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by genericuser314
1736 days ago
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Isn't your definition an example of a No True Scotsman fallacy? Aren't you liable to wind up in situations where you find yourself saying "Ah-hah, now that person I thought was not one of the elite is now one of the elite because they didn't go to prison. Ah-hah, now that person I thought was one of the elite is not one of the elite, because they are going to prison."? |
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"For better or worse I've started to think of 'elites' more as people that have differential outcomes in regards to the law"
So it's not that elites don't go to prison, in this case they didn't, it's that they get extremely favorable outcomes as compared to the average population. Epstein is a good example of this. The first time he was convicted he spent a meager 1 year in prison in conditions that would never be afforded to the general public.
These hackers are another good example of this, they got a large fine but they're not spending any time in prison, and yet lots of people have gotten prison time for hacking.
Being elite is a lot different from being Scottish, in that there are only vague signals for being elite, and none of them are so easy to measure as being Scottish. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of elites are wealthy, but I don't believe that all wealthy people are elites. There are people with a lot of localized power like mayors or state senators, but those people certainly aren't nationally elite. To my mind the clearest signal is when the system interacts with a person, how does the system behave, versus when it interacts with an average person. Now this is by no means a definition, just how I've started thinking about the question of who is elite.