by rubbing shoulders at these conferences?

Sure, it mentions insects, but along with 'organic, whole foods' and 'small farms' and 'circular economy'. This isn't an 'elite planning to force people to eat insects'.

Why do you think insects are being suddenly and simultaneously approved for consumption in all these countries? Did I miss some "Eat The Bugs" party sweep the elections?

You shouldn't take stated goals on their face if there's some reason to believe otherwise ... but what reason is there? Businesses paying to get access to politicians or influential people is hardly surprising or a WEF exclusive.

circumventing the democratic process

How do you think democracy works? "The people" aren't drafting legislation and regulations, interest groups, lobbyists, staffers etc promote or write them, and networking and conferences to that effect are necessary and normal. There's always some elite, even if only by stratification of competence and interest, iron law of oligarchy etc. "a democratic republic" has always been about delegating the responsibility of creating and enforcing laws to 'representatives'. Nothing outside that norm is happening here. Of course, those 'elites' can be malicious, democracy may be a lie and harmful, but that the people aren't having a vote on Proposition 5928: Eat The Bugs Act is entirely expected (was there an explicit vote on the Air Fryer Act or the EUV Lithography Act?)

Why do you think insects are being suddenly and simultaneously approved for consumption in all these countries

Maybe some companies applied for approval, and tried to create buzz about it by pitching it as green and sustainable? There is an application process.

Finally I'm not at all convinced 'the bugs' are unhealthier than much of the current american diet. Is there any evidence for that, beyond "modern food bad + insect disgusting + elites not nice"?

Finally I'm not at all convinced 'the bugs' are unhealthier than much of the current american diet. Is there any evidence for that, beyond "modern food bad + insect disgusting + elites not nice"?

So uh, can anyone defend this bug eating thing without eventually resorting to 'and if it's happening it's a good thing'?

I guess I can try:

If a bunch of finance professionals think there’s alpha in bugburgers, why should I be horrified? Let the markets sort it out. Maybe the third world ends up with cheap protein, maybe it flops.

I don't love the "it isn't happening and if it's happening it's a good thing" attack in most cases. It implies a sense of lying, two-facedness that isn't really present, and serves as an excuse to not argue the point. If the thing is bad, then just argue it's bad! It fits progressive issues because as we swim left, we move from "being gay is a private matter don't infringe on their liberty" to "being gay is AWESOME" - but just noticing this doesn't free you from actually arguing against the latter!

If you're a queer anarchist, then your response to "gay acceptance will lead to trans and queer acceptance" is: "i don't know if it will, but hell yeah if so". If you're a nazi, your response to "Trump will lead to increased acceptance of fascism" may be "i doubt that, but if it does, then #BASED".

For less extreme examples, many right-wingers did say "Roe v Wade won't be overturned, but if it were it'd be good".

The trouble arises when "it isn't happening" is implied to mean "nobody is agitating for it and you are silly to agitate against it."

The reason people are against eating bugs is not because they think bugs are bad for you, it's because they don't want to eat bugs, and are concerned that people with the power to affect the affordability of non-bug sources of protein would like to rig the game so that bugs are all they can afford to eat.

Bringing up the relative health benefits of eating bugs seems like a non-sequitur on your part.

it is silly to agitate against eating bugs, because nobody's going to be forced to eat bugs. also pretty sure bugs won't take off as as a food source generally.

It's significantly more plausible to agitate against forced veganism. That's still dumb, but it's much less so than 'i wont eat the bugs' - vegetarianism/veganism is somewhat popular generally (unlike bug-eating), it's popular specifically among parts of the 'elite liberals' (again, unlike bug-eating), and 'vegan food' is a decent-sized business!

and are concerned that people with the power to affect the affordability of non-bug sources of protein would like to rig the game so that bugs are all they can afford to eat

... you understand the people at the WEF are physical people, right? And they went to good schools, and then good colleges, and many of them read the NYT or the economist? And they tend to believe mainstream centrist or liberal, or sometimes even conservative (more CEOs go R than they do D)! "We're going to make non-bug-food unaffordable for the general population so they have to eat bugs" isn't the kind of thing a progressive, or centrist, believes. It' feels more, if you are them, like something an evil scientist in a cartoon would do.

Back to veganism - something significantly more plausible for a progressive 'elite' is "more of the world should be vegan because it's healthier, it's more sustainable, it's cheaper, it helps alleviate hunger". This makes the proposal out as good for people! And it isn't obviously depriving them. This doesn't translate to 'and we'll ban meat' (which would poll badly atm), but it's much, much more plausible.

"nobody is agitating for it and you are silly to agitate against it."

That's a perfectly coherent statement if you interpret "agitating for" as "wanting to mandate" and "agitate against" as "wanting to forbid" (or "keep forbidden"). Not that I think anyone in this thread wishes to ban the consumption of insects, but in many countries selling insect-derived products as food is currently illegal*, and one can wish to change this fact without wanting to force any diet on anyone.

"It's not happening and it's good" is not contradictory, either, if the two "it"s refer to different things. One can quite plausibly believe, for example, "forcing insect-eating is not happening, and permitted insect-eating is good".

EDIT: * With at least one universal exception being honey, of course.

I mean, defending eating bugs by definition means arguing that eating bugs is good.

Maybe try confectioners glaze shellac as a camel's nose to get people comfortable with the concept.

Cochineal, a red food colouring, is another very common insect-based food additive.

