Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

It's not particularly original, but is a convenient single name to corral existing ideas about intractable lose-lose scenarios:

Prisoner's Dilemma, but at the societal level. Defaulting is the logical move for the one-shot game, but it does not produce overall benefit, and is not best in the repeated game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Local optimizations, under imperfect knowledge. Small local maxima can halt progress. Eventually Goodhart's Law takes over, incentives break down, then shortcuts, grift and corruption come to dominate. Self-preservation and expansion of elites or bureaucracies are always hidden objectives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Destructive patterns such as: Bait and Switch strategies, like Enshittification of business; Divide and Conquer applied by those with power to keep power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Wicked Problems, which are not solvable in the current context or state of knowledge. You can't get there from here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

  "Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."

Ultimately these all boil down to coordination problems. The touted solution is to encourage transparency, rationality and cooperation. But bottom-up never gets successful momentum, people don't agree on objectives; top-down always results in tyranny, abuses of power and fails anyway. Vested interests and bad actors always subvert promising initiatives.

I cannot find it or remember who wrote it, but learning to recognize when things are out to get you (his example was Facebook). Nearly an hour into my first encounter with TikTok, memories of that post made me realize that probably needed to be my last encounter with TikTok.

Curious to read this when you think of it.

I think they predate that by a lot, and I don't think it was anything to do with the ultra wealthy.

IMO people talking about political correctness often miss an important point though: that what's believed to be acceptable is largely derived from an actual philosophy that is changing over time, which develops and evolved as society processes new ideas in the background. That processing happens online and in communities, in books and essays, in art, etc... and then everyone becomes aware of its new conclusions over time.

All of the philosophical work underpinning the 2010s was very much around in the preceding decades in a less crystallized form, but it rose to prominence on the back of various crises and scandals. I can attest, for instance, that the underlying philosophy of social justice predates Occupy, because I first heard it in college in 2009-2010ish, and it wasn't new then. By that point it had a life of its own already, as people people subscribed to it (because it gave them a framework to feel like they were being a moral person).

Aside, I think people overpredict manipulation of culture by organizations and elites because they aren't sufficiently imaginative to see how it could happen organically. Ideas have lives of their own, largely based on the problems they solve for people: how to feel moral in their life, how to put into words their moral intuitions about justice and duty, etc, and (rarely, much less than people think, but definitely sometimes) how to have social power over other people.