Is that really so much worse than hiring tenured STEM faculty who actually just write zero-value low-impact papers for sci-ed journals about the history of race in science? Mr Creationist can sit in his nice office at Harvard and write papers for the Kansas Journal of Creation Science and teach a class on creationism that 5 students a year (4 of whom are just curious about this strange ideological subculture) will take and that's fine. In time though, even his presence will, in a small way, counter the equally poor equivalents on the left.
2rafa
1d ago
When I was a young child, I cried every single morning for years because I didn’t want to go to school. Often my parents had to physically carry me out of the house before I begrudgingly accepted I was going, and I would cry the entire way.
But I loved school. Every day I had a great time and I’d be sad to come home and I’d tell my parents about who I spoke to and played with and how much fun I had. Much more than if I’d have stayed at home.
Adulthood is often similar. I was depressed for a year and stopped working because I was so sad and my life felt empty and meaningless. I got very lucky that an old coworker offered me a new job and everyone in my life essentially forced me to accept, and when I started I suddenly found things cleared up. I liked talking to people every day, I enjoyed working toward a goal, the sense of achievement after a long week, meeting new people, small talk about nothing in particular.
But if I hadn’t gotten lucky or had my arm twisted into accepting that lucky break, I fully know I could have spent another five years doing nothing on my couch, watching YouTube video essays and every Real Housewives franchise and reading and playing video games.
Not everyone knows what will make them happy. Even fewer can force themselves to do what will. Traditional institutions like early marriage and the expectation that couples produce children exist in part because sometimes it’s only with the passage of time that we realize the happiness and fulfillment these things bring us.
Let 10 year olds eat as much candy as they want, stay up all night to play video games and skip school and they will, no matter how much their future selves might regret it. Adults aren’t so different. If you give people basic income and infinite free amazing quality entertainment then certain consequences are inevitable, and if you care about the wellbeing of your fellow man (and I do) then that is suboptimal even if the machines can look after us.
The only thing that has even a remote chance of working is forcing universities to hire thousands of young right-wing tenured faculty for ‘ideological balance’. The left will still try to allow them to all be fired when they come back to power, but you can at least try to hold that up in the courts. The grant stuff is meaningless, they will swear fealty to this regime to get money and in a few years will swear fealty to the next. The only thing that works is getting your people into the machine.
I don’t know, I think company and companionship with other biological humans are important. Call me sentimental but if everyone’s going to be living out hyperrealistic fantasies in VR for dopamine for 80 years then I struggle to see why you mightn’t just save the resources and administer them a euphoric fatal heroin dose and be done with it.
I am increasingly absolutely convinced that a fulfilling post-scarcity world will involve mandatory make-work, not 40 hours a week of fake emailing (ideally), but forced interaction with other human beings, teamwork, shared projects, civic engagement, some kind of social credit to encourage basic politeness and decency even if you don’t need them to survive and so on.
I grew up with many people who already live ‘post scarcity’ lives on account of great inherited wealth and the ones who consume all day are universally less happy than the ones who work, even in high pressure jobs, even though they will inherit more than they could make in a thousand years.
Wall-E is about the choice that post-scarcity offers. At the end, when the humans are replanting trees and clearing garbage it’s clear that AI and robotics are good enough in this universe to do this work, but it’s the humans who win when they do it themselves.
2rafa
1d ago
Some of the really bad consequences of media addiction are currently limited by the low quality of most ‘bulk’ visual content (reels, daytime TV, YouTube, most video games).
When you get to a stage where you can cheaply generate infinite seasons of Mad Men or Sopranos or Red Dead Redemption quality entertainment, such that you can play a 5000 hour Rockstar campaign or watch 10,000 episodes of your favorite comfy comedy show with no discernible dip in quality, it’s over.
Wall E remains, the failure to predict Ozempic excluded, the most deeply prescient piece of 21st century mainstream science fiction media.
Always? It’s part of the former Ottoman Empire, part of the ‘Arab World’, part of the “MENA” demographic and geographic category which is widely used, and closely genetically, culturally and religiously related for thousands of years.
‘East’ is obviously dubious if you’re in Germany and we’re talking about Morocco, but the orient and occident were long more than just geographic designations.
2rafa
1d ago
I wonder if there is a divide on the right between those who say “the problem in Afghanistan was only that we just didn’t kill enough people” and those who take the Tucker Carlson paleo con / isolationist view that we need to get out of these foreign wars.
As others have said, this is a specific thing about Muslims from a guy who really doesn’t seem to like them, based on my impression of him. Not that I expect there are many Muslims in the US military, and those there are are surely assimilated enough to be fully on board with being deployed to the Middle East in service of US foreign policy goals (and so less likely to require a beard).
This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.
Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
2rafa
2d ago
Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.
The problem is that progressives (both in terms of race and class) spent decades promoting the message that “access to credit” was a key axis of intersectional inequality and the reason why various communities were locked out of “building wealth” that must be remedied as soon as possible. Of course lending to poor people, because of the inherent credit risk, can only be viable at very high rates to cover the many, many defaults involved.
Either you ban lending to the poor, and progressives whine about people locked out of credit and the opportunity to build wealth, or you allow them to borrow, and face the consequences. Blaming the lenders is ridiculous.
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah, there’s a meme on Anglo-reactionary Twitter, which I will do a post about at some point, that essentially says well you know popular democracy was designed for and works for 130 IQ Anglos. And the further you get away from that, you know, either the worse your democracy becomes or the less democracy you can have. Much of the American system over the last 150 years and before (thanks in some part to the wisdom of the founders) has been engineering things so that they still kind of work even when most voters aren’t 130 IQ Anglos, but there’s a limit to every system. Brazil is a democracy. India is a democracy. There are localized corruption issues but, generally speaking, these are countries in which the most popular party wins a majority in the legislature etc etc. They are still poor and dysfunctional.
2rafa
2d ago
There are other options. Forms of internal exile, for example, which has a long history over the millennia. Multiplayer servers that pool cheaters together away from rule-abiding players are one example.
A big part of the problem with Western modernity is universal human rights, not in a “some people shouldn’t have rights hahahaha” shitposting way, but in the sense that some people struggle to function in modernity and must, for their benefit and the benefit of wider society, live with a lesser amount of both liberty and responsibility.
We understand this in some cases, people with down’s, late stage dementia, low-functioning autism. But those one or two cognitive steps above them have been granted, by the courts, almost absolute freedom. This was the second components of the emptying of the asylums.
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
These people don’t deserve to be slaves. They have value as people, and in our materially abundant and prosperous society they should be supported in finding their happiness. But, in their interests and those of wider society, they shouldn’t be as free as us either.
There must be a stage between liberty and being a total ward of the state. A half-freedom.
2rafa
2d ago
I agree. There aren’t many Mormons in NYC (actually I grew up with a few and they have quite a strong network in finance, but the absolute number is low) and I highly doubt Trump is aware of Mormon theology or any differences with mainstream Christianity, and if he was he wouldn’t care. Mormons tell outsiders they are Christians (this is a big part of their missionary strategy) and they believe they are Christians, so why wouldn’t Trump take them at their word? Even many lay American non-Mormon Christians see them as Weird Christians, just like they do Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mennonites whatever.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think the specific nature of services, which vary hugely by culture and denomination, means much. Modern Mormon services often seem Protestant, as I understand it, but that’s quite temporal. In the 19th century assimilated Jews reconfigured synagogue services to become essentially Christian in the style of the time (adding sermons, adding organs, adding hymns), but they were still Jewish obviously, and some of those things later became less common - and were never common among the very orthodox.
2rafa
2d ago
I certainly agree with that. They say Tokyo has excellent French food, although I can’t remember having had any.
2rafa
3d ago
There are a literal handful of good sushi places in Budapest, the reality of having to fly in the good stuff does limit you relatively far inland. That said, it might have the cheapest Nobu in the world, which I’ve always found interesting.
2rafa
3d ago
Sports franchise revenue (4 of the top 10 games sold every year are EA sports games, pretty much every year) is probably predictable enough to make them comfortable. This will look stupid eventually for the Saudis and Silver Lake, but for now I don’t think it’s a comically bad loan.
2rafa
3d ago
For years, Andrew Wilson has been the most personally ambitious chief executive in the S&P 500. A self-made man, he went from small scale producer to CEO of EA, and then set about reverse-merging it into (or otherwise being acquired by) one of the major Hollywood conglomerates. From there, I imagine he would have gone for CEO of one of the FAANGs, or maybe the Magnificent 7 a few years later. Indeed he almost succeeded in becoming CEO of Disney, although Iger ultimately preferred a company man (and then latterly, of course, himself). He tried with several others.
That unachieved, he can at least facilitate (and make no mistake, this is all him) the largest LBO in history. I hope it makes him happy, though for men like him there is always another hill to climb.
2rafa
3d ago
Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States. One can go overboard with this (easy to say that Hart-Cellar wouldn’t have happened without major Catholic and Jewish immigration, but similar things happened in various other Northern European Protestant countries that had very little of either), but there is a limit to calling the impact overstated, too. The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. Old WASP Boston, old WASP New York, old WASP San Francisco, these places are as vanished as Christian Anatolia or Parsi Mumbai; whether through conflict or simple attrition they have ceased to exist. America is lower trust, more violent, more divided and more selfish than it would have been if the mass immigration of 1865-1920 hadn’t happened. For all the talk at how horrified many Founding Fathers would be at the America of 2025, they would have been horrified too at the America of 1925 and its ethnic character.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s shrieking aside, it is also fair to say that America is still extremely wealthy, that its greatest global outperformance followed that period, and that in the end those disparate populations still managed to come together and build a relatively well-functioning civilization, at least for a while.
2rafa
3d ago
I don’t think Matt Yglesias has a particularly coherent worldview. He certainly has read Sailer, Murray, Yarvin and others. So has Scott, of course, who is also still a liberal if a less confident one than Yglesias.
My guess is that Yglesias accepts that some form of HBD is true but thinks it can be mediated by rapid economic growth, the flynn effect, affirmative action and deciding not to speak about it ever. This isn’t even an uncommon opinion, it was the default view of a large proportion of the American progressive elite between the 1950s and early 1990s.
The decision to integrate coincided with the general decline of religiosity across the western world that followed the 1950s. Only one major Christian movement - American Protestantism - held on long after the others (European Protestantism, Lutheran and other, and Catholicism in general) fell, and that was in large part because of the unique success of the evangelical televangelists and the Christian revival movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, led by extraordinarily capable preachers like Billy Graham and supported by an embrace of modern media and to some extent music. Catholics tried to copy some of this with happy clappy post Vatican II masses and so on, but it never had the same vitality.
The evangelical revival preserved a religious Christian (not social customs; divorce and single parenthood still rose of course) identity among otherwise deracinated American Protestants and the many, many Catholics who converted to it for almost two generations after most Europeans largely abandoned regular churchgoing Christianity. It didn’t really die, not wholly anyway, until the mid-2010s, and even today hangs on due to comparatively higher birth rates and the large scale conversion of Latin American Catholics and their descendants, both in their homelands and in the US.
Catholics didn’t have that, and so a combination of suburbanization due to white flight clearing out the old ethnic neighborhoods and throwing various white ethnics and founding whites together in suburbia and the decline in Catholic mass attendance led to intermarriage and the merging into a shared American identity. Sometimes this is laid at the feet of WW2, but I disagree. The New York or Philadelphia of, for example, 1949 was still very much a place with distinctly separate white ethnic identities. It happened 10-30 years later.
2rafa
3d ago
Maybe the TikTok algorithm is advanced enough to know I’m Jewish (I’m not even kidding), but Instagram and YouTube both recommend me by far more overtly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic content than TikTok does. If anything, I think the Chinese - to avoid entangling themselves not only in foreign conflicts with America but with various other countries besides - have overtly toned down political content on TikTok, whereas Meta and Alphabet (both still controlled by their Jewish founders in terms of voting rights and in Meta’s case day to day leadership) don’t care and no doubt just prioritize by engagement, which necessarily favors political content.
Say your son becomes a heroin addict. All he does all day is get high and waste his life. He has UBI and lives in social housing, so his financial situation isn't precarious. He has a sophisticated future chip implant for dosage that always just stops him from ingesting a fatal dose. He never goes outside, and he has a dark web supplier who delivers by mail (easily affordable on his UBI check), so he's no aesthetic or criminal or otherwise problem for the public.
Would you be happy for him? Would you be proud of him? Would you care about him doing that with his life?
Call it empathy, but I do care, I do consider it my business, and I have interest in stopping others from doing so, whether they are my family or my community or my countrymen and women or just the wider human race. There are a lot of decent people out there who deserve better than a life as an addict, having never created anything. It doesn't have to be "of value", this isn't an economic question. In a post-scarcity world I think it better for people to play sports, socialize in person, work with their hands, craft, cook, construct, have children, raise them, fall in love (with each other). Is that an aesthetic preference? Sure.
But it's also an empathetic one. Most people don't have the agency and the time preference setup to be able to autonomously turn off the dopamine pump. We don't know if we would, which is why they tell you never to try heroin. Even plenty of people who want to quit tobacco never make it, even if they really want to. It seems to me supremely arrogant to assume that so many people, not least yourself, have that degree of control over their own happiness, their own destiny. This is likely a philosophical difference between us.
Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves. You acknowledge this in the way in which we often discuss it, homeless drug addicts threatening people on subways, feral children who never finish school, but it's not just about the negative externalities, not just about the fact that it makes things harder for me, or for you. It's about them too, and about us, because while we maintain a work ethic and some discipline today, who knows how that will hold up in the face of the entertainment that is coming?
Sure, maybe we can rewire ourselves to inject fake memories of an entire life well-lived, winters by the warm hearth, homes built by hand, children's clothes sewn, religious services attended, adventures had, and then cheat ourselves to fulfilment that way. But even that is a little sad, when so much of the promise of automated abundance is that finally we can take a step back (with our hopefully longer lifespans) and do all of these things. And yes, I think forcing people to do them is better, and will make them happier, than allowing them to press the pleasure button all day, which the vast majority of people, quite possibly pretty much everyone, will do if you let them and if the button is good enough - which you and I both agree it probably will be.
My preference, by the way, would be for a status hierarchy with a baseline that allows for real wireheaders to do what they do, but which provides superior status and more resources to those who embrace a more fulfilling, communal and meaningful existence, as defined in various but strongly overlapping ways by philosophers going back to Socrates.
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