Eating the Australian wood grubs that supposedly taste like scrambled eggs is probably a good deal healthier than a double cheese whopper, with fries and a large coke, true.

On the other hand, Americans aren’t about to start eating wood grubs. If Americans start eating bugs, they’ll be covered in Cheeto dust after being deep fried, and served with ketchup. This does not seem any healthier than fries.

After a bit of googling, one potential guess is that the occasional "Wowee zowee! Insects for human consumption?" efforts are mainly marketing for the actually economically potential use of insects as protein - animal feed.

I don't follow. Why would you need to approve, and promote them for human consumption, in order to feed them to animals? There's already different norms for human food and animal feed.

Because companies need publicity, and "let's use insects as an animal feed" is a throughoutly boring topic unlikely to get any publicity on its own.

It's like politicians lying to their constituents in a way which looks threatening to non-constituents. They may lie all the time, but they're not actually supposed to, and you have a right to take them at their word. It's not as if you can prove whether it's the constitutents or the rest of the world that they're lying to.

If a political group promotes something bad "because they need publicity", I'm entitled to take them at their word.

More comments

I can't imagine this gives you a better bang for your bucks than targeted ads.

but there are thousands of different field-specific conferences businesses spend millions on,

How many can you name that pull as many high-profile people as the WEF?

the WEF having that doesn't prove some hidden conspiracy.

Yeah, it's not hidden...

More seriously, what do you mean by "conspiracy"? Do you think my Eunuch Archive story counts as a conspiracy theory?

Finally I'm not at all convinced 'the bugs' are unhealthier than much of the current american diet.

That's not even the issue, to be honest. They may be, or they may not be. The point is that there's a clear push to promote them despite their massive unpopularity.

How do you think democracy works?

It's supposed to involve some form of public debate before implementing sweeping social or economic reforms. It's all par for the course when bankers write banking regulations, or whatever, but if you have a goal of changing the diet of an entire continent or whatever, whether they like it or not, and to that end you'll be quietly passing regulations nudging them in the desired direction, I'd say you're circumventing democracy. Passing Obamacare was a debacle, but it was more in accordance to the democratic process than what they're doing with the bugs thing.

It's supposed to involve some form of public debate before implementing sweeping social or economic reforms

Allowing the sale of insect-protein-containing food products and scrapping housing regulation allowing more dense but less comfortable housing are not 'sweeping social or economic reforms'. (and the second one isn't even happening! I'd be happy to live in a pod while traveling, or at least have a windowless hotel room).

but if you have a goal of changing the diet of an entire continent or whatever

If there's a 200% tax on meat or something, that's worth complaining about, but that hasn't happened. So far we just have 'advertising for bug-eating'.

Well, before we get into all that can we clear up whether or the elites trying to get us to eat bugs is a rightoid conspiracy theory, or is it happening, and it's a good thing?

I'm happy to debate the relative advantages and disadvantages of bugs, but I can't stand the Narcissist Prayer framework.

“well, market will decide, I guess”. What’s the problem?

Because the market isn't going to decide, not the way most people understand that term. It's going to decide the same way it decided to ban Parler from hosting infrastructure, and that's without going into things like regulations making one cheaper and the other more expensive.

More comments

deleted

"Market will decide" would be fine -- but given elite-man's recent interpretation of 'letting the market decide' whether they want their customers vaccinated or not, it does not seem unreasonable to fear that there will be a thumb on the scales?

Uh, if they are better, then a 'push to promote them despite unpopularity' is good? Was the green revolution bad because it was pushed by the elite? (There may be problems wrt unnatural food, pesticides, etc but that goes along with the population increase) There was a push against cigarettes because they were unhealthy, this isn't exactly malicious. Nobody would care if the WEF were pushing for whole grains, food waste reuse, or food safety in africa (which, indeed, they are).

Yeah, it's not hidden...

You're claiming something is, because we're not taking their stated goals at face value, as if they're hiding something. But hiding what?

Uh, if they are better, then a 'push to promote them despite unpopularity' is good?

No. If you're going to claim that let's end the farce, and just come back to feudalism or whatever.

Was the green revolution bad because it was pushed by the elite?

I'd need to read up on it, I probably could find some bad things about it, but the bigger point is about how it was pushed.

You're claiming something is, because we're not taking their stated goals at face value, as if they're hiding something. But hiding what?

Oh, I'm not claiming anything beyond what they're stating publicly. When I said "not taking them at face value" I meant more in the sense you watch ads. Just because they add a whole lot of padding about how awesome everything is going to be, around the bit about eating bugs, doesn't mean you should believe it, the same way you don't assume those Gillette razors are going to turn you into some sexy hunk.

The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing.

People on all sides unironically fall for all kinds of stupid crap. Doesn't mean they're wrong, even if they're right for the wrong reasons.

They were on the right, and they accused Schwab of being behind a cabal of progressive elites...

Key distinction: Schwab is not "behind" the cabal, he's in front of it. Any real truther will tell you that the elites with real power don't want their names known and don't want to publicly identified at all. By being a social node for these elites, Schwab's WEF is saying some of the quiet parts loud, and the real elites are generally OK with it because the power they wield is becoming so intense it doesn't really matter. Besides, he knows he'll have people like you help dismiss it all as nonsense and cast those paying attention as crazy conspiracy theorists.

People on all sides unironically fall for all kinds of stupid crap. Doesn't mean they're wrong, even if they're right for the wrong reasons.

