Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem.
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The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.
Here's a historical example that I think about a *lot*. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain.
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
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The network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.
In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a city where his word was law - he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:
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Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:
Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:
Elon Musk Got His SpaceX Company Town. Will He Soon Regret It?
The explosive early days of Starbase, Texas, are revealing of the new powers—and bureaucratic headaches—the new city gives the aerospace industry leader.
Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:
Eugenics isn't dead—it's thriving in tech
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley.
Mother Jones (www.motherjones.com)
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Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:
Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:
Elon Musk Got His SpaceX Company Town. Will He Soon Regret It?
The explosive early days of Starbase, Texas, are revealing of the new powers—and bureaucratic headaches—the new city gives the aerospace industry leader.
Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:
Eugenics isn't dead—it's thriving in tech
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley.
Mother Jones (www.motherjones.com)
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Like Peter Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:
Musk says Twitter will charge $8 a month for account verification after criticism for $19.99 plan | CNN Business
After facing criticism for his plan to charge Twitter users $19.99 a month to get or keep a verified account, Elon Musk has a counteroffer.
CNN (edition.cnn.com)
And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:
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Like Peter Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:
Musk says Twitter will charge $8 a month for account verification after criticism for $19.99 plan | CNN Business
After facing criticism for his plan to charge Twitter users $19.99 a month to get or keep a verified account, Elon Musk has a counteroffer.
CNN (edition.cnn.com)
And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:
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Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.
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Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.
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This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.
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This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.
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This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
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This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
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This *can't* be true, because *every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people*. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
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This *can't* be true, because *every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people*. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
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The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
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The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
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Image:
Aude (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:80th_floor_of_3_World_Trade_Center_-_OHNY.jpgCC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.eneof/
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
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@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
@madengineering @pluralistic or the fact they intentionally used lead acetate as a wine sweetener (which continued in europe until mid 18 century)
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@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
@missqarnstein @pluralistic Looking further into this, I see articles about how "sapa," better known as lead acetate, was used as a sweetener.
Thank you for your assistance in understanding the chemistry involved, miss Qarnstein. Chemistry is my weakest science.
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic Until Trump I assumed all the discussions of Nero were hyperbole
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Even if Peter Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a *comet*. And of course, being as rich as Peter Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Peter Singer is *doubly* dangerous.
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@pluralistic *Paul Singer
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Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem. After all, I believe my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
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@pluralistic *Paul Singer
@gneilyo Fixed!
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@madengineering @pluralistic Until Trump I assumed all the discussions of Nero were hyperbole
@etchedpixels@mastodon.social @madengineering@mastodon.cloud @pluralistic@mamot.fr
As I posted elsewhere, "if there are future historians, I wonder if they will wonder if Trump literally golfed while the world burned." -
@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
@Enema_Cowboy@dotnet.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr
A significant chunk tends to fall into areas where you lack enough knowleged to "know what you don't know". Sadly, there's a lot of people where such "areas" effectively comprise "everything". -
@etchedpixels@mastodon.social @madengineering@mastodon.cloud @pluralistic@mamot.fr
As I posted elsewhere, "if there are future historians, I wonder if they will wonder if Trump literally golfed while the world burned."@ferricoxide @pluralistic @etchedpixels @madengineering The world would be in a much much better place if all he had done was played golf for 4 years.
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Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
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@pluralistic I don't understand why the factory would even have to do anything differently. You could simply turn the entire building - or the entire town - around 180 degrees.
