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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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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.

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.

Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics.

Thiel is positing potential ways in which the antichrist could manifest into our world, not giving actual specifics he's more exploring the problem. Again, I'm not a Thiel-stan I don't agree with his theology, but given the follow up to this sentence, you're very much pattern matching a snarky atheist here lol. I'm not surprised you're not engaging with his metaphor, because from my perspective you're basically reading "antichrist" and going "oh this guy is just another religious idiot, anything he says must be bunk."

For instance, Jesus does indeed go into many specifics in his parables, calling out specific groups like the Pharisees, Samaritans, etc etc. For the parable of the mustard seed, He even goes into specifics of soil quality! Metaphors often employ specifics that are relevant to the audience.

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).

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'm not particularly convinced by it, but there is a logic there.

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.

Good points, thanks for coming back around to this.

I agree that early Christianity was apocalyptic! Obviously not as apocalyptic as the insane cults we've seen throughout history, since they survived and spread incredibly well, but there was a strong bent towards it for sure.

the hoi polloi

Not to be all snooty and everything but following the original it's "hoi polloi", not "the hoi polloi". The phrase is a direct transliteration from ancient Greek of "οἱ πολλοί". In Greek οἱ is the nominative masculine plural definite article meaning "the" and πολλοί means "many". Saying "the hoi polloi" is like saying "the the masses", the first word is redundant.

It's a very minor thing and you can argue that English as a language has evolved and developed to the point where "the hoi polloi" is now grammatically correct (I'd even agree) but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

Thank you for clarifying! The Greeks at my church would be aghast at my ignorance of the language. Alas, I am part of hoi polloi after all.

Ancient Greek as a language is very different from modern Greek (more so than Chaucer is distinct from modern English), I don't know the first thing about modern Greek so please do your own research on how modern Greeks speak.

Hah well we do the Liturgy and such in ancient Greek so, they'd still be disappointed.

but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

It is a good way to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi after all.

Indeed, finally all those Classics lessons paying off. I knew one day they'd come in useful. Perhaps in a different life I'd have read Greats at Balliol, but in this one at least I still get to use the bits and bobs I've picked up from here and there.

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