For sure. UVA rape hoax, Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, Noosegate, Smirkgate..too many to count.

Besides, he knows he'll have people like you help dismiss it all as nonsense and cast those paying attention as crazy conspiracy theorists.

I hate psychoanalyzing people I like, but 2rafa, have you recently seen a big wave of mocking Davos/Schwab/pod/bugs "conspiracy theories" in your finance circle? Are you trying to distance yourself from a low-status, low-class phenomenon?

Tangential: if you want some entertainment, watch this debate between Destiny and a believer in the Schwab conspiracy.

The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing. It reflects not only a lack of baseline critical thinking ability, but a complete inability to figure out where political and economic power actually lie (and with whom they sit).

Argument-as-soldiers can always come across as embarrassing, but it's a solid tactic. Who cares if you miss on a few targets? The point is to generally fight, not get bogged down and wring your hands over some unfortunate person caught in the crossfire. The US did not stop invading Iraq just because a few civvies must have accidentally died, though I would trust the military to not be completely indifferent to this because it has much more dire consequences.

I normally sigh whenever people here bring up "the woke" or whatever no matter the topic, but I'll do it in this case. For all the posts about "peak-woke" or "a return to sanity/reason", not one of them seemed to grasp that losing a battle was not equivalent to losing a war. To use a recent example, Hamlin University, the site where a professor recently got accused of bigotry for showing a historical artwork depicting Muhammed made by Islamic artists, backed down on their support of the students who called for the professor to be removed. But for every case like this, there are probably more where people just decide to not deal with the hassle of fighting at all and capitulate.

It's only a reasoning test if you assume your enemies are interested in truth to its own end. Otherwise, it's just a casualty of the culture war.

To use a recent example, Hamlin University, the site where a professor recently got accused of bigotry for showing a historical artwork depicting Muhammed made by Islamic artists, backed down on their support of the students who called for the professor to be removed.

No they didn't. The professor is still jobless. The most they admitted was that they may have gone too far by calling her "Islamophobic."

I don't think I said what exactly they did in response, but even so, this just proves my point. That professor doesn't get to come back (most likely, though not guaranteed). If Hamlin and their students write history, they'll debate the morality of this firing at that time, but they won't back down overall just because they overstepped.

Other examples include the 'Great Reset' (a WEF paper that primarily advocates an agreement on a global minimum corporation tax, hardly revolutionary dystopian policy here) and so on.

That does seem concerning to me.

Governments defecting against other w.r.t. taxes creates downwards pressure on tax rates, a race to the bottom, which is one of the things that prevents the governments from taxing as high as the market can bear, and therefore capturing all the produced value. Dismantling this mechanism by coordinating a global price fixing scheme on taxation; worse, creating an institution that facilitates these kinds of agreements — doesn’t look good to me. It will lead to higher taxes worldwide, if successful.

That said, I don’t know whether the WEF actually promotes this idea, or if it was a one-off paper of no consequence. Would be interesting to read your thoughts on it, 2rafa.

Governments defecting against other w.r.t. taxes creates downwards pressure on tax rates, a race to the bottom, which is one of the things that prevents the governments from taxing as high as the market can bear, and therefore capturing all the produced value.

Seems like neither is really desirable - letting corporations threaten to run to some other country in a legal fiction about where your headquarters is located to not have to pay taxes while reaping the benefits of access to the higher-tax market. I don't know what the better solution is, though.

Gatekeeping access to a market is a questionable practice in and of itself. So, one day you want to buy something useful to you from a company producing that thing. But.. isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?

Gatekeeping access to a market based on willingness to obey laws and pay taxes is essential to a functioning market.

And yet, a democratic nation means that nominally, the will of the people is that a company does not get access to the market. I don't think that's nearly as tyrannical as implied.

That said, I don’t know whether the WEF actually promotes this idea, or if it was a one-off paper of no consequence.

The OECD have certainly promoted it. It was big news here in Ireland when we agreed to a minimum corporation tax rate of 15% along with 136 other countries, a 2.5% increase on the old rate.

For largely dull reasons... the conference became more important over time and was eventually attended by many European and later world leaders, often for many of the same reasons noted above... Nobody has ever attended his conference to hear what Klaus Schwab has to say.

Another, unmentioned and even more dull reason's that Schwab charges quite a lot for corporate access to WEF (along with a ton of donations etc), while giving free access for politicians, NGOs, and media, along with offering a lot of very favorable amnesties. That's not an unusual form of scratch-your-back just-pols-being-pals, but it's a lot about how a lot of this runs.

The quote actually came from the relatively kooky Danish socialist politician Ida Auken, who used it in predicting a kind of utopian-dystopian society, in which people in wealthy communities were prosperous and able to rent whatever they needed (houses, cars, vacation homes) cheaply, with goods delivered by drone, while a great population of poor people would live 'outside the city', struggling to survive. This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.

There's a certain risk involved whenever writing dystopian fiction, as any serious reader of Huxley knows, but I don't think this an accurate summary in the slightest. In particular:

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

To steelman, there's a Huxleyian "I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard", where this is supposed to be the measures imbued into the speaker's preferences changing their opinion and perspective, rather than outside measures of value or those measures from the view of the described group. But it's a really reaching one and very hard to make compatible with the buzzword-laden groping that the writer gives otherwise: the City is nearly free, closer to 'nature' (or at least the City's version), long-lasting goods with a variety of environmental and practical benefits, yada yada. The intuitive read is not people who were poor, and it's notable that the lost are separated not by those who were obsolete by robots and AI (the viewpoint character themselves seems in this category, given "When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people."), but those who felt obsolete.

