Yeah, but we are not talking about people in general, we are talking about board rooms in think tanks and cameras of commerce. What is the motive there?
That's just your perception of what "we're" talking about. Think about it as you would when debugging software: how might you (an instance of a class in a complex system) know what other people (instances of classes within the system) are "talking about" (where talking derives from thinking/computation that takes place within those object instances)? Are you obtaining this knowledge via the calling of public interfaces? If not, then what is the True source of this knowledge?
Ironically (or not), the title of this overall thread is "This is Real, That's Not". The content of the discussions is a fine reflection of the very phenomenon that Doreen is talking about, and I suspect a plausible demonstration of why humanity can't sort its shit out, decade after decade: an inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the self-delusional nature of the human mind.
> What is the motive there?
The motives are complex, and unknown (the necessary callable public interfaces to obtain such knowledge do not exist - and yet, observe the number of people in this thread who perceive that they have knowledge of the contents of other people's minds. Is this not an extremely interesting phenomenon? Might this phenomenon have consequences in a complex system, especially if it exists but is completely unrealized?
I suspect that a specific, conscious motivation to bring about the specific end state that we are experiencing (inequality, homelessness, human suffering in general) also does not actually exist. Rather, I reckon the mess we are living in is more like some sort of a cosmic demonstration of the law unintended consequences, due to an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities inherent in reality. A religious person may consider this punishment from God for disobedience. A comedian (or a schizophrenic) may consider it to be comedy at its finest. Each individual perceives reality through a custom lens, and comes to vastly different conclusions.
I could be wrong of course, but it's a fun way to look at it. Part of the fun is observing how people react to crazy ideas like this, that may actually have a fair amount of validity to them (how might we know, for sure, if they do, or do not?).
I do agree that it's ironic that a subthread on a post called "This is Real, That's Not" has devolved into conspiracy theories about secret cabals of businesspeople in smoky rooms scheming to cut public services in order to keep people on the streets so that the people not on the streets will be scared into continuing to pay their rent and mortgages.
I don't doubt that there are some people who want this, but the idea that there's a giant, organized, shadowy group out there... that's something out of a very bad spy movie.
And yet, The System seems to reliably produce this outcome in the USA to a much larger degree than elsewhere.
The full spectrum of causation is often (strongly) asserted to be very specific things, but rarely does one encounter any person or organization asserting that the problem is complex and not fully understood. It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some wrongdoing may indeed be happening here and there.
That said, the highly inconsistent (other than confidence levels of assertions) approach to conspiracy theories is indeed wonderfully ironic.
Today is a good example of this...one one hand we have a thread about the abstract notion of CIA deception:
When discussing this sort of topic abstractly, it seems the HN hivememind has no problem whatsoever conceptualizing it.
However, if one changes the topic to a specific, object level news event (Jimmy Wales & Wikipedia), the ability (to conceptualize deceit) seems to vanish, as ~always:
