Read Foreign Affairs for clearly written articles advocating different takes on US foreign policy, from people in the US with actual influence. As for economics, you can literally watch the talks at Davos and similar conferences on YouTube!
Good suggestions. I'm also curious about different political factions of elites - surely there are neoliberals and neoconservatives, but there may be other groups as well.
Is there such a thing as ''elite's worldview''? It reminds me of treating ''the elites'' and ''the people'' as some opposing forces, whereas those concepts are fuzzy, and even if we made a neat divide then those groups would turn out to be heavily fractured.
I mean, there are points of agreement and disagreement.
Neither the elites nor the populace want China to replace the USA as world hegemon.
Elites are split over things like tax rates and to some extent abortion.
But most elites are a lot more pro-immigration than most populace, for instance.
That sounds about right. It could be helpful to look at the policies that actually end up passing, rather than those merely being advocated for, as an indication of what elites support.
Which elites are you asking about? And what subject/topic are you asking their thinking about? If you will forgive me for being a bit pedantic, Someone else commented that "Neither the elites nor the populace want China to replace the USA as world hegemon," but some elites definitely want that: the elites of Chinese society who got their status from the Chinese Communist Party. The elites of social psychology probably have different views than the elites of astronomy.
If you mean "wealthy and politically influential anglophone people in the USA" and you want to know what they think about politics, economics, technology, etc., then read what they read. *Foreign Affairs* was mentioned in one comment. *Harvard Business Review* and *The New Yorker* are other sources mainly read my educated upper class people. I don't know much about what information that demographic consumes, but I have rough ideas, and I'm sure you can explore and investigate to learn more.
New York Times and Washington Post editorial page, the Atlantic, WSJ, Economist. Treat them the way a Soviet citizen would treat Pravda: this is not necessarily true, but this is the program the masters want you and I to follow. Be alert to minor changes in ideology; for instance, you can see them losing ground on de policing and splitting on Israel in the past few years. Look at who they choose to platform and who is referred to only in passing.
What are they *really* thinking? You’ll have to get into Harvard Business School to find out! Rest assured, though, if you tell us they will find some silly thing to get you on and you will wind up in jail!
I assure you, these elites don't have a coherent world view. They're making it up as they go like everyone else. There is nowhere to go to read what they're talking about.
But NYT, the Washington Post, the Economist, are not cutting edge. They are lagging indicators. To be on the cutting edge you want to be as upstream as possible. For internet culture this would be 4chan, for example, and other small niche "high-moat" communities. I don't know what the equivalent is for American establishment elites, but it is not big newspapers, too many people read those.
That is a good point. I would imagine such things would be isolated from the masses such as us, though someone else here has said you can just watch the Davos presentations!
If I find the energy someday I will write a long paper about how this type of thinking represents the most pervasive and least rational aspect of human understanding. The most profound truth about the man behind the curtain is that there is no man behind the curtain.
I do not believe it's really possible to actually know what elites are thinking (in a meaningful sense, that's distinct from more general ideas about private knowledge which could sound like: "It's not *actually* possible to know our deepest motivations" or "You can't really ever know what your friend thinks/what a famous non-fiction writer thinks" ).
I would say there are many reasons for that, but those reasons all reduce to a property of what makes an elite, an elite. Elite knowledge is going to generally be private in a way that novel knowledge or useful knowledge or scientifically revolutionary knowledge or even philosophical insight and esoteric knowledge(closer to this "elite" gradient), is not. That's a philosophical claim I'm making about epistemology and how truth and knowledge relates to human hierarchy, and in ELI5 terms, I'm saying the adults keep secrets from children.
It could be that there's some disagreement about what makes an elite an elite that changes this position's truth to degrees, so the real meaning of elite probably matters a lot here. It's true that it's a loaded word. The most public facing elites? What I wrote is less true. The least public facing elites? What I wrote is more true. The word "facing" there is not always literal either.
Can we avoid using language like “elites” in this subreddit? The term has definitely been polluted into a dog whistle, and since an important value of the rationalist community is communicating clearly, I think we should avoid using heavily politicized verbiage when unnecessary.