The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs, which is common in some countries and so hardly particularly modern or degenerate or whatever, that noted their farming emitted less methane than cattle farming.

That's... a bit of a weakman. "Some human interest" stories are coming at a near-monthly pace not just from food blogs but a half-dozen times in the NYTimes, TIME magazine lauded a Clinton initiative, so on. "I will not eat the bug" became a meme because it keeps fucking coming up.

Now, I don't like lobster (or crab, or most other shellfish), to the point where I prefer 'imitation crab sticks' even in sushi, but I also like cinnamon in chili and pineapple on pizza: my tastes are... unusual. And as a furry, in general I kinda need to support the rule de gustibus non est disputandum. If someone wants to chew down on a nice tasty roach, I'm not gonna join 'em, but that's their opportunity.

Except one can't help but notice that this comes at the same time and from many of the same outfits also curiously interested in making beef more expensive and less available -- and you can't help notice it because the same sources will happily make the link for you. Sometimes it's for health reasons, sometimes it's cow farts, sometimes it's land usage, and sometimes it's whatever new purpose of the day pops up.

And yet it's there.

The latter phrase stems from a 2019 WEF report on housing options in densely overcrowded cities that notes possibilities in 'tiny homes' or shipping container apartments to create more 'affordable housing'. That these housing options might be much better than what the average proletarian in Chennai or Chengdu currently has was the point, rather than to force affluent American picket fence suburbanities into modern banlieues.

Again, this is a bit of a weakman. This one's a little harder to show since so many of the search times are bloated with shipping container houses, but even ignoring them as noncentral there's still an absolute ton of emphasis among an amazingly wide number of sources promoting tiny living spaces while (more importantly!) attacking and arguing for state restrictions or discouragement of more conventional living conditions. More broadly, it's also the subtext for almost every complaint about suburbia and a lot of the complaints about 'auto culture'.

And I think this focus on weakman kinda undermines your point. Contrast:

In the mid-2010s, a bizarre conspiracy theory emerged in which Klaus was a central figure in a cabal of illuminati-esque global elites who got together to plan their annual strategy at the World Economic Forum, as the conference came to be known, each year.

from your op, with the later

The argument isn't that the WEF isn't a generic neoliberal organization, it's that it's (a) powerless and (b) doesn't really stand for anything outside the status quo. The UN is also a broadly progressive organization, but that doesn't make it not powerless.

The "bizarre conspiracy theory" you originally brought up wasn't that the WEF has secret police powers and its own army, or that it's proposing some nightmare vision scifi dystopia only one man would want otherwise. I mean, I'm pretty sure someone has proposed that, if only because there's a lot of nutters out there, but it's still not the actual softball you t'd up.

It's that Schwab was a leader of a group planning their dire acts. Which, to be fair, is still wrong: he's 'just' bringing a whole bunch of people together, pointing the ideological to the powerful, and selecting which match his viewpoint. As you say, he doesn't have the breadth of vision or charisma to really drive people. But that still does have a ton of powerful people and corporations meeting and listening to his carefully-selected goals that happen to overlap with theirs, which they often go out afterward to use their power to implement.

That tells us that if Schwab made the wrong stock picks and went backrupt and the WEF disappeared, these positions wouldn't go away. The commonness of this sort of giant coordination conference, if seldom so high-profile or large-scale, tells us that it isn't and never was the only coordination mechanism. But it doesn't tell us whether the WEF acts as a significant coordination mechanism.

I think the city is portrayed in a utopian-dystopian way. It’s not hell, but it has significant problems. And this makes sense, the author is a green socialist, she isn’t a follower of Schwab’s ideology and has in fact been paid to provide the ‘take’ of someone from a different movement for the WEF blog.

I think that's a fair description for the privacy concerns; I don't think it's accurate to describe those left outside as the "poor people struggling to survive" (note even the WEF page describes them as "discontents". More importantly, it's very obvious and overt that the "you will own nothing and be happy" isn't and very obviously isn't supposed to be part of the "significant problems" side.

The point is that attaching the “you will own nothing and be happy” quote to the WEF is like describing the New York Times as a Trump supporting newspaper because you quote a line from a single Op-Ed written by a Trump supporter that was commissioned for the sake of ‘ideological diversity’.

That's be a far stronger position were there a few dozen 'no we don't want this and in fact want the opposite of this' arguments to point toward, rather than something that gets promoted under other terms for everything from air compressor to carpet tiles.

((And, uh, also if Auken or involved editors were shoved out of the organization in a giant high-confrontation mess over the matter.))

It isn’t. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people employed as ‘food writers’ across the English-speaking world, to say nothing of non-food writers that cover the subject or hobbyist food bloggers. The NYT’s “food journalism” section alone has several dozen employees and its own subscription service.

That would be a useful rejoinder, if still not within the limits of your original "some human interest stories by food blogs ", if it were just the NYT's food journalism section. Instead it's the Opinion section (complete with Learning Network study questionaire), a small section on cricket flour in Climate FWD, applauded by a comedian (?) giving relationship advice. And that's just one outlet.

Sure, it's all a bunch of people bringing up this stuff (or rewarding it when it comes from outside), and it being happily rubberstamped by layers of fact-checkers and editors), and no one bothering with any objections. Sure there's tons of random things like that.

