Imagine everyone on a giant perfectly transparent mountain. So transparent it's invisible. It looks like people walking on air.
Taller people and people at higher elevations can look down and see where everyone is. They see the "true heights" of those below them but seeing the "true heights" of people above you is impossible.
-
-
E.g. most people can't tell who the best pianist is just by listening to their music. They'd rely on something like host fast the song is or how complicated it sounds as a heuristic.
Show this thread -
Another example is telling apart difficulty of advanced math problems if I have trouble with basic algebra. It all just looks like "complex math mumbo jumbo" to me.
Show this thread -
From the bottom of this mountain a millionaire and a billionaire look the same, even though they're incredibly different. If my everyday consists of thinking about cents and dollars there's no way I can imagine that much stuff. I don't have the higher level abstractions yet.
Show this thread -
Not being able to appreciate something usually comes down to either not spending the consciousness or not having the right abstractions. You're just seeing noise when you try.
Show this thread -
Learning the abstractions is the joyful and playful act of learning. Something "looks fun" which inspires you to try and learn it and if successful, becomes fun. You can become better and better at correctly identifying what things are fun for you.
Show this thread -
This equates to "climbing the mountain". As you get closer to the dots above you, you start to be able to humanize them. Something that was impossible when they only registered as pixels in your mind.
Show this thread -
Only a billionaire will be able to emphasize with another billionaire about billionaire problems. That's something valid to complain about. After all, *you* do believe that friendship is priceless and even billionaire need friends right?
Show this thread -
To actually believe in this is to not resent people who have money. To have priceless + 10 dollars is the same infinity as priceless + 1 billion dollars.
Show this thread -
This divides people into 2 camps. If you value your people as priceless, you won't care about money. If you don't value your people, then all you *can* care about is money.
Show this thread -
It's perfectly possible to not care about money but also want to be paid more. Most people who say this have valid non-hypocritical feelings. What they're complaining about is not the money, but how their lives have become similar to a form of slavery.
Show this thread -
They never cared about money but the world became one in which they were FORCED to care about money or become homeless or die on the street.
Show this thread -
Their complaints are about a world where if you're not "smart" enough you basically become a slave to the system. That's because the system has grown so fast that they *are* dumb compared to the tops of what the system produces.
Show this thread -
People who could have had fulfilling lives being themselves now have to give handjobs to apis to barely scrape by. A punishment for not being smart enough to provide society with the fuel it needs.
Show this thread -
Since when did caring about money become such an important virtue? It's like making the best plumber a heroic pillar of society. An important role yes, but hardly the divine figure that the wolf of wall street inspires.
Show this thread -
Because we figured out how to use it as a weapon. It started out as life infrastructure but then became a weapon. As a weapon it absorbed a lot of yang energy and imbued it's profession with many heroic virtues. To wield money well was to wield Excalibur.
Show this thread -
The darkness is in how we figured out to use it as a weapon. Money as a weapon only works on stupid people.
Show this thread -
What Money as God does is that it re-orients societies into a value hierarchy based on the manipulation of money. This turns society itself into a "spear".
Show this thread -
A society that is a Money Spear is very powerful. It has a decent degree of correlation with intelligence so the more knowledgeable people are making the more important decisions.
Show this thread -
Though at the top pure knowledge isn't enough. Knowledge isn't the god, Money is. The top consists of people who know how to handle vast swaths of money to make it grow.
Show this thread -
A Money Spear society will have better weapons and also make far better macro-scale decisions.
Show this thread -
It utterly crushes Physical Strength societies (barbarian tribes) and even Whoever Has the Most Guns Societies (which often implode from money mismanagement)
Show this thread -
This society where it is organized in a way so that people who can make "money" "grow" are valued as the most useful is the best society we've had so far. Valuing people based on other stuff just doesn't come close.
Show this thread -
One of the reasons high school is terrible in the U.S. is b/c it's a physical strength society. Kids have huge size differences at that age combined with the social emphasis on football.
Show this thread -
Valuing people based on who their parents were or how pure their bloodline is also doesn't work. Humans just aren't very good parents. (Though good communities in the aggregate *are*, takes a village to raise a child.)
Show this thread -
Besides better macro decisions. (The high school jock or the used car salesman don't end up making National Economic Policy) what really makes Money Spear the most powerful weapon shape for a country is that it's recursive.
Show this thread -
The best money managers are the best because they can manage, identify, and train good money managers. Because money management lends itself to recursion it allows for snowflake-like incredibly robust scaffolding for society. Like carbon nanotubes or something.
Show this thread -
At each level in society, people can roughly point you to "up" or "down" and tell you how to get there. Society becomes a paved road rather than a wild jungle.
Show this thread -
At the top of these pyramids you can have single individuals making massive amounts of money because of how many layers they seeded. Each layer a recursive and thus SIMILAR to every other layer. Each layer looks at the others and think "I could do that." and are RIGHT.
Show this thread -
Countries who worship Money are granted great demon-like powers. But Money as God has some weaknesses:
Show this thread -
Money has gravity and over time it loses it's ability to actually "grow" in a lively sense. It's just like a black hole sucking up everything it touches. Over time it's no longer possible to use "can make money grow" as a useful measure of ability.
Show this thread - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.