domain:kvetch.substack.com
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
"That's a no from me, dawg" as the great bard of our time, Randy Jackson, would say.
You actually did the article author a big favor with your down select of sections. Buried in a lot of emotionality are some interesting economic and geopolitical points for debate.
But so much of the article is full of these kind of things:
Disrupt the disruptors. Boycott companies that don't demonstrate integrity. The future isn't lost yet, we can still create the world we deserve.
How can a company "demonstrate integrity?" This is the same wishy-washy style assertion as "be an ally" or "speak truth to power." It's just so sophomoric.
If I have to pick just one cognitive and logical failing from the article, it directly falls into the fundamental attribution error trap multiple times:
These people think AI is the last thing humans will invent
and
The people in power aren't willing to risk that outcome, and they've been bewitched by the idea of being the only ones to have superintelligence, so they're willing to go all-in to win big and fast.
and
Remember that these people place incredible value on being the first to superintelligence
and
The dynamic in the valley is that the people at the top know the game already, and they intend to exploit it to its fullest
Then you also have these kind of whoppers:
I wouldn't be surprised if Larry Ellison already has a contract signed in blood for this stashed away somewhere to whip out once he knows he can get away with implementing it.
and, in the "conclusion."
We can fight back though, we already have the weapon of our liberation: the power of the purse. You're not powerless. Boycott campaigns forced Disney to walk back Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, that was our power in action. If you care about a just world, don't do business with unethical companies. Demand that the titans of tech change, and if they don't, stop feeding them your dollars.
Then, there's the truly tinfoil hat level of conspiracy thinking:
They've been gutting the IRS and talking about reforming the tax code for a long time, but the plan I see them positioning for is sinister. By raising the nominal tax rate at the same time that they reform the tax code, they can engineer in quasi-legal loopholes that the wealthy can take advantage of by design, probably involving digital coins. They get good talking points ("time to tighten our collective belts for the good of the nation," etc) while letting their friends dodge most real responsibility.
Team Trump (which is really being controlled by the Silicon Valley oligarchs) is going to revamp the IRS in order to support a crypto investment scheme? They're going to pull this off under the radar yet in plain sight. And the tens of thousands of bureaucrats at the IRS, FTC, SEC etc. that would need to be "in" on this scheme are just going to be unaware of it happening? Or they are in on it? And what about when the Big Banks get wind of this? I though they controlled Congress. No, wait, that's Silicon Valley. Or Big Oil. No, I meant Big Pharma.
While above the median level of "orange man bad / big tech bad", it isn't much above that level. I don't know what this authors politics are and, unlike him, I will not presume to know his personal cognitive state or full internal belief and value structure.
On a content only level, I look at this as another flavor of AI doomerism. This isn't paperclip machine doomerism, this is economic theory doomerism. "We've put so much money into AI that it has to work out!" But money doesn't just disappear if a business fails. If the business burnt through all their money, it's probably bad for that businesses' particular investors, but it also means that money went somewhere - other vendors, other businesses. The market moves the money the best it can. Of course I'll admit that this isn't necessarily a great outcome. It's not as if bubbles and over investment are good things in the long run --- right?. Regardless, while growth may flatline (which is bad) the money is still moving. Why 2008 was so frightening was because it looked like money might actually stop moving. A system level credit crunch means that even really good and obvious investments or simple spending can't happen because of a lack of liquidity.
But back to the main economic point; are we so "all in" on AI that if it "fails to deliver" we're 100% giga-fucked? Sure, if we keep all of these definitions slippery and uncertain, why not. On the "failure to deliver" point, I don't see any real rubric or threshold from the author beyond "you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation." Okay, so we need the ROI on AI to be approximately one Abracadabra. Got it. If we don't get to this magical level of returns, what, exactly, happens? All the BigAI firms go insolvent overnight. Locked out employees, broken keycards. And the new datacenters and chip fabs just immediately fall into a state of disrepair and end up looking like the steel mills outside of Youngstown, Ohio? Again, I'll be charitable here and say that if the BigAi bubble bursts hard, it probably is recession time for a while. But the money doesn't evaporate and all of the human capital doesn't commit suicide. There is a VERY direct line to be drawn from the dot com bubble of late 90s to early 2000s all the way to the rocketship of silicon valley beginning in .... 2009? Or earlier? Google IPO'ed in 2004 IIRC.
