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Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
- 729374929292 2mo ago[flagged]
- etdznots 2mo agoIt doesn’t misread anything, it doesn’t read at all.
- steveBK123 2mo agoI don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies. Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president. Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jurgenburgen 2mo ago> Rule of law, functioning government providing services Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
- ygjb 2mo agoJokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators. In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
- yks 2mo agoIn societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
- jltsiren 2mo agoRussia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo agoIf I was a semi-rich thug boss I'd hire out my thugs as security to all the nervous billionaire nerds. Including cybersecurity. Then I could make a move whenever.
- steveBK123 2mo agoIt’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
- yks 2mo agoRussian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agothat is the lesson of Khodorkovsky you can be the boyar and punch down, but you get uppity and challenge the Tsar you end up in a cage
- wat10000 2mo agoThat was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example? But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive. Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
- Avicebron 2mo agoI think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
- lenerdenator 2mo agoThis is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees. If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
- steveBK123 2mo agoAnd many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds
- jimbob45 2mo agoSame with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
- tacomonstrous 2mo agoThe true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
- jimbob45 2mo agoHow? Charge stadium ticket prices and jerseys at cost?
- Gud 2mo agoThis is only a problem in the USA. In Sweden, we don't have enormous college stadiums.
- labcomputer 2mo agoSure, why not? The founding charter of every D1 football school claims that it is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education. It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education. Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures. So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).
- swiftcoder 2mo ago> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy
- epgui 2mo agoA lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”. I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
- jfengel 2mo agoPeople really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue. So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
- lisper 2mo agoIt doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.
- demilicious 2mo agomind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
- lisper 2mo agoHow would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense. If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like: https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idiot.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idio... Oh, and since this is HN, I'll also invoke an argument from authority and cite: https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
- gaigalas 2mo agoSci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want. The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect. It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
- petermcneeley 2mo agoClarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
- crote 2mo agoThey started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!
- jocaal 2mo agoThis is a naive take. Sure they had wealth, but multiplying wealth to the scale some of those people do is no easy feat. I am not defending them, just trying to state a fact.
- petermcneeley 2mo agoWere did bill gates mother work?
- techblueberry 2mo agoI listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool. I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term. It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
- kraussvonespy 2mo agoWell said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.
- zombot 2mo agoThe powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.
- aiisjustanif 2mo agoIf by command you mean by using coercion or compulsion. Then history has told multiple stories that show to sustain power you need more than just to command. Whether it be centuries ago like in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the more recent complex stories of power like Euromaiden in 2013. In my opinion history and modern time supports the theory of hegemony very well. Ironically one the top modern examples of the powerful understanding the need to convince and executing on those goals is the global dominance of Silicon Valley tech platforms and the billionaires that lead them. They shape what is "common sense," and political discourse worldwide without direct command.
- gdilla 2mo agothey do to the extent they don't want to be eaten. Sure they can retire to their fortified bunkers but that's more insurance than it is a way of life they want to promote.
- peterashford 2mo agoI think the philosophy is post-hoc justification of their actions.
- croes 2mo agoWith Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
- rightbyte 2mo agoThey take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.
- fallinghawks 2mo agoHeck, we're living Idiocracy right now.
- fragmede 2mo agoThe UFC fight on the Whitehouse lawn was a bit much.
- yesbabyyes 2mo agoThat, and the FIFA Peace Prize. Too on the nose.
- croes 2mo agoCamacho made the most intelligent man secretary of the interior, Trump would never do that. So it’s kind of worse than Idiocracy
- hunterpayne 2mo agoBrought to you by Carl's Jr.
- 927373912092 2mo ago[dead]
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- Conol_ai 2mo ago[flagged]
- RevEng 2mo agoThey know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.
- WalterBright 2mo ago[flagged]
- SamoyedFurFluff 2mo ago??? Elonjet????
- WalterBright 2mo ago[flagged]
- newspaper1 2mo agoIt's not doxxing, it's posting public information and it's 100% free speech.
- WalterBright 2mo agoIt certainly is doxxing (although there is no legal definition of it that I'm aware of). I also wrote that X has the least censorship of any social media platform. If you have to dig down to elonjet, it just affirms my statement. Elon also has legitimate concerns for his safety.
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- ang_cire 2mo agoBeing and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities. Every child starts out thinking, "if I was in charge, I could fix this. It's so simple!" Then you actually see that when you make bad choices, you or others get hurt, and you realize that you don't always know what's best. But these guys never get hurt, because they have the money to be shielded from it, so they end up being these delusional wrecking ball assholes, who think they know better than everyone else and don't need anyone else's consent (I.e. votes) to make whatever overly simplistic or authoritarian changes their underdeveloped brains concoct.
