Why is this puzzling to people? Isn't this behavior exactly what we'd want out of intelligent, thoughtful people in high places? The ability to countenance and enjoy interesting and thought-provoking ideas that are contrary to their own immediate interests?
IMO, most critiques are poorly-thought-out and therefore quickly dismissed, so when a well-thought-out critique appears and captures interest, this is surface-level puzzling. Especially to those who are poorly able to evaluate the quality of an argument themselves.
> It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies
> “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”
It's not puzzling, it's troubling. To see these people who are actively destroying society be so fascinated by their own powers of destruction.
Oh you're being a literalist. I can go into Bitcoin for global warming if you want that, but when people say "destroying the world" in the thread they are talking about destroying the set of values and institutions that make up our current culture/society.
To that definition, I think ad tech is helping destroy the world will of it's psychological manipulation of people at a scale that's never been done before
Merely responding to the tone of the comment I was, well, responding to.
> To that definition, I think ad tech is helping destroy the world will of it's psychological manipulation of people at a scale that's never been done before
I see very little evidence that ad tech is doing any of that. I think you could make a much better case that social media is doing that. But it's not the ads that are toxic - it's the primary content. The ads are really no worse than they've ever been on television or otherwise.
There's certainly a case to be made that social media, a small corner of the tech universe, is harming certain social institutions and values. But it's a far cry from destroying the world, especially in light of how much tech has given the world that has been good.
Social media and ad tech are currently intertwined. Facebook and Twitter are both two large players who are both ad tech and social media based. Google was until recently, and that was after years of failure, which they committed to because social media is such a force multiplier for adtech. Can you name another large social media company who doesn't make money off of ad tech? Snap Chat is the only other major social media company I can think of at the moment, and they also make their revenue off of ads.
As for
>Merely responding to the tone of the comment I was, well, responding to.
You were responding to the well known phrase "destroying the world" as if it was physically tearing the earth apart, when it's been a phrase for destroying the currently accepted social norms since at least the 90s when I first heard it in popular media.
If you want to have a discussion stop being disengenous about your arguments
Edit: I went and reviewed the thread. You asked "You think that all tech is doing is destroying society?". When I said "Yes", you asked for the physics of how it was destroying the world. Please stop moving the goal posts
> Social media and ad tech are currently intertwined. Facebook and Twitter are both two large players who are both ad tech and social media based. Google was until recently, and that was after years of failure
Social media was never an important part of Google's business.
> Can you name another large social media company who doesn't make money off of ad tech?
Wrong set containment. Yes, social media functions on ad tech. Bullets function on momentum. So what? Ad tech does a lot of things, social media is just one of many, many things it is used for. You are decrying ad tech as 'destroying the world', by pointing at a sliver of its use cases. You're not upset with ad tech, you're upset with social media.
> You were responding to the well known phrase "destroying the world" as if it was physically tearing the earth apart, when it's been a phrase for destroying the currently accepted social norms since at least the 90s when I first heard it in popular media.
Erm, no. I was using the phrase exactly how you are. My question, as you went back and reviewed, is whether or not the ONLY thing that ad tech is doing is destroying the world? I didn't even object to the silly insinuation that it was in fact, doing so.
> If you want to have a discussion stop being disengenous about your arguments
I'm not being disingenuous, you just need to work on your reading comprehension.
> Edit: I went and reviewed the thread. You asked "You think that all tech is doing is destroying society?". When I said "Yes", you asked for the physics of how it was destroying the world. Please stop moving the goal posts
I didn't ask if it was destroying the world. I asked if all it was doing was destroying the world. You still haven't answered the physics question, either. Ad tech is a business model for social media.
If you want to tar 'ad tech' with the sins of social media, then you need to assert that social media can only exist because of ad tech, and that the other things enabled by ad tech (e.g. google search) would be worth giving up in exchange for eliminating social media. Otherwise you're just saying "Bullets rely on momentum and bullets kill people! Therefore momentum is bad!".
>How, exactly? Explain the physics of that to me. How is ad tech destroying the world?