Doomerism isn't better than irrational exuberance just because it is the inverse. This is the cowardice of cynicism and pessimism more generally. "I hope I'm wrong but I'm probably not (unsaid: because I'm just so dang smart!)" isn't the flex people think it is. You're prognosticating a negative outcome probably as means to do some preemptive emotional self-satisfaction. I'm not against hearing about downsides to AI. In fact, I've posted about them myself at least two times. All I'm looking for is a cogent enough argument on the hows of Things Falling Apart.
5434a
4hr ago
Nazi = bad.
Nazi apologia = bad.
Nazi apologist =/= Nazi.
The problem with applying the label of Nazi to connote badness is that the charge is so easy to reject on account of the labelled not actually being an actual Nazi (I assume SS isn't a WW2 veteran living in a German care home). It's intellectually lazy. Nazi apologia is bad on its own merits, it doesn't need the laziest boo-light in the world to fortify any criticisms.
Hyperbole and false equivalence are a cancer on discourse, and getting away from that cancer is why I came to TheMotte.
["But isn't 'laziest boo-light in the world' also hyperbole?". No, because I can't think of a lazier one other than maybe "eww, you're smelly".]
HereAndGone
4hr ago
I would find even hipster irony declarations of support for Hitler to be a step too far, but then I'm old. I'm out of touch. I'm two generations behind the bright young things of today and the tearing down of conventions because they stifle our individual liberties and oppress wimmen'n'minorities.
Good taste has long ago been dumped out with everything else in the bathwater, and relabelled tone policing, which is a sin because it means you are trying to restrict the expression of lived experience of wimmen'n'minorities.
These are the very same people who ripped down that fence, they don't get to be appalled when the bull runs out of the field straight at them.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Even lots of fantastic conservative guys who are actively condemning this behavior like Governor Scott, or some of the guys at the Babylon bee or some of the National Review reporters.
AKA "guys who know and accept the work rules."
HereAndGone
5hr ago
The elites of Silicon Valley have cozied up to Donald Trump in a way that's unprecedented in the history of modern democracy.
Can we get a date range on that? Because it makes a big difference if you mean "modern as in the past fifteen years" or "modern as in the past one hundred and fifty".
They've lined the pockets of his presidential library foundation, supported his white house renovations, paid for his inauguration
Allow me a moment to be shocked, shocked! that never ever before has a politician, a political party, or political campaigns received bucketloads of cash from Silicon Valley and/or other business types.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Don't you have a concept of politics as rooted in moral values unrelated to your own personal fate?
The other side sure doesn't care about my fate. Why is it on me to be their infinite moral superior, to sacrifice myself and everyone I care about?
Is there any amount of evil that people to your right could wreak on strangers that would outweigh making the trains run on time in your specific neck of the woods?
Any, yes. When the amount of evil is somewhere near the "actual death camps or radio broadcasts telling people to hack apart their neighbors" level, I would care.
Does that amount include my people being the only acceptable target of racism and sexism, to the point the other side tried changing the dictionary so their bigotry doesn't count? No.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
It might be a microaggression, the more up-to-date please fill me in on whether microaggressions are still the equivalent of burning someone at the stake or if we've moved on to trans genocide instead as the most heinous of crimes?
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Yeah, true. They just say it out in the open, rarely any consequences! Well, except for losing to Trump twice.
2D3D
5hr ago
These people will cite The Wire as one of their favourite showa but only remember Ziggy as the irritating gangster.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5hr ago
Once they got gay marriage, they DID try to trans the kids next.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Is "I've rewritten the dictionary so I can't be racist" really an acceptable reason to call them not racist, though?
