quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I think everyone who is not a radical pacifist will endorse the deliberate killing of other persons in some circumstances. Once you have conceded that, you are merely haggling over the price.
Fortunately, this is very moot in the contemporary US, because Trump can be easily voted out of office in about three years, which is a far better outcome than any violence could hope to accomplish. I also do not see him defeating the federal bureaucracy to the point where he can rig or suspend the elections, so even that hypothetical is not very relevant.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Frankly, MAGA has a lot more in common with fascism than being right-wing nationalist.
Taking Eco's definition, I would argue that MAGA checks about half the boxes.
The points which apply IMHO from WP:
- "The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
- "Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
- "Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
- "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
- "Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
- Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
- "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
- "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
I do not see the classic militarism (universal heroism, permanent warfare), Trump does not want his followers to die in Stalingrad for him, for the most part. The full rejection of the Enlightenment is probably limited to the retvrn crowd, and there is little embrace of (fake) tradition. Machismo is also rather absent, Trump has women in positions of power. Newspeak also does not seem a prominent feature, covfefe aside.
And of course, MAGA is also characterized by a denial of objective truth and widespread kleptocracy, and is ideologically too light-weight for classic fascism.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.
I agree that I was a bit uncharitable. That being said, I am unconvinced that I am entirely wrong. For example, calling Catholicism a doomsday cult would be silly. From my very laymen understanding, Early Christianity did have a bit of an apocalyptic streak (e.g. Book of Revelations, ca. 95 CE).
The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.
I guess his fears make more sense from the perspective of a billionaire. The current Gini index is only stable in periods of exponential growth. As long as every generation has a life substantially better than their parents, few care too much if the billionaires are owning more and more. One the cake stops growing, they will likely have strong opinions on its current distribution ratio, which might easily end the billionaire class and thus, civilization, from their point of view. ('Humans might survive, but without private helicopters and space tourism, as mere animals nesting in suburban homes' or something along the lines.)
I will grant you that the reading "perpetual technological growth is the only way to keep the present society stable, so anyone who threatens that (i.e. Greta, Eliezer) are agents of chaos, i.e. the antichrist." would be a self-consistent philosophical position.
Of course, the god of perpetual exponential growth is likely not Jesus Christ (who did not die on the cross to maximize shareholder value). For most of Christianity, technological progress was glacial slow. On the other hand, calling Greta the antimammon does not really have the same ring to it.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist.
My experience is that people who talk about the devil and the antichrist a lot are very likely to be fundamentalists.
I was raised Catholic-lite, I went to Church twice a year and attended one or two hours a week of Catholic education in German public school, before I opted out in favor of a non-religious ethics class (which was more interesting in the topics it covered) at age 14. This forms the baseline of my model of liberal (but not necessarily insincere!) Christianity. I think the devil only appeared as tempting Jesus in the desert, and even there was interpreted more like an inner drive than as an external, rational agent. We did not cover Revelations at all. There was no preaching of fire and brimstone, sex was not a topic. There was certainly no mixing of religion and politics, the god of my childhood did not endorse any candidates.
Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order.
You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?" I certainly had a (Catholic) history teacher who expressed such an opinion. Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people who thought that changing the organization of society might alleviate suffering (and were correct in the case of social democrats and terribly wrong in the case of communists).
I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?
It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).
This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'
I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.
Frankly, if Thiel wants to make the point that Greta or Eliezer exemplify what is wrong with our world, I would probably give him two paragraphs of moderate length to convince me that he is making an interesting argument. I am much less inclined to spend the resources to try decipher a deliberately obfuscated argument on the off chance that it holds some insight instead of him being a MAGA weirdo who has found a new favorite thing to call his political enemies.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
Since he said it in private
He gave a bloody lecture in front of a couple of hundreds of people. This is very different from having a private dinner with a couple of friends which was bugged by the guardian.
Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.
There is a reason that western culture has evolved an allergic reaction to Christians accusing others of either being in league with the devil or the antichrist. The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.
If Thiel was giving lectures about the Eucharist and the guardian tried to spin this into "well obviously he is advocating for cannibalism", nobody would buy it, because while Christian beliefs about transubstantiation are definitely weird, Christianity also has an excellent track record as far as avoiding actual cannibalism goes.
From a stochastical terrorism perspective (which I personally do not like much), saying "X is the/an antichrist" is the right-wing version of saying "X is literally Hitler". Either has a mild priming effect on people who have a psychotic break and decide to murder someone, I would guess.
Suppose that instead of the antichrist, he gave a lecture on jihad. Would you go well, there is no way that a Western Muslim in 2025 would actually advocate for violence. Actually, what he really means is jihad in the sense of an inner struggle which brings you closer to god.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
To be fair, this was just a Fermi estimate on my part, I simply assumed that the number of people who believe in The Omen are roughly the 14% who believe that the second coming of Christ is near.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Sure, the source is hostile.
But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.
If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.
If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.
Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.
I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).
Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.
In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.
I mean, the criticism that ASI believers are just reinventing either god or the devil is not exactly new. In a way, it is pure Bulverism, "Eliezer has simply translated the ancient myth of the apocalypse for the technological age". It does not engage with his arguments at all.
I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.
Yes, I have just the quotes without the broader context, for all I know, Thiel's lectures could not be on theology any more than Jesus' parable of the sower is about agriculture. Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics. For example, he points out that the antichrist does not necessarily have to be a Jew -- which would be silly if there already was a common understanding with his audience that it is all just a metaphor, and no real person can be the antichrist.
Basically, if I read a version of the parable of the sower where Jesus goes into detail about soil acidity, bound nitrogen, rainfall and temperature patterns, and fertilizers, at some point I give up on trying to understand what the equivalent of the soil pH in the heart of man might be and conclude that he is talking about agriculture, after all.
With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.
I think that compared to the 1970s, technological progress has slowed down a lot. But the cause is mostly diminishing returns. Moore's law only kinda keeps holding because the market exploded between the 8086 and today, so you can recoup your R&D costs from more customers. The discovery of the Higgs boson was immensely more expensive than that of the W and Z bosons. AI companies are burning through huge stacks of investor money to get moderate increases in model performance.
Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).
Greta is not about stopping the research of new technologies, but about building more instances of very mature tech which work by burning fossil fuels. Eliezer is against frontier AI capability research until we make progress with alignment, which might take a few decades. However, in all the worlds where the current LLM paradigm will plateau soon, the costs are rather small, because current LLMs will not overcome the diminishing returns of most research fields. Without alignment, any AI which would be smart enough to overcome the general trend of stagnation would also be a potential x-risk for humans.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.
From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.
It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price." What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.
He continues more coherently:
Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:
I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.
First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
From the article:
As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon.
They quote him:
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"
My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.
Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.
In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky].
It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.
Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.
Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.
One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.
Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)
Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.
The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.
As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?
Personally, costs aside, there are a lot of European cities where I would rather travel by public transport than driving a car. Driving a car in a big city is not my idea of a great time even if I do not get stuck in a traffic jam. Then there is always the problem of finding a parking spot, which can quickly eat up any time savings from being able to take the most direct route with the car.
Currently, I commute by car because my commute is 10min by car, 20min by bike, or 30min by public transport. If public transport was 15min instead, I would prefer that -- 5 minutes of being at home is not worth 15 minutes of watching videos while on public transport to me.
For people who go to the city for a drink, taking a car is not a great option, obviously.
I will grant you that once cars are fully autonomous, a lot of the downsides will disappear, as the car can keep you entertained en route and then dropping you off before searching for a parking spot. Still, the amount of people you can transport with a metro if you have a train every two minutes is rather impressive, and I do not see cars with one passenger per vehicle replacing that.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
One possible way to explain exorbitant CEO salaries would be conspicuous consumption on the part of the company, especially to attract investors.
"Look at us, we are paying 100M$/a to our CEO, not necessarily because we believe that the marginal dollar of his salary is a good investment, but simply because it is a performance expected of us, and paying less would signal to our investors that we are not a solid company to invest in."
If you are king, and there is a widespread belief that good kings keep war elephants, then that is a great reason to spend huge sums to keep war elephants, even if you privately believe that spending the money on infantry would be more efficient.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Regarding pensions, I think having private companies pay out pensions to employees is silly. It also distorts incentives, with the state more willing to rescue a company because the pensions of a lot of former employees depends on it.
Instead, the retirement part of the paycheck should be invested either by the employee directly or by a specialized company (under strict regulations, basically "hang all the C-level executives if the company folds during a finance crisis" or something). I am fine with an insurance model, where people who live to 100 get their pensions subsidized by people who died half a year into retirement. I am not particularly fine with my deductibles directly paying for current pensioners (which is the case in Germany), and all I get in return is a vague promise than politicians will make future generations pay for my pension in turn.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
You could double that spending [e.g. 2% GDP] and easily get everything from domestic batteries to chips, from steel to rare earth metals for it. It's an absolutely enormous amount of money, after all.
While I do not doubt that for 2% of the US GDP, you could get some batteries, a decent range of chips and possibly REE refining, I think that for full independence from foreign markets at near-equal performance, even 100% of the GDP would not be enough.
Modern production chains are incredibly complex. A lot of products which are viable if your target market is a few billion people are not viable when your target market is just 300M. Remember when the 2011 floods in Thailand drove up hard disk prices for a year or two, because HDD manufacturing had naturally clustered in the Pacific rim?
Gains from scale are real and significant, they are what is powering the global economy. If someone in the US decides to build a game console which is made out of ore mined in America and manufactured and assembled in the US, that would require investments of many billions and result in a product which would be 10x as expensive as its international competitors.
If you want full autarky, join the Amish.
A better question would be which parts of the production chains you see as strategic important and especially vulnerable, and then think whether it is feasible to onshore these (or subsidize a friendly country building them). At the end of the day, the American people will survive if China will refuse to sell them the latest iPhone, after all.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
One question would be how related not paying a lot to the CEO is to the CEO destroying the company. I mean, there have been CEOs which have made disastrous business decisions, but are their cases where we can say "if only the company had been willing to pay 100M$/year instead of settling for the kind of incompetent fool you will attract if you offer only 50M$/year"?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.
I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.
My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.
That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.
I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.
Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think the main point where having more planes helps is if the airspace is contested. Fighters carry a limited number of air-to-air missiles, and once they are out their ability to interdict airspace even to inferior enemies seems questionable. Any nation fighting an existential war and having problems with air superiority would likely be willing to pour a sizable chunk of the GDP into planes (or drones).
I agree that nobody is keen to re-enact the battle for Britain, and as long as you have air superiority, how many planes you can have in the air at once is much less of a concern. And if a large-scale war were to break out, the primary concern would be how fast you can ramp up the production of iodine tablets, at which point I tend to lose interest in the timeline.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Fair. That being said, I think she is mostly building a strawman. I have contact with plenty of technical people (though not from SV), and I never got much in the way of condescension for being a physicist. The only people I have heard making jokes along the lines of "oh, you have a PhD, should I help you to tie your shoes?" are my colleagues expressing self-irony.
Of course, it helps that I (mostly) know what I am talking about, and possibly also that I am a guy.
A lot of big tech companies were conceived in academia, Sun and Google come to mind. I really do not think that the tech sector looks down on academia, I am very doubtful that Google would hire anyone who expressed the opinion that graph theory and big-O calculus are just masturbation for academics in their ivory tower who have no idea how the real world works.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
But "sit here for hours and never move from this exact spot" is antithetical to their nature, and the 10,000 years of jobs they've done for us thus far.
Agreed. I think another aspect is the hypocrisy of it. Using pain to condition a working dog who has a job like herding is one thing. But this dog's job is literally "be in the video stream and look friend-shaped, so that viewers will continue to watch". It is very much unsurprising that people have an emotional reaction to the dog getting shocked.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
From the "waffles" link:
noted race scientist Scott Siskind
Wow, Meredith really knows how to win the hearts and minds of her readers.
Actually, that article is full of money quotes.
Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.
Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room. </sarcasm>
this is why Linus Torvalds, despite having some serious issues, is not beyond redemption, whereas Raymond and Stallman have fallen into perdition: Torvalds was motivated first and foremost by wanting a working open-source kernel, whereas Stallman and Raymond started with the ideology, and this is why Hurd still doesn't work
Glad to know that Torvalds is not beyond redemption, hope does not get more than a few years of sensitivity classes.
Also, ESR and RMS had different ideologies, with ESR favoring 'open source' for practical reasons while RMS free software movement started from the dogma that closed source software.
Also, while what Torvalds accomplished is super impressive, to reduce Stallman's impact to "haha, Hurd" seems plain wrong to me. That guy build fucking GNU, after all. And you would think that given the gist of the article ("knowing arcane runes is overrated"), she would appreciate that RMS founded the organization which invented copyleft, which is very much an active ingredient in much of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Sure, ESR is less impressive than the other two, but he did sell F/OSS to the suits (wait is that term elitist?) and writes NTPsec, which seems a lot more useful than what Meredith is doing.
we have to fight through a massive pile of Venture Capitalist money and the likes of Curtis Yarvin to do this.
