#Tech Bro libertarians

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

If I could be arsed to learn how to edit videos and had some kind of mic, I would 110% make a two part video essay series on the politics of Jurassic World because MY GOD, there's so much to dissect.

The first part would be about how the park is the epitome of neoliberal futurism for techbros, including the way the park so easily falls apart though I doubt that aspect is purposeful. Everything is aesthetic first and function second, and we can't possibly use any of the reliable infrastructure we've already come up with because a train is not gonna get us to Mars, but a monorail might.

And the second would be about the buckwild terrible gender politics going on. The movie is deeply unsympathetic to Claire seemingly because she's a woman who prioritised her career as it's both centre to her character arc and also an inciting event of one of the plots. Not to mention the whole Zara thing or the Owen and Claire thing or the stupid "him, I meant him, line. The movie is rife with misogyny, but it feels like that specific misogyny was isekaied over from backlash to second wave feminism.

I could talk about it all for so long because in a way, it feels like a perfect time capsule for 2015. Back when people took Claire running in heels to be this feminist statement to be made fun of and not just a deeply misogynistic movie trying to sell you feminism. And back when Elon Musk managed to get away with his "I'm the real life Iron Man" shit, and people believed he was smart and all his plans would come to fruition. 2015 was a great time to be a tech bro in Silicon Valley with people just throwing money at all your fake promises.

Yeah. See. This is what I mean when I say I could talk about it forever.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."

Capitalists hate capitalism. Capitalism is defined by risk – like the risk of competitors poaching your customers and workers. Capitalists all secretly dream of a "command economy" in which other people have to arrange their affairs to suit the capitalists' preferences, taking the risk off their shoulders. Capitalists love anti-competitive exclusivity deals with suppliers, and they really love noncompete "agreements" that ban their workers from taking better jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

One of the sleaziest, most common ways for capitalists to shed risk is by shifting it onto their workers' shoulders, for example, by sending workers home on slow days and refusing to pay them for the rest of their shifts. This is easy for capitalists to do because workers have a collective action problem: for workers to force their bosses not to do this, they all have to agree to go on strike, and other workers have to honor their picket-lines. That's a lot of chivvying and bargaining and group-forming, and it's very hard. Meanwhile, the only person the boss needs to convince to screw you this way is themself.

Libertarians will insist that this is impossible, of course, because workers will just quit and go work for someone else when this happens, and so bosses will be disciplined by the competition to find workers willing to put up with their bullshit. Of course, these same libertarians will tell you that it should be legal for your boss to require you to sign a noncompete "agreement" so you can't quit and get a job elsewhere in your field. They'll also tell you that we don't need antitrust enforcement to prevent your boss from buying up all the businesses you might work for if you do manage to quit.

In practice, the only way workers have successfully resisted being burdened with their bosses' risks is by a) forming a union, and then b) using the union to lobby for strong labor laws. Labor laws aren't a substitute for a union, but they are an important backstop, and of course, if you're not unionized, labor law is all you've got.

Enter the tech-bro, app in hand. The tech-bro's most absurd (and successful) ruse is "it's not a crime, I did it with an app." As in "it's not money-laundering, I did it with an app." Or "it's not a privacy violation, I did it with an app." Or "it's not securities fraud, I did it with an app." Or "it's not price-gouging, I did it with an app," or, importantly, "it's not a labor-law violation, I did it with an app."

The point of the "gig economy" is to use the "did it with an app" trick to avoid labor laws, so that bosses can shift risks onto workers, because capitalists hate capitalism. These apps were first used to immiserate taxi-drivers, and this was so successful that it spawned a whole universe of "Uber for __________" apps that took away labor rights from other kinds of workers, from dog-groomers to carpenters.

One group of workers whose rights are being devoured by gig-work apps is nurses, which is bad news, because without nurses, I would be dead by now.

A new report from the Roosevelt Institute goes deep on the way that nurses' lives are being destroyed by gig work apps that let bosses in America's wildly dysfunctional for-profit health care industry shift risk from bosses to the hardest-working group of health care professionals:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The report's authors interviewed nurses who were employed through three apps: Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev, and reveal a host of risk-shifting, worker-abusing practices that has nurses working for so little that they can't afford medical insurance themselves.

Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of those shifts later but can't take them, their app-based score declines and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn't guarantee that you'll get work on any of those shifts – in other words, nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won't be enough demand for their services.

Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift. Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you. This is a classic example of what the legal scholar Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination" – a form of wage theft that's supposedly legal because it's done with an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Shiftkey workers also have to bid against one another for shifts, with the job going to the worker who accepts the lowest wage. Shiftkey pays nominal wages that sound reasonable – one nurse's topline rate is $23/hour. But by payday, Shiftkey has used junk fees to scrape that rate down to the bone. Workers have to pay a daily $3.67 "safety fee" to pay for background checks, drug screening, etc. Nevermind that these tasks are only performed once per nurse, not every day – and nevermind that this is another way to force workers to assume the boss's risks. Nurses also pay daily fees for accident insurance ($2.14) and malpractice insurance ($0.21) – more employer risk being shifted onto workers. Workers also pay $2 per shift if they want to get paid on the same day – a payday lending-style usury levied against workers whose wages are priced based on their desperation. Then there's a $6/shift fee nurses pay as a finders' fee to the app, a fee that's up to $7/shift next year. All told, that $23/hour rate cashes out to $13/hour.

On top of that, gig nurses have to pay for their own uniforms, licenses, equipment and equipment, including different colored scrubs and even shoes for each hospital. And because these nurses are "their own bosses" they have to deduct their own payroll taxes from that final figure. As "self-employed" workers, they aren't entitled to overtime or worker's comp, they get no retirement plan, health insurance, sick days or vacation.

The apps sell themselves to bosses as a way to get vetted, qualified nurses, but the entire vetting process is automated. Nurses upload a laundry list of documents related to their qualifications and undergo a background check, but are never interviewed by a human. They are assessed through automated means – for example, they have to run a location-tracking app en route to callouts and their reliability scores decline if they lose mobile data service while stuck in traffic.

Shiftmed docks nurses who cancel shifts after agreeing to take them, but bosses who cancel on nurses, even at the last minute, get away at most a small penalty (having to pay for the first two hours of a canceled shift), or, more often, nothing at all. For example, bosses who book nurses through the Carerev app can cancel without penalty on a mere two hours' notice. One nurse quoted in the study describes getting up at 5AM for a 7AM shift, only to discover that the shift was canceled while she slept, leaving her without any work or pay for the day, after having made arrangements for her kid to get childcare. The nurse assumes all the risk again: blocking out a day's work, paying for childcare, altering her sleep schedule. If she cancels on Carerev, her score goes down and she will get fewer shifts in the future. But if the boss cancels, he faces no consequences.

Carerev also lets bosses send nurses home early without paying them for the whole day – and they don't pay overtime if a nurse stays after her shift ends in order to ensure that their patients are cared for. The librarian scholar Fobazi Ettarh coined the term "vocational awe" to describe how workers in caring professions will endure abusive conditions and put in unpaid overtime because of their commitment to the patrons, patients, and pupils who depend on them:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Many of the nurses in the study report having shifts canceled on them as they pull into the hospital parking lot. Needless to say, when your shift is canceled just as it was supposed to start, it's unlikely you'll be able to book a shift at another facility.

The American healthcare industry is dominated by monopolies. First came the pharma monopolies, when pharma companies merged and merged and merged, allowing them to screw hospitals with sky-high prices. Then the hospitals gobbled each other up, merging until most regions were dominated by one or two hospital chains, who could use buyer power to get a better deal on pharma prices – but also use seller power to screw the insurers with outrageous prices for care. So the insurers merged, too, until they could fight hospital price-gouging.

Everywhere you turn in the healthcare industry, you find another monopolist: pharmacists and pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, medical beds, saline and supplies. Monopoly begets monopoly.

(Unitedhealthcare is extraordinary in that its divisions are among the most powerful players in all of these sectors, making it a monopolist among monopolists – for example, UHC is the nation's largest employer of physicians:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-big-medicine

But there two key stakeholders in American health-care who can't monopolize: patients and health-care workers. We are the disorganized, loose, flapping ends at the beginning and end of the healthcare supply-chain. We are easy pickings for the monopolists in the middle, which is why patients pay more for worse care every year, and why healthcare workers get paid less for worse working conditions every year.