And now your telling me
>I didn't ask if it was destroying the world
Was some critical word here deleted by autocorrect? Because those you explicitly asked how it was destroying the world in the text that is in this thread
You asked how it was destroying the world, and then said you didn't ask that. I am actually trying to understand you, but cannot see what you mean when these statements can't both be true
I asked if all it was doing was destroying the world. Then, in a follow-up, I asked you to explain the physics of how it was destroying the world. The emphasis being on the word 'how' in that question. I didn't mean the literal physics in the sense of tearing the earth apart - I meant the process by which it was eroding culture, community, values, etc.
I think that there is a decently strong case to be made that social media, especially certain forms of social media, are in fact doing those things. I think there is a case to be made that advertising generally has helped that along, by allowing social media services to be free for users. I don't really see the case that 'ad tech' has had much to do with that, other than by optimizing the ads seen to make the companies marginally more profitable.
Ad tech can be destructive but it’s picking up the tab for a lot of useful tools. It’s a tough one. If ad tech were to dissapear tomorrow I suppose we’d just go back to an Internet more like the mid nineties perhaps?
It’s an interesting thought experiment. What would the Internet become if ad tech were to dissapear right now?
Why do you guys assume your fathers haven't those issued covered? You think they are new issues?
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It's covered. We have decentralisation, scrutiny and from that comes the ability to secede.
No machine nor algorithm nor class is gonna take over and remove your right to pursue happiness. At least not permanently.
The point being, let's not make a reality of a possible future. Whatever future comes, we have it covered.
the declaration of independence has no legal authority. that's just a tactic politicians use to make their voters feel safe about their rights being violated.
You can always secede, but some systems make it harder. You won't find a better system than the one which clearly stipulate you have scrutiny and "easy" secession. So don't let fear makes you adopt for a lesser system.
Fear is the strongest of our enemy. That's the position the declaration of independence let you in. How beautiful is that?
I'm not a Silicon Valley CEO, but I like hearing this sort of thing because I don't think my work is going away even if the social impact of the industry is known and controlled.
As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either.
>As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either.
Yeah, a lot of folks both at C-level and in the trenches may feel, even if they run an individual company, that they're a bit caught in mutual escalation and wouldn't actually mind some level of imposed disarmament. Ie., it wouldn't be bad if there were in fact some more consideration forced so long as that applied to everyone all at once, but that it's harder to do unilaterally on their own, particularly taking into account VC/investor/customer pressures. Having someone challenging the entire industry intelligently could actually help take things in a direction many wouldn't mind moving anyway.
One example I think where this already happened was sales taxes. Yes there were some people ideologically opposed to all taxes even after the industry matured, or were seeking out some individual advantage, but I also know plenty of people who had no specific problem with taxes per se but just didn't want to be put at an active disadvantage vs competitors. Compared to other tech companies they didn't want them to have zero while they didn't, and compared to local retailers they didn't want any gotchas of getting screwed by hard to parse local composite tax numbers and figuring out where to send the money nationwide and all that with many states/counties have terrible scaling archaic systems. If there was just a database to consult and an orderly system to send to then no problem. So there was a win-win potential there as far as they were concerned and people challenging "nothing" weren't unwelcome, but it was still hard to do alone.
> An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Mr. Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story.
Did Alphabet have him sign an agreement before presenting?
An interesting read, and I don't see why he'd be confused. In my experience and personally a lot of intelligent people, particular ambitious startup types, like to be challenged (in an intelligent way). They like "intellectual combat", vigorous debate. They may defend themselves vociferously (they're also the type to have extensively thought about and researched their positions already, so they're not lightly held) but it's exciting to encounter opposed views argued beautifully, where there is strong disagreement but damn if they don't have a point. I think some people confuse people dismissing what they consider mediocre arguments with no interest in any challenge at all. As always implementation matters a lot. I mean, that's why a lot of us are right here on HN right? To gain information from those smarter then we are.
