I think I semi-agree with your perception, but I did have a recent experience to the contrary: when I did a throwaway post about suddenly noticing a distinction in the reaction UI, I found it very odd that some people marked the central bit “Insightful”. Like, maybe it's useful to them that I pointed it out, but it's a piece of UI that was (presumably) specifically designed that way by someone already! There's no new synthesis going on or anything; it's not insightful. (Or maybe people wanted to use it as a test of the UI element, but then why not the paperclip or the saw-that eyes?)
Everything2 did this with votes. I think the “votes per day” limit used to be more progressive by user level, but it's possible that's me misremembering; looking at it now, it seems like they have a flat 50/day once you reach the level where voting is unlocked at all. Here's what looks like their current voting/experience system doc. (Note that E2 has been kind of unstable for me, so if you get a server error, try again after a few minutes.)
One good that might be offered is dominance.
“As material needs are increasingly met, more surplus goes into positional goods” seems like a common pattern indeed. Note “positional” and not purely “luxury”. I consider both prestige-status and dominance-status to be associated with position here. Even the former, while it could lead to a competition for loyalty that's more like a gift economy and cooperates with the underclass, could also lead to elites trying to outcompete each other in pure consumption such that “max comfort” stops being a limit for how much they want compared to the underclass. Indeed I vaguely recall hearing that such a dynamic, where status is associated with how much you can visibly spend, already holds among some elite classes in the current day.
My thoughts are shaped by the cultural waves of the last few decades in the USA, so they lean toward imagining the moral fig leaf as something like “make sure the people benefiting from our stuff aren't enemies/saboteurs/Problematic” and a gradual expansion of what counts as the excluded people that involves an increasing amount of political and psychological boxing-in of the remainder. That all flows nicely with the “find ways to get potential rebels to turn each other in” sort of approach too. Of course that's one of many ways that a dominance-motivated persistent class asymmetry could play out.
If you're familiar with the story “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect”, a shorter story that the author wrote in the same universe, “A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace”, depicts characters with some related tendencies playing out against a backdrop of wild surplus in a way you may find stimulating to the imagination. (Edited to add: both stories are also heavy on sex and violence and such, so be cautious if you find such things disturbing.) Also, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano about a world without need of much human labor doesn't show the harsh version I have in mind, but the way ‘sabotage’ is treated evokes a subtler form of repression (maybe not worth reading all of just for this though).
The “sounds like a bunch of it has definitely been written by ChatGPT” from Garrett's initial response and the “genuine specific critiques that I can take to improve my writing” you are asking about do not go well together. This has inspired me in the background to try to write something more detailed about why (which may or may not yield anything), but a shorter and more actionable take for you is that if you affirmed unambiguously that you have personally followed the Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong for this post, it might go a long way toward convincing people to give it more of a shot. (Or if it turns out it's too late for that for this post, it might convince people not to bypass later posts for slop-reputation reasons.) A key paragraph is quoted below, emphasis mine:
A rough guideline is that if you are using AI for writing assistance, you should spend a minimum of 1 minute per 50 words (enough to read the content several times and perform significant edits), you should not include any information that you can't verify, haven't verified, or don't understand, and you should not use the stereotypical writing style of an AI assistant.
Edited to add: if you find this also unconvincing due to being the “kind of meta discussion that infuriates [you]”, I have an alternate and more directly political variant to try, but I'd rather not go for that one first.
In the “Race” ending of “AI 2027”, the actual destruction of humanity only occurs in 2030, though?
1To be clear, that last part isn't just from here. Occasionally getting a Substack link that insists on surrounding the post with the rest of the feed/home interface and being unable to find how to get the same post without that has frustrated me before, and I think Reddit's version of something similar has frustrated me, and maybe one or two other sites doing similar things… in general it seems like it's a really easy source of “75% of it works, have fun whacking your metaphorical limbs on the edges”. Which is sort of still indirectly relevant as an influence on responses to the pattern even though some of it is not in your control. 🙂
I am curious what alternatives you're looking at now!
I just wound up in some additional super-confusing behavior. My best recollection is that “Angry Atoms” showed up in the feed display, I clicked it, it opened in the overlay view, and then when I tried to navigate from there using its own link to “How An Algorithm Feels From Inside”, seemingly nothing happened, except that I got a weird hunch and clicked the close-overlay left-arrow button, revealing that the front page had been replaced with the second post? And now there was no way to get back to the first one, and the browser Back button did… initially nothing, and then… maybe something? I wasn't writing it all down while it happened and now I can't easily reproduce it because the recommendation contents have naturally changed unpredictably.
I seem to be gradually picking up lingering emotional-experiential scrapes around the “yo I heard you liked navigation so I put navigation in your navigation so you can navigate while you navigate” school of site design.
I've hovered over them to see the applicable text or lack thereof before, yes, and I was aware that both types of reaction were possible. Overall I don't have a clear enough memory to say why I didn't pick up on this connection sooner, but my off-the-cuff guess would be that seeing both inline-portion and whole-comment reactions on the same comment is rare, which would mean there wasn't a clear juxtaposition to show that it's only present sometimes, and my visual processing would likely have discarded the cartouche as a decorative separator.
Interesting! Maybe there's an experiential crux in there (so to speak)? My reader experience of this is that the first-person inner monologue is indeed very different from mine, but I perceive that as increasing the immersion and helping frame the story. To the extent that there's a group of humans it saliently bears little resemblance to, I might think of that group as something like “humans who are psychologically ‘healthy’ in a certain way which varies across a wide spectrum, where social spheres with concentrated power may disproportionately attract people who are low on that spectrum”. I'm deliberately putting the main adjective in scare quotes there because in my fuzzy mental model, there isn't really a clear delimiter between treating that trait cluster as a health indicator and treating it as intersubjective values dissonance; it feels consonant with but not directly targeting dark triad traits. But also, I'm not sure if you're referring to the same thing I am or if it's some other feature of the first-person description that bothers you.
FWIW, culturally speaking, I've been socially adjacent to Bay Area / SV-startup / “mainstream big tech” culture via other people, but not really been immersed in it—I've splashed around in the shallow part of that pool long ago, but for “try not to build the Torment Nexus” reasons (plus other unrelated stuff) I historically bounced away a lot as well and wound up in a sort of limbo. So that colors my impression quite a bit.