And then there's a pretty wide variety of common things that don't, and it becomes noticeable.

I suppose they do say that eating beef is bad for global warming, but if you did believe in global warming then the impact of cattle farming on methane emissions would probably be important to you, I guess (I can’t say I care about it).

Yes, people who care about things care about them. But that's going from 'it's not happening' to 'and it's good that it is' pretty quick.

Except, again, when they do talk about housing regular people this isn’t really about the US or West at all... The only example that features normal blue collar Westerners is the example of the British ‘pod’ housing company, which not only embraces that vessel of suburbanization (the car), but which also looks like a pretty nice update to the awful, squalid and cramped Victorian terraced housing in which many of the local working classes live.

Naraburns below linked to this piece with a smorgasboard of Western-specific focuses; the Times has lauded "the winner of the small space/tiny home competition sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development". For other examples on broader restrictions against conventional housing, see here for one that highlights an American local law!, natgeo about specifically average American home sizes.

They're just people interested in the matter! And it's not that aggressive yet. But they're just people interested in it here. The pretense that this is solely for the developing world (and parts of the UK no one likes) runs into some problems given that.

This is a great write-up, thanks. I really enjoyed it.

I see two somewhat separate theses competing for dominance here. One is something like "Klaus Schwab is nobody important, it's kind of stupid to worry about him." The other is something like "the papers people give at WEF are not important, it's kind of stupid to worry about them." I'm well persuaded of the former (in fact until I read your post, I had never consciously heard of Klaus Schwab and could certainly not have named him as the organizer of WEF); am I still an embarrassment if I am skeptical of the latter?

The reason I ask is that I am sometimes inspired to revisit old documents from seemingly trivial or irrelevant conferences, and I repeatedly find the words of John Maynard Keynes remarkably insightful:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas….

I have lived long enough to notice that American culture is now at the bottom of a great many slippery slopes which I was personally assured, by very apparently sensible people, were not slippery slopes at all. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to feed me bugs? Surely not. Is there a prospiracy to make it expensive-to-impossible to keep meat on my menu? Yes, definitely. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to put me in a pod? I can't imagine. Is there a prospiracy to shrink people's houses generally? Well, yes, there definitely is.

These various prospiracies do not rely on the cunning of Klaus Schwab or, really, anyone else. At this point, they are mostly--though not entirely!--academic scribblings. Which I can certainly dismiss as academic scribblings--if I'm not at all worried that some government bureaucrat or other might suddenly take them up. For example, this article from January 2022 did not start a culture war spat over gas stoves, but a recent critical comment from a Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission did. I'm sure it's nothing! And as long as I continue to be sure it is nothing, then I am no obstacle to gas stove critics making it into something, possibly in such a way that by the time I say anything at all, I have already definitively lost on the issue.

Of course, this isn't always what happens--sometimes crazed academic scribblings never become more than that. But it is difficult to know for certain which ideas will take hold in advance. If I should not be concerned about what people talk about at the WEF, pray tell--what should I be concerned about? How can I know which objectionable academic plots at merely fanciful, and which I must strangle in the crib if I am to ensure they never harm me or mine? You have suggested that conservatives who worry about liberal globalists have a "complete inability to figure out where political and economic power actually lie," so maybe you can tell me--where does political and economic power actually lie, if not with the academic conferences that have been deliberately and successfully shaping broad swathes of American and global culture pretty much as they please--since the 1960s or 1970s at latest?

Of course, this isn't always what happens--sometimes crazed academic scribblings never become more than that. But it is difficult to know for certain which ideas will take hold in advance. If I should not be concerned about what people talk about at the WEF, pray tell--what should I be concerned about?

I think if you're concerned about shrinking homes, meat increasing in price, gas stoves, etc. it's a better move to write your own intelligent think pieces about the benefits of large homes, meat, gas stoves, etc. instead of ranting and making memes about how the elite global order want to make your life worse. I don't really have any hard evidence for it, but intuitively I feel like Zvi's blog post about the benefits of gas stoves was many more times effective in preserving gas stoves than any number of /r/politicalcompassmemes posts or comments hating gas stove bans and regulations. Because if you're genuinely in the right, there's a decent chance a well written essay will beat out the essays of your opposition.

Though I don't begrudge anyone their essays, I don't really like this presumption. The left is much better at writing essays and getting them published, because most journalists and writers are lefties. The battle, by it's nature, is asymmetrical, and picked by the collective consciousness of the left to be the path of least resistance to them - since all they need to do is sow doubt about whether gas stoves might be harmful, and because the regulations they favor are designed to boil the frog and wipe out gas stoves thirty years down the road rather than tomorrow.

Mmm. I cannot for the life of me find it, but I remember reading something a long while ago, and I think it was some kind of meta-analysis, definitely something with actual data anyway, that studies are more likely to be published and cited if they come to a left-favouring conclusion. A study finding that women have it harder in some way, for example, will be published and boosted to the high heavens while one highlighting male hardships will be largely buried.

The Paranoid Rant used Cumulative Meta-analysis as a Publication Bias Model, though it's a fairly small number of items for a meta-analysis and only one is obviously political.

What I remember was contained within a blog post, I'm pretty sure. Not SSC, a different layout. But the same topic. But that's getting at what I mean.

Well, thence this place, no?

Though I admit I'm skeptical about its real-world impact.

I have some bad news for you: It is already too late.

