quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Free trade fundamentalism, open borders migration
Depending how much Trump chickens out of his favorite policies, this may actually be enough to win the elections.
In the past, the US has profited immensely both from free trade and from attracting the best and the brightest people of the world to their universities.
Trump's zero-sum mentality (roughly: "If we don't fuck over our trade partners, we are the ones getting fucked over") towards trade and the general xenophobia of the his administration both harm the US in this regard. Investment is kinda risky if you do not know if Trump will put immense tariffs on your raw materials. And if I wanted to study abroad, I would think twice before going to the US, which very much makes it clear that they do not want me to stay there. Canada, the UK, or China also have decent universities, and at least the first two are much less likely to cancel my visa over political views expressed online. And while a few professors might be DEI hires, their governments are not waging a war on the university system to get them to DEI-hire 50% Trumpists.
The lack of international students will only be felt in 10-15 years, but I think the tariffs are already felt. If the AI bubble bursts by 2028, and it becomes apparent that the Stargate money went down the drain, that will likely spell a recession.
In such an environment, the Democrats only will have to say "our economic policies are mainstream, like under Clinton, Obama, GWB", and that will be enough to attract voters.
Voting based on the positions on transgenders in bathrooms is something you can only afford to do if both parties have sane economic policies, after all.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
A lot of people with dark humor have been victims of the things that they joke about, by the way. I find it quite distasteful when people who haven't experienced such things accuse them of being insensitive, which is often what happens. Too much morality is performative, and I find this whole situation to be another instance of people point fingers at others in order to feel morally superior and score virtue signaling points, or at the very least it's a reaction prompted by fear (rather than goodwill, taste, actual concern, etc)
Agreed. There is this joke about a holocaust survivor dying, going to heaven and telling God a holocaust joke. God tells him that this is Not Funny. He replies, "well, I guess you just had to be there."
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Being anti-gay was an area where the Nazis went above and beyond tradition. Sure, there were a few Nazis who were able to get away with gay sex, allegedly, but the median man accused of sodomy would have very much preferred to be in the Kaiserreich.
The Nazis were not big on Christianity or traditional families. Basically, the Fuehrer needed cannon-fodder. Turning kids into Nazis was not the job of the family, but of their youth organizations. As long as both partners met the Nazi definition of racial purity, the Nazis had no problem with supporting single mothers.
Their economic politics are likewise downstream of their ideology. Like every aspect of the nation, the economy had to be under the control of the Fuehrer. That is hard to accomplish if your economy is based on small businesses, so favoring big companies made sense. Typically, non-Jewish industrialists were not considered enemies, a lot of them had supported the NSDAP financially and did thrive under them. But ultimately, the Nazis called the shots, telling Hitler that your factory would not produce tanks because you believed that cars would be a more profitable product would not have gone well.
I don't know a lot about Nazi art, but I think generally their culture was a melange of different trends which were in the water supply at the time, together with a largely faked appreciation of the pre-Christian history of the German peoples.
So I guess I mostly agree with you, the TL;DR version is that the Nazis were a revolutionary and not a conservative movement, even if they kept lots of the social structure in place and embraced their version of RETVRN. I think the Fascists and Francoists were more pro-Christian and pro traditional family values.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years.
Until a few years ago, mechanization has only been competing with some human skills. Skills which were automation-proof, such as truck driving, were well within reach of the median human. Sure, you would need to employ a lot more people to transport 40 tons of goods using horse-drawn carriages, but this was compensated by an explosion of shipping (as per-unit costs plummeted).
In the future Altman envisions, humans do not have a moat which prevents AI from eating their lunch. Perhaps there will be a minimum wage labor market for people being biodrones (just wear AR glasses for eight hours and follow the instructions) until robotics or neural interfacing catch up and provide better options. But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Chatgpt has millions of daily users.
The analogy would be an online shoe seller who spends investor capital to sell shoes at half to themselves, in the hope of cornering the market. Presumably, they would have an impressive revenue (if only because every shoe store starts buying from them).
Per WP, OpenAI has a revenue of 3.7G$ per year, and net losses of 5G$ per year, but their plan is to start burning through money much faster than that, for 2029 their goal is 115G$.
In my mind, this level of investment can only be worth it if they reach a game-changer threshold which far dwarfs anything AI has done so far. If their 2029 investment only yields net profits of 10G$/a, that will be their doom, because then it takes them them a decade just to recoup costs. And they will not have a decade before other models inevitably catch up to them (unless they burn through even more money).
Either they built an LLM which can do anything which an IQ 160 human can do, or they go bust.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Opposition to women’s suffrage is common.
That is not very reassuring, actually. It is also a platform which is widely unpopular. I guess that >90% of the women will oppose it, along a majority of men. The only way I see women losing the franchise is along with everyone else.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
We know this not least because Actual-Nazis had a historical record of being murderously serious about their agendas as identified in formal Nazi literature, and openly self-identified as Nazis in very serious contexts.
Come on, that is a strawman you are beating. Nobody is suggesting that these guys are members of the NSDAP, an organization which was disbanded long before they were born. Since 1945, only the very stupid have openly expressed admiration for the NSDAP in the Western world. The ones with a bit of a brain have noticed that openly flying the swastika is a good way to become a social outcast.
In Germany, there are numerous links between the far-right anti-migration AfD and neofascist organizations.
Imagine you are a 25yo white nationalist in today's America. Now you could get a swastika tattoo and join the Aryan Brotherhood or something, but then you will never make a difference. Or you could join one of the two major parties, and the one closer aligned to your views are the Republicans. Of course, merely supporting mainstream Republican policy will not save the White race, you want to increase support for your own world view.
Jokes in small groups are a great way to reach a common understanding that Nazis are not icky. Obviously not everyone who plays along is a Nazi, perhaps some only like the jokes because the SJ people are whining about the Nazis all the time, but it is very much a step in the right direction, moving the overton window where you want it to go.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
telling racist jokes is a shibboleth and tribal signal.
So naturally, you would also support lefty people joking about Kirk getting shot, which is likewise a very powerful shibboleth and tribal signal. Or Palestinians wearing para-glider badges after Oct-7.
(Personally, I feel an intense dislike for anyone who makes jokes which trivialize or celebrate either the holocaust, the Kirk assassination, or the Hamas attacks, but that is probably because I am a liberal snowflake.)
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think nobody suggested that the they should be investigated for conspiracy to commit murder wrt the gas chamber chat. Everyone understands that they were not seriously suggesting that.
However, the attitude of a group about what is or is not appropriate to joke about is often indicative of deeper beliefs. And there is such a thing as "haha only serious" (think Eliezer announcing MIRI's 'Dying with dignity' strategy on a first of April). Joking gives you plausible deniability to hint at deeper beliefs which are outside the groups overton window to state outright. If A is into B, A might joke about A being into B. It puts the possibility into the open without creating common knowledge.
If you do not want to expand the overton window in a certain direction, you typically would not make jokes in that direction. For example, if a guy tends to joke about having taken 20 cocks in the ass during the weekend, that will do little to cement his reputation as straight.
Take rape jokes, which are deeply outside the overton window today. The reason is not that they directly lead to rape, but that they serve as a completely deniable signal for the opinion "rape is acceptable". Not everyone who tells rape jokes is into rape culture, obviously, some people just like dark humor, but they can certainly be used to transport the message "rape is not a big deal".
So X making jokes about gas chambers does not mean that X is a Nazi who has read Mein Kampf five times. But it indicates that X regards updating his group's beliefs towards him being a Nazi at least neutrally.
Personally, I would like to see people indicating that they have noticed the skulls of those who came before them, and strive to learn from their mistakes.
If a leftwing group chat made jokes about the Holodomor, Mao or Pol Pot, this would make me very much disinclined to trust them with any power, as they have clearly not learned from the past. If a right-wing group chat thinks that gas chamber jokes are fun and edgy, that does not necessarily mean they will build Auschwitz 2.0 at the earliest opportunity, but still it is sufficient for me not wanting them to have any power either.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that almost all societies which are commonly labeled fascist did not use that as an endonym. Comes with the territory -- "we just adopted an ideology of the Italians" is a hard sell for ultra-nationalists.
I think there is a cluster in thing-space for the states of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and it is useful to have a word to reference that cluster, and the word their opponents have adopted for better or worse is fascism. One can debate how well it applies even to Franco and if it ever applied to any other states, of course.
Just because the SJ lets people pick some common identifiers it does not mean that individuals get to pick all identifiers. The SJ certainly does not like "I identify as native-American", and "I identify as assigned-female-at-birth" is absurd. Nor do we respect people deciding that they are not schizophrenic, but merely willing servants of the man in the moon.
Fascism as used by Eco is mostly an exonym, and it makes sense to have an exodefinition for that.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think blowing up Americans on US soil would be contrary to the interests of the Kremlin.
Trump has been solidly meh about Ukraine. Sometimes he chews out Zelenskyy for not dressing adequately, then he is angry at Putin for a bit for blowing up yet another hospital, or wanting them to agree to a peace so he finally gets his Nobel.
However, Trump does have a vindictive streak. Piss him off and he will still try to destroy you eight years later.
Putin blowing up Americans would piss off Trump badly because it would be interpreted as "he made me look bad". Him being on Trump's shitlist instead of having a relationship status of "it's complicated" would hurt his aims a lot more than the Tomahawk missiles.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think everyone who is not a radical pacifist will endorse the deliberate killing of other persons in some circumstances. Once you have conceded that, you are merely haggling over the price.
Fortunately, this is very moot in the contemporary US, because Trump can be easily voted out of office in about three years, which is a far better outcome than any violence could hope to accomplish. I also do not see him defeating the federal bureaucracy to the point where he can rig or suspend the elections, so even that hypothetical is not very relevant.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Frankly, MAGA has a lot more in common with fascism than being right-wing nationalist.
Taking Eco's definition, I would argue that MAGA checks about half the boxes.
The points which apply IMHO from WP:
- "The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
- "Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
- "Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
- "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
- "Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
- Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
- "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
- "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
I do not see the classic militarism (universal heroism, permanent warfare), Trump does not want his followers to die in Stalingrad for him, for the most part. The full rejection of the Enlightenment is probably limited to the retvrn crowd, and there is little embrace of (fake) tradition. Machismo is also rather absent, Trump has women in positions of power. Newspeak also does not seem a prominent feature, covfefe aside.
And of course, MAGA is also characterized by a denial of objective truth and widespread kleptocracy, and is ideologically too light-weight for classic fascism.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.
I agree that I was a bit uncharitable. That being said, I am unconvinced that I am entirely wrong. For example, calling Catholicism a doomsday cult would be silly. From my very laymen understanding, Early Christianity did have a bit of an apocalyptic streak (e.g. Book of Revelations, ca. 95 CE).
The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.
I guess his fears make more sense from the perspective of a billionaire. The current Gini index is only stable in periods of exponential growth. As long as every generation has a life substantially better than their parents, few care too much if the billionaires are owning more and more. One the cake stops growing, they will likely have strong opinions on its current distribution ratio, which might easily end the billionaire class and thus, civilization, from their point of view. ('Humans might survive, but without private helicopters and space tourism, as mere animals nesting in suburban homes' or something along the lines.)
I will grant you that the reading "perpetual technological growth is the only way to keep the present society stable, so anyone who threatens that (i.e. Greta, Eliezer) are agents of chaos, i.e. the antichrist." would be a self-consistent philosophical position.
Of course, the god of perpetual exponential growth is likely not Jesus Christ (who did not die on the cross to maximize shareholder value). For most of Christianity, technological progress was glacial slow. On the other hand, calling Greta the antimammon does not really have the same ring to it.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist.
My experience is that people who talk about the devil and the antichrist a lot are very likely to be fundamentalists.
I was raised Catholic-lite, I went to Church twice a year and attended one or two hours a week of Catholic education in German public school, before I opted out in favor of a non-religious ethics class (which was more interesting in the topics it covered) at age 14. This forms the baseline of my model of liberal (but not necessarily insincere!) Christianity. I think the devil only appeared as tempting Jesus in the desert, and even there was interpreted more like an inner drive than as an external, rational agent. We did not cover Revelations at all. There was no preaching of fire and brimstone, sex was not a topic. There was certainly no mixing of religion and politics, the god of my childhood did not endorse any candidates.
Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order.
You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?" I certainly had a (Catholic) history teacher who expressed such an opinion. Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people who thought that changing the organization of society might alleviate suffering (and were correct in the case of social democrats and terribly wrong in the case of communists).
I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?
It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).
This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'
I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.
Frankly, if Thiel wants to make the point that Greta or Eliezer exemplify what is wrong with our world, I would probably give him two paragraphs of moderate length to convince me that he is making an interesting argument. I am much less inclined to spend the resources to try decipher a deliberately obfuscated argument on the off chance that it holds some insight instead of him being a MAGA weirdo who has found a new favorite thing to call his political enemies.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Since he said it in private
He gave a bloody lecture in front of a couple of hundreds of people. This is very different from having a private dinner with a couple of friends which was bugged by the guardian.
Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.
There is a reason that western culture has evolved an allergic reaction to Christians accusing others of either being in league with the devil or the antichrist. The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.
If Thiel was giving lectures about the Eucharist and the guardian tried to spin this into "well obviously he is advocating for cannibalism", nobody would buy it, because while Christian beliefs about transubstantiation are definitely weird, Christianity also has an excellent track record as far as avoiding actual cannibalism goes.
From a stochastical terrorism perspective (which I personally do not like much), saying "X is the/an antichrist" is the right-wing version of saying "X is literally Hitler". Either has a mild priming effect on people who have a psychotic break and decide to murder someone, I would guess.
Suppose that instead of the antichrist, he gave a lecture on jihad. Would you go well, there is no way that a Western Muslim in 2025 would actually advocate for violence. Actually, what he really means is jihad in the sense of an inner struggle which brings you closer to god.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
To be fair, this was just a Fermi estimate on my part, I simply assumed that the number of people who believe in The Omen are roughly the 14% who believe that the second coming of Christ is near.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Sure, the source is hostile.
But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.
If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.
If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.
Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.
I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).
Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.
In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.
I mean, the criticism that ASI believers are just reinventing either god or the devil is not exactly new. In a way, it is pure Bulverism, "Eliezer has simply translated the ancient myth of the apocalypse for the technological age". It does not engage with his arguments at all.
I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.
Yes, I have just the quotes without the broader context, for all I know, Thiel's lectures could not be on theology any more than Jesus' parable of the sower is about agriculture. Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics. For example, he points out that the antichrist does not necessarily have to be a Jew -- which would be silly if there already was a common understanding with his audience that it is all just a metaphor, and no real person can be the antichrist.
Basically, if I read a version of the parable of the sower where Jesus goes into detail about soil acidity, bound nitrogen, rainfall and temperature patterns, and fertilizers, at some point I give up on trying to understand what the equivalent of the soil pH in the heart of man might be and conclude that he is talking about agriculture, after all.
With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.
I think that compared to the 1970s, technological progress has slowed down a lot. But the cause is mostly diminishing returns. Moore's law only kinda keeps holding because the market exploded between the 8086 and today, so you can recoup your R&D costs from more customers. The discovery of the Higgs boson was immensely more expensive than that of the W and Z bosons. AI companies are burning through huge stacks of investor money to get moderate increases in model performance.
Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).
Greta is not about stopping the research of new technologies, but about building more instances of very mature tech which work by burning fossil fuels. Eliezer is against frontier AI capability research until we make progress with alignment, which might take a few decades. However, in all the worlds where the current LLM paradigm will plateau soon, the costs are rather small, because current LLMs will not overcome the diminishing returns of most research fields. Without alignment, any AI which would be smart enough to overcome the general trend of stagnation would also be a potential x-risk for humans.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.
From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.
It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price." What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.
He continues more coherently:
Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:
I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.
First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
From the article:
As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon.
They quote him:
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"
My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.
Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.
In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky].
It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.
Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.
Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.
One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.
Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)
Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.
The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.
As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?
Personally, costs aside, there are a lot of European cities where I would rather travel by public transport than driving a car. Driving a car in a big city is not my idea of a great time even if I do not get stuck in a traffic jam. Then there is always the problem of finding a parking spot, which can quickly eat up any time savings from being able to take the most direct route with the car.
Currently, I commute by car because my commute is 10min by car, 20min by bike, or 30min by public transport. If public transport was 15min instead, I would prefer that -- 5 minutes of being at home is not worth 15 minutes of watching videos while on public transport to me.
For people who go to the city for a drink, taking a car is not a great option, obviously.
I will grant you that once cars are fully autonomous, a lot of the downsides will disappear, as the car can keep you entertained en route and then dropping you off before searching for a parking spot. Still, the amount of people you can transport with a metro if you have a train every two minutes is rather impressive, and I do not see cars with one passenger per vehicle replacing that.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
One possible way to explain exorbitant CEO salaries would be conspicuous consumption on the part of the company, especially to attract investors.
"Look at us, we are paying 100M$/a to our CEO, not necessarily because we believe that the marginal dollar of his salary is a good investment, but simply because it is a performance expected of us, and paying less would signal to our investors that we are not a solid company to invest in."
If you are king, and there is a widespread belief that good kings keep war elephants, then that is a great reason to spend huge sums to keep war elephants, even if you privately believe that spending the money on infantry would be more efficient.
I have seen zero evidence for that. I mean, sure, perhaps some Democratic staffer was willing to trespass in the office and hang the print there, picking a spot where it would be seen by the zoom camera, and made it exactly so non-obvious that the poor innocent staffer who got screenshotted with the flag in the background did not notice it.
But my priors are that the sort of people who share edgy gas chamber 'jokes' (scare quotes because they were not particularly funny beyond simply being edgy, imho) also seem like the sort of people who would print out edgy enhanced US flags. They simply fucked up by having them in the view of the camera.
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