I think his interpretation of UBI is an oversimplification however that does not fully encompass many practical or positive moral considerations in support of it:
>'This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”'
There are at least a few parts to this. To get the most simple and pragmatic out of the way first, some people are interested in UBI and base level resource/shelter/information access purely (or at least heavily) from a coldly rational efficiency point of view. They see it as a better system all around vs an unorganized hodgepodge of defined bespoke benefits, and simply figure "well if something needs to be kept around let's make it better" and go no farther then that. This also does in fact have at least some real world support as well as theoretical. Simply giving money directly to people in the developing world has yielded promising results in some initial trials I read vs trying to distribute goods. It can be made more resistant to corruption, more decentralized, and many of the efficiencies of a market economy work just as well if the economic input is external.
Practical considerations also encompass an expression of humility: even if someone cared only about the "valuable" humans, we don't actually have any clear idea how that comes about beyond the roughest figures. But we do know that bad nutrition and lack of even basic opportunity can destroy potential for good. I'm positive, just on a pure statistical level, that we have had world changing genius level intellects in the dozens to hundreds that have been born in slums, into starvation and threats and lack of any sort of serious upward potential and have thus been utterly wasted. Enormous amounts of valuable human potential has been actively pissed away for no good end at all, in fact for negative value since that directly correlates to crime/prison. The poor are not some lesser race, but that's how policy has effectively treated them.
Both those lead into and inform a moral angle, which is that I think direct income (and in turn UBI) can also come from a much more fundamental position of respect for individual humans, not merely "but we are nice". This may be easiest to come at by looking at the charity example: if you dig down, a lot of current schemes fundamentally come from a view of poverty being a moral failing. The view is that the poor and desperate are that way because they're stupid, inferior beings, and in turn they must be given the goods they need (decided by their betters) directly because otherwise "of course" they'd fritter the money all away on booze/drugs/junk/[thing giver considers a bad idea].
It turns out though that while sure there are hard cases there are also plenty of smart, decent people who are nonetheless very badly off due to essentially bad luck and an inability to muster the capital...
Occam's Razor tells me it's because they are being painted as capable of subverting seemingly larger-than-life systems and institutions. I imagine it's an ego boost to a lot of these tech CEOs.
And it's arrogant to boot. Seriously believing machine learning is going to make everyone worthless/unemployed and end government is even crazy for Malthusian standards. This is the same age old debate over technology has been going on for centuries. There's nearly infinite things to work on out there, even if the latest steam engine makes a particular thing more efficient or require less workers. Those workers re-train and move on to other things. The key to minimizing the issues is to provide the education, tools, health care, etc. to help displaced workers with that.
I think his argument has always been more along the lines of machine learning will give the people in charge the knowledge of what it is that the citizen wants to hear and what they will believe, which means that the owner of the data then has power not by way of voting or military might, but by way of manipulation of the masses - which is a sentiment that I find much easier to believe.
I actually think that well before the useless class becomes useless for economic productivity, they will be put to use for another purpose — mass violence.
The elites will simply put guns and bombs in the hands of the unemployable masses and use them to take what they can’t win in the market place.
You can already see sustained and successful efforts to radicalize people online and it’s only going to get worse.
Asymmetric warfare is always going to work and no matter how many drones and missions you have, enough armed radicals will eventually bring anyone to their knees.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a global spasm of violence but I think we’ve been inching closer and closer towards it, year by year since 9/11.
A lot of Silicon Valley, and its global sphere of influence, loves consuming pseudo-contrarian content because they are themselves incapable of producing the tiniest bit of contrarian thought. Either because it's an intellectually too consuming task or simply because they are too scared to break rank with what is socially acceptable, even in the intimacy of their own minds. It is very hard to find anything subversive outside of anonymous clubs living on the fringe of the internet, a few domain specific publications, and "crank" hot-spots.
The cheap worship of contrarian thinking has taken off when Thiel popularized the idea of "secrets" in From Zero To One as well as with F8 and their analogous notion of "unfair advantage". Of course that is a much older idea, but they are the ones who synthesized it clearly in addition to consciously leverage it aggressively in business contexts.
It's odd, as usual, and an old phenomenon. There is a a bit of mimesis (craving for the the object of high-status Peter Thiel's desire: contrarian insights), a bit of laziness (taking the path of least resistance: consuming content instead of producing original thought), and a bit of messianism and vanity. I am not casting a moral judgment on the latter. The issue is that it comes at no cost: you never deploy efforts to challenge the tenets of your world and you never have to feel uncomfortable contemplating forbidden ideas. So you allow yourself to feel vain for a most obedient opinion.
If I were to draw an "ecology of contrarian ideas", I would say that there are about two types: the ones that will spark outrage and the ones that will spark indifference. The former are more abundant, easier to come up with, and probably more destructive too. The latter consists of all the positions that you can take in public without them having repercussions on your career, network, and status - since no one cares or understand. So, when you hear someone lauded for their "contrarian takes", chances are that they are either high-status, not taking any risks, or off-the-mark.
That's not exclusive to the tech world at all and maybe it will improve.
Edit: you've posted other uncivil/unsubstantive comments recently. We ban accounts that do that, so can you please review the rules and follow them when commenting here from now on?
I think this is a really good answer. I think his works are just edgy enough to really flatter the Valley Identity, one of the core aspects of which is to see yourself as a contrarian / outsider / challenger / disruptor, etc.
Although, I think the Valley can also be very faddish with it's thinking and techno-criticism is really in right now. Had his books been published 10 years earlier, they would have not been noticed at all.
I hate this line of reasoning that not accepting "contrarian" ideas is narrow minded, because while it's not wrong, 90% of the time it's used to justify believing the earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, and climate change is untrue. What's that, you don't like my ignorance? Ah well, then you're part of the narrow minded blind elite for not accepting contrarian thought!
Ultimately, the point is the pursuit of the truth.
The postulates are that we are blind, fallible, and prone to "cargo-culting". So, in that setting, the preliminary step for any inquisitive mind should be to make space for the truth to emerge.
Hopefully, if you labor the intellectual land, ruthlessly digging deep, much deeper than you would normally do, then you might find important truths trapped beneath concepts and ideas which no one questions. As it turns out, it seem that important truth hide behind simple but devastating lies. More generally, Thiel calls these truths secrets, I much prefer the term treasures, or even things that were hidden since the foundation of the world if I'm in a biblical or Girardian mood.
In the context of technology and entrepreneurship, the postulate is that business leverage these secrets are the best kind. That is the whole argument that Thiel very eloquently lays out in his book From Zero To One.
But because critical inquiry is not something that comes naturally to most people, you need to train yourself and condition your brain to be effective at it. That is, control the mind's natural inclination to reject what goes against the doxa. The first step toward this is of course to be generous with odd ideas, and then grooming yourself to put your own beliefs in danger. It is an exercise in self-deconstruction and discipline. What belief makes you uncomfortable? Why? Keep pushing until your mind collapse under its own contradiction, until you have toppled every single of the foundations which hold up the larger edifice - if you are familiar with Cartesian doubt, that is exactly what I am talking about, only more violent.
When people discuss about contrarian thinking, they immediately think of controversial ideologies and political stances. In fact, I think these are some of the least interesting spaces to explore. I am much more excited about critical inquiries that lead to insights that people are, at first, indifferent to. They grow very deep and are most fruitful.
Sure, I understand the argument. Critical thinking, questioning everything that is around us, is important. I'm just saying that it's also important that this argument doesn't provide ground for holding ideas that are objectively false, as proven by science.
yup, Silicon Valley is a hivemind of people patting themselves on the backs as being intellectual contrarians. If you want to see what happens when someone with actual contrarian thought voices their opinion, see James Damore or Peter thiel and how fast they were excommunicated for their heresy.
While Damore was ostracized relatively quickly, I don't think you can say the same of Thiel. He's had his views since his days at the Stanford Review, yet that hasn't stopped him from being almost idolized (indeed, he's referenced in the parent comment as a source of this thinking). If anyone's patted themselves on the back for being a contrarian and been rewarded for it, it's Thiel.
The difference is that most people weren't aware or didn't care until he announced his support of Trump. Nothing objectively changed, but like a bunch of robots everyone immediately started calling for him to be removed from the Facebook board of directors and the relationship with YC to be ended.
Every era has its third-rail speech codes. It wasn't that long ago that saying certain things would literally get you burned at the stake. We consider ourselves enlightened today because nobody cares if you say those things.
The irony, though, is we've just adopted a different speech code (political correctness) where expressing a taboo notion will get you metaphorically burned at the stake.
I wonder what people a century from now will think of our modern speech codes. If past speech codes are any guide, they won't think positively about it.
If you read my comment again, you will see that I am not criticizing anyone for being smug. In fact, I say that I don't mind vanity when it is deserved. Elaborate and we could have a discussion, as it stands there isn't much for me to reply.
If you use language like "they are themselves incapable of producing the tiniest bit of contrarian thought", "they are too scared to break rank with what is socially acceptable", etc. then of course you are judging others, whether you say you are or not. What I don't like about comments like that one (nothing personal mind you) is that they don't actually say anything. It's all just pejorative language, putting down others, and thus implicitly taking a superior position yourself.
Unless I'm missing something, the only sentence in the comment that doesn't fit that description is It is very hard to find anything subversive outside of anonymous clubs living on the fringe of the internet, a few domain specific publications, and "crank" hot-spots. That, at least, isn't putting down other people. But why assume that the people you're talking about don't know this?
That's because you take my criticism of the overall laziness as the ultimate end of my comment. It's not. It serves as context to answer the question that the article prompts: Why are techies enamored with Pr. Hariri, their "doomsayer"?
And the answer is directly related to the fact that there is a search for contrarian-ness, a quest that is not introspective at all because that would actually require some effort rather than passive content consumption.
You choose to describe my criticism as "putting people down" as if my goal was to be mean, but I suspect you are more annoyed at what you interpret as arrogance rather than anyone's feelings. I don't mind you thinking that but I don't think that's the case.
I can't recommend his books highly enough. It's human nature explained in a single book! And although I've read hundreds of other books on various aspects of human nature, Harari's non-judgemental synthesis from a consistent point of view clarified my thinking significantly.
IMHO, starting with Sapiens is better—as that is the really core expertise of Harari, and it's a masterful distillation of human history into a single book.
His predictions don't sound that far off from something Ray Kurzweil would predict. They're both predicting a utopia and the beginning of a new form of intelligence. The difference is that Yuval Hariri is a little more explicit about the fact that not everyone might make it to the rapture.
Quick reminder: doesn't matter how exclusive you make heaven. People have a tendency to believe that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
More importantly, they don't really leave a lot of room for avoiding something that feels inevitable to a lot of people. Well, a lot of people in the audience anyway. The people you encounter at lunch would probably find the notion of God-like humans to be kind of crazy.
It reminds me of The Boondocks. Huey Freeman dreams of inciting white people to riot by shattering their most cherished beliefs, but he discovers that the wealthy, white people of his neighbourhood aren't bothered by his revelations in the slightest.
Huey: And all I'm saying is, Ronald Reagan was the devil.
Rich Man: You are such an articulate young man.
Huey: I'm trying to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil! Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names have six letters? 666? Man, doesn't that offend you?
Rich Man: I love this kid!
....
Huey: (to Granddad) These people aren't worried about us. They're not worried about anything. They're rich. No matter what happens, these people will just keep applaudin'.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] thread> “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”
It's not puzzling, it's troubling. To see these people who are actively destroying society be so fascinated by their own powers of destruction.
To that definition, I think ad tech is helping destroy the world will of it's psychological manipulation of people at a scale that's never been done before
Merely responding to the tone of the comment I was, well, responding to.
> To that definition, I think ad tech is helping destroy the world will of it's psychological manipulation of people at a scale that's never been done before
I see very little evidence that ad tech is doing any of that. I think you could make a much better case that social media is doing that. But it's not the ads that are toxic - it's the primary content. The ads are really no worse than they've ever been on television or otherwise.
There's certainly a case to be made that social media, a small corner of the tech universe, is harming certain social institutions and values. But it's a far cry from destroying the world, especially in light of how much tech has given the world that has been good.
As for
>Merely responding to the tone of the comment I was, well, responding to.
