fozz
1yr ago
I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.
And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.
Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.
Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.
They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.
My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.
Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.
Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.
#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.
As someone who is very annoyed by what one might call the 'attitude of victimhood', I've come to be persuaded victimhood and privilege are the defining characteristics of any discussion about ethics, and by extension politics. I've done so reluctantly, using objective assessment.
While the manifestations of Wokeism are often clumsy and wrongheaded and outright ridiculous for some of the reasons you cite ('emotional bigotry' makes some sense), the beating heart of the movement seems to have the correct moral intuition that life isn't fair & there are things we can do to correct the most egregious outgrowths of this in order to alleviate suffering & expand flourishing.
It's more than sustainability, as I said, though I think sustainability is at the heart of the issue and will be fine for this discussion.
I'm advocating for a sort of hybrid of utilitarianism & deontology. Ultimately, the ends are what matter. But it turns out the best way of ensuring sustainably good ends involves honoring certain non-strictly-utilitarian principles in certain circumstances.
In your thought experiment, I'd say a correct moral decision would be for the patient to choose to die in order to save the four people who would benefit from his organs. The logic is related non-directed organ donations, where the donor lives.
Deontologically, we'd need to normalize rational, voluntary personal sacrifice such that surgeons would never need to accidently kill patients on purpose to maximize life-saving organ availability. People ought to recognize suffering (regardless of proximity) & feel a very natural obligation to help—as in the child drowning in a shallow pond.
Yes, I am saying people should be willing to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of others. If by your death you can save 10 other people, while I'm sure we can imagine lots of creative exceptions (e.g. they were 10 Hitlers), but it's generally, and obviously, the right thing to do.
EA recognizes this foundational principle of self-sacrifice.
Giving away all your wealth above subsistence is whack-a-doodle & flies in the face of all of economics. But people are doing it. They're also donating organs to strangers. This will grow to greater and greater levels of sacrifice. Because the logic is airtight. It feels super hard, but there is no escaping the logic.
The characteristic that makes this non-political is that the government (roughly in the same position as the surgeon) has no say in any of this. Your choice to sacrifice self for the sake of others is free and personal.
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