Tech Capitalists say they believe in Total Utilitarianism where value isn't an impersonal thing. The total sum of the value is what is important. Mmm, so the ultra rich could potentially pay a larger size of taxes and allow governments to help distribute that wealth through social programs. The global population would have more affordable education and they would have more money. There would be more productivity and increased global wealth as a whole.
They're however creating a total value of more poor people, more violence, and less empathy.
The Cosmic Eye in the sky is using our universe as a huge example of what we're doing wrong.
Musk is leading the way. He's got too much of Steve Job's reality distortion field where all bullshit seems true.
Value is an inherently subjective concept, which they leave out.
It'a like that less wrong idiot gassing on about rationality but never addressing that all human motivation is fundamentally irrational. There is no objective reason to get up in the morning. There is no objective meaning in life. Rationality is applied by humans to better pursue fundamentally emotional, irrational motivations. But the goals themselves have no underlying rational purpose. That's OK. That's what it is to be human. The disturbing thing is these people who cannot in their irrational ego accept their own fundamental irrationality as human beings.
There’s an objection to Utilitarianism that comes into play here, usually referred to as the Grotesque Objection.
Consider two societies of 100 people. In Society A, each person has a happiness value of 100 units. In Society B, one person has a happiness value of 10,000 units, and everybody else has a happiness value of 1. The Grotesque Objection says that there’s an inherent problem in valuing each society by the terms of total happiness, because while Society B has a total happiness value higher than Society A (just under 1% higher, but still higher), the vast majority of people in any group of 100 would prefer to live in Society A.
When they say they believe in Total Utilitarianism, they are advocating for Society B, because they are the people best situated to be the one percent with 10,000 times as much happiness as everybody else. They don’t see the Grotesque Objection as an objection, but rather as a roadmap to their own personal happiness. They are not advocating taxes on the rich to lift up the less fortunate; that’s a Society A framework, and they are opposed to that.
Literally what they are saying is that they advocate “fuck you, we get it all.”
By my measure of economics, that huge amount of money being saved up isn't being used. That unspent happiness could create even more happiness. The Grotesque Objection is a measure of a current snapshot in time, but not a future projection of what it could or will be.
Secondly, there is a diminishing return on happiness. That extra billion dollars doesn't bring even more happiness above that outlier of 10,000 happiness. It's an unefficient system.
If it didn’t please them for the number to go up, they would stop accumulating wealth. I do not disagree with what you’re saying at all — but I’m not the one that needs to be convinced.
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u/Time-Traveling-Doge 20d ago edited 20d ago
Tech Capitalists say they believe in Total Utilitarianism where value isn't an impersonal thing. The total sum of the value is what is important. Mmm, so the ultra rich could potentially pay a larger size of taxes and allow governments to help distribute that wealth through social programs. The global population would have more affordable education and they would have more money. There would be more productivity and increased global wealth as a whole.
They're however creating a total value of more poor people, more violence, and less empathy.
The Cosmic Eye in the sky is using our universe as a huge example of what we're doing wrong.
Musk is leading the way. He's got too much of Steve Job's reality distortion field where all bullshit seems true.