eBay
Article
eBay is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 19, 2023 and January 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money”; “what if there was an Amazon or an eBay for paying politicians not to run?”; “eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models”. It most often appears alongside Amazon, Trump, 1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: April 19, 2023
- Last seen: January 25, 2024
Appears In
- Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters
- Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
- The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
Related Pages
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- 1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists (1 shared issues)
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- 2016 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2024 (1 shared issues)
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- Aaron Peskin (1 shared issues)
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- accelerationist conspiracy (1 shared issues)
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- Adam D’Angelo (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AES-192 encryption (1 shared issues)
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- altcoin (1 shared issues)
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- Altmancore (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service. I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: collectors enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want. I’m not sure this works; when I was young in the 90s, there was a store in my hometown that sold rare coins; even then I could have gone to the store and walked out with a pretty good collection. But maybe the fact that I would need multiple books to know which coins were “rare”, and that the store could have been out of one or two valuable pieces, was enough cover to make it still seem interesting and impressive. Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.
“Have you read Going Infinite? The book on Sam Bankman-Fried? Not that I generally approve of Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s just that - the book says Sam tried to bribe Trump not to run in 2024. Apparently Trump was willing to do it for $5 billion. And again, not to say Sam Bankman-Fried was right or anything, but obviously if you have $5 billion and you’re a Democrat, then that’s the best use of your money, right? And not to say that I wish he was never caught and had gone on to become a multi-deca-billionaire, but, well, you know . . . “ he trailed off. “Anyway, I was reading about all these delicate negotiations between Sam’s people and the Trump team, and it was funny - here’s this guy who’s famous for creating markets, and he’s stuck with boring old Mk 1.0 backchannel negotiations. So I thought - what if there was an Amazon or an eBay for paying politicians not to run? We wouldn’t have to get Trump our first year. We could start with your local city council member - Aaron Peskin, someone like that. Lots of people would pay Aaron Peskin money not to run. Then we build up from there.”
Inline links: tried to bribe Trump not to run in 2024
A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.