- JohnFen 2mo agoI think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club". Every worse, they -- like pretty much all of us -- tend to think that most people are just like them, so they think not only that they understand normal people, but that they are normal people. And the ones that don't either tend to think that their will should be imposed on the rest of us because we're too stupid to understand what's good for us and/or just view us as resources to be mined.
- hunterpayne 2mo agoI think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this. If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader.
- bonsai_bar 2mo agoYou're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others. You may want to get your info from more places than Fox News.
- rdmuser 2mo agoReminds me a bit of this article that got submitted a few times recently and got a little discussion: https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-problem https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050173
- mistrial9 2mo agoDoes this article mention Adam Becker at all ?
- arduanika 2mo agoSo, a cool shortcut is that you can go to a website and press "Ctrl-F", which will let you search for a given string on the page. It's okay that you didn't know that! https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ But the answer is, no, it doesn't. I would say that Becker covered a lot of the same ground, and does it better.
- ilamont 2mo agoI think it’s true that when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, “Yes, this story is a template for what I should do with my company,” that’s bonkers. But there is [also] this technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on. Is there some evidence for this claim? Lepore in her reply says "I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan" and then there is a lot of talk about Asimov. I also read a very old article about Amazon, and the journalist noted that a book by David Niven was the only one on Bezos' office bookshelf. But, so what? I read Heinlein and Niven and Asimov when I was young, too, along with a bunch of much pulpier stuff (James P. Hogan, anyone?). Does that make me and millions of other science fiction fans technocratic libertarians? If not, why do people regularly point to science fiction as the source of these three men's libertarian leanings?
- swiftcoder 2mo agoDid you also get hold of a billion dollars at some point? For some reason, those of us who work for a living seem less inclined to such psychosis
- hunterpayne 2mo agoThe historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.
- strken 2mo agoI'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing. Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
- hunterpayne 2mo agoThink about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap. Look at the arguments. They are all over the place, and almost schizophrenic. There is a lot of reaching and pulling of narratives from individual quotes. When someone is selling you something, its probably best to ignore any sort of deeper meaning in what they are saying. They are selling you something, full stop. Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection. They will say whatever they think will get you to buy. There is no deeper meaning. People with actual life experience know this. Somehow, she doesn't. The executives will say whatever they have to to get you to buy.
- lapcat 2mo agoI don't think there's anything deep here. Good fiction is entertainment. The author may or may not also intend to send a message or teach a lesson, but above all fiction has to be entertaining, or it won't get read. A sense of morality is obviously not required to be entertained. People like Musk are science fiction fans who also happen to be morally bankrupt. I believe those two factors are mostly unrelated. Space, rockets, aliens, lasers, pew pew pew, end of story.
- gdulli 2mo agoRight, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here. There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.
- Barrin92 2mo ago>but above all fiction has to be entertaining As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that is an artifact of modern mass media. In the Abrahamic traditions idolatry and an aversion to imagery exists exactly for this reason, because it leads to a culture in which people cease to be able to distinguish how something appears from what it's supposed to point to. They aren't unrelated at all. People like Musk or Zuckerberg are the way they are, because they grew up in an environment that disregards the moral, intellectual, religious and even aesthetic dimensions of fiction (or non-fiction) and are effectively overgrown toddlers as a result, and in that they're just like most people now, except with more power.
- bawolff 2mo agoYou also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work. I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting. If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.
- yoyohello13 2mo agoIn the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise. Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoThere's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?
- yoyohello13 2mo ago> weren't they right during the Cold War? Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo agoNo, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social democracy. They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets." They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist. But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent. See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoYea the economic ideology that seems most correct is the Austrian school.
- amberjack 2mo agoI don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill. The stuff about nation states and corporations taking over seems confused as well, since pretty much everywhere goverments, regulation and taxation are highest/largest they've ever been. Also, it is very strange taking the interest of some people in getting rid or moving beyond nation states as sinister since this has been a stated goal of democratic projects like the EU. Furthermore, in China technology is completely subservient to the state and they intentionally kneecapped the whole sector fairly recently since it grew too big.
- psunavy03 2mo agoIf the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point. Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.
- amberjack 2mo agoIt depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.
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- zbentley 2mo ago
- Trasmatta 2mo agoI think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's. The other canonical example of this is the naming of Palantir, of course. In many cases I think it's less that they misread the fiction, and more that they intentionally model themselves after the villains in fiction.
- ReptileMan 2mo agoOf the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.
- qiine 2mo agoDoes this include Pippin ?
- ReptileMan 2mo agoYes
- kergonath 2mo agoThere is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc. AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation). So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story. To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.
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- watrr 2mo ago"I’m really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we’re in the midst of right now." They she doesn't understand centralization, surveillance to the nth power, and IQ loss that comes with AI.
- GMoromisato 2mo agoThis was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book. That said, I disagree with a lot of her conclusions. Contra her assertions, I believe that technological change is the principal cause of historical change. Lawrence Lessig wrote Code is Law, which highlights how specific software system decisions constrained the available legal regimes that could apply. The same thing happens for all technology: the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization, which is the real reason nation states are eroding. I do agree with her about the undesirability of an "artificial state"--an algorithmic government that rules by deterministic rules instead of representative human judgement. And I do agree that many technologists think that we'd be better off being ruled by machines instead of people. But that is (a) not a new phenomenon, and (b) equally found outside Silicon Valley. Paul Krugman often writes about Asimov's psychohistory being a strong influence on him. He longs for a world of Philosopher Kings who make decisions logically and without the messy delusions of the masses.
- philipwhiuk 2mo ago> the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?
- paleotrope 2mo agoAmericans needing fresh bananas did it.
- jhbadger 2mo agoWhat we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
- msabalau 2mo ago
- hinkley 2mo agoPeople have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel. I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore. There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves. I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.
- jmyeet 2mo agoSilicon Valley has been heavily influenced by a different author. It just happens to be Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand sold this idea that selfishness is a virtue. Taken further, you see a strong thread between objectivism and transhumanism. In the early days of Silicon Valley, tech companies were disrupted. But we shouldn't forget that the true origins of Silicon Valley were in defense contracting. Modern tech companeis have become so large that they have become almost indistinguishable from the state (ironically, in a way that people accuse Chinese companies of doing). Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are now in the same category as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Put another way, tech companies haven't sought a utopia, they've simply amplified the current system, which is one of increasing inequality.
- hunterpayne 2mo ago[flagged]
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- yunnpp 2mo agoRe: replacing functions of democratic government, this was already predicted in Democracy Incorporated almost 10 years ago now: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178486/democracy-incorporated https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178486/de...
- mnmnmn 2mo ago[dead]
- bawolff 2mo agoFeels like a bit of a strawman. Just because the PR dept of a company spouts some bullshit doesn't mean that it actually represents the company's views. A super bowl advert referencing 1984 does not literally mean the company sees itself as the protagonist of 1984 I see no evidence they even read these SciFi books in the first place let alone misunderstood them.
- ETH_start 2mo agoThe government has expanded by any objective measure: From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today. From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects. From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today. From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today. This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.
- flir 2mo agoSo you're saying it's improved. (If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
- ETH_start 2mo agoI'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
- owisd 2mo agoThe article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
- ETH_start 2mo agoIt's up since 20 years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ
- RunSet 2mo ago> “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said. Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates to have latched on to the lingo of Stranger in a Strange Land while apparently never having read a sentence of Heinlein's prose. As a rule of thumb, those who say "grok" do not. And it's always Stranger in a Strange Land for the messiah figure. Here, have a better Heinlein story. https://archive.org/details/Unknown_v04n06_1941-04_PDF_unz.org/page/n83/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Unknown_v04n06_1941-04_PDF_unz.o...
- mbmbn 2mo ago> “ Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates” Jesus Christ. You people, smelling your own farts. It’s just ridiculous. A bunch of nobodies, pending they are some sort of intellectual powerhouse, reining down on a guy that revolutionized, electric vehicles, space communications and space travel, like THEY are actually his mental superiors.
- ramoz 2mo agoAlso on the front page this morning: "An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
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- andyjohnson0 2mo ago> "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]." With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. "We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." ...and on and on it goes. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
- kergonath 2mo agoSometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points. What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoBarlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.
- eikeegi 2mo agoI very much doubt that Silicon Valley people actually read the books they talk about.
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- brandonmenc 2mo agoScience fiction is entertainment. There's no way to like, "misread" it.
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- zombot 2mo ago> “I’m not an anti-technologist,” Lepore insisted. The usual easy cop-out. Everybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-semite and everybody who criticizes SV is an anti-technologist. If that's your defense, you have none.
- sebastianconcpt 2mo agoAnd how her thesis holds when evaluated against the system in China?
- zombot 2mo ago> what dominates today is this 19th-century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress, and therefore all technological change is progress, as opposed to — objectively, it’s only progress if things are getting better. And, worse, our technological change has converged to enshittification on all fronts, but it's still called progress. The idea that it's only progress if things are getting better is actively being fought against.