Oh no. Not only Musk and Thiel with their billions of dollars, but the final boss battle will be moldbug. How can they possibly hope to survive?
Sorry for being a bit emotional, but that text really pulled my strings.
Very charitably, she is not entirely wrong. Gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping is bad. Long ago, a decade or so after I started programming C, I gave Python a try. Today I use it when I find it appropriate. I no longer consider it absurd to have programming languages which are usable by people who do not understand how pointers work.
Still, I think a huge part of what outsiders consider elitist in computer nerd and hacker culture is mostly striving for excellence. Outsiders often are "I don't care how it looks or what it does, as long as it (superficially) works". This is anathema to any craftsperson who takes pride in their craft.
Nobody (I think) goes to a meeting of a Poetry society and reads their poem and then goes "well, it was grammatically correct, and it conveyed how I felt about my cat dying, so if you do not like it, you are just a bunch of elitist pricks."
Apart from some minor technical details, there is no difference between the skill of a brain surgeon and someone who once tried to butcher a rabbit, after all.
My final observation is that the insistence on stuff being as simple as humanly possible is exactly what placed the left-leaning ex-Twitter users in their present conflict with Bluesky.
During the exodus from Twitter, there were two different main destinations: Bluesky (theoretically an open protocol, de facto a single platform), and Mastodon (an actual decentralized system, where different servers can have different content policies while their users can still engage with each other). Naturally, the anti-tech left moved to Bluesky, because it was slightly more convenient. If they had listened to the hackers, they would have told them that placing the people who write the software in charge of the servers (and thus content moderation) is generally a bad idea, and that it is worth the increased complexity to avoid such a situation.
Now they find that they have merely moved from one golden cage to another one, and that the developers of that one are also not as much into censoring speech as they are.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Obviously the broadcast spectrum is in limited supply and has to be regulated somehow. In times when the number of channels which could be transmitted were sharply limited, I can also see why the government wanted some control over content rather than leasing frequencies to the highest bidder.
This is also where public service broadcasters (like the BBC in the UK or ARD in Germany) come from: if you only can carry one or two radio or TV stations, then letting some private company transmit would give them a lot of power over public opinion. On the other hand, you also do not want the broadcaster to be beholden to the government. Hence these semi-independent structures which are funded through (often unpopular) mandatory fees payed by the citizens. By contrast, there was never a bottleneck with newspapers, because any kiosk could easily stock dozens of them.
While a whopping 16% of Americans still get their TV signal OTA (in Germany, the number is 3%), the state of the art technology to get video to the consumer is the internet. 90% of US households have broadband internet access. The only thing left for the regulators to do is to enforce some basic net neutrality (i.e. consumers pay for bandwidth, their ISPs does not get to bully content providers for preferential treatment) and let the court system handle illegal content.
All this OTA and cable stuff with complex rules around it, as well as European mandatory fee broadcasters and licensing requirements for streamers feels incredible archaic to me. Like squabbling over government mandates related to horse-drawn mail coaches when cars and the interstate network exist.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.
The difference is that Starbucks charges everyone they sell a coffee to the same sales tax, but different employees are very likely to pay different income taxes. In Germany, you get tax credits for being married to someone without much income (Ehegattensplitting, also known as Herdpraemie (stove bonus)) and having kids. Depending on circumstances, you can also deduct a lot of different expenses from your taxes.
The closest practical solution to your proposal I can see is that jobs are required to advertise what a fictional reference employee (18yo, able-bodied, single, no kids, no other sources of income or deductible expenses) would get as a paycheck. Of course, for a single parent who already has another part time job, the amount they will make will likely be different.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
From your link:
The new regulations create Beijing's version of US rules which block countries from selling chip-making equipment to China.
The US has used those measures to slow China's development of powerful chips that could be used for artificial intelligence (AI) with military applications.
Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.
I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).
By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.
That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.
I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)
As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.
I think blowing up Americans on US soil would be contrary to the interests of the Kremlin.
Trump has been solidly meh about Ukraine. Sometimes he chews out Zelenskyy for not dressing adequately, then he is angry at Putin for a bit for blowing up yet another hospital, or wanting them to agree to a peace so he finally gets his Nobel.
However, Trump does have a vindictive streak. Piss him off and he will still try to destroy you eight years later.
Putin blowing up Americans would piss off Trump badly because it would be interpreted as "he made me look bad". Him being on Trump's shitlist instead of having a relationship status of "it's complicated" would hurt his aims a lot more than the Tomahawk missiles.
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