Mostly the part that brings groups of humans to optimize for wealth, even if this directly makes the life of other humans shittier. It turns humans into automata who blindly want to make the number go up, and not worry about the consequences.
A potential mitigation could be for governments to make the bad consequences more illegal. And in order to do so they need not be influenced by the algorithm, but unfortunately they are.
Good question. Wouldn't it be convenient if this were one of the most written-about political subjects of the last 150 years?
In short: The problem with capitalism is class striation. Society is divided into a capital-owning class and a labouring class. Capitalists, as they control the productive capital in our economy, portion out economic profits as they see fit, paying labourers as little as is necessary while retaining for themselves the maximum possible amount. Labourers, owning negligible amounts of capital themselves, are dependent on capitalists for work and have little recourse.
Hence, power consolidates in the hands of capitalists. They have leverage over politicians through lobbyists, over the public through media, and over their employees through the threat of job loss. The labouring class are second-class citizens. Healthcare is inaccessible to many them. They're frequently mired in debt. If they become disabled, they could easily lose their homes and wind up on the street.
In one sense, the solution is obvious: Dissolve the boundary between these classes so that none of these class inequalities exist anymore. Now, how is that done? Who knows. The traditional answer is, "the tensions in the existing system will exacerbate until the workers all organize and force a new status quo upon society," but that doesn't seem to be happening. Then again, if we had a solution, the problem wouldn't exist anymore, would it.
on HN you can either be a moldbugian reactionary or a utopian socialist, but the important thing is that your ideology remains unimplementable and thus unfalsifiable and safe forever from the dangerous forces of empirical results
The utopian socialists were pre-Marxist, actually. Marx spent a lot of time critiquing them. They're not really around anymore.
Anyway, what does it mean to "implement" a critique? All I did was point out the problems with capitalism, for which there is plenty of empirical evidence.
If you want to know which policies I support implementing, I'm afraid they're relatively dull and incrementalist, since policy can't reorder the global economy by fiat.
Classic thought-terminating cliché. Any critique of capitalism is communism, and communism invariably entails Maoist crackdowns or what-have-you; therefore it's best to "immunize" oneself even against basic critiques of capitalism because they're just a slippery slope to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
None of my remarks are particularly incendiary—or do you think the idea that billionaires exert control over politics through lobbyists and media corporations is controversial? And I'm pointedly not making any policy prescriptions.
I'm afraid you've immunized yourself against even reading the posts you reply to.
How would you fix it or improve it?