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Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

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Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#171

Post by Recurecur »

dinfinity wrote: post #161
wdr1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency. Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've f…

> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government]. To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency? I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones a…

One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.

Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.

Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#172

Post by kergonath »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #147

> "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-c…

Sometimes, 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?

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#173

Post by taurath »

lordgrenville wrote: post #155
swiftcoder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Lucky we have the counterexample of a tech company run by a guy who did a humanities PhD under Jürgen Habermas...Palantir.

In his case, it could be called opposition research

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#174

Post by qiine »

ReptileMan wrote: post #81
Trasmatta wrote: post #36

I 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 th…

Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.

Does this include Pippin ?

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#177

Post by owisd »

ETH_start wrote: post #127
flir wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 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")

I'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.

The 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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#178

Post by AngryData »

MarkusQ wrote: post #153
bawolff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being 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 other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class. that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You do…

Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support. https://thetechleaders.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-exploring...

Compared the the majority of the population in the US, and like 95% of the population in South Africa, he seemed to grow up pretty damn wealthy. Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.

No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did, but part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.

If you don't think Musk grew up wealthy after listening to what he says about his childhood, I could only assume you also grew up in an extremely privileged environment and just don't realize how far above the median your life was.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#179

Post by flir »

ETH_start wrote: post #127
flir wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 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")

I'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.

Fair enough. But why stats from 1950?

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#180

Post by Lerc »

taurath wrote: post #173
lordgrenville wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky we have the counterexample of a tech company run by a guy who did a humanities PhD under Jürgen Habermas...Palantir.

In his case, it could be called opposition research

And thus you have demonstrated the irrelevance of academic background as a meaningful data point for explaining motivations at the individual level.
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