That whole "whiteness doesn't mean white people" thing was loathsome racist gaslighting and that 'deflection' does not change the state of reality.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Tim Walz style "black pepper is too spicy" is a racist joke, shibboleth, and tribal signal.
"That fascist deserved to get shot in front of his kids, let's do it again" may be a tribal signal, but it's not a joke. Wearing a symbol of terrorism is a tribal signal, but also not a joke.
I, for one, am not such a free speech advocate that I would be opposed to banning all of it. The only stumbling block is that, as we already see, enforcement would be wildly biased in favor of the left's shitbirds having no consequences.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
5hr ago
It's especially hilarious because they do show trashy, low class, black-coded people and every one of them is a wigger and it's still as cringy and lame as a white principal trying to "rap with these kids" in 1990 because not a single person involved in the production has ever had a five minute conversation with a black person who did not have a college degree.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr ago
I mean it is pearl clutching if the support for Hitler is a very small portion of the Young Republicans. You can find crazy people in any population of people. There are blacks who believe the Natiin of Islam’s Yacuub theory. There are outright communists on the left. There are Christian nationalists who want to make other religions illegal. I find the isolated demands for decorum to be a bit silly simply because it’s always the right who has to justify and denounce its crazy people while the left gets a complete pass. Yes, Nazis are a problem, yes we should denounce them, but im still waiting for democrats to be forced to answer for: communists, woke crazies, “the resistance” (who insist that the current administration is “the regime” to be opposed at all costs), and anti-religious zealots. It doesn’t happen. It’s just the right told to denounce crazies. Kamala was never asked about groups like “Refuse Fascism” that posit that MAGA is fascism. They are never asked to tone down the rhetoric or denounce crazies as the price of being seen as respectable. Why should the GOP be asked to pre-smear itself with craziness (by calling attention to it) when it’s so one sided? It’s the “have you stopped beating your wife” thing on a political scale. To answer is to smear yourself.
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.
Jokes on you, nobody else cares! I mean, I agree that they absolutely shouldn't be trusted with so much as town dogcatcher. But that hasn't stopped anyone to the left of Mitt Romney in my lifetime. Praising communist psychopaths gets you elite university professions and has no negative consequences.
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.
Hey, have a little respect for the MSM crowd that don't like the gaudy flags.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
5hr ago
Your brothers are crazy and I've never seen a single indication that you even think it's a problem. You just engage in pure "arguments as soldiers" arguing.
But by all means, show us the way. Demonstrate some policing of your own side.
Corvos
5hr ago
I think there is a crisis of earnestness, people are absolutely allergic to being serious which creates this sort of “Haha just joking….unless?” aspect which rightly scares people. In part I blame Trump for the degradation of seriousness as a virtue in American politics, but perhaps he was more a effect than a cause.
Surely the crisis of earnestness is downstream of the fact that the overton window was tiny for a very long time in regards to subjects people really cared about? Trump and the current irony-drenched commentators succeeded because they were able to parley common opinions such as
'maybe driving blue-workers' wages down with illegal immigration is hurting them'
and
'maybe white people aren't responsible for everything bad that happens to people of colour and everything bad done by people of colour'
past the censors. The earnest people were stomped on repeatedly until everyone except the most quokka of quokkas got the message.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
It's somewhat older but had a resurgence when AOC was doing her Green New Deal schtick, which was called green but was mostly about wealth redistribution and spoils for the preferred groups.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
5hr ago
And that rhetoric has, in fact, recieved an enormous amount of lattitude, to the point where it's users can't even recognize a moment (say, immediately after a political assassination driven by said rhetoric) to settle down and have an ounce of respect.
Though I guess I can understand why leftwingers would assume this was water-testing for literal violence - it's what they do, after all.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5hr ago
Where does endless escalation lead and tit for tat reprisals?
