faceh
20hr ago
I sometimes wonder how much the valuation of those companies (and hell, the entire stock market) is impacted by the pure actuarial odds of Musk getting into a fatal accident or straight dropping dead.
The valuation of Berkshire Hathaway continuing to rise even as Warren Buffett reaches ancient age is a hint that maybe it is less than we think. But that's a very different industry.
The "problems" I view with the culture in rationalist and immediately rationalist adjacent communities is pretty much exactly what you alluded to.
Tossing aside norms and traditions because they can reason out rules that work better and a more universally applicable morality. Whilst eliding that norms and traditions that survive are carrying important information and aren't just noise.
Relatedly, an tendency to write off second order consequences that happen to other people. I'm specifically thinking of the embrace of polyamory for this and the previous one. Rationalist morality seems to care a lot about the individual... and a lot about humanity as a whole.
And finally, the ad hoc reconstruction of certain norms and rules from 'first principles' whilst almost never acknowledging that's what they're doing. "We went through a very circuitous journey of discovery and we've wound up in almost the exact place that things started out, and we learned so many useful things along the way (that most 'normal' folks already know and consider 'common sense')! How fun!"
This is my take on EA, ultimately. "We can do philanthropy CORRECTLY by throwing out the extant playbook and starting from scratch with proper axioms, measurable goals, and airtight logical reasoning. Aahhhhg where'd all these grifters come from? Why are we falling prey to edge cases constantly? Why are all these people mad at us when we just want to improve the lives of shrimp?"
In short, when they're relegated to their laboratory in Berkeley to work and play amongst themselves they seem to get on just fine as things go. Interacting with the outside world they often project a "we're not weird, you normal folks are just doing EVERYTHING wrong!" attitude, and yet they haven't really been able to demonstrate that their way of operating (culturally, that is!) is a workable system given the substrate that our civilization is actually made of/running on.
Which hey, write all the fanfiction you want about a superior, uberrational alternate universe where things are done better! But end of day you're living in this one.
What you're hitting on seems to be a manifestation of this sort of hubris. Maybe its justified.
I think Rationalists et al. would do a lot better if they approached norms and traditions with a via negativa approach. Don't start from scratch. Remove one (1) given rule and see what changes. Then maybe another one. If something breaks then reinstate a rule. And don't slice through multiple rules in one fell swoop, especially ones that look particularly load-bearing, EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE THEM WITH NEW, MORE OPTIMIZED RULES.
If you're going to remove rules/taboos on casual, public sex... don't ALSO remove taboos on involving young kids in sexual activities/exposing them to strangers in sexual situations. Especially if you've also removed rules/taboos on drug use and, call it 'self modification' from tattoos to top surgery (fair admission: I am presuming that this stuff goes on at vibecamp).
Increasing the risk of sexual assault (and the attendant trauma and mental health issues) is certainly one possible outcome there, but you're basically banking on every individual attendee to, I dunno, intuit the proper boundaries of behavior when there are kids around, after you've already gone ahead and blurred the lines to an absurd degree?
I think a person of average intelligence but more 'standard' upbringing can foresee the failure modes there pretty easily.
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