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“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.”

“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.” This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite). Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers. Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics

aetagj 7mo ago
This is pretty reductive. There are different systems (even broken ones like the Soviet union managed to build up an army and feed its people) and there are vital and useless technologies. Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  Not sure whether you are addressing my main point
kingofthehill98 7mo ago
Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us. He's a lunatic.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  Ok he’s bad but what has he got wrong? I think he was pretty good at predicting certain things and I find him at least a bit insightful. Without going into good vs bad
  - canelonesdeverd 7mo ago
    >what has he got wrong? For starters, Greta Thunberg doesn't seem to be the antichrist.
  - advael 7mo ago
    Can you name a prediction? Most of your claims in the prior paragraph are retroactive causal explanations of phenomena, "just so" stories per se. Most aspects of Thiel's apparent vision of the future that have come true did so through his direct involvement via money, power, and influence. I see no meaningful evidence of unusual predictive power demonstrated thus far by you or anything else I've heard about. I suppose you could take the line that having power and using it to impose your will on the world is prediction in a sense, but it's certainly an unusual usage of the word
  - nurettin 7mo ago
    He's right twice a day like any other crackpot. Stop fawning.
asdff 7mo ago
>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers. Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?
- simianwords 7mo ago
  I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.
  - asdff 7mo ago
    Hunter gatherer tribes also have religion, culture, and economics, and ideas.
    - simianwords 7mo ago
      they have shitty versions of all of them
      - Snow_Falls 7mo ago
        I recommend reading "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber & David Wengrow. You might learn something about those "shitty" versions.
        simianwords 7mo ago
        your revealed preference would tell a bit more about this than any book. keep me updated on whether you would like to live in a tribal society's culture or a modern one.
        asdff 7mo ago
        I think the tribal society would be better for mental health. It is how humans evolved to live. You have to be raised in it from birth to collect the skills you need for it though. Not something one can switch to very easily. Modern society is so far removed from how we adapted as a species. It is no surprise so many struggle with it to varying degrees large and small. Depression and obesity are some examples I'd say of modern life ills. We live in this society where we are sedentary all day and constantly in fight or flight response due to work pressures. We were built to forage and hunt over some 8 miles a day. It is no wonder many of us are still fat and sad in this modern world of supposed abundance. There are some opinions out there of agriculture being this sort of "wrong turn" of our species (1). Yes we could sustain great numbers, but with agriculture we introduced zoonotic disease vectors. Widespread environmental damage replacing native species with crops, and the ecological disturbance that would result from having such an unbalanced amount of resources at that stage of the food chain, leading to plague numbers of pests, also sources for disease. Our numbers also exploded too but are liable to all sorts of famine and other issues from overshooting these resources when a crop failure might occur, and still having all these mouths to feed. Agriculture enabled fielding large armies and violence on a scale never seen before. "Today, around 75% of infectious diseases suffered by humans are zoonoses, ones obtained from or more often shared with domestic animals. Some common examples include influenza, the common cold, various parasites like tapeworms and highly infectious diseases that decimated millions of people in the past such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid and measles. In response, natural selection dramatically sculpted the genome of these early farmers. The genes for immunity are over-represented in terms of the evidence for natural selection and most of the changes can be timed to the adoption of farming. And geneticists have estimated that 85% of the disease-causing gene variants in contemporary human populations arose during the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, or alongside the rise and spread of agriculture." "Another surprising change seen in the skeletons of early farmers is a smaller skull especially the bones of the face. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had larger skulls due to their more mobile and active lifestyle including a diet which required much more chewing. Smaller faces affected oral health because human teeth didn’t reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. This led to increased dental disease along with extra cavities from a starchy diet. These changes dramatically shaped our attitudes to material goods and wealth. Prestige items became highly sought after as hallmarks of power. And with larger populations came growing social and economic complexity and inequality and, naturally, increasing warfare. Inequalities of wealth and status cemented the rise of hierarchical societies — first chiefdoms then hereditary lineages which ruled over the rapidly growing human settlements. Eventually they expanded to form large cities, and then empires, with vast areas of land taken by force with armies under the control of emperors or kings and queens. This inherited power was the foundation of the "great" civilisations that developed across the ancient world and into the modern era with its colonial legacies that are still very much with us today." https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agriculture-the-greatest-blunder-in-human-history-- https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agricultur...
digdugdirk 7mo ago
Where are you getting this opinion from? Because the vast number of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies throughout history would disagree with you. Those "woke" policies existed prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions and were stamped out by the "mentally developed" societal and economic systems that we invented along the way. I'm not sure where you're getting your "fundamental truths" from, but as the fields of sociology and economics don't actually have anything of the sort it'd be worthwhile to expand your reading list and adding some history in there for good measure.
analog31 7mo ago
Without technology, say bye bye to at least 6 billion people. We've turned the earth into a machine for sustaining life. It's clear that we need people who understand how the machine and its parts work, well enough to keep it running. But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it. A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king. "Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.
ehnto 7mo ago
People are not born without rights, it takes a society or group to take them away. Who do you think opresses women and those in minority groups? Societies didn't evolve to be enlightened, they evolved into discriminatory systems. Those systems get torn a little bit down, built back up, asymmetricaly across societies, constantly and probably forever. Just gander across our current collection of societies and marvel at how diverse those systems are, even in high tech societies.

