I get the sense the deeper you penetrate into elite circles, the harder it is to not become complicit in something ugly. To some extent elite cultures are almost defined by a kind of mutually assured destruction condition of collective complicity.
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It's incredible to me how much I've returned to this piece.
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I came here to post this, thought about it frequently since refactor camp. It only got better with age :/
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it's a blog post from 2015 and it's obviously intended for a specific community, what's the problem?
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It falls into the same trap as many "galaxy-brain" intellectuals, whose conceit does not allow them to understand that the global billionaire elite run circles of malev-gnorance around them while barely possessing a command of how to use email.
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We who inhabit the mini-Moloch of the "intellectual elite" are only one small part of the global Moloch of hard power and dark finance. There isn't some dark overlord, some secret handshakes. It's very much just a higher evolved bunch of Medicis (who started as cloth traders!).
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There is intellectual dishonesty in insisting that "there is a network of corruption!" and then focusing on the behaviors of *individuals*.
If our world is collapsing b/c of networked evil, then first&foremost we must recognize it as *complex* in nature, not merely complicated.
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Disagree. There is no zero sum relationship between individual responsibility and systemic effects. That is collectivist thinking; that the only way individuals come together in networked ways is by losing their individuality and therefore culpability.
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You are inappropriately extrapolating system failures without a moral agency dimension, BUT with strong incentives to localize blame (example “normal accidents” in nuclear reactors, see Perrow) with social systems of aggregate agency. They’re not the same thing.
Blaming individuals for either knowing complicity or gross negligence of due diligence in who to trust is NOT the same as blaming (say) a nuclear technician for a failure caused by unanticipated systemic reactions.
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“Network of corruption” is a simple and ancient social mechanism. Bringing systems theoretic angles or cynefin type analysis to it is to a red herring. The appropriate level of analysis is something like Goffman’s cooling the mark out infofranpro.wikidot.com/19520101-on-co
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