Cooperate-bot is a good way to lose forever.
Are we expecting some kind of come-to-Jesus mutual disarmament moment or just escalation until Civil War?
There needs to be a sufficiently-influential and popular figure that can actually, credibly lead the first move. Unfortunately, no one like that exists on either side, and neither side believes they need to be the one to produce that figure. There's no longer a messianic organizer, an MLK or Billy Graham, that can credibly speak to and for enough people.
I have to recognize it is always possible to conjure self-serving reasons why “this time it’s different.”
I started reading Nussbaum's From Disgust to Humanity yesterday, and was immediately struck by how self-serving and blinkered liberal usage of the disgust concept is. Indeed, it is always possible, and this circles back to the lack of the messianic figure.
I think peace requires you to put aside the different river instinct and recognize it is similar enough
Is public versus private similar enough for these purposes? Or is this, as an anti-parallel to recognize one can always conjure self-serving reasons as to why it's different, a desire to conjure a self-serving reason why it's not? Jay Jones is much more similar than the Kirk commentary, and I think lumping them together weakens your broader point for that reason.
We don't have to go fully braindead and think that Lawrence v Texas means public indecency laws are moot.
2D3D
5hr ago
The military is the most racist and sexist and homophobic culture that is also the gayest race blind society in practice (except the USN which is race segregated by shop). Still sexist as fuck but thats the reality of kinetic capality being inviolate.
ControlsFreak
6hr ago
I'm not sure why we'd assume a continuity of ancient atheism and modern atheism.
I don't know that I would. But I think that's kind of not my point. My point is more that I saw the reasoning as being, "Look at these people, having an Ethics and Politics; that's Christian!" (Yes, that's a simplified caricature.) I don't think that qualifies it as being a "Christian heretical sect".
In general, I should probably make an effort post on what it would be to be a "______ heretical sect". Tentatively, I would expect that one would find some folks in that sect writing within the context of the tradition that they are being heretical from. I think it likely that you would find them claiming that what they are doing is that tradition, while others in that tradition are saying that their work is actually heretical. I highly doubt that if we go look at the folks who developed the frameworks for wokism and the like, we will find them writing, "Jesus Christ is our Lord; we are doing our best to follow Him as we find guidance in the bible. Here are the parts of the bible that support our woke doctrines and guide our sect."
There may be other ways to argue that folks are a "______ heretical sect"; thus the need for a larger effortpost. But that would be, I think, the top-tier type of evidence.
Consider New Atheism: their moral critique of Christianity was that it was a) unnecessary and b) insufficiently universalist
I think you put a lot of stock in the universalist axis, and I don't think it's that load-bearing. Again, it's a bit of a superficial relation. Not quite "Hitler was a vegetarian", but yeah, I think we can find a range of views on the universalist axis across all sorts of traditions.
Criticisms of the morality of the Old Testament God are born of the same impulse that gave us an actual, clear Christian heresy like gnosticism: the god of the Hebrew Bible, at first blush, fails by the standards of the New Testament/NT-inspired modern morality.
Oh boy. This one takes a whole lot more actual theology, but I'm not really sure how it's germane to the question at hand of the provenance of wokism.
The other claim is that science can fill the role religion plays as an arbiter of truth, a moral authority and a source of meaning and the sense of the numinous. I see no reason for these to be basic atheistic assumptions. A lot of our debates are about principles. And truth doesn't have to be numinous.
This is a within-atheists fight between sects, which I wrote about:
I've observed plenty that The Ethics was always a sore spot for Internet Atheism; they just couldn't figure it out, and they ran off in a bunch of different directions with mutually-contradictory sects, some trying to prop up some form of "science-based" "objective" version and others often running headlong into naive meta-ethical relativism. Interestingly, you see both forms in Wokism, depending on how hard you scratch and how far up the priesthood you inquire.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
6hr ago
I do find it funny/trendy when people label "eating a late breakfast" as intermittent fasting.
