The Noise Makers
There's a particular type of person that seems to have directed their lives in the direction of making understanding the world harder: introducing metaphysical/epistemic noise. As someone who likes the occasional conspiracy theory, something I cannot help but think is there are people who like to make this stuff up. They're literally just introducing noise into the pool of knowledge, quite literally making it harder to make sense of the world.
They're just one example. Liars, scammers, news channels, politics, ego-driven people, perverse incentive structures. I'm completely numb (though not immune) to it all now.
Entropy and Social Decay
The podcaster bro scene has recently started talking more about "entropy." When you just let life run its course, shit starts to fall apart. The insane, homeless man screaming in the street is introducing anxiety and confusion into the zeitgeist. They're just (literally) noisy, a result of a (metaphysically) noisy society.
The Final Cash Grab
As fewer and fewer people believe that hard work can make you successful, more people are turning to just "playing the game": forex scams, crypto, lying, scamming and stealing. I can hardly blame these people. They're seeing the writing on the wall and are just joining in on the final cash grab before the ladder is well and truly pulled up for good.
The risk with this is the amount of noise that exists in the world now is genuinely deafening. The recent terrifying statistic of roughly half of content on the internet being AI/LLM generated is only causing this signal to noise ratio to get worse. LLMs are the best example of photocopies of photocopies. The whole idea of the "dead internet theory" isn't a theory any more. We're living it. We're just going to end up living in a Doodle-Bob society.
Me hoy minoy!
Perverse Incentives
Much of this goes back to my previous writings on perverse incentives. When you see videos of people walking into supermarkets, grabbing handfuls of food and walking out, and either completely getting away with it or getting a slap on the wrist, you feel like an idiot for working for money to pay for things.
Being a decent person doesn't seem to get you very far anymore. Every rich person I know just does arbitrage plays: "I can hire Indians for $1/hr then make them produce me $2/hr." Nothing real gets done.