The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.

If Klaus Schwab and his more successful attendees don't want this future, it's only because they haven't played out their own beliefs far enough in their own heads, not because it's anathema to them. It will be their intent if it's not already; they just haven't game-planned that far. This is precisely why the rightoid memes are believed - because they're credible, because they're consistent with what we know about these people, because they're coherent with the visions of the future which they have stated publicly.

Trying to tar belief in these conspiracies as "embarrassing" is just shaming tactics, and you'll not "tut tut how gauche and low status" me out of them by making irrelevant points that Klaus Schwab himself is kind of a loser (to the extent that a man with a million dollar salary can be a loser). Yeah, he's not in the Illuminati, but his opinions are representative of the heads of government that come to his ski resort, who are.

The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.

The left can say the same thing about their own conspiracies, too. "Even if it was a hoax, blacks still face systemic oppression, so it's a teachable moment and not completely divorced from the stark reality blacks face in America today."

They can't even point to a system. The WEF at least has proposals, and is part of a movement that has passed legislation in every Western country. Systemic racism is spaghetti monster level stuff.

They can find a quote from a CEO of a fortune 500 company?

My experience among these elites of the world is they do not have contempt for the working class because that requires some measure of emotional valence towards a group they basically have little contact with. Their contempt is reserved for those close to their station. The nouveau riche as it were (in influence terms).

Its more they are entirely detached than contempt. Notably I was brought on to the higher echelons of the civil service and then into politics and lauded as being from below decks so to speak.

My dad was a headmaster, I went to grammar school and university. I'm middle class but I might as well have been from a council house in Stoke from their perspective.

You always have elites, being indifferent rather than openly hateful might be our best option.

I think the difference is that the elites aren't going to be banning large homes and meat, they're just trying to price in externalities as appropriate. The conspiracies are embarrassing because the have the vibe of "The elites hate us and we should angrily riot to resist them". The better response would be try to come up with other more acceptable solutions that price in externalities.

they're just trying to price in externalities as appropriate

"Ban? No, no. I'm just going to tax you until you are too poor to eat a hamburger or have a garage. But we aren't banning anything."

they're just trying to price in externalities as appropriate

UN claims that climate change is threat to human survival. There are 8 B humans alive today. FEMA claims that a human life is worth 7.5 M USD. The world produces 59.4 B kg of beef per year.

Putting these numbers together, 8B*7.5M USD/(59.4B kg)=1010101 USD/kg is what the tax on beef should be for the consumer to fully internalize the externality of human extinction.

I would say that such price amounts to ban for all but the superwealthy.

Fully outside the context of conspiracy theories, recent history and existing upcoming plans on bans vs pricing in externalities hasn't been promising. Or even just letting people judge internal costs themselves, in the case of incandescent lights.

And I'm not even sure to what extent the pushback comes from elites, versus populists. Some brands of populist like bans because many people read 'pricing in externalites' as letting rich people keep sinning while the masses suffer, vs the fairness of everyone suffering.

I think the difference is that the elites aren't going to be banning large homes and meat, they're just trying to price in externalities as appropriate.

It's not happening, and it's good that it is?

This is like defending the pizzagate conspiracy by saying that sure, the actual comet pizza allegation might have been total bullshit (I’m not saying it is or isn’t, only using it as an example here), but “some elites” are “predators” so it’s still “kind of true”. Like yeah maybe, but you’ve gone from a specific allegation to a general one.

Wait a tick, you are willing to declare the Davos/WEF/Illuminati conspiracy embarrassing nonsense, but you are only willing to say the comet pizza allegation was bullshit provisionally? Have you not looked into it as much as you have the WEF conspiracy?

“Broadly Klaus Schwab has similar views to those of the technocratic neoliberal global elites who attend his conference” is a banal statement. It’s also one I and probably everyone agrees with. It says nothing and contributes to nothing, it’s barely even an allegation.

Yes, but "Klaus Schwab, while personally unimpressive, has played a very important function as a facilitator and connector between global capital and a particular set of ideas, and as such has played a large role in the deployment of capital in service of those ideas (i.e. climate doomerism, disdain for suburbs and mid/high-wage western workers, etc.)" is not so banal.

A few notes:

Do you have examples of right-wing anti-WEF conspiracy theories before the pandemic? Since before the pandemic the only anti-WEF criticism I can remember came from the left, and it didn't concentrate on Schwab or even the organization WEF itself but mainly the Davos conference. Like the term "WEF" would probably not have rung that many bells within the antiglobalization/anti-neoliberal set but the term "Davos" certainly would have. Or at least that's my experience.

If you look at images like this, Schwab looks like he's leaning into his newfound rep as an evil genius. Then again, I'd imagine it would be quite a rush to be a fairly minor (in the grand scheme of things) middle-manager type for the global jetset and suddenly find yourself the head of the global Illuminati in the conspiracy-theorist central casting. Examples abound of similar leaning into "cool dark" image, from teenage goths to the "Dark Enlightenment" (remember that?)

One of the things that WEF is into is trying to make predictions and scenarios of the future - the whole exercise that the "You will own nothing..." things is a part of is a part of that. Schwab's boring books also have a similar affect. We know that trying to predict the future is fun and exciting, considering how popular various superforecasting contests are and how much this topic features in, for example, Scott's blogging.