Why not? A late breakfast and an early dinner is the easiest form of IF.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
6hr ago
You've probably been hearing that we're in an AI bubble. I think that's both loaded and reductive, and I'd like to take some time to help people understand the nuances of the situation we're currently in, because it's deep. To be clear, I am pro AI as a technology and I have an economic interest in its success (and for reasons I'll discuss, so should you), however there is a lot more going on that I don't agree with that I'd like to raise awareness of.
AI capital investments are running far ahead of expected returns, and the pace of investment is accelerating. Analysts estimate AI-linked activity drove roughly 40–90% of H1-2025 U.S. GDP growth and 75–80% of S&P 500 gains. If it wasn't for AI investments, it's likely the United States would be in a recession right now. According to Harris Kupperman of Praetorian Capital “the industry probably needs a revenue range that is closer to the $320 billion to $480 billion range, just to break even on the capex to be spent this year.” It sure sounds like a bubble, however thinking of it as just another bubble would be doing a disservice to the magnitude of the dynamics at play here. To understand why, we have to explore the psychology of the investors involved and the power circles they're operating in.
The elites of Silicon Valley have cozied up to Donald Trump in a way that's unprecedented in the history of modern democracy. They've lined the pockets of his presidential library foundation, supported his white house renovations, paid for his inauguration and provided a financial lifeline for the Republican party. Between Elon Musk, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, Peter Thiel and his acolyte J.D. Vance, Trump has been sold the story that AI dominance is a strategic asset of vital importance to national security (there's probably also a strong ego component, America needs "the best AI, such a beautiful AI"). I'm not speculating, this is clearly written into the BBB and the language of multiple executive orders. These people think AI is the last thing humans will invent, and the first person to have it will reap massive rewards until the other powers can catch up. As such, they're willing to bend the typical rules of capitalism. Think of this as the early stages of a wartime economy.
[...]
I'm going to say something that sounds a little crazy, but please bear with me: from a geopolitical perspective, what we're doing is a rational play, and depending on how valuable/powerful you expect AI to be and how hostile you expect a dominant China to be, possibly a near optimal one. If you're a traditional capitalist, it probably looks like a bad move to you regardless of your beliefs about AI; you're going to need to put those aside. This is not a traditional economic situation. We're in an arms race, and we're veering into a wartime economy, or at least that's how the powerful view it.
[...]
Returning to the traditional capitalists, I'd like to note that they aren't wrong; this AI push is unsustainable (for us). I'm not sure how long we can run our economy hot and directed before the wheels come off, but my napkin estimate is between 5-10 years, though it's likely we'll lose the political will to keep pushing before that point if the AI transformation is underwhelming and we still have a democracy. To further support the traditional capitalists' position, if AI unwinds at that point having under-delivered, the economic damage will probably be an order of magnitude greater than if we had just let the bubble deflate naturally. This will be exacerbated by the favorable treatment the administration will make sure the Oligarchs receive; we will suffer, they will coast.
Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.
I don't have the expertise needed to evaluate the economic arguments, so I'm mainly posting this here to solicit feedback on the linked article.
It's probably too late to avoid a future of "brutal serfdom" regardless of what happens, even if we reach singularity escape velocity. Power will do what it always has done, which is centralize in the hands of a few to the detriment of the many; turning every human into a cyborg god won't change that (you simply have the problem of organizing the coexistence of cyborg gods rather than the problem of organizing the coexistence of baseline humans). To think otherwise is to implicitly rely on a Rousseauean (and anti-Hobbesean, channeling Hlynka) presupposition that people are basically good and just and suffering is merely an incidental byproduct of material lack, which we have reason to be skeptical of. The second half of the 20th century provided what were probably the most fertile material and social conditions for freedom that have ever been seen in human history; regardless of wherever we're going now, we're leaving freedom in the rear-view mirror.
Eh, Young Republican chat thread isn't on the same level as pissing on the altar. I'll save my outrage stocks for worse things.
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