This is the one area where the Biden administration indisputably took action, bringing cases, making rules, and freaking out investment bankers and billionaires by repeatedly announcing that crimes were still crimes, even if you used an app to commit them.

The kind of treatment these apps mete out to nurses is illegal, app or no. In an important speech just last month, FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya explained how the FTC Act empowered the agency to shut down this kind of bossware because it is an "unfair and deceptive" form of competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

This is the kind of thing the FTC could be doing. Will Trump's FTC actually do it? The Trump campaign called the FTC "politicized" – but Trump's pick for the next FTC chair has vowed to politicize it even more:

https://theintercept.com/2024/12/18/trump-ftc-andrew-ferguson-ticket-fees/

Like Biden's FTC, Trump's FTC will have a target-rich environment if it wants to bring enforcement actions on behalf of workers. But Biden's trustbusters chose their targets by giving priority to the crooked companies that were doing the most harm to Americans, while Trump's trustbusters are more likely to give priority to the crooked companies that Trump personally dislikes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

So if one of these nursing apps pisses off Trump or one of his cronies, then yeah, maybe those nurses will get justice.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image. It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful. “It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.” As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.

The broligarchs’ vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality

The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors. Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said. And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.” All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or übermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

[...]

The broligarchs — because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley and not 19th-century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.

Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence. For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.

Vox has an insightful article on the disastrous vision that broligarchs like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg subscribe to.

[andreablog2]

One thing abt the Luigi thing is how it breaks the mold of being able to scapegoat certain subcultures. From the 50s up into recently “radical left” had a specific look media outlets could run with and vilify, from beatniks and hippies to woke sjws and just anyone who protests. The Luigi guy basically kept up the appearance of a well adjusted life and all images of him look very broy and tinder friendly. Even the way he dipped out of society would raise no red flags given age and area of industry.. I think this causes more focus to his ideology, that in all honesty is a modified form of libertarianism with more steps and ambiguity that allows for more opportunism in whatever circles he was trying to gain something from. His “political incoherence” is a hallmark of tech bros. It’s kind a relief he’s white and not queer or outwardly creative, though the Monopoly money was gagy. Because his milieu of upper class tech bros is essential to the American defense system in this moment, it’s not a group of people that’s wise to slander …from a political maneuvering perspective on the establishment right or left …so there’s this weird tension of what to vilify him for other than the principles of murder…which itself has has been argued in Luigi’s favor by millions online. It’s going to be hard to vilify every granny with nothing to lose who feels emboldened to complain about their insurance. Especially as like on the world stage, this is what America gets clowned on the most for, both gun violence and healthcare.

[misfitwashere]

Trump's attack on the American mind

Behind his closure of the Education Department, his assault on higher education, on science, and on libraries and museums, lie the oligarchs of the techno-state.

ROBERT REICH

MAR 20

Friends,

Today, Trump is dismantling the Department of Education. He’s ordering wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut her department. 

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago. 

But there’s a much larger plan here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research), and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

Put this together with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science, 

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors. 

And Trump’s and rightwing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide. 

Put this together with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

Combine this with his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president). 

What’s the larger picture? What’s the overall purpose? 

Not to mount an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “a culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Or that Trump seeking “small government” over “big government,” or is advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism. 

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind. 

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books. 

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. 

Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education; and for public libraries, museums, and the arts. They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it. 

Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind. 

The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president; and from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk. 

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient, and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control. 

Be warned.

[chongoblog]

help me feature-length video essays completely dismantling tech bro libertarians

[katherinakaina]

Hello, @strange-aeons . I’ve been a fan of yours for several years. Unfortunately, your last video is very poorly researched, up to not understanding basic definitions. Please read at least a little bit of this.

TLDR: Rationality and rationalism are two different things. Rationality is not about relishing in being right, it’s about searching for the ways in which you are still wrong. And just subscribing to a philosophy is not enough to make you perfect, no one has argued that. Yes, MIRI failed and we aren't hiding from this fact, the community is pushing for regulations or a total ban on AI capabilities research at the moment. The community is very diverse and very queer. SA happens in any group and demographic, it’s a pretty disingenuous way to discredit us.

First, 101 rationality understanding real quick. It’s rationality, not rationalism. Rationalism is a philosophy about Pure Reason being enough for getting the accurate picture of reality. That is bollocks. Turns out you have to actually do science*.