If you fancy yourself a noblesse-oblige type wealthy benefactor of humanity (surely how these types see themselves, even if it's probably not how others would describe them), and if you have the sort of networks and amounts of non-public data that you might get from private conversations in global elite meetings like this, you'd probably try to use them to heighten your predicting ability. After all, you know stuff that others don't, and that's a rush in itself. (I wonder how many people, after reading enough stuff about conspiracies, just resolve that they just must know more about this and that they must attempt to join the conspiracy itself to do this?) And, of course, various governments and businesses will draw up scenarios for the future as a part of their normal functioning.

However, if your predictions are too good, it will cause problems - since many people will just decide that nobody can predict things this specifically, they must have made them happen. Thus, you have the various pandemic scenarios used by conspiracy theorists to argue that they're correct enough about specific things that they show that the people making these predictions (global think tanks etc.) must have made the pandemic happen and announced this beforehand for... uhm, reasons. I wonder if this will eventually lead to such predicting diminishing, or becoming less and less specific.

The infamous "You will own nothing..." scenario is fairly creepily expressed, and I don't think it's just that Auken is presenting it as both utopian and dystopian. Auken has actually had a varied career in the Danish parliament, representing three different Danish parties - while she started in the Socialist People's Party, a party somewhat analoguous to Greens in many other countries, she has also been a Social Liberal and now a Social Democrat. Her thinking doesn't seem to represent as much any sort of doctrinaire socialism as a sort of a green, urbanist liberalism.

Then again, that sort of stuff, combined with a kind of a political autism, can lead to politicians making weird statements - I distinctly remember one Finnish Green, in an election panel for out city election, exclaiming that his ideal city would be have everyone living in a dense city with "wolves running outside the city wall". In my experience this kind of experience is often less a proof that you're a part of a global conspiracy and more a result of being the precocious kid in some rural village experiencing moving to a bigger city as a life-changing revelation showing the superiority of all urban life to ruralism, combined with playing too much SimCity.

Anyway, what strikes me about the "You will own nothing..." video is that whatever utopian aspects there are are basically putting a hippy-dippy sheen on a process that's basically predicated on pure capitalism - ie the expansion of the "rent, don't own" model, already popular when it comes to Netflix, the "sharing economy" etc. to all other facets of life as well. Generally, though, this is not done to help humanity or to abolish private property (it's just concentrated in fewer and fewer private entities) but to make piles of cash and profits for stockholders. And "putting a hippy-dippy sheen on processes designed to make money" describes quite a bit of what WEF does, really.

When it comes to the whole "eat the bugs" thing, the bug-eating trend attempts have come and gone for years now, and they fail every time - bug-eating just plain isn't a part of the Western culture. However, I've never got the impression that the bug-eating promoters are trying to make the proles eat the bugs - rather, it's almost like an progressive middle-class version of kids trying to dare each other to eat worms. An enlightement status game among hipsters, with no-one, in the end, being truly willing to commit to this bit, mainly because, as said, bug-eating just isn't a part of the Western culture, and the ones who are willing to commit to avoiding meat for environmental reasons can just go vegan.

Finally, one of the participants in the current Davos conference is, of course, the Finnish PM Sanna Marin, and the Finnish media has duly featured her trip there, where she has used her newfound publicity to make statements like this, a basic and pedestrian statement in Finnish politics but apparently manna from heaven to many foreigners looking for firmness and resolve regarding the Ukraine war.

The fact that she's participating openly in this "conspiracy" seems to make conspiracy theorists, both foreign and domestic, almost confused - why is she so open about being a WEF puppet? - and this confusion in turn leads to more confusion among more traditional political types. Yes, she's participating in an event featuring global political and business actors and trying to ingratiate herself to them, that's a major part of her job! When you're a leader of a small country and participating in abroad events like this, you are inevitably also operating as the brand ambassador of Business Finland, trying to convince foreign corporations that Finland is worth investing in, hopefully leading to jobs and wealth.

If she was to declare that she will never participate in events like this - which is something she might have done in her younger and more leftist years - presumably she could then well be attacked for failing to do her job and making Finland poorer and less integrated to the global economy. And, of course, that's how the global elite networks keep operating - even if you wouldn't want to attend, there's always something that might mean you basically have to.

Do these memes and so on really serve a deeper purpose than communicating the vibe 'TECHNOCRACY BAD'? Paul Kingsnorth for example, seems to see Schwab for what he is, though I grant Mr. Kingsnorth is hardly a central example of a rightist:

A smooth, clean, ordered world, free of dangerous melons on little market stalls, free of small businesses and anarchic commercial arrangements and awkward human interactions of any sort - a world run by efficient, clean, digitised corporations offering ‘e-solutions’ for any activity that might threaten our safety and wellbeing: this has been on offer for years now, but the pandemic - as Schwab openly acknowledges - has been a blessing for those behind it. We are prepared to accept things now which would have been inconceivable three years ago. What will be conceived next year? And who will listen to the ragtag mob of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, fascists and nutters who want us to say no to it?

This is the sort of thing that fuels the genuinely weird ‘conspiracy theories’ around Schwab and his agenda. But it’s not necessary to believe that the virus was deliberately released or doesn’t exist, to simply observe the wider picture. For decades now, nation states and their political leaders have been progressively disempowered by globalisation, and power has been concentrated in the hands of those who create and control the world’s technological infrastructure. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Klaus Schwab, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Ray Kurzweil and the like have been moulding our reality for decades, and the limbic capitalism they pioneered has been hyper-charged by covid - as has awareness of it, and a growing counter-reaction.

We are living through a time in which the conflict between technocracy and democracy has spilled out into the open: the battle is being fought daily now on street and screen. Schwab has caught the spotlight because he is publicly attempting to put a storytelling framework around this conflict. Only last month, at a conference in (where else?) Dubai, he made this ambition explicit by rebranding his Great Reset as the ‘Great Narrative’. The world needed a new global story to unite it, he said. He and the WEF would help to ‘imagine the future, design the future, and then execute the future.’

What is the correct answer to the reasoning test? My position is that while the WEF holds no formal power, paying some degree of attention to it makes sense to keep a finger on the pulse of what technocratic policymakers think would be basically pretty good ideas. In 2020, I observed an arbitrary level of power exercised by both federal and local bureaucrats in seemingly mundane agencies - the CDC suddenly discovered that it had the power to set national housing policy and require landlords to house people indefinitely, local agencies followed broader leads in determining which businesses (and even which aisles in those businesses) may remain open.

Seeing these incredibly broad powers exercised with no meaningful check suggests to me that I could see public health, land management, energy departments, and so on take similarly strong and broad-reaching policies to address the putative emergencies of climate change, refugee resettlement, natural disasters, famine, and wars. If the CDC can force quartering of the destitute indefinitely, why couldn't the Department of Energy place heavy restrictions on use of gas-powered vehicles or the Department of Agriculture implement a ban on certain meat products?

This does not require believing in an evil conspiracy master-minded by the dastardly Schwab. In fact, it would be easier to address if there was a dastardly conspiracy afoot! Instead, it just looks like an incredibly boring set of safety-minded bureaucrats getting together to decide what's best for everyone going forward, to all appearances being basically sincere in their belief that they're serving the public.

the putative emergencies of climate change, refugee resettlement, natural disasters, famine, and wars.

Is your position that these issues are not important, or that you have superior policies in mind? If not, what problems do you think are important (aside from the well-tread topics of wokeness and the CDC)?

My complaint isn't that the issues aren't important, it's that they should not be considered license to create arbitrary powers for government agencies and that nothing about them validates abrogation of constitutional rights in the fashion that Covid was used to justify. Whatever their importance, they're not temporal emergencies, they're issues that should be subject to the severe policy-making constraints of limitations on federal powers that would have been considered normal a century ago rather than the unlimited capacity that seems possible now.

Not to promote this view necessarily, but I believe that the WEF-conspiracist POV on this is that it's not even important which issues are chosen -- the WEF solution to any issue is globalist techno-totalitarianism; the consolidation of power is the point, not the issues themselves.

I will promote the view, and yes that is a succinct way of phrasing my objections to the whole thing. Thank you.

That’s a practical-enough motte.

It also doesn’t make the same predictions about the cultural side, about LGBT and race relations and veganism and... Safetyism is much more defensible due to being relatively specific. It’s the belief in cabals and figureheads and New World Orders that represents a failure of reasoning, but also offers conspiracy theorists ammunition against the broader world of things they don’t like.

If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".

Non-central fallacy. Eating lobster is not a central example of eating bugs (aside from the question of whether it counts at all, if you're not Taylor Hebert).

The WEF has posted some stories about the business opportunity in vegan meat substitutes, much as it posts articles about every other kind of possible business innovation.

How often does it post about a clearly inconsistent with the left business innovation?

Non-central fallacy. Eating lobster is not a central example of eating bugs

... why, exactly though? The 'non-central fallacy' implies the example has an important difference from / doesn't share an important aspect of more 'central' examples. Lobsters certainly aren't as disgusting to us as cockroaches. But the reason for that example is that, aside from extremely socially-contingent food-disgust ideas, insects aren't fundamentally unhealthier or disgusting than mammal meat or vegetables - some hunter-gatherers have various insects as a large part of their diet due to contingency of their natural environment. While I don't eat the cockroach-chips because they probably aren't produced very naturally, they're probably more nutritious, including in the trad holistic sense, than 'soy protein isolate' or white wheat flour.

The keratin of insect shells is much harder for humans to digest than mammal or vegetable matter

Vegetables have plenty of indigestible parts too (cellulose), you'd be getting nutrition from the non-keratin parts. Missing nutrients aren't a problem, most individual foods poorly satisfy all human nutrient needs, which is why we eat a variety of them - it has to have some useful stuff, but nobody's going exclusively insectivore. I don't think anyone's actually evaluated the nutritional quality of the bugs during this whole discourse - which I'd expect would vary significantly depending on the species and diet of bug.

I can’t figure out where exactly the WEF is “posting some stories,” but I’d imagine they cover all sorts of fintech.

As for lobsters, I think it’s closer to the common conception of eating bugs than grasshopper flour. Neither is really what the memes are implying, though.

I can’t figure out where exactly the WEF is “posting some stories,” but I’d imagine they cover all sorts of fintech.

I don't think it does post as an organization, directly; most of these seem to be members submitting to papers: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better is part of this series, for example.

And... yeah, they're mostly a mix of generic progressive spiel and generic upper-management business paradigmamamgam crap.

It may not have hard power, but to the extent that it influences the thinking of people who do, that seems like an important kind of soft power.

Is the WEF powerless? The org itself may lack formal powers but it’s attended by the top business executives in the world. This isn’t some random Vegas lawyer conference.

I’d argue that being able to attract top talent and set the conference agenda is certainly a type of power.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats