Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It should be noted that fascists and kiddy-diddlers are by no means mutually exclusive sets of humans.

All I wanted to add - proceed with the squabbling!
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Alrite, first let's separate the issue. Gus is conflating the two things I brought up and adding a third which I didn't. So

1) longtermism
2) tech connections to far right and/or reactionary thought
3) a whataboutism argument about all the bad things corporations outside tech do and whether they're worse

Don't have time for all rn, so I'll start w/longtermism

This is by a former longtermist philosopher turned apostate


Ord similarly argues that ‘the problem is not so much an excess of technology as a lack of wisdom,’ before going on to quote Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot (1994): ‘Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise.’ In other words, it is our fault for not being smarter, wiser and more ethical, a cluster of deficiencies that many longtermists believe, in a bit of twisted logic, could be rectified by technologically reengineering our cognitive systems and moral dispositions. Everything, on this account, is an engineering problem, and hence every problem arises from too little rather than too much technology.

A couple of relatively indepth articles by journalists

Because, for all its sci-fi flavorings, what commands attention to longtermism is not any compelling case for prioritizing the value of distant exoplanets and centuries, but the billionaire politics it seeks to impose on the rest of us.

A program that abstracts civilization so completely from these systems [the Earth's own regulatory systems i.e. climate] is not a serious one for thinking about the year 2122, never mind 3122. Longtermism is less a sober plan for securing the future than a fanciful scheme for locking in an eternal present that can never be.


As you’ll see, longtermism is not just an intellectual trend; it’s an intrinsically political project, which means we shouldn’t leave it up to a few powerful people (whether philosophers or billionaires) to define it. Charting the future of humanity should be much more democratic.

A largely critical review of McAskill's book by a philosopher who goes into some of more technical philosophical tenets - population ethics, value neutrality, etc

All of those pieces have a wealth of further quotable bits, but I encourage anyone interested to just read them for yourselves
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
The Vox article in particular does a good job of distinguishing between weak and strong longtermism. Let's call them wlt and slt for convenience. Wlt, as it says, basically just anyone concerned with the future beyond the short to medium term. Climate Extinction etc would certainly qualify. So would things like seed banks.

Strong longtermism is the what's being pushed by the actual ideologues (i.e. philosophers) - McAskill, Ord, Greaves, etc, and their forerunners like Bostrom. The basic idea is 1) more people will exist in the totality of the future than exist now 2) by their utilitarian ethics (slt basically == utilitarianism updated for the age of space travel, AI, VR, etc) the greatest good is the most aggregate happiness, therefore 3) the math leads to all kinds of, putting it mildly, counterintuitive conclusions about how to allocate resources to increase happiness, mostly ignoring current suffering and crises (i.e. climate change, poverty) in favor of preventing highly unlikely but possible "existential risk".

Because the slt philosophers realize that many of their conclusions would be unpalatable, if not outright despicable, to the public at large, there is a conscious effort to soft-pedal the weak version while attempting to convert billionaires etc to the strong version in order to secure funding. That's where Musk, Thiel, Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn etc come in, as well as McAskill's famous conversion of a young Sam Bankman-Fried to the cause.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
What it really minds me is the advent of neoliberalism. The Mont Pelerin founders realized similarly that many of their ideas would be unpalatable to the public so they sought, like slt, to bypass the public and go directly to the levers of power via founding think tanks and academia. They then basically soft-pedaled a watered down version (freedom to choose) as a front for the harder, very unpopular version (centrally imposed austerity). The difference with slt is that they did it much faster, years instead of decades, and they went directly to the ultrawealthy for funding as a startup would, but it's the same basic strategy.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
There's a ton more that could be said about strong longtermism, how fucked up it is and the multiple deeply flawed assumptions (i.e. what shapes the population ethics math) it rests on, but that's a decent start

So there you go: a tiny clique of philosopher-kings seeking to optimize their version of human (and/or posthuman/transhuman) happiness with essentially no democratic input, checks, etc

Gus or whoever else is welcome to post refutations either of their own or preferably, longtermist philosophers
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Oh one more thing

I'd like to see any evidence that any of these people are strongly influenced by James C. Scott, who I'm very familiar with. Because there is zero indication of it in their own literature.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This reminds me of the bit in Spaced where Daisy is psyching herself up for a job interview she's got with a women's magazine called FLAPS, and she asks herself "What do you think about current events?", then answers "I like them; I think they're good", and nods sagely as she's just said something really insightful.
 

Leo

Well-known member

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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Next Elon will break into a showtune song-and-dance about Free Speech while neuralinked with his Bonobo back-up dancers.


"Don't Mind the Mind Virus (and Make Twitter Great Again!)"

Therrrrrre's.... a.... rampant set of notions takin' over
The values and opinions of our youth!
And we don't have to take it bendin' over,

[Musk and Bonobos bend over and peek-a-boo under their legs at the audience]
When our new moderator is so shrewd!

The fear of being canceled is no longer
The primary suppressant of our views!

[Musk and Bonobos gesticulate holding binoculars to their eyes]
Our children will assuredly be stronger
And our women will no longer be confused!

You are free to speak your mind
with no pressure to be kind.
Just think of all the libs whom you can trigger!
We just know you're salivatin'
while anxiously anticipatin'
the opportunity to say the word nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-


[Musk's neuralink overheats and he falls to the floor, foaming at the mouth, while the Bonobos break into electrocuted chaos]
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
But the lead backup Bonobo dancer, Maurice, escapes backstage, thanks to a benign phenotypic anomaly which prevented the neuralink implant from short-circuiting the nervous system - the same anomaly in fact which heightened his ability to master the dance routine and climb the professional ladder at Henry's Movin' Monkeys.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"Don't Mind the Mind Virus (and Make Twitter Great Again!)"

Therrrrrre's.... a.... rampant set of notions takin' over
The values and opinions of our youth!
And we don't have to take it bendin' over,

[Musk and Bonobos bend over and peek-a-boo under their legs at the audience]
When our new moderator is so shrewd!

The fear of being canceled is no longer
The primary suppressant of our views!

[Musk and Bonobos gesticulate holding binoculars to their eyes]
Our children will assuredly be stronger
And our women will no longer be confused!

You are free to speak your mind
with no pressure to be kind.
Just think of all the libs whom you can trigger!
We just know you're salivatin'
while anxiously anticipatin'
the opportunity to say the word nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-


[Musk's neuralink overheats and he falls to the floor, foaming at the mouth, while the Bonobos break into electrocuted chaos]
That's brilliant, in the sense of actually being awful enough to be in one of Pynchon's books.
 

Leo

Well-known member
where does Elon find the time to run a half-dozen companies, respond to tweets from randos, coordinate "the twitter files", and go out to comedy clubs?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
where does Elon find the time to run a half-dozen companies, respond to tweets from randos, coordinate "the twitter files", and go out to comedy clubs?
Reminds me of a comment I read on Twitter, that was something like "Elon Musk being CEO of three companies at the same time suggests to me that being a CEO isn't a particularly taxing or important job."
 
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