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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite. The media writes about them out of anthropological curiosity, in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon. Like there was a big NYT article about rationalist date-me-docs and the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting” that underlies all these pieces.

Of course the tone is more negative now after SBF. But sorry, yes, if a guy in your movement does an enormous fraud, has a high-profile trial, and goes to jail, your movement attracts negative attention. But this isn’t tearing down a threatening counter-elite, this is an anthropological piece about how that weird Amazonian tribe that turned on its neighbors is still being weird.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

There very obviously is a reasonably ideologically coherent right-wing counter-elite hiding in plain sight in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is the Grand Heresiarch, Roger Mercer was an early backer from the East Coast, and Steven Hsu, Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin were all early recruited talent. Right now the biggest players are Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, with David Sacks as court jester. Balaji Srinivasan is pursuing a separate project, but is clearly sympathetic. Richard Hanania's vomit-inducing hagiography of this group makes him the spoony bard of the movement. If the current elite is vulnerable to a coup by a shadowy cabal, then this group have the cash and talent to pull it off. They also control two important power centres - VC money (Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have the prestige, but A16Z and The Founders' Fund have the cool) and Twitter. The main reason the Thielosphere doesn't matter more is that Trump has cut off all the oxygen for any anti-establishment right movement that isn't MAGA, and the Thielosphere disagrees with MAGA on too many points to be allowed near power in a MAGA regime.

"Rationalists et al." are a group with cash and talent who are close to the Thielosphere on the social graph and are sufficiently hostile to the centre-left establishment that they might have been recruitable in a slightly different world. I am 90% confident that Thiel did spend serious cash and effort trying to bring Eliezer Yudkowsky into his network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached out to Scott Siskind as well. Cade Metz' hatchet job accused Scott, almost certainly correctly, of being widely read within the Thielosphere, and therefore presumably sympathetic.

If I was advising George Soros and Klaus Schwab on emerging threats to their world empire, I would include the Thielosphere on the list of things that aren't an immediate threat but need an eye kept on them if they become one. And if I were the Globohomo Elite, Third Class assigned to dealing with the Thielosphere then stopping them absorbing the rationalists would be part of my job. Obvious options include threatening to drive the rationalists out of polite society unless they dissociate themselves from right-wing heresy (worked on Eliezer) or offering a more attractive alternative.

Amusingly, the flow of money from SBF into effective altruism probably was part of the reason that the Thielosphere and the rationalists parted company. SBF was a (as it turns out, rogue) member of the establishment - even to the point of which VCs invested in him (Sequoia backed FTX largely because they were afraid of A16Z becoming the dominant player in crypto). Peter Thiel couldn't or wouldn't compete with SBF in rationalist-buying. If that was an op, then someone has earned a promotion to Globohomo Elite, Second Class.

People on this forum give these guys way too much credit. The tech/VC types keep making the same mistake of thinking that money and power are the same thing. I’ll update my priors if they can get the politics of their own backyard, SF, in any kind of reasonable order. Visit SF and visit NY and decide for yourself if the tech guys are in any way competent enough leaders to govern better than the finance and law guys.

I’m skeptical (they seem too busy cranking out AI SaaS slop to do anything serious) but who knows.

The tech people are not in charge in SF, and never have been.

thats my point, despite having a ton of money they’ve totally failed to accomplish anything political

If money was all someone needed to become powerful we'd be loving in the 2010s era neoliberal anomie of President Michael Bloomberg and be all the better for it. Power is relative influence over other people to action ones will, but oftentimes what matters is getting people to do something they were inclined to do anyways and convince them that it was your idea. No amount of high end pulled pork buffets could get people motivated to attend Bloombergs political rallies, and no amount of VC lavishing on startups can generate politically influential mass. Commies and MAGA capture the politically motivated crazies dedicated enough to waste time on entryist politics, VC captures nerds who would prefer to jerk off to, and play, MOBA games.

Yes. This is my point. These people are not/unable to make themselves politically relevant.

You're right, but I guess the reason some in this forum see fit to ruminate openly about this clearly observable situation is the extant conspiracy of VC and SV actually being one of the agents of chant. We can see its not true based on outcomes, yet ink and neurons are expended hyping up their capabilities and attributing consequences to this group of dweebs, who themselves seem to be intent on sucking themselves off. Thats the discrepancy that invites speculation.

From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.

I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.

I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.

Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.

More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.

And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.

Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".

Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).

I disagree. Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action. They are the counter elite who are waiting in the wings for when (if) the existing elite collapses.

These people are the smart ones who have been excluded, and the current elite feel the wind shifting. Thus, the attack.

I feel it is more likely they (2010s white and asian men left behind in the current cultural conversation yet resourced enough to weather a storm independently) successfully sequester like a NIMBY John Galt (we see this with St George county in Baton Rouge) as opposed to forming a successful political movement sympathetic to their plight to wrest control. An existing elite collapsing will just lay bare the rotten bones of the system cannibalized by current incompetence, and enough of the rationalists do see the rot present even now, disincentivizing the seizing of the current reigns.

Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action.

They're also privileged (i.e. have above-average incomes).

in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon.

I'm pretty sure the authors of pieces about isolated tribes in the Amazon don't go on Twitter to gloat about how it made the subjects "seethe" and scatter in fear. Are you going to update?

If the Amazonian tribesmen could seethe on Twitter the authors certainly would go on and gloat.

  • -10

They can, and that's not the response we got.

Agreed,

In addition, SBF and his associates have the issue of being, not strawmen per se, but a near-perfect encapsulation of what critics of utilitarianism say utilitarianism will lead to in practice, which makes them a go to example for said critics.

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

Sure they are. Americans have a very weird way of talking about the elites, where I always have the impression they only ever mean "elected representatives" or "the ultra-rich". Intellectual elites are a thing too, and that's exactly who's threatened by the Rats, and who's writing the hit pieces.

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite

And yet they can apparently brainwash scammers with billions of dollars to follow their quasi-religion and donate money to them. I think you're underselling the importance of cultural influence.

the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting”

Somehow, this weirdness only ever seems to be interesting to the prestige media when it's connected to VCs and other powerful people.

If that's not the deciding factor, how come they don't report on the much more sensational lolcow antics kiwis are obsessed with? My terminally online ass has hung out with weird and interesting people for decades and I only ever see them in the media when either they do something insanely criminal or get access to any significant amount of power.

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

The wider world of normies really needs to know more about his saga, it's hilarious!

This is the trial streamer guy right? Some people just can’t help themselves. What happened now?

It appears he may have serious substance abuse problems and be a swinger of sorts, and he and his wife and another female friend were arrested on drug charges recently. This all happened a few months after someone sent him a Sonichu medallion in the mail along with a note saying "you are the next chosen one" or something like that. He wore the medallion on stream, leading people to theorize that it was cursed.

Edit: there's also a child endangerment charge in there, I'm assuming it's related to something involving his own kid

I just find it tragic and sad honestly. Expose the one guy online that seems to have his shit together to the power of the Sonichu medallion and consequences will never be the same.

Well yes, the media focuses on powerful, influential people, and on crime.

I do think mainstream left-leaning media (NYT et al) have been tacking more toward center of late because of the visible success of new platforms and publications with more moderate, rationalist-adjacent takes. I'm thinking of Substack (Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias), or The Free Press, for examples. Not necessarily huge success in what has long been described as a dying market, but enough that mainstream media is at least taking notes.

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