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Opening up the discussion on Palantir's CEO 22 points manifesto (original twitter link) which is an excerpt for his new book The Technological Republic.
First impulses when reading through the list, I see that it's melding nationalism and civic responsibility with some kind of tech-elite-ism (?) and culture war critiques.
Anyways, here is what I got from it after thinking about it more and talking with various AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen):
I think I am influenced because I am currently reading through Seeing Like a State, but I get the feeling that Alex Karp believes he is a leader in a vanguard of tech elites that knows what's best (even if many are distracted from the real issues right now) and everyone should listen and just follow this vanguard. Oh and throw in some "woe is me, only I can save the republic, they just don't understand me, so read my book because then you will".
I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies. My impression of the man has decreased, and increasing my concern for the kind of leaders and elites that is brewing up within American society.
I have become increasingly unimpressed by business elites in general. It's pretty safe to say that they are not stupid, but they don't seem to be inclined towards the qualities we would desire in political leadership. They are not brave or principled or wise; in practice they are primarily selected for ambition and acquisitiveness and their ability to please investors (which in turn tends to mean a kind of bloodless and unscrupulous administrative competence). However, their financial success endows them not only with the arrogance to believe their domain expertise generalizes (a common failing of the successful in any intellectual field) but the resources to bend reality to their preferences.
I don't know, maybe those landed gentry complaining about the venal upstart merchants were on to something (they weren't). Karp's attitude seems predicated on the assumption that tech elites have a special claim to being smarter/more capable, but it's not really in evidence (DOGE being a mere embarrassment is the kindest thing you can say about it). As I said, I do not think that they are stupid, but I do think they are fundamentally gamblers who have confused the combination of survivorship bias and mere competence for brilliance.
Why make the point and then immediately deny it, beyond reflexive ideological distaste?
That was indeed the complaint of the landed gentry. People who just made lots of money are not necessarily good caretakers - they are often acquisitive and grasping, they tend to be gamblers whose individual endeavors are disposable, they're not trained to be leaders, and they often don't regard themselves as having obligations to society because they transcended society. The landed gentry had serious, solid holdings that couldn't be moved or got rid of, a clear and specific personal relationship with the people of a certain area (the kind of relationship that MPs / senators (?) are meant to have and don't), and were self-consciously trained for virtue even if it didn't always take.
Because the superficial resemblance amuses me.
The gentry's critique of the commercial class rests on the proposition that they were more virtuous as leaders (and as people), but I don't think that is in evidence. There's significant overlap of vices (likely just a broad pathology of moneyed elites), and they, of course, have their own sets of problems. I also think
a) some of their criticisms didn't land even at the time and are clearly just kicking down at a rising rival power center
b) modern business elites are qualitatively different from their pre-20th century counterparts (I don't mean that in a better or worse sense, just that you are talking about different kinds of people)
In general, conscious efforts to cultivate virtuous and effective elites seems very hit or miss, and is more often claimed than realized. Landed gentry, e.g. weren't really trained to be leaders. They were a mostly-hereditary leisure class that also leveraged their economic and legal power into political and military influence.
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I see stolen valor. Karp wants the status of a warrior-elite, understands and is willing to deliver on the obligations of noblesse oblige that come with it, and thinks he deserves it because of the contributions his company makes to national security. But he hasn't personally fought so he can't have it.
See also Tanner Greer's mostly-negative review of Karp's book comparing Karp negatively to the Gilded Age commerical oligarchs and longer blog post explaining what the East Coast establishment that emerged from the Gilded Age did that the Tech Right have not yet attempted.
My talk on Greer's thesis is that the East Coast Establishment was a real elite (who understood itself as such, worked hard to perpetuate itself as such, and took its nobless oblige seriously) that justified its elite status almost entirely in commercial (as opposed to martial) terms and is thus pretty much the only available model for non-fighting techbros like Karp.
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I like the corollary that, if not everyone shares the risk and cost, society should not fight the next war. Meaning we’d probably fight only when it becomes existential.
A position I heard elsewhere that I agree with: ideally, every nation should have a mandatory (for everyone) “Service Corps”, which isn’t just war preparation but also community service. Unfortunately, in most nations today, it would probably be corrupted.
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Citation needed.
Palantir is a very valuable company in the strict dollars and cents ... sense, but I don't know how "important" they are in the sense of a Ford, General Electric, US Steel, IBM, Standard Oil etc. Even within the post 2008 tech world, I wouldn't put them in front of Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the legacies-turned-cool-again Apple and Microsoft.
To shed some light on what Palantir actually does; they have a data "platfrom" that combines a bunch of open source technologies with their own tooling and integration layer. To be fair to them, this isn't something that anyone could vibe code. A lot of it is hard won engineering knowledge.
Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness -- it's kind of a "do anything" platfrom. Which sounds fun and cool and amazing until you consider that it does nothing out of the box. A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.
Sound confusing and kind like a shitty way to do software development? You're not wrong. The Federal market loves this because it's how they've done software for ages -- by paying other people unending dollars to write it for them. The big Beltway Bandit firms like CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos, Deloitte Federal, and literally hundreds of smaller players do more or less what Palantir does, but with shittier marketing and without selling a required software license the way palantir does. All the way back in 2016, this got so bad that Palantir SUED THE ARMY for not giving them a "fair shot" at a contract.
(Again, to be totally generously fair to Palantir, protests over contract awards are common and all large players will use them from time to time. I think actually suing the gov't, however, was quite unusual).
An interesting note about Palantir is that several of its current and former executives are very publicly prominent, especially in tech spaces like X/Twitter and the podcast circuit. You have Alex Karp, Shyam Shankar, Trae Stephens (now at Anduril) among others. They capture a lot of attention and, frankly, a lot of what they say is smart and forward thinking. Still, you can't say the don't market themselves well. The cherry on top (crown jewel) is, of course, that Peter Thiel was an early Palantir investor and J.D. Vance worked for Thiel's investment company before running for Senate. In the good old fashioned DC tradition, a lot of Palantir's success has been because of Who They Know.
In terms of these culture war adjacent manifestos, I don't see how they make any sense from a risk/return perspective. Companies that get involved in culture war stuff often face blowback sooner or later without seeing much bottom or top line growth. If you're familiar with the hilarious tone-deaf "All In" podcast, you'll know that there's a tradition of Silicon Valley types thinking that because they're highly competent in one domain, they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain. Elon's Doge experiment was his flirtation.
In fairness to people who are intelligent high-decouplers, we're generally correct when we make that observation. We're really good at basically anything that requires you match patterns (because that's what intelligence is); that's why the middling among this class of person is also especially paranoid about being replaced with a computer system that can do this. When we take a step back and examine a system's inputs and outputs without being butthurt about the way things are [or "low decoupler" for short], and apply our reason to the way a system emerges from that, we call that "first principles thinking".
And yes, that means we do know better than you, about most everything, most of the time (and not internalizing this posture is destructive for us; it is a fail-state for us to ever communicate that sentiment to you, obviously, but I see no alternative here), but because of that there are a bunch of challenges that- if not accounted for [the shorthand for this is "the human element"]- will end up causing more harm than good. One of the pitfalls unique to us is that we end up creating the 1 Corinthians 8 problem, where what we're doing is, from first principles, correct [and we know that- if we shut ourselves off from knowing it, or otherwise permit low-decouplers to dictate our morality for us, we self-destruct] but mere correctness isn't the only factor in a solution, or what is acceptable to do or say when. INT outwardly resembles, but isn't actually fungible with, WIS. (And yes, it takes someone who has both to teach that, and yes, they are very rare. Accommodation is following God's example; He does not grumble dragging the cross- the ultimate instrument of accommodation for humankind- and as such, neither will you.)
On a broader level, this is also kind of why different cultures end up with different perspectives on things; different starting conditions reveal different answers to different questions, and also create different problems. Which is also why we tend to be given to weeabooism and other weird/offensive nonsense; part of the appeal of spicy or particularly unpalatable food is enjoying the fact nobody else can eat it, and the same applies to certain kinds of information for the same reason. Of course, if you were a restaurant and made every dish that way, your restaurant would close and you'd end up serving nobody, unless you had a sufficient hard-core customer base that hung around enough to sustain you. (This is why 4chan is the way it is.)
You do ultimately have to accommodate for the low-decouplers and the people who take time to come around to things. Which I think is why
would probably be an effective strategy to combat/work with that type of person. You actually have to observe the customer, how they work, how they communicate, and how they think and reason, to turn Knows Better into effective service. (Also, it just occurs to me that this is, if you squint a little, missionary work.)
I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.
My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this
Bruh.
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Have you ever thought that this, in itself, is a problem that needs to be solved?
Which is why the line after that is “there’s no other way to really say this”. If there was, I would have said that instead.
The problem with ‘you’re just going to have to trust me; what I’m doing is too hard for you’ is that you have to be right, both objectively and (as much as is otherwise possible) subjectively.
Most people don’t think about it as much or that way; they generally outsource what they think to others and match that (best case, those who that was outsourced to are following these rules and keeping things palatable for the average person, but that doesn’t help the people who have already mastered that part).
By this, I meant that we should cower when speaking the truth and that the truth should be subordinated to acceptability. Isn't that a serious problem that needs urgent solving?
Actually, no; but I'd characterize it less as "subordinated to acceptability" and more as "the necessary translation layer to get as much of the truth across as possible".
You can't say the phrase "daily bread" to a people who don't know what bread is, so if you have something to deliver them you have to find words that do mean that and then say those.
This saves you so that once/if you get to the part you can't do that for (specifically, at 7:19) when your audience has to make the special effort to understand something- and you have to tell them which part to focus on, they don't naturally know that- they spend, and are still willing to spend, that limited effort [and time] only on the irreducible/important part.
Why isn't it a problem? Imagine if everyone were intelligent. What a great world it would be.
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The question isn't whether we know more than "you" (i.e. the man in the street - the idea that Silicon Valley-based Motteposters have superior access to intelligence and rationality than other Motteposters is straightforwardly silly), it is whether we know more than relevant domain experts.
How long it takes for a smart generalist to come unstuck is notoriously a measure of how legitimate a field of knowledge is, and there are plenty of legitimate fields of knowledge outside the core competence of "tech" - most obviously all the non-software engineering disciplines. Before Musk founded a rocket company, he found as many smart rocket guys as he could and listened to them. When he bought into and refounded a car company, he hired car guys and listened to them. But there is legitimate subject-matter expertise to be had outside STEM. When Musk took over large parts of the US government, he didn't bother to talk to people who understood governing, and DOGE came unstuck - and not just, or even mostly because Musk was too autistic to maintain public and political support for what he was doing per @ThisIsSin, but because he was taking an approach (what P J O'Rourke would call "balancing the budget by cutting helium funds") which everyone who understands the budget knows can't work because the math doesn't math.
Sounds like Musk didn't apply engineering first principles to his DOGE initiative. And as you pointed out, it takes time for a generally smart person to become an expert in the field, but I would like to point out that it all starts with first principles and that becoming a domain expert is always by applying first principles to their given interests.
Personally, my explanation for why Musk deviated from his successful formula is that Musk was ideologically captured, had increased drug use, and couldn't keep a cool head.
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This jives with my understanding, I always have thought of them as similar to a software consulting company for Defense related projects.
Yep.
Their commercial work is stranger to me. I know that, at one point, they had some bad interactions with big companies and got shown the door but, of late, their commercial work has picked up. This, however, may just be on the back of general AI hype.
Having done both Federal and Commercial work, there's an interesting cultural split; Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable." Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.
There's always more tax cattle.
They've got to exploit early mover advantage.
The standard term is pay pig /s
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Arnold Kling reviewed that book and noted its representation of a drift away from democratic capitalism's defense of the small man and their petty consumer desires. Not very Milton Friedman-esque. Karp's is a more muscular, great state-driven neoliberalism.
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Is it one of the most important companies? I honestly don't know, it certainly gets enough press for it recently.
No, seriously, I don't know what exactly they do, certainly not how I mostly know what SpaceX, Google, Meta, Apple, and the rest do. Probably in large part because unlike most of those previous companies, they don't have any real consumer-facing presence, no products that 'regular' people integrate into their lives. Even looking at their history its like they took a bit of tech used in Paypal for fraud detection and adapted it to analyze, effectively, any given database you might plug in? And it kinda stuck around in a stealthy startup phase for like 10 years, then started getting various DoD/Government contracts, and then finally IPO'd in 2020, so seems like it took a long time to find footing, and during that time the founders kept tight control of it and kept adding funding to it even while it wasn't clear what the company would do.
I am not in fact critiquing them on this basis, I'm just saying it is opaque to me why this company is important in the same way that Boeing, Eli Lilly, or even Amazon is important. If they disappeared tomorrow, how would i most obviously notice their absence?
And if detection of fraud is a core feature, I'm definitely confused as to why all the various fraud schemes in Minnesota, California, New York, and elsewhere just went undetected for so long, or at least unremarked and prosecuted.
Again, not a critique of the company, maybe a critique of how gov't actors have been using it, but certainly me wondering the value being provided here.
And since as far as I can tell they do make some sort of platform that allows use of AI analysis, but they do NOT build their own AI models... what would make them more important than one of the frontier AI labs, or the Chip manufacturers, or any given major player in the energy sector?
As for the the manifesto, I guess I'd ask for it to put out something more 'actionable' to really offer a opinion on it. I think I see what it is gesturing at, but the actual, positive vision for what the world should look like hasn't been laid out here.
This seems to be the most concrete point:
It also does that annoying thing by pointing out that U.S. "adversaries" will keep trying to undermine U.S. interests. Great. But what does the actual threat model look like? There's an easy list of countries that are 'adversaries,' and none of them are able to launch a land invasion. None of them can (currently) threaten U.S. energy independence, or disrupt citizens' lives much without exposing themselves to much worse reprisal.
Realistically the U.S. is going to bring itself down through self-inflicted wounds before any of its adversaries can mount an effective attack that actually cripples the country. And this seems to be part of the thrust of the manifesto but what does it say we do? Are we rejiggering the constitution to function in this new era, or just ignoring it where convenient, and where, precisely, do they want the ultimate balance of power to end up, with regard to sovereignty over the territories that compose the U.S.?
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Wait that's just Gaullisme.
Think about it:
The victory of the engineer, the priest, the soldier over the merchant, the professor, the artist. Neo-France arrives from the future.
I've always been bullish on the French elan, but as the state ideology of America.... Hmm, you may have inspired a psychohistoric babbling schizopost, we'll see.
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This is beautiful. You nailed it.
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"Your rebellious colony turned into France."
Brits on suicide watch.
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Free email is a form of economic growth!
You can send long messages and images and videos to people hundreds of miles away nearly instant for basically no cost, that you can access, store, and reference back to easily.
Whereas just a century ago you would need to pay a person to haul your mail the whole way to them, possibly taking weeks if not months depending on the distance and would have to physically store away any mail you wanted to keep and spend time organizing it so you can actually go back to that when needed.
What the fuck does "economic growth" mean to them if not things like mail being more available, cheaper, or in better quality? Are they gonna start saying that a 300 dollar 50 inch flat screen TVs doesn't count as an improvement over these 2k+ tiny ass black and white things because it's "decadence"?
What does this actually compose of, obeying the masters of big government?