Epistemic Rationality is basically about doing science. As in, trying to obtain the most correct picture of reality by all means available. Then Instrumental Rationality is about trying to make the best decisions with this information. It’s all very common sense and I would guess you’d actually agree with most of it if you just stopped strawmanning. For example:

I saw you agree with the assessment that rationalism is a philosophy that proclaims itself to be correct. I assume you actually think that the rationalist community is this way. That reminds me of people who attack science for ‘those big brain jerks think they already know everything!’ betraying a lack of rudimentary grasp on what science is. In both theory and practice it’s mostly about searching for the places where you are still wrong (to become less wrong, get it?) and correcting your mistakes time and time again**.

It’s actually very similar to how we leftists approach social issues, always checking our privileges, always listening to minorities and always expanding our understanding of oppressive structures. Can being a leftist make someone a bit arrogant and insufferable as if they’re already perfect and have nothing more to learn? Many such cases. Same with rationalists. It’s Dunning–Kruger effect, it’s the same for every field where the point is to become better. People start, quickly learn a lot, become a bit annoying about it, then they are humbled mostly by members of their own community.

Second, you decided based on vibes that the rationalist community is a bunch of sexist elitist tech bros. You didn’t collect testimonials like you often do for your other projects. It looks like you just read a bunch of articles and listened to podcasts made by other biased individuals and maybe looked for ridiculous sounding threads on forums to confirm your suspicions*** (or just took them at their word).

And while it is generally true that ‘something only men are interested in is never cool’, LessWrong adjacent rationality is not that. It’s a giant worldwide community that is very diverse. It is maybe half shy nerdy guys and the other half is women and queer people, also shy and nerdy (read neurodivergent, overwhelmingly). It’s the most pro-feminist and sex positive community I personally encountered outside of feminist and queer communities themselves – and it’s in Russia, even rationalists aren’t too woke over here. The situation is way better in Europe from what I’m able to see in the group chats. All my friends are rationalists and all of them are queer (I do talk to other people, don't you worry, I watch you!).

The community is also politically diverse as well. While the overwhelming majority is liberal, there are many left leaning people as well. There are (unfortunately) many libertarians in the mix and a few conservatives (those who don’t mind being disagreed with most of the time). The thing is the community tries to discourage political tribalism and foster an issue-by-issue discussion instead. So there’s always a percentage of people who disagree with the consensus opinion on every topic, discussion is always happening. And because people are trying to be all evidence-based over there, minds are actually being changed****.

The community isn’t without its biases. The entire MIRI idea was based on this fantasy of a group of math geniuses saving the world, finding the perfect solution even though no one believed in them (including many people within the rationalist community itself). Well, now the realization kicks in that they failed and the problem of AI alignment is way more complex than they thought (if solvable at all) and the actual solution is to push for AI regulations. That’s the state of the AI safety conversation right now. It’s either ‘shut it down’ or ‘put them under the heaviest scrutiny’. Almost no one thinks they have the time to change the course of the iceberg anymore. And yes, they do focus on existential risks but it’s not like they appreciate all the harm AI does on its way to destroy the world.

I’m not going to elaborate too much on how rationality techniques improve my life in ways big and small or we’ll be here all day (it’s mostly problem solving and conflict resolution). But the crucial thing is that LessWrong never claimed humans are perfect robots or have a potential to be perfect robots or can be easily turned into perfect robots. How shit human brains are at actual reasoning if left to their own devices is the entire point (that’s why it is not rationalism in any way).

An analogy sometimes used is martial arts. People can fight with no training, they have some in-born fighting capabilities. But hoo boy does training help. Actual training, years of practice, constant effort of keeping yourself in shape. Not a correct philosophy or one course. Does this sound exhausting? Well, you are neither a scientist nor a sportsman. But some people really do take self improvement seriously and really are this ambitious. Most are practising recreationally, however. And it’s fine. Few people who run twice a week believe themselves to be olympic runners. Few church goers believe themselves to be monks. Few regular leftists believe themselves to be revolutionaries. And few casual rationalists believe themselves to be big time researchers or scientists. But exercising a little is still better than rotting on the couch.

