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That said, ads absolutely don’t belong next to the page title and the site itself feels a bit confusing. I read a few articles and they’re interesting, but the Issues and Events pages are honestly leagues ahead of the rest of the site.
Something that strikes me every time I encounter SV Rationalism presented this way is the self-annihilation of it: tastes and preferences are to be optimized out as cognitive biases, grey uniforms mandated in lieu of individual expression (fashion). The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress" I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if…
Art takes many forms, and not everyone need be interested in the same kind of art.
There's plenty of aesthetic consideration that goes into scientific and technological projects. Consider the huge stack of technologies starting with silicon to massive computing clusters and code-bases with hundreds of millions of lines of code running on them. It's an impressive feat of science and technology, but the many pieces that go into making them also have an austere beauty of their own, often constrained by the need to be actually useful in an unforgiving world.
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> Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true. People who have all their needs met (food and safety, social, etc) tend to want to make the world around them better. I would wager the nice looking places are more likely to have well-treated people. Places that look like dumps are the ones more likely to be populated by people who are treated poorly.
unrealistic expectation. The city is hyper–clean because anyone who litters is shot.
This piece totally misreads the temperament of actual builders imo. The author confuses a malicious will to power with a genuine, if sometimes naive, optimism that code/crypto can solve human coordination problems.
I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.
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I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.
No idea why you're getting downvoted. That's exactly how it played out. Though the "mass of people" rapidly lost their naivete.
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It does if you don't want a worse privately owned government. Either the government will stop crime, or Palantir and the Pinkertons will stop anything they seem to be crime, or there never was any crime.
No it doesn't. Libertarianism is just fine with the government working to prevent crimes. That is one of the main roles libertarians feel the government should fulfill!
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unrealistic expectation. The city is hyper–clean because anyone who litters is shot.
Or because people in the community have pride in the community. One of the differences I've noticed between Hawaii and Tahiti is in how dirty and messed up the buildings and streets are. In Hawaii there's more of a "community spirit" that tends to encourage cleanliness. I felt more despair from Tahiti.
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I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.
Although that may be a lack of historical knowledge on my part, Lenin does not strike me as suffering from a thirst of power but as sincere ideologue (in rare combination with a good dose of pragmatism, see his critique and later repression of "leftists" and his adoption of the NEP)
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> a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism. Your definition, maybe. Redefining that idea and assuming it is accepted as fact is a touch arrogant.
I'm not assuming or defining anything, just summarizing my observations of how self-proclaimed libertarians behave.