fnix
Indeed an amazing piece of journalism, a gripping read throughout! Thanks for the share.
I feel like you’re just going offtopic here. I mean, poverty around the world may be down for reasons that have nothing to do with what Silicon Valley is peddling; the article specifically criticizes the latter’s particular “tech utopia” vision of the future and not what was written up in the UN Millennium Development Goals.
It’s also telling how he shies away from bringing his line of thought to its logical conclusion: if you think you need to “optimize” your child’s genetics to perfection, why shouldn’t you try to optimize their environment like that as well? If you’re such an imperfect being with all your faulty genes after all then it’s probable you will make mistakes during parenting, so by your own logic thinking you would be suited to raise a child in the first place is a terrible crime no different from refusing cuckoldry.
And they call this “effective altruism”. Jesus Christ these people need help.
Testing for genetic defects is very different from the Gattaca-premise of most everything about a person being genetically deterministic, with society ordered around that notion. My point was that such a setting is likely inherently impossible, since “heritability” doesn’t work like that; the most techbros can do is LARP at it, which, granted, can be very dangerous on its own – the fact that race is a social construct doesn’t preclude racism and so on. But there’s no need to get frightened by science fiction when science facts tell a different story.
If I wanted to sound like a rationalist I’d tell Scott to check his fallacies, specifically category error. It’s just such basic, wilful misconstrual on his part. Yeah, me liking my spaghetti quite salty doesn’t mean I want to add salt to the dessert!
That’s all besides the original point being that a rigged system is one where the best do not rise to the top, so even if our socioeconomic system and… Starcraft streamers (lol) were comparable categorically, which shouldn’t have to be said they in any way aren’t, the OG point is precisely that so much talent goes underutilized and glory unrealized due to a lack of broad cultivation and opportunity.
I don’t get what makes people this way, with such small souls, just painstakingly intent on being miserly. Same thing with JK Rowling, she has all the money in the world to have the wildest pleasures or to leave everything and go off to some yurt for a spiritual search and instead she just purposefully acts in the most destructive and self-constricting manner. And this applies more generally to the awash-in-cash techbro and rationalist sets as well. You have the resources to do really interesting things, and yet you dedicate your time to making Juiceros.
Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:
If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.
What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:
What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”