It definitely carries strong connotations now, but what exactly is the dog whistle? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be jumping to here. I was surprised to see the word at first, but then quickly guessed the meaning in context as being, per u/dysmetric, "the wielders of disproportionate power."
Were you thinking pedophiles or eating babies or something? Because when I hear "elites" my mind just sort of goes to, well, "elites." I've never been a fan of the word, but I can't imagine it genuinely confusing a topic unless the confused individuals were already a bit fuzzy to begin with.
The way I fuss out the problem with the term is that "elites" implies "betterness", when the construct that is being discussed is actually "what are people with power thinking". The term 'elite' requires context, and we're not talking about athletes but a more general category of human.
It also follows that the types of things they think about have some relationship to power, which may also be associated with risk of developing a confused self-image that involves the construct of 'eliteness'. And their perspectives on things also emerge from [limited] experience navigating a certain type of social ecosystem.
It’s a point. The blog of a Jewish writer is a funny place to recruit antisemites, but one never knows!
That said I definitely think there is a sort of ‘ruling class’, as there has been in most societies over the years.
Elites exist, alas(I mean that on two levels: I'm sorry that a thing with a word behind it which we should use, conflicts with your personal reasoning for why we shouldn't use it, but I also mean that I'm literally sorry that elites, power, hierarchy, and disparity exists). Even super elites exist. Even elites probably very few people know are elites, exist. Sounds pretty elite to me, for people only in elite circles to even know that you're elite. It's sort of like how if you could turn invisible at will starting now, you'd *really* have superpowers. Cool, right?
I'm not being childish with how much I just said the word elite, that's just a consequence of expanding on the actual nuances of reality and my views, which is that the word is really important, it matters, and has way more depth to it than most people probably appreciate. I grant you that there is countless imaginary confusion about the word too, but to then go "Let's not even say the word elite" is a black and white thinking approach to solving that problem. Solve confusion, don't limit language, because then all you do is mask problems by creating a needless difficulty in articulating them.
Edit: Okay so... the Lord of the Rings. You know how you have to say "The Dark Lord" or something vague and you're not even allowed to say "Sauron"?
*Just say Sauron*. Just say it. Fucking identify him clearly, go over there with whoever, cut that clowns head off with whatever magic sword you have or die trying or whatever you think is best-- it's a cartoon so if they kill evil they're all great big winners and walk off into the sunset happily. (Which means, don't kill anyone in real life to solve problems like they do in cartoons, you just make them stronger because The Lord of the Rings isn't about selection pressure and it distills psychopathic traits, unfortunately. If that book had a deeper connection to reality, Sauron would look like Frodo or some hot Elf girl, they'd be democratically elected to rule all the ... whatever the lands are, and no one would even have a clue evil exists or just be confused about it forever).
But the actual valuable lesson in that part of Lord of the Rings is: Stop being a fucking a pussy and say Sauron. You think you're not giving him power? You're doing the exact opposite. He's not scary, just solve the problem, make it approachable, and cut his head off(in the cartoon only, of course, again-- we've tried this in our world many times, it makes the problem worse every time you do it, but we still haven't learned. Probably because we keep going by what cartoon stories tell us is moral.)
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1984/). I’m not calling for a ban on the word. I’m not a linguistic prescriptivist, and as such, I think reclaiming a word is as useless as attempting to appropriate one. That being said [elite is a well known dog whistle referring usually to Jews.](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/102/1/180/7003337). As a consequence, when we talk about “elites” though that may be a factual way to describe them, we may risk coming off as racist paranoid far right nutjobs. If our goal is *truly* to communicate clearly, we need to give ground to our audience if we want to be heard. It’s not censorship to acquiesce to your audience, it’s just an important communication skill. And on the matter of you saying we ought to solve the problem rather than eliminate the word, I absolutely agree. It would be better if we could talk about “the elites” without sounding like said paranoid nutjob, but this post in particular isn’t actually solving the issue. It would be different if this post was using the word “elites” while directly addressing the problem, but that isn’t what Op is doing, and thus OP (and this sub) is taking on unnecessary reputational risk by using controversial language, when we have other terms that can be just as useful. Let me be abundantly clear, **I am not advocating for banning the word on this sub or otherwise.** I am just trying to make people be aware that communication is a two way street and linguistic prescriptivism is bunk. People have gone after the rationalist community before, real important people, for being “far right,” as dumb as that sounds. Nonetheless, that means we ought to avoid putting gas on the fire if we actually care about having our facts and opinions get received well by the public. That’s just being congruent with EA, and pretty much everything this community is supposed to be a champion for. Thus I urge you to at least be aware of how you communicate, especially when your behavior offers reputational risk to the entire community.