You were responding to the well known phrase "destroying the world" as if it was physically tearing the earth apart, when it's been a phrase for destroying the currently accepted social norms since at least the 90s when I first heard it in popular media.
If you want to have a discussion stop being disengenous about your arguments
Edit: I went and reviewed the thread. You asked "You think that all tech is doing is destroying society?". When I said "Yes", you asked for the physics of how it was destroying the world. Please stop moving the goal posts
Social media was never an important part of Google's business.
> Can you name another large social media company who doesn't make money off of ad tech?
Wrong set containment. Yes, social media functions on ad tech. Bullets function on momentum. So what? Ad tech does a lot of things, social media is just one of many, many things it is used for. You are decrying ad tech as 'destroying the world', by pointing at a sliver of its use cases. You're not upset with ad tech, you're upset with social media.
> You were responding to the well known phrase "destroying the world" as if it was physically tearing the earth apart, when it's been a phrase for destroying the currently accepted social norms since at least the 90s when I first heard it in popular media.
Erm, no. I was using the phrase exactly how you are. My question, as you went back and reviewed, is whether or not the ONLY thing that ad tech is doing is destroying the world? I didn't even object to the silly insinuation that it was in fact, doing so.
> If you want to have a discussion stop being disengenous about your arguments
I'm not being disingenuous, you just need to work on your reading comprehension.
> Edit: I went and reviewed the thread. You asked "You think that all tech is doing is destroying society?". When I said "Yes", you asked for the physics of how it was destroying the world. Please stop moving the goal posts
I didn't ask if it was destroying the world. I asked if all it was doing was destroying the world. You still haven't answered the physics question, either. Ad tech is a business model for social media.
If you want to tar 'ad tech' with the sins of social media, then you need to assert that social media can only exist because of ad tech, and that the other things enabled by ad tech (e.g. google search) would be worth giving up in exchange for eliminating social media. Otherwise you're just saying "Bullets rely on momentum and bullets kill people! Therefore momentum is bad!".
>How, exactly? Explain the physics of that to me. How is ad tech destroying the world?
And now your telling me
>I didn't ask if it was destroying the world
Was some critical word here deleted by autocorrect? Because those you explicitly asked how it was destroying the world in the text that is in this thread
I think that there is a decently strong case to be made that social media, especially certain forms of social media, are in fact doing those things. I think there is a case to be made that advertising generally has helped that along, by allowing social media services to be free for users. I don't really see the case that 'ad tech' has had much to do with that, other than by optimizing the ads seen to make the companies marginally more profitable.
It’s an interesting thought experiment. What would the Internet become if ad tech were to dissapear right now?
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It's covered. We have decentralisation, scrutiny and from that comes the ability to secede.
No machine nor algorithm nor class is gonna take over and remove your right to pursue happiness. At least not permanently.
The point being, let's not make a reality of a possible future. Whatever future comes, we have it covered.
Fear is the strongest of our enemy. That's the position the declaration of independence let you in. How beautiful is that?
As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either.
Yeah, a lot of folks both at C-level and in the trenches may feel, even if they run an individual company, that they're a bit caught in mutual escalation and wouldn't actually mind some level of imposed disarmament. Ie., it wouldn't be bad if there were in fact some more consideration forced so long as that applied to everyone all at once, but that it's harder to do unilaterally on their own, particularly taking into account VC/investor/customer pressures. Having someone challenging the entire industry intelligently could actually help take things in a direction many wouldn't mind moving anyway.
One example I think where this already happened was sales taxes. Yes there were some people ideologically opposed to all taxes even after the industry matured, or were seeking out some individual advantage, but I also know plenty of people who had no specific problem with taxes per se but just didn't want to be put at an active disadvantage vs competitors. Compared to other tech companies they didn't want them to have zero while they didn't, and compared to local retailers they didn't want any gotchas of getting screwed by hard to parse local composite tax numbers and figuring out where to send the money nationwide and all that with many states/counties have terrible scaling archaic systems. If there was just a database to consult and an orderly system to send to then no problem. So there was a win-win potential there as far as they were concerned and people challenging "nothing" weren't unwelcome, but it was still hard to do alone.
Did Alphabet have him sign an agreement before presenting?
I think his interpretation of UBI is an oversimplification however that does not fully encompass many practical or positive moral considerations in support of it:
>'This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”'
There are at least a few parts to this. To get the most simple and pragmatic out of the way first, some people are interested in UBI and base level resource/shelter/information access purely (or at least heavily) from a coldly rational efficiency point of view. They see it as a better system all around vs an unorganized hodgepodge of defined bespoke benefits, and simply figure "well if something needs to be kept around let's make it better" and go no farther then that. This also does in fact have at least some real world support as well as theoretical. Simply giving money directly to people in the developing world has yielded promising results in some initial trials I read vs trying to distribute goods. It can be made more resistant to corruption, more decentralized, and many of the efficiencies of a market economy work just as well if the economic input is external.
Practical considerations also encompass an expression of humility: even if someone cared only about the "valuable" humans, we don't actually have any clear idea how that comes about beyond the roughest figures. But we do know that bad nutrition and lack of even basic opportunity can destroy potential for good. I'm positive, just on a pure statistical level, that we have had world changing genius level intellects in the dozens to hundreds that have been born in slums, into starvation and threats and lack of any sort of serious upward potential and have thus been utterly wasted. Enormous amounts of valuable human potential has been actively pissed away for no good end at all, in fact for negative value since that directly correlates to crime/prison. The poor are not some lesser race, but that's how policy has effectively treated them.
Both those lead into and inform a moral angle, which is that I think direct income (and in turn UBI) can also come from a much more fundamental position of respect for individual humans, not merely "but we are nice". This may be easiest to come at by looking at the charity example: if you dig down, a lot of current schemes fundamentally come from a view of poverty being a moral failing. The view is that the poor and desperate are that way because they're stupid, inferior beings, and in turn they must be given the goods they need (decided by their betters) directly because otherwise "of course" they'd fritter the money all away on booze/drugs/junk/[thing giver considers a bad idea].
It turns out though that while sure there are hard cases there are also plenty of smart, decent people who are nonetheless very badly off due to essentially bad luck and an inability to muster the capital...
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
I agree with you about investment in education, healthcare, etc., but those things won’t pay the rent and buy groceries I’d there aren’t enough jobs.
The elites will simply put guns and bombs in the hands of the unemployable masses and use them to take what they can’t win in the market place.
You can already see sustained and successful efforts to radicalize people online and it’s only going to get worse.
Asymmetric warfare is always going to work and no matter how many drones and missions you have, enough armed radicals will eventually bring anyone to their knees.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a global spasm of violence but I think we’ve been inching closer and closer towards it, year by year since 9/11.
Of course they love his message, in it they win.
A lot of Silicon Valley, and its global sphere of influence, loves consuming pseudo-contrarian content because they are themselves incapable of producing the tiniest bit of contrarian thought. Either because it's an intellectually too consuming task or simply because they are too scared to break rank with what is socially acceptable, even in the intimacy of their own minds. It is very hard to find anything subversive outside of anonymous clubs living on the fringe of the internet, a few domain specific publications, and "crank" hot-spots.
The cheap worship of contrarian thinking has taken off when Thiel popularized the idea of "secrets" in From Zero To One as well as with F8 and their analogous notion of "unfair advantage". Of course that is a much older idea, but they are the ones who synthesized it clearly in addition to consciously leverage it aggressively in business contexts.
It's odd, as usual, and an old phenomenon. There is a a bit of mimesis (craving for the the object of high-status Peter Thiel's desire: contrarian insights), a bit of laziness (taking the path of least resistance: consuming content instead of producing original thought), and a bit of messianism and vanity. I am not casting a moral judgment on the latter. The issue is that it comes at no cost: you never deploy efforts to challenge the tenets of your world and you never have to feel uncomfortable contemplating forbidden ideas. So you allow yourself to feel vain for a most obedient opinion.
If I were to draw an "ecology of contrarian ideas", I would say that there are about two types: the ones that will spark outrage and the ones that will spark indifference. The former are more abundant, easier to come up with, and probably more destructive too. The latter consists of all the positions that you can take in public without them having repercussions on your career, network, and status - since no one cares or understand. So, when you hear someone lauded for their "contrarian takes", chances are that they are either high-status, not taking any risks, or off-the-mark.
That's not exclusive to the tech world at all and maybe it will improve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've posted other uncivil/unsubstantive comments recently. We ban accounts that do that, so can you please review the rules and follow them when commenting here from now on?
That seems like a pretty uncharitable interpretation tbh, but duly noted.
Although, I think the Valley can also be very faddish with it's thinking and techno-criticism is really in right now. Had his books been published 10 years earlier, they would have not been noticed at all.
The postulates are that we are blind, fallible, and prone to "cargo-culting". So, in that setting, the preliminary step for any inquisitive mind should be to make space for the truth to emerge.
Hopefully, if you labor the intellectual land, ruthlessly digging deep, much deeper than you would normally do, then you might find important truths trapped beneath concepts and ideas which no one questions. As it turns out, it seem that important truth hide behind simple but devastating lies. More generally, Thiel calls these truths secrets, I much prefer the term treasures, or even things that were hidden since the foundation of the world if I'm in a biblical or Girardian mood.
In the context of technology and entrepreneurship, the postulate is that business leverage these secrets are the best kind. That is the whole argument that Thiel very eloquently lays out in his book From Zero To One.
But because critical inquiry is not something that comes naturally to most people, you need to train yourself and condition your brain to be effective at it. That is, control the mind's natural inclination to reject what goes against the doxa. The first step toward this is of course to be generous with odd ideas, and then grooming yourself to put your own beliefs in danger. It is an exercise in self-deconstruction and discipline. What belief makes you uncomfortable? Why? Keep pushing until your mind collapse under its own contradiction, until you have toppled every single of the foundations which hold up the larger edifice - if you are familiar with Cartesian doubt, that is exactly what I am talking about, only more violent.
When people discuss about contrarian thinking, they immediately think of controversial ideologies and political stances. In fact, I think these are some of the least interesting spaces to explore. I am much more excited about critical inquiries that lead to insights that people are, at first, indifferent to. They grow very deep and are most fruitful.
Are you referring to 4chan?
edit: dear downvoter, this is an honest question
That reminds me of the old joke that the radicals in Soviet Russia were the ones that thought there should be not one but two Stalins.
I've often wondered if they were aware of the irony in that.
The irony, though, is we've just adopted a different speech code (political correctness) where expressing a taboo notion will get you metaphorically burned at the stake.
I wonder what people a century from now will think of our modern speech codes. If past speech codes are any guide, they won't think positively about it.
Your beginning points seem arbitrary too. Thiel didn't begin any of that and the idea of unfair advantage long predates Facebook.
Unless I'm missing something, the only sentence in the comment that doesn't fit that description is It is very hard to find anything subversive outside of anonymous clubs living on the fringe of the internet, a few domain specific publications, and "crank" hot-spots. That, at least, isn't putting down other people. But why assume that the people you're talking about don't know this?
And the answer is directly related to the fact that there is a search for contrarian-ness, a quest that is not introspective at all because that would actually require some effort rather than passive content consumption.
You choose to describe my criticism as "putting people down" as if my goal was to be mean, but I suspect you are more annoyed at what you interpret as arrogance rather than anyone's feelings. I don't mind you thinking that but I don't think that's the case.
Quick reminder: doesn't matter how exclusive you make heaven. People have a tendency to believe that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
More importantly, they don't really leave a lot of room for avoiding something that feels inevitable to a lot of people. Well, a lot of people in the audience anyway. The people you encounter at lunch would probably find the notion of God-like humans to be kind of crazy.
Huey: And all I'm saying is, Ronald Reagan was the devil.
Rich Man: You are such an articulate young man.
Huey: I'm trying to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil! Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names have six letters? 666? Man, doesn't that offend you?
Rich Man: I love this kid!
....
Huey: (to Granddad) These people aren't worried about us. They're not worried about anything. They're rich. No matter what happens, these people will just keep applaudin'.