E Pur Si Muove
blog.samaltman.com
E Pur Si Muove
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Re: E Pur Si Muove
#2Don't be so dramatic. Baylife has always been terrible, but it was affordable in the past, so people put up with it.
If you care too much about what other people think of you, then you possibly aren't spending enough time thinking about things that aren't people.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#3Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full
of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took
it personally.
Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't
being told that they were wrong that offended them, though. It was the
underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about _anything_.
So on the Night in Question the night-- of Avi's fateful call -- Randy had done
what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation.
In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
-- Cryptonomicon, 1999.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#4I've noticed similar, that a lot of people here in SF live in a fairly-well-intentioned bubble and are super vocal sometimes to the point of socially castrating when you don't agree with them.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#5Next time he's in China maybe he should think about donating some money to a local union and see how free the speech is there. I'm no fan of the Bay Area but comparing to China freedom of speech is a bit weird.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#6I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science.
Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.
Particularly when we start involving healthcare, a "move fast/break things" type approach can be extremely detrimental, for example.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#7Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized?
Me: let's extend life
Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical
Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#8Next time he's in China maybe he should think about donating some money to a local union and see how free the speech is there. I'm no fan of the Bay Area but comparing to China freedom of speech is a bit weird.
That struck me as ridiculous. If you piss off the mayor of SF you don't get disappeared, but that very much does happen in China.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#9Next time he's in China maybe he should think about donating some money to a local union and see how free the speech is there. I'm no fan of the Bay Area but comparing to China freedom of speech is a bit weird.
Or conversely, maybe we should listen to people who are pointing out that we arn't as free as we think we are, and people who we think are more constrained may not be.
It's a good thesis to try and prove.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#10Thank you Sam for speaking out about this.
Every few months living in the Bay reminds me of the importance of Paul Graham's http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring.