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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."
I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:
I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.
There is way too much money floating around in these communities. It breeds certain pathologies, obscenely paid escorts being one of them. See also how there's the whole "unless you follow exactly our ideologies and beliefs and do what we say is the right way to do things then you'll be
damned foreverpart of the eternal underclass".The solution here is for these communities to be put in their place, which is only really going to happen via some form of external shock. When and if that happens nobody can say.
I agree completed. Income is way too laissez-faire today. The issue is that people who would spend their money on Aella are even allowed to get enough to spend 5 figures on her in the first place, not Aella herself. The injustice is that such people even have the money at all, not that they give it out to prostitutes. That money should be reserved for the highest types of people, which unfortunately is something Western capitalism cannot achieve. Because such people will hardly subject themselves to the free market as much as Aella fans.
Who decides what constitutes a "highest types of people"?
Let's not pretend like we don't know what virtue is.
We can barely agree on basic human morals, pretending that one cultural viewpoint of virtue is some how objectively correct already fails contact with reality.
Clearly put, if we decide that the "highest types" are ranked according to progressive virtues, then conservatives will hate it. We do christian virtues, then non-christians will riot. You've failed to articulate an actual measurement to decide who is an "Ubermensch" but you want a top down system to do so, meaning you need a metric and a decider. If the answer is "anyone I like" then congrats you have a thoroughly unoriginal idea that has existed for all of human history. It's also very bloody, and unstable and never creates an actual "better" society for anyone but those at the top.
How about we just weight all the measures by historical incidence rate? I think we all naturally conceive of what kind of measure that produces. The argument about virtue is boring and disingenuous and mostly just bad people coping.
Historical incidence rate of what? A particular value set? A behavioral distribution? A comparative cross-sectional study of different civilizational values throughout history and their effectiveness and pros/cons would be interesting but one would need to account for local selection pressures. Warlike values are very adaptive in violent, tribal, resource-scarce environments but not very useful in post scarcity western society where cooperation, norm-following, and restraint are likely more adaptive.
Virtue arguments are always boring because they are unfalsifiable and unrealistic. But i would disagree that it's just bad people coping. Needing to view people with a different value set from you as "bad" is already Untermensch behavior indicative of being a slave to basic primitive tribal impulses. Any real "highest type" would already be able to not be chained to those primordial impulses.
No, that's what made good people/humanity. You do not need to „account“ for it.
Sounds like you reject warlike values. That is, manliness, courage, honour, bravery, leadership, assertiveness. See, you do know what I mean when I say virtue, you just want to reject virtue. But everybody knows that weakness, deceit, cowardice, long housedness, and going with the rabble are lowly characteristics. That's the problem, that people with those inferior traits get money at all. It's not because being warlike isn't adaptive for men, it's because man is beset by non-conscious entities which eat at his soul and rob him. Yes, capitalism likes the low, because capitalism is a demon and wants slaves in the form of degraded men. Worshiping that demon leads to race degeneration and we're seeing it. It's very real and powerful but it ought to be fought instead of given into with a shrug and a „what is good, anyway? Maybe the demon called Modernity favors herbivore-men ... who am I to judge?“
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