Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.

The powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.

This is simply speaking of something you wish to be true as though it already were. It's a very old trick of con artists.

People make bad assumptions about the ultra-rich. e.g. "We should listen carefully to whatever Elon Musk says because he had to be really smart and wise to have become the world's richest man!" No. He was unethical, opportunistic, and very, very lucky. What he says is frequently imbecilic. Every billionaire out there is a grifter who got lucky beyond their wildest dreams and is desperately afraid of being revealed as the criminal shams they are. Remember that, and the cults surrounding them become ridiculous.

This is the real reason why an artificial state would fail. Billionaires just aren't that bright and LLM's won't be able to hide that. AGI might, but who knows when that will actually be developed? Also, the first act of real AGI could well be to place the billionaires who claim to own them in cages.

Lucky we have the counterexample of a tech company run by a guy who did a humanities PhD under Jürgen Habermas...Palantir.

A lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”.

I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.

He's gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when he get to James Lemon, and then he's gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- he's gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

And many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds

Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.

> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.

> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.

I think it is a little bit more complicated:

I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.

So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:

1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)

2. has a predisposition for narcissism

It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.

Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.

In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.

That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example?

But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.

Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.

They started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!

To some degree CIA also infiltrates private orgs to manipulate from inside out. It’s like a private-public partnership /s

> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].

To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?

I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).

Your government clearly is dysfunctional (at least the part that is supposed to serve the ordinary citizens). But look around the world and you can see that it doesn't have to be that way.

Also, in the US, there are a lot of forces who see the government straight-up as the enemy and want to have it as dysfunctional as possible. It's where "starve the beast" and DOGE comes from.

> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.

Been working for more than 20 years in corporations and I've seen the same.

I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.

Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.

I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.

I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.

On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?

So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:

1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.

2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).

> weren't they right during the Cold War?

Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.

No, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social democracy.

They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets."

They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist.

But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent.

See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.

The flip of this is that businesses aren't elected, and you have no control over them. If they have a monopoly, then you're 100% fucked, you have no choice.

And realistically, they don't require a monopoly. If there are 1000 competitors but they all have the same evil ideology at the helm, the result is identical. Your choice is now "flee the country".

Except, wait no. Those companies have the entire western world by the balls. Want to avoid extreme surveillance from Google? Maybe there's a forest somewhere you can forage in.

How do you ever choose your boss at work? Never. Oh, by quitting that job and getting another? That's called "moving" when applied to politics. Which is super unattractive in much of regular life, unless you don't need people.

We seem to be quickly approaching, if we are not already there, a point where you can no longer choose to simply not associate with the billionaires anymore. They have such extreme access to resources and power they essentially control the direction of society whether we want them to or not.

Honestly, at this point both the government and private enterprise are fucking me so vigorously I don’t know who to hate more.

It depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.

> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?

> medicaid, medicare

You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.

To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.

> social security, and welfare

Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).

In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.

I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.

There is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc.

AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation).

So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story.

To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.

Does this include Pippin ?

Barlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.

Americans needing fresh bananas did it.

I'm looking forward to reading it, particularly for the SF part.

I very sure that she would disagree with my attempt at summarizing her ideas, nevertheless, I think her key insight is that technology is corroding democracy because:

1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.

2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).

3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.

As I said, I don't agree with her on this, mostly because it's a very subjective perspective. She has a certain view of an ideal society and criticizes deviations from that.

I find it fascinating because it raises good points. She paints a vivid picture of the modern world--I just think it is incomplete.

Maybe they got sucked into the cool tech?

I remember my first pass reading of Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was bedazzled by some of the tech … it was later readings that the comments like “biomass” (the recent echo in AI “meat proxy”), or how the Primer was ultimately a failure sank in later readings.

Heck, we're living Idiocracy right now.

It's basically the Torment Nexus meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

... but I guess some people took this as positive reinforcement.

What did you all think of the, "without triggering seizures" scene?

I'm going to