Speaking of couches. As I mentioned, the community is very sex positive. Very kink friendly, very supportive of polyamory and trying out new things just to experiment. Even in the perfect world with no patriarchy involved there would be a bunch of drama caused by just regular human behaviour. Unfortunately, there is patriarchy involved and there are a lot of women in the community. So, a bunch of sex scandals did happen. But framing it as ‘these people don’t respect women, what a surprise’ is highly misleading. By that line of reasoning you could discredit any movement or demographic. The tactic that is indeed used by the right all the time against trans people, immigrants, democratic party, you name it.

And LessWrong isn’t a country. If women felt unwelcomed, they’d leave, like they leave industries and fandoms. Like they leave most ‘intellectual’ communities because they are often hostile to women and queer people. LessWrong is a rare exception and women rarely leave it. They feel very welcomed, in fact. They own the place in many cases (like my first local meetup in one of Russian cities that was run by a wonderful lady).

Yes, it’s not perfect and people are constantly trying to make it better. But it's a general patriarchy thing that was not caused by LessWrong or rationality. The same way there’s rampant misogyny on the left as well and we talk about it but we aren’t cancelling the left, are we?

More about Ziz here.

About hpmor here.

* There’s a saying ‘Logic is true in any universe, but it doesn’t tell you which universe you are in’.

** In fact, even calling yourself a 'rationalist' is something that's being challenged. A preferred term is an 'aspiring rationalist', to empathize that no one here is actually rational, that we all are just trying to be a bit more rational to the best of our abilities. I personally don't use it but many people do.

*** Forums are very big and all sorts of controversial topics are discussed there. It’s not surprising to find threads about accelerationism or longtermism or decision theory that lead to ridiculous conclusions. All of those are controversial but people need a place to talk about it, that’s the whole point.

**** It is way more difficult on political issues than on random science topics. I hope I don’t have to explain why.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Friends,

Yesterday, Trump dismantled much of the Department of Education. He ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

But there’s a much larger story here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors.

And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science.

With Trump’s and right-wing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide.

Combine this with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

And his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president).

What’s the larger picture?

Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Certainly not that Trump is seeking “small government” over “big government” or advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism.

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education and for public libraries, museums, and the arts.

They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it.

Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind.

The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: from JD Vance and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president. And from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian group of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.

Be warned.

[romicat]

I've recently found @shokuto who has been doing some headcannons and snippets and fanart based on what they think Kamala would've look like in the Ultimate Earth-1610. So I've been thinking about what I would like Kamala to look like on Earth 6160.

While I think Kamala would work great in pretty much any corner of 6160, and the North American Union has been the focal point a big chunk of the new Ultimate line already. . . I kind of want to keep her in New Jersey.

Like I've said in another post: All her villains slide pretty effortlessly into the North American Union pseudo libertarian/anarcho-capitalist "everything is controlled by capital and corporations". The Inventor and Dr Gaiha being in the tech sector. Monopoly is already a play on tech bro CEOs who focus primarily on growth above all else and form a cult of personality around themselves. Lockdown gets reworked as a security firm that becomes a thorn in Kamala's side.

There are no super heroes for Kamala to admire. They only recently started to surface, acting as insurgents. But you know what there are? The precursors to superheroes.

Yep, just like in the Heroes Reborn Universe, my version of 6160 Kamala is a history nerd.

More specifically, I picture her as a history teacher. Age wise, she's in her mid 20's, just getting her life started. She's working at one of the many private primary schools in New Jersey, teaching World History. She's living in a two-bedroom apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world with 3 other friends.

[animentality]

I consider Tumblr and Reddit to be more natural enemies to lovers than Twitter and Tumblr.

While Reddit is crawling with tech bros and libertarian anarchists and hentai obsessed gamer degenerates, it has more in common than you would think, as a resident of Tumblr.

Unlike Twitter and Tiktok, Reddit can be perfectly tailored to your interests. Like Tumblr, you follow only subreddits/users that you want to hear from, and can totally ignore Popular or Trending or algorithmic content. You can build your own little communities and only interact when you choose to.

You can be just-just this weird...weird little guy.

Obsessed with this very specific niche THinG that other people who are fans of this very specific niche ThinG can find and hang out with.

And sure, not everyone on Tumblr or Reddit is nice about it, but.

There is a community, to be found.

Reddit and Tumblr are made up of little communities, that can and do exclude people who try to destroy the things you build.

So while I get the kneejerk reaction of this tiny little bat cave, hissing as someone shines a light inside, I still encourage you all to try to be nice to new users here.

They're learning.

And if they've left Reddit, well. The culture shock will wear off eventually.

They'll be weirdos on Tumblr soon enough. Instead of just weirdos on Reddit.

[flyingfishtailoutpost1]

Doing the annual report at work, and I’m like oouuuaagghhhhh This Is Borrrriing. Our microtech, who’s an annoying libertarian tech bro, was just like, so, use ChatGPT to do it? I told him that it’s not that kind of report, I’m clicking in fields to fill in data I already have, also ChatGPT can go fuck itself, but also…in what universe will feeding tons and tons of library data and circulation stats into an AI machine and proofreading all the crap it spits out be ANY LESS BORING????

He was like…what do you mean “proof-read it”???

[saltmalkin]

Here's what that anon was talking about! In essence, the BlueSky terms of service have some boilerplate legal stuff about how they need the right to use content uploaded to the service, it's all pretty standard for a social media site. You'll notice this person's tweet got, like, half a million views; they're the main propagator of the 'BlueSky feeds your content to generative AI' theory that BlueSky staff have publicly said just isn't true. I do think there's merit to other peoples' complaints about BlueSky's hate group toggle, though; the way the platform's moderation is supposedly going to work is to have the community vote on what is and isn't a hate group at some point in the future. The supposed goal is to have new features, priorities, and even stuff like content moderation rules be voted on by the userbase, but ultimately it's up to BlueSky staff to enforce those decisions and it's no secret their leadership is to some degree libertarian or conservative-minded.

Of all the potential Twitter replacements I think it has the most promise, but we'll have to wait and see whether the tech bro mindset runs it into the ground. It's decentralized, and the stated goal is to have other people run their own federated BlueSky instances for people who aren't interested in the way the main instance is governed, so in essence it's a simpler-for-the-end-user Mastodon that's built on a different codebase. I think it's worth hopping onto BlueSky's waitlist to reserve a username and check it out if you're worried about Twitter's collapse.

Ah okay, this all makes sense. I've been making accounts on all the new places but haven't hedged my bets into any of them yet. Probably will continue to do that - thank you for the info!

[pscottm]

Crypto is for Criming

The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends.

The hypocrisy here is thick enough to cut with a knife. If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts.

What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

[inoppositionflorien]

In further proof that the "tech bro" is not a coherent categorization of individual nor description of some ideological mindset held in common among a particular group, they are also considered an enemy by conservatives, but with an almost entirely different set of beliefs attached to them.

Pretty much the only thing the two views have in common are "vaguely libertarian in an economic sense" and when you consider the capitalist libertarian view on them (which is yet another thing, they also often have the Tech Bro as the Enemy) doesn't include that as part of the package (they often see them as monopolistic in tendency and quashing competition unjustly, and overreliant on the government) it becomes even clearer that this is the case.

[female-malice]

Burning Man is pathetic and disgusting. Wealthy libertarian tech bros absolutely destroying the environment just so they can commit sex crimes in the desert.

These freaks believe in settler colonial values first and foremost. They are the truest representatives of American "pioneer" culture. That's what makes them so insufferable.

They were blockaded by environmental activists who were making simple and reasonable demands. So naturally, they called their cop buddies and had them brutalize these environmental activists who were mostly women.

Oh and just in case you thought they couldn't be any worse... they're also NIMBYs. They're rich neoliberal sex crime NIMBYs.

[misfitwashere]

Vance and the future of the anti-democracy movement 

Vance has been anointed its future leader

ROBERT REICH

OCT 3

Trump, Vance, Thiel 

Friends,

JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Trump wins in November.

But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull? 

Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?

In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Vance refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6, 2021. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.

Trump picked Vance for his vice president because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do: overturn democracy and place America under MAGA control.

In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos put to Vance last February — “Had you been vice president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” — Vance said:

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”

In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion.”

Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory,” Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”

In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny them to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in America.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.

Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with the former president when urging Trump to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn America away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

That’s the point. Thiel and Vance — along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement — believe that the only way true libertarians can win in America is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the American establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—” as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the American establishment with an authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: The foundation for America’s first true anti-democracy president is being laid right now.