Regardless of its intent, this essay is great for the research that went in. I hadn’t known about the details of Singapore’s initiative, and had never heard of NOEM.
They de-budgeted; from $500B to $8B. But they will never admit they bit off more than they could chew and made a lot of truly bad bets because then MBS looks bad and we can't have that.
"hyperstition (plural hyperstitions) A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes." - wiktionary
My spellchecker is yet to recognise the word.
Nice attempt to get people to share the post by saying that they are thinking of sharing it... hehe
Anyway, for me the ultimate Grandmaster of Hyperstition is Elon. He has parlayed his one trick of stuttering, pausing, then coming out with some insanely grandiose claim that 'um... erm... well by as early as next year we will have... [tech thing]' - with [tech thing] being whatever he calculates will make the share price of whatever he's shilling go up, despite it being impossible in that timeline or maybe just impossible altogether.
And it works, the share price goes up, and like the physical ruins of the dot-com crash, doesn't go down again.
Why didn't people do this in the past? Because we had things like a more informed population, a press willing to ask difficult questions rather than a series of yes-men afraid to lose 'access', and we didn't have this exaggerated concentration of wealth where one person can be worth as much as a small country.
Also a large enough hardcore of people want the narrative he's pushing to be real, they want a saviour who can invent his way out of all of our crises, who will give them the perfectly frictionless and comfortable future they were promised. So they're willing to overlook the fact that almost none of what he's promised in the past has come true, and his many, many lies and obfuscations. Not to mention the Nazi salute, the catastrophic harm and destruction caused by 'DoGE', and so on. So they give him the benefit of the doubt time and time again.
He is not imagining a better world into being, which could also be hyperstition, but he is imagining a higher share price into being, and for him, that's what really counts.
also, are we really trapped? maybe proposing a need for an exit creates that dualistic reality? maybe we are neither trapped nor not trapped, and there's no need to collapse that wave... unless we choose to
Regardless of its intent, this essay is great for the research that went in. I hadn’t known about the details of Singapore’s initiative, and had never heard of NOEM.
They de-budgeted; from $500B to $8B. But they will never admit they bit off more than they could chew and made a lot of truly bad bets because then MBS looks bad and we can't have that.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/12/04/saudi-arabia-mbs-s-futuristic-projects-struggle-with-setbacks_6735099_4.html#
This is one of your best!
"hyperstition (plural hyperstitions) A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes." - wiktionary
My spellchecker is yet to recognise the word.
Nice attempt to get people to share the post by saying that they are thinking of sharing it... hehe
Anyway, for me the ultimate Grandmaster of Hyperstition is Elon. He has parlayed his one trick of stuttering, pausing, then coming out with some insanely grandiose claim that 'um... erm... well by as early as next year we will have... [tech thing]' - with [tech thing] being whatever he calculates will make the share price of whatever he's shilling go up, despite it being impossible in that timeline or maybe just impossible altogether.
And it works, the share price goes up, and like the physical ruins of the dot-com crash, doesn't go down again.
Why didn't people do this in the past? Because we had things like a more informed population, a press willing to ask difficult questions rather than a series of yes-men afraid to lose 'access', and we didn't have this exaggerated concentration of wealth where one person can be worth as much as a small country.
Also a large enough hardcore of people want the narrative he's pushing to be real, they want a saviour who can invent his way out of all of our crises, who will give them the perfectly frictionless and comfortable future they were promised. So they're willing to overlook the fact that almost none of what he's promised in the past has come true, and his many, many lies and obfuscations. Not to mention the Nazi salute, the catastrophic harm and destruction caused by 'DoGE', and so on. So they give him the benefit of the doubt time and time again.
He is not imagining a better world into being, which could also be hyperstition, but he is imagining a higher share price into being, and for him, that's what really counts.
also, are we really trapped? maybe proposing a need for an exit creates that dualistic reality? maybe we are neither trapped nor not trapped, and there's no need to collapse that wave... unless we choose to