aetagj 7mo ago

This is pretty reductive. There are different systems (even broken ones like the Soviet union managed to build up an army and feed its people) and there are vital and useless technologies. Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.

simianwords 7mo ago
Not sure whether you are addressing my main point

kingofthehill98 7mo ago

Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us. He's a lunatic.

simianwords 7mo ago
Ok he’s bad but what has he got wrong? I think he was pretty good at predicting certain things and I find him at least a bit insightful. Without going into good vs bad
- canelonesdeverd 7mo ago
  >what has he got wrong? For starters, Greta Thunberg doesn't seem to be the antichrist.
- advael 7mo ago
  Can you name a prediction? Most of your claims in the prior paragraph are retroactive causal explanations of phenomena, "just so" stories per se. Most aspects of Thiel's apparent vision of the future that have come true did so through his direct involvement via money, power, and influence. I see no meaningful evidence of unusual predictive power demonstrated thus far by you or anything else I've heard about. I suppose you could take the line that having power and using it to impose your will on the world is prediction in a sense, but it's certainly an unusual usage of the word
- nurettin 7mo ago
  He's right twice a day like any other crackpot. Stop fawning.

asdff 7mo ago

>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers. Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?

simianwords 7mo ago
I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.
- asdff 7mo ago
  Hunter gatherer tribes also have religion, culture, and economics, and ideas.
  - simianwords 7mo ago
    they have shitty versions of all of them
    - Snow_Falls 7mo ago
      I recommend reading "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber & David Wengrow. You might learn something about those "shitty" versions.
      - simianwords 7mo ago
        your revealed preference would tell a bit more about this than any book. keep me updated on whether you would like to live in a tribal society's culture or a modern one.
        asdff 7mo ago
        I think the tribal society would be better for mental health. It is how humans evolved to live. You have to be raised in it from birth to collect the skills you need for it though. Not something one can switch to very easily. Modern society is so far removed from how we adapted as a species. It is no surprise so many struggle with it to varying degrees large and small. Depression and obesity are some examples I'd say of modern life ills. We live in this society where we are sedentary all day and constantly in fight or flight response due to work pressures. We were built to forage and hunt over some 8 miles a day. It is no wonder many of us are still fat and sad in this modern world of supposed abundance. There are some opinions out there of agriculture being this sort of "wrong turn" of our species (1). Yes we could sustain great numbers, but with agriculture we introduced zoonotic disease vectors. Widespread environmental damage replacing native species with crops, and the ecological disturbance that would result from having such an unbalanced amount of resources at that stage of the food chain, leading to plague numbers of pests, also sources for disease. Our numbers also exploded too but are liable to all sorts of famine and other issues from overshooting these resources when a crop failure might occur, and still having all these mouths to feed. Agriculture enabled fielding large armies and violence on a scale never seen before. "Today, around 75% of infectious diseases suffered by humans are zoonoses, ones obtained from or more often shared with domestic animals. Some common examples include influenza, the common cold, various parasites like tapeworms and highly infectious diseases that decimated millions of people in the past such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid and measles. In response, natural selection dramatically sculpted the genome of these early farmers. The genes for immunity are over-represented in terms of the evidence for natural selection and most of the changes can be timed to the adoption of farming. And geneticists have estimated that 85% of the disease-causing gene variants in contemporary human populations arose during the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, or alongside the rise and spread of agriculture." "Another surprising change seen in the skeletons of early farmers is a smaller skull especially the bones of the face. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had larger skulls due to their more mobile and active lifestyle including a diet which required much more chewing. Smaller faces affected oral health because human teeth didn’t reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. This led to increased dental disease along with extra cavities from a starchy diet. These changes dramatically shaped our attitudes to material goods and wealth. Prestige items became highly sought after as hallmarks of power. And with larger populations came growing social and economic complexity and inequality and, naturally, increasing warfare. Inequalities of wealth and status cemented the rise of hierarchical societies — first chiefdoms then hereditary lineages which ruled over the rapidly growing human settlements. Eventually they expanded to form large cities, and then empires, with vast areas of land taken by force with armies under the control of emperors or kings and queens. This inherited power was the foundation of the "great" civilisations that developed across the ancient world and into the modern era with its colonial legacies that are still very much with us today." https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agriculture-the-greatest-blunder-in-human-history-- https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agricultur...

digdugdirk 7mo ago

Where are you getting this opinion from? Because the vast number of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies throughout history would disagree with you. Those "woke" policies existed prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions and were stamped out by the "mentally developed" societal and economic systems that we invented along the way. I'm not sure where you're getting your "fundamental truths" from, but as the fields of sociology and economics don't actually have anything of the sort it'd be worthwhile to expand your reading list and adding some history in there for good measure.

analog31 7mo ago

Without technology, say bye bye to at least 6 billion people. We've turned the earth into a machine for sustaining life. It's clear that we need people who understand how the machine and its parts work, well enough to keep it running. But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it. A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king. "Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.

ehnto 7mo ago

People are not born without rights, it takes a society or group to take them away. Who do you think opresses women and those in minority groups? Societies didn't evolve to be enlightened, they evolved into discriminatory systems. Those systems get torn a little bit down, built back up, asymmetricaly across societies, constantly and probably forever. Just gander across our current collection of societies and marvel at how diverse those systems are, even in high tech societies.