Like let's look at the latest controversy. Anthropic doesn't want Claude doing mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons because they don't believe it is good for the citizens/the technology is ready yet. Helping the nation doesn't mean "doing whatever the current leaders demand and say is good".
A classic argument that always ignores the real world, that countless regulations often are preventing the market from acting. Take the housing debate for instance, is lack of building because the "market failed to act" or is it because local jurisdictions literally ban and cripple building? One of the reasons why healthcare is such an expensive mess is because the government keeps fucking things up. One way to see this is to look at voluntary procedures like LASIK, laser hair removal, botox or breast augmentation, and how they've gotten cheaper and more accessible over time.
Autonomous weapons will definitely be something to reckon with, but wait till you see what a nuke does to the data centers.
No that phrase means being the masters.
It's a political formula in the sense of Mosca, a whole cloth made up duty and therefore right to rule, much like noblesse oblige, popular sovereignty, vanguardism, divine right, expertise, etc.
What this whole thing is saying is that a certain political coalition (not in the politicians sense, in the power sense) considers itself better fit to rule than the current one. I'd go as far as to say it's what I've long predicted: the insurgency of technocapital over managerialism.
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This list reads empty to me. Yes, I get it, the United States. But what is the point of the United States? Why does the United States deserve the best weapons, the best economy, and an universal conscription army? Why should anybody want to die for the United States? As far as I'm concerned, any decent man should refuse to put his life on the line for the United States. It's lost any heavenly mandate it once had due to lack of meritocracy and feminism. It doesn't give men, not even many very high quality men, good wives, and it actively interferes with this through many of its laws, so it is essentially a reproductive enemy, and therefore something of a genocidal threat, to the majority of good men.
Basically, the manifesto comes off as you must die for Buttsex in Botswana, peasant. No thanks. And I know that's what it is because the guy who owns the company has no interest in wives but lots of interest in buttsex. Oh, also can you imagine what that frizzy haired CEO of Palantir would say if the United States suddenly became a radically anti-Israel state? Yeah, it would be the Great Shaytan over night. So the United States is the defender of Israel and the purveyor of sodomy. Yay.
It's definitely missing the grandiose promises that it should feature.
But those are easy to come up with on the spot given American history: space colonization is the manifest destiny of the United States.
That and something about the lot of the common man improved by technology or something. Though the issue is that industry doesn't have the easy and inherent positive valence it used to have. The SV people need to have something better to sell than higher dopamine injection through attention control. Meaningful jobs?
But that would be boring, soulless, egalitarian slop drivel. Wow, the United States let the common man degenerate to an even lower state with antibiotics and keeps him entertained with a technology stack ultimately stolen from Europe and its early European settlers, who are now a persecuted minority. What could make that better? Oh, I know, what if we do it on a cold, desolate shithole planet!
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Some notes on the manifesto:
No affirmative obligation is necessary. There are enough engineering elites who are either US nationalists or who will work on weapons simply for money without thinking too hard about moral questions to suffice for the needs of national defense. As for the needs of national offense, that is a different matter.
Strange take. It was mainly nuclear weapons, not American power, although American power certainly played a role. Let me give an example: in the early stages of WW2, US, UK, and Soviet power did not deter the Germans or the Japanese. Being weaker than the enemy does not deter leaders from starting wars often enough to bring about an era of peace. Facing nuclear war, on the other hand, so far has kept peace between the great powers. I wonder if Karp actually believes his thesis or if he is just sucking up to the establishment, which indeed seems to love to believe this kind of theory about America's role in the history of the last few decades.
Europe is not being forced to pay any heavy price for Germany's weakness. Europe's support of Ukraine is a matter of choice, not something forced on it. There is no existential risk to Europe from Russia (outside of the risk of mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war, which Russia wants to avoid every bit as much as the EU does) for the simple reason that the EU has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, a nuclear-armed member in France, and can easily produce more nuclear weapons at any time it wishes. And that's even leaving NATO out of the equation. Even if Russia somehow managed to conquer all of Ukraine, which seems extremely unlikely, it would pose no genuine threat to Europe. It's simply not strong enough.
