Recently I was telling some people about UpTrust and they were like, so basically profit maximization sucks right?
and i was like, profit maximization’s just one output of a much larger thing, which is our unconsciousness. We’re simply not that mature as a species, and that gives rise to systemic loops where people do things that might (or might not) be good for them personally, but all together aren’t good for the species. I don’t even want to call that a problem, in the same way I don’t think a child is a problematic adult.
Take Facebook for example. Why does it suck and drive people to extremes?
There’s no secret cabal of lizard people or billionaires trying to bend the reward mechanisms against the common man, there’s a bunch of little unconscious nudges in all four quadrants: systemic (quarterly earnings reports and short term stock markets, versus for example the https://ltse.com/) personal (earn money, get a promotion, not piss off my boss, get affirmed for helping the team, compete with your friends for who earns the most), biological, societal, that all together create a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating loop.
Probably most people at Facebook are simply not thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions, because that’s really hard to do and it isn’t rewarded. It’s not rewarded because we as humans haven’t built the reward mechanisms for helping out all of humanity yet. We still have sex slavery, and are fighting with tanks over land. What do we expect? That doesn’t mean we should give up, it means we should be honest about the problems and the landscape as we bootstrap these reward cycles.
I think what matters to me is saying there’s no one to blame. There’s no drama triangle here. Even Zuck is not a total db, he’s subject to psychological and social pressures to satisfy wall street, who is not to blame because they’re trying to maximize profit for everyone including their retirees, who are not to blame because they’re part of society, who’s not to blame because we’ve just been bootstrapping ourselves to be more comfortable, get more calories, make more babies, etc, which is our biological imperative. We’ve done a great fucking job, actually.
More needs to be said, but posting this for now.