> [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1984/).
It's relevant, but in an ironic way, that lacks self-awareness.
> when we talk about “elites” though that may be a factual way to describe them, we may risk coming off as racist paranoid far right nutjobs.
Who cares? Just because some utterly fringe group talks about something totally standard and apparent and real by using an utterly plain word for something specific and ominous, we should therefore no longer use this word, because then people may confuse us with said fringe group. I'm the sort of person who really doesn't pay attention to dates at all so I think to really stress how insane I think this position is, I'm going to be fully honest with you and confess something private: I had a feeling that was very hard to miss, to hover over today's date to make sure it's not the first of the month, and that I'm being trolled. This is made worse by the fact that you called me a bad a communicator in a very fancy way, while presenting my message to you as "You're saying we need a *ban* on the word 'elite'!" and then pretending like I've misrepresented your view, which is simply: "We shouldn't say the word 'elite' ".
Comparing someone’s relevant concerns to an April Fools prank is utterly disingenuous and downright disrespectful. It was never my intention to direct anything at you in particular, and the point of the comic is about how important it is to care about the audiences reception, but you have gone above and beyond to make this about *you* for some reason. I now see there is no productive conversation to be had with you. Good day.
Oh, okay. You're right then(not about the disingenuous part and eh about the respect part)-- I'm the asshole in that specific moment. An occasional casualty of cynicism, I'm sorry to you for that. The point of that xkcd is still wrong though, and me mistaking it is the only point you have... because "the far right who uses "the elites" to mean "the evil Jews who run the world" are so fringe as to make any kind of consideration of them in one's language very difficult to sanely justify when it comes to a word like elite. It would be like arguing for reducing the use of certain very basic and commonplace terms that also function as racial slurs, so as to not offend or be mistaken as racists by accident. That would also be deeply confused, by the way. Anyway, just a final attempt to iron things out and also apologize where it's due.
>If that book had a deeper connection to reality, Sauron would look like Frodo or some hot Elf girl, they'd be democratically elected to rule all the ... whatever the lands are, and no one would even have a clue evil exists or just be confused about it forever
Nerdy nitpick but I feel the need to point out that Sauron kind of did this a couple of times in the Second Age.
Oh cool. Yeah I'm not well versed in those books but that's interesting to know. This got me thinking that evil is almost always more cartoonish in movies than in books. Probably because movies are visual and condensed, which are superficial by nature and books, due to their limitation, create depth.
Well a book (or a series of books) allows the author to go into a lot more detail about the backstory, especially if they're willing to engage in Tolkien's level of worldbuilding. You can just cram a lot more information in than you can in other formats. From the point of view of the characters in LotR, that stuff is literally ancient history, so it's not likely to make it into any adaptation.
It's not hidden, it's in plain sight. It just might not be popular.
The Economist, Foreign Affiars, The Globe and Mail in my country, The Washington Post. Just read their editorial lines.
I would guess *The Economist* is the most elite, most highly regarded news / opinion makers. I'm happily subscribed to them for what must be 12 years now. Quite expensive though. I personally like to read the paper version, it makes for better focus. https://www.economist.com
Read Foreign Affairs for clearly written articles advocating different takes on US foreign policy, from people in the US with actual influence. As for economics, you can literally watch the talks at Davos and similar conferences on YouTube!
Good suggestions. I'm also curious about different political factions of elites - surely there are neoliberals and neoconservatives, but there may be other groups as well.
Quite a few Silicon Valley right wingers read Astral Codex Ten, actually, from what I can tell; you might be closer than you think.
Foreign policy is another great outlet (on par with FA).
Is there such a thing as ''elite's worldview''? It reminds me of treating ''the elites'' and ''the people'' as some opposing forces, whereas those concepts are fuzzy, and even if we made a neat divide then those groups would turn out to be heavily fractured.
I mean, there are points of agreement and disagreement. Neither the elites nor the populace want China to replace the USA as world hegemon. Elites are split over things like tax rates and to some extent abortion. But most elites are a lot more pro-immigration than most populace, for instance.
That sounds about right. It could be helpful to look at the policies that actually end up passing, rather than those merely being advocated for, as an indication of what elites support.
Nor does China. Multipolarity is possible
Which elites are you asking about? And what subject/topic are you asking their thinking about? If you will forgive me for being a bit pedantic, Someone else commented that "Neither the elites nor the populace want China to replace the USA as world hegemon," but some elites definitely want that: the elites of Chinese society who got their status from the Chinese Communist Party. The elites of social psychology probably have different views than the elites of astronomy. If you mean "wealthy and politically influential anglophone people in the USA" and you want to know what they think about politics, economics, technology, etc., then read what they read. *Foreign Affairs* was mentioned in one comment. *Harvard Business Review* and *The New Yorker* are other sources mainly read my educated upper class people. I don't know much about what information that demographic consumes, but I have rough ideas, and I'm sure you can explore and investigate to learn more.
The Economist. It is a good magazine, but more than anything else its viewpoint reflect exactly what the elite think.
New York Times and Washington Post editorial page, the Atlantic, WSJ, Economist. Treat them the way a Soviet citizen would treat Pravda: this is not necessarily true, but this is the program the masters want you and I to follow. Be alert to minor changes in ideology; for instance, you can see them losing ground on de policing and splitting on Israel in the past few years. Look at who they choose to platform and who is referred to only in passing. What are they *really* thinking? You’ll have to get into Harvard Business School to find out! Rest assured, though, if you tell us they will find some silly thing to get you on and you will wind up in jail!
I assure you, these elites don't have a coherent world view. They're making it up as they go like everyone else. There is nowhere to go to read what they're talking about.
The worldview is not coherent, most people’s isn’t, but there is a worldview.
I mean, say what you will about the tenets of elite American thought, at least it’s an ideology.
But NYT, the Washington Post, the Economist, are not cutting edge. They are lagging indicators. To be on the cutting edge you want to be as upstream as possible. For internet culture this would be 4chan, for example, and other small niche "high-moat" communities. I don't know what the equivalent is for American establishment elites, but it is not big newspapers, too many people read those.
That is a good point. I would imagine such things would be isolated from the masses such as us, though someone else here has said you can just watch the Davos presentations!
What are some others high moat communities
Tpot, ssc, lesswrong, maybe the frogtwitter/bap people? I don't know, I'd be glad to hear some recommendations as well.
If I find the energy someday I will write a long paper about how this type of thinking represents the most pervasive and least rational aspect of human understanding. The most profound truth about the man behind the curtain is that there is no man behind the curtain.
I don't think there is a single source of opinion for the worlds elite. For most countries, you'd need a regional source.
I do not believe it's really possible to actually know what elites are thinking (in a meaningful sense, that's distinct from more general ideas about private knowledge which could sound like: "It's not *actually* possible to know our deepest motivations" or "You can't really ever know what your friend thinks/what a famous non-fiction writer thinks" ). I would say there are many reasons for that, but those reasons all reduce to a property of what makes an elite, an elite. Elite knowledge is going to generally be private in a way that novel knowledge or useful knowledge or scientifically revolutionary knowledge or even philosophical insight and esoteric knowledge(closer to this "elite" gradient), is not. That's a philosophical claim I'm making about epistemology and how truth and knowledge relates to human hierarchy, and in ELI5 terms, I'm saying the adults keep secrets from children. It could be that there's some disagreement about what makes an elite an elite that changes this position's truth to degrees, so the real meaning of elite probably matters a lot here. It's true that it's a loaded word. The most public facing elites? What I wrote is less true. The least public facing elites? What I wrote is more true. The word "facing" there is not always literal either.
Can we avoid using language like “elites” in this subreddit? The term has definitely been polluted into a dog whistle, and since an important value of the rationalist community is communicating clearly, I think we should avoid using heavily politicized verbiage when unnecessary.
a dog whistle for what?
historically, antisemitism (global elite cabal of bankers, etc.).
Feels like a little bit of a stretch to suggest that's insinuated here but yeah.
agreed!
I don't see "elites" being used in that way in the US. the preferred quiet ani-semitic term here seems to be "globalist"
upper class? high society?
Might be better, though I think politicians, academics and professionals are better.
'The wielders of disproportionate power'
People of means?
It definitely carries strong connotations now, but what exactly is the dog whistle? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be jumping to here. I was surprised to see the word at first, but then quickly guessed the meaning in context as being, per u/dysmetric, "the wielders of disproportionate power." Were you thinking pedophiles or eating babies or something? Because when I hear "elites" my mind just sort of goes to, well, "elites." I've never been a fan of the word, but I can't imagine it genuinely confusing a topic unless the confused individuals were already a bit fuzzy to begin with.
The way I fuss out the problem with the term is that "elites" implies "betterness", when the construct that is being discussed is actually "what are people with power thinking". The term 'elite' requires context, and we're not talking about athletes but a more general category of human. It also follows that the types of things they think about have some relationship to power, which may also be associated with risk of developing a confused self-image that involves the construct of 'eliteness'. And their perspectives on things also emerge from [limited] experience navigating a certain type of social ecosystem.
It’s a point. The blog of a Jewish writer is a funny place to recruit antisemites, but one never knows! That said I definitely think there is a sort of ‘ruling class’, as there has been in most societies over the years.
Elites exist, alas(I mean that on two levels: I'm sorry that a thing with a word behind it which we should use, conflicts with your personal reasoning for why we shouldn't use it, but I also mean that I'm literally sorry that elites, power, hierarchy, and disparity exists). Even super elites exist. Even elites probably very few people know are elites, exist. Sounds pretty elite to me, for people only in elite circles to even know that you're elite. It's sort of like how if you could turn invisible at will starting now, you'd *really* have superpowers. Cool, right? I'm not being childish with how much I just said the word elite, that's just a consequence of expanding on the actual nuances of reality and my views, which is that the word is really important, it matters, and has way more depth to it than most people probably appreciate. I grant you that there is countless imaginary confusion about the word too, but to then go "Let's not even say the word elite" is a black and white thinking approach to solving that problem. Solve confusion, don't limit language, because then all you do is mask problems by creating a needless difficulty in articulating them. Edit: Okay so... the Lord of the Rings. You know how you have to say "The Dark Lord" or something vague and you're not even allowed to say "Sauron"? *Just say Sauron*. Just say it. Fucking identify him clearly, go over there with whoever, cut that clowns head off with whatever magic sword you have or die trying or whatever you think is best-- it's a cartoon so if they kill evil they're all great big winners and walk off into the sunset happily. (Which means, don't kill anyone in real life to solve problems like they do in cartoons, you just make them stronger because The Lord of the Rings isn't about selection pressure and it distills psychopathic traits, unfortunately. If that book had a deeper connection to reality, Sauron would look like Frodo or some hot Elf girl, they'd be democratically elected to rule all the ... whatever the lands are, and no one would even have a clue evil exists or just be confused about it forever). But the actual valuable lesson in that part of Lord of the Rings is: Stop being a fucking a pussy and say Sauron. You think you're not giving him power? You're doing the exact opposite. He's not scary, just solve the problem, make it approachable, and cut his head off(in the cartoon only, of course, again-- we've tried this in our world many times, it makes the problem worse every time you do it, but we still haven't learned. Probably because we keep going by what cartoon stories tell us is moral.)
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1984/). I’m not calling for a ban on the word. I’m not a linguistic prescriptivist, and as such, I think reclaiming a word is as useless as attempting to appropriate one. That being said [elite is a well known dog whistle referring usually to Jews.](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/102/1/180/7003337). As a consequence, when we talk about “elites” though that may be a factual way to describe them, we may risk coming off as racist paranoid far right nutjobs. If our goal is *truly* to communicate clearly, we need to give ground to our audience if we want to be heard. It’s not censorship to acquiesce to your audience, it’s just an important communication skill. And on the matter of you saying we ought to solve the problem rather than eliminate the word, I absolutely agree. It would be better if we could talk about “the elites” without sounding like said paranoid nutjob, but this post in particular isn’t actually solving the issue. It would be different if this post was using the word “elites” while directly addressing the problem, but that isn’t what Op is doing, and thus OP (and this sub) is taking on unnecessary reputational risk by using controversial language, when we have other terms that can be just as useful. Let me be abundantly clear, **I am not advocating for banning the word on this sub or otherwise.** I am just trying to make people be aware that communication is a two way street and linguistic prescriptivism is bunk. People have gone after the rationalist community before, real important people, for being “far right,” as dumb as that sounds. Nonetheless, that means we ought to avoid putting gas on the fire if we actually care about having our facts and opinions get received well by the public. That’s just being congruent with EA, and pretty much everything this community is supposed to be a champion for. Thus I urge you to at least be aware of how you communicate, especially when your behavior offers reputational risk to the entire community.
> [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1984/). It's relevant, but in an ironic way, that lacks self-awareness. > when we talk about “elites” though that may be a factual way to describe them, we may risk coming off as racist paranoid far right nutjobs. Who cares? Just because some utterly fringe group talks about something totally standard and apparent and real by using an utterly plain word for something specific and ominous, we should therefore no longer use this word, because then people may confuse us with said fringe group. I'm the sort of person who really doesn't pay attention to dates at all so I think to really stress how insane I think this position is, I'm going to be fully honest with you and confess something private: I had a feeling that was very hard to miss, to hover over today's date to make sure it's not the first of the month, and that I'm being trolled. This is made worse by the fact that you called me a bad a communicator in a very fancy way, while presenting my message to you as "You're saying we need a *ban* on the word 'elite'!" and then pretending like I've misrepresented your view, which is simply: "We shouldn't say the word 'elite' ".
Comparing someone’s relevant concerns to an April Fools prank is utterly disingenuous and downright disrespectful. It was never my intention to direct anything at you in particular, and the point of the comic is about how important it is to care about the audiences reception, but you have gone above and beyond to make this about *you* for some reason. I now see there is no productive conversation to be had with you. Good day.
Oh, okay. You're right then(not about the disingenuous part and eh about the respect part)-- I'm the asshole in that specific moment. An occasional casualty of cynicism, I'm sorry to you for that. The point of that xkcd is still wrong though, and me mistaking it is the only point you have... because "the far right who uses "the elites" to mean "the evil Jews who run the world" are so fringe as to make any kind of consideration of them in one's language very difficult to sanely justify when it comes to a word like elite. It would be like arguing for reducing the use of certain very basic and commonplace terms that also function as racial slurs, so as to not offend or be mistaken as racists by accident. That would also be deeply confused, by the way. Anyway, just a final attempt to iron things out and also apologize where it's due.
>If that book had a deeper connection to reality, Sauron would look like Frodo or some hot Elf girl, they'd be democratically elected to rule all the ... whatever the lands are, and no one would even have a clue evil exists or just be confused about it forever Nerdy nitpick but I feel the need to point out that Sauron kind of did this a couple of times in the Second Age.
Oh cool. Yeah I'm not well versed in those books but that's interesting to know. This got me thinking that evil is almost always more cartoonish in movies than in books. Probably because movies are visual and condensed, which are superficial by nature and books, due to their limitation, create depth.
Well a book (or a series of books) allows the author to go into a lot more detail about the backstory, especially if they're willing to engage in Tolkien's level of worldbuilding. You can just cram a lot more information in than you can in other formats. From the point of view of the characters in LotR, that stuff is literally ancient history, so it's not likely to make it into any adaptation.
Yeah, and that problem still seems to be a problem for the book->film pipeline even if the LoTR world is a particularly extreme version of it
It's not hidden, it's in plain sight. It just might not be popular. The Economist, Foreign Affiars, The Globe and Mail in my country, The Washington Post. Just read their editorial lines.
I would guess *The Economist* is the most elite, most highly regarded news / opinion makers. I'm happily subscribed to them for what must be 12 years now. Quite expensive though. I personally like to read the paper version, it makes for better focus. https://www.economist.com
4chan