Comment by osobo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by osobo | Hacker News Reader

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In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding ground to some old vices: Jaleousy and greed. Watching other people's lives and see them spending money and enjoying fineries in an (supposedly) unedited, reality-like format makes a lot of people feel that it must all be real and they should be living that live themselves. Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. This, coupled with the ease of packing in actionable links and buttons, creates a whole new dynamic where people get lured in by shiny things (crypto/NFS/MLM etc) only to get duped. It's a really old phenomenon, though.

> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them.

And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month.

And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.

> what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more

This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.

Yeah the tech bubble is one of the worse ones. 800eur/month is not even possible for most people, let alone pocket change.

Not disagreeing with you but quite a few younger people driving those cars are living at their parents and have little to no other significant expenses. Yes, 800€/mo is a lot for many but for some it's in the "affordable if I don't do much else" category.

I've also heard about people pooling their money and driving them on alternating weekends. Luxury car ownership has gotten a lot cheaper than before when you needed to pay upfront or with hefty interest.

It would seem luxuries have gotten more accessible while necessities have gotten more dear. Not sure what that says about global versus local inequality.

The real weirdness is that bad local policy has led to uneven inflation, so our cultural 'anchors' of luxury are all thrown off.

A luxury car? We've gotten 10x+ better at making those since the 1950's, so ofc it's cheaper.

A trip to the Maldives? Same.

A reasonable house to live in? Well, we've sort of gotten better at making those, but not as drastically, AND we've decided to make laws that make it harder to build more of them anyway.

Lot's of fun hierarchy of needs debates to be had from that.

That's almost $1k/month. I don't know where you live or what life you live that $1k/month for a car that's probably not very practical is viable, but that's not normal in the US. That's rent in the exurbs, never mind the city. That's over a third of median annual salary before taxes. Now add fuel, maintenance, registration, and insurance. And leases usually require better than minimum insurance, so factor in good insurance on a $90-100k car.

Those leases include maintenance.

Well, the financing plans you use which make luxury "affordable" are more a symptom of our debt based economy and monetary policy. Most people expect it to crash at some point

> 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month

€800 a month? i have an income of €1100 per month. so after rent and bills (€500), i have €600 per month for all my other costs. no BMW for me.

although (like you(?)) i do live in a European country (Holland) where there is excellent, although expensive, rail/bus travel and biking infrastructure.

Are you a programmer.

€1100 is not a lot of money.

But now I'm thinking that's a possible retirement destination

Is that a full time job?

I thought holland was better paid than that. Short term unemployment benefits in Denmark would pay out approx 1808 eur a month after taxes.

That's luxury brands moving downmarket to cash in. I've seen a lot more Maseratis out in my part of the 'burbs than before. We're not the rich 'burbs or area of the city, but deeply middle-class, and I'm quite certain that hasn't changed. I suspect instead that brand has moved down-market.

Some try to ride the line and do both. Create an overpriced line that's maybe less well-made than the "real" ones, and slap your brand name all over it because some segments of society think advertising the right brand names and lots of fake gold and such are what rich people like, and they want to be like them while prominently advertising that they can afford "luxury". Then you sell them in different stores from where you sell your actually-luxury goods. A Gucci bag with the most prominent design element being "Gucci" tiled all over it isn't actually a luxury item. "Big pony" Ralph Lauren isn't even luxury-adjacent like the mainline brand is (or, at least, has been), it's trashy as hell—but they produce them for a reason, and in some stores that's nearly all they have. That's a signal of the kind of store you're in and who they're selling to, not a sign that luxury has become more accessible.

None of this is "luxury" becoming more affordable.

> Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers)

It's even worse than that because of the algorithms.

They show you more of what they think you like, but the bubbles are quite narrow. For example, suppose you want to see what's going on with all the vaccine skepticism.

There is a bubble centered around Joe Rogan. They're talking about how the existing vaccines aren't as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants, and debating whether the (in both cases low) incidence of myocarditis in adolescents is higher from the vaccine or from the virus.

Then there is a bubble centered around Alex Jones. They're telling you that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines and that the vaccines cause protein folding and therefore prions.

You click on the wrong thing and the algorithm decides you want to see more of that. It surrounds you with the people who already believe those things. Now you're the skeptic and they're the establishment and you're trying to remember enough of high school biology to describe the relationship between protein folding and prions while conceding that maybe Bill Gates does suck and maybe that does make him technically a vampire, but could someone explain what that has to do with population control?

Meanwhile there are plenty of scientists who are happy to explain it to you, but once it decides you want to see fear porn, you don't get to see the people debunking it anymore.

And Alex Jones is just the canonical exemplar. The bubbles like that form everywhere. You have people who still believe that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black, or that Julian Assange reports to Putin.

One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.

But telling people what they want to hear sells more advertising than eat your vegetables, so doing the wrong thing is more profitable.

> when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected

There appears to be a growing trend that claims it's innately harmful to experience contrary viewpoints.

Yes... and anyone who peddles that line of thinking must be afraid of counter-arguments.

Oh god, thankfully small but a world of snowflakes is something to fear so let’s keep it in check.

> One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.

I'd argue that it's really two sides of the same coin. Take a social graph where nodes are people. It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.

Ideally, we wouldn't have to eliminate any bad nodes, but that would require a stable graph where bad nodes don't attract more and more connections. Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.

> It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.

There are at least two problems with this.

The first is that as long as you have an algorithm which is isolating people into silos and frothing people for "engagement," all you're going to do is create another one.

The second is that the bad man doesn't actually disappear from the world, and many people will follow them to wherever they go instead, where they're even more isolated and have less opportunity to break out of the bubble. The general trend is also causing alternate social media platforms to spring up which are splitting the population along party lines. Having more platforms is good, having the platforms be implicitly partisan is terrible. And having everyone on the right move to other platforms would leave the existing platforms with only people on the left, which will melt their brains just as much. You need the opposition around to keep yourself honest.

> Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.

Regulate algorithms can't work. Never mind the obvious First Amendment problems, think about the incentives. To fix the problem would be to break the business model; stop driving engagement. Billions of dollars at stake. So the political incentive is instead to let them keep radicalizing people, as long as they're radicalizing people for whoever is currently in power. If this isn't sufficiently alarming to you because of who is currently in power, imagine the public official they have to appease is Trump.

What we need are social media companies with a different business model. Ideally in some kind of federated system with competing discovery algorithms so the harm from a bad one has less scope, and people can choose not to use the ones known to be malignant without having to opt out of the networks with the largest network effect.

You have to interpret “regulate” charitably. I wasn’t advocating for any particular type of regulation, and not necessarily in reference to government intervention. Substitute with “tweak” if that’s less bothersome.

Fair enough.

It seems like it's an incentives problem. Something needs to change so that making money stops being aligned with doing the wrong thing.

Whatever fixes it is going to have a different business model. Maybe the best thing the government could do is do some trust busting. Make it easier to enter the market, increase the number of competitors and we have more chances to find the answer.

>or that Julian Assange reports to Putin

Ah...this has been debunked?

The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks didn't reveal its source, but Assange said "no, nope, it definitely wasn't the Russian government, no way".

Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.

Where/what was the debunking?

You may be the victim of a large disinformation campaign.

There is definitely a very large disinformation campaign going on, we can all agree on that.

None of what you wrote even implies Assange reports to Putin, let alone is evidence of such.

I see your point, and I think you are technically correct.

What it implies to me is that "Assange reports to Putin" has not been debunked.

Do you think that it is disinformation, then?

> Ah...this has been debunked?

> The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.

Assange is the one publishing the secrets of "US intelligence agencies," so they don't like him very much. Given this conflict of interest and the knowledge that they'd never be asked to provide any actual evidence, their credibility is low.

> Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.

He indicted actual Russians, who are in Russia and not subject to US jurisdiction. The expectation was that they wouldn't show up in court and prosecutors would never have to prove their allegations.

Then some of the accused did show up, so they dropped the charges against them: https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/justice-department-drop...

But even ignoring that they never proved it in court, that still doesn't imply that Assange reports to Putin or had any knowledge Russians were involved (if indeed they were).

"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence" is debunked by Hitchens's razor.

>"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence"

Sure, if you like, there is no need to debunk the claims. Let's not bicker and argue about that, as I certainly have no idea. I still, perhaps pedantically, would claim that "no need to debunk" is different from "has been debunked".

Regardless, the breathtaking size of this isolated bubble of disinformation is worthy of note.

Four bubbles I see in the original comment: Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, people who believe false things about Rittenhouse and then there is...

   ...most of the US government, media, and Democratic party.

It's like saying a typical American breakfast is orange juice, cereal, and an aircraft carrier.

Maybe it's true! But it sure raises a lot of questions, and something funny is going on if people don't even agree that one item in the list stands out.

Something even funnier is going on if people get mad at you for noticing. People who make fun of conspiracy theories. Remember that's where this started, a comment on how prone people are to believing in conspiracies.

You can't trust the establishment! Still, big conspiracy.

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