More to the point, Europe is so far effectively deterring Russia even in Ukraine, even despite Germany's military weakness. The war has become stalemated and the EU is through proxy regularly blowing up Russian infrastructure without even having to send a large military contingent to fight directly in the war.
This, and point 18, seem blatantly self-serving to me. Of course Karp would think this. I mean, it's possible that he actually is saying this abstractly rather than from his own bias, but it seems more likely that he is saying it from bias.
This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense. Being an open intellectual movement does not necessarily mean being tolerant of people who claim that the Earth is flat or that they are being mind-controlled by lizard people. It does mean that you should give such people a say instead of censoring them, but it does not mean that you should pretend to take them seriously or give them much attention. And as for the kinds of religion that are compatible with rationality (they do exist, for example pure spirituality without belief in gods or woo), I don't really see the elites being intolerant to them. Indeed, since such kinds of religion are relatively obscure, I'm not even sure that the elites are aware of their existence.
Of course Karp himself would not serve, nor would any children that he has be likely to serve in any dangerous capacity either. Maybe as a society we should be hesitant about launching wars and only fight the next war even if not everyone shares in the risk and cost?
No, it has a moral debt to the people who made its rise possible. Those people are a persecuted minority in the United States and are spread out over several continents and many nations. The United States is an incidental social construct, and a bad one with a terrible culture compared to that People's other states at that.
Random question- would you be interested in posting a user viewpoint focus? The last guy nominated wasn't. We should get strong opinions spelled out on the front page more often.
Sure.
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I see your point, but how are those people a persecuted minority in the United States? They usually make loads of money.
They make less than the counterfactual where there's no persecution.
What kinds of persecution do you have in mind. Like, affirmative action or something? The way taxes work?
Yes.
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From a purely pragmatic standpoint of an American elite (and I don't have a good read on Karp so this might not be his perspective) intolerance towards religious belief is basically pure self-ownage. (Keep in mind that in the US, religious behavior is correlated with higher education levels.) There are a lot of smart, motivated religious people who will happily serve in the military and then work in your munitions plant afterwards and if you are intolerant of them you're running the risk of losing their talent or, worse, making yourself their enemy.
Good point.
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I think to see where he's coming from you've got to remember how unbelievably, staggeringly bad all the rest of our governance has gotten, largely though "democratic oversight" by the old school of experts. What would be really hard, but worth doing, is combining a much-needed replacement of elites with some kind of revival of Tocquevillian civic engagement and oversight, so that the new elites don't fall straight back into the high modernist trap.
What is the "high modernist trap"?
Roughly, believing that you have a sufficiently perfect view of the real world from your position of power to justify radical top-down action, as opposed to knowing you only have access to those particular forms of information that manage to reach you through the filters of power.
Surely medieval and ancient rulers must have run into this problem too? I have a hard time imagining that they were much more self-aware about their own limited access to information than today's elites.
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Thanks for the reminder that I should read this.
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A lot of disengagement stems from an “elite” that is actively hostile to the local interests and norms of the broader population. To copy the first point:
I disagree with this. What would you have any elite class in society do? Withdraw to the margins of society and live in their own gated communities, leaving the bulk of people to fend for themselves?
I really don’t mind such a class of people, provided they’re actively working in my interests.
Really get to know the "local interests and norms of the broader population". Learn from them and align your and the public interests, or even do the hard work of persuasion and cajoling the public to follow you. I admit this is what Karp is doing and I at least respect him for wading into the fight. But to say "stop criticizing me" is just pathetic
Exactly, I'm not sure if Karp's best interest is with mine. At the very least, it's certainly making me feel reactance to what he's proposing.
There’s a very fine line between someone saying “stop criticizing me,” and “stop whining and complaining.” I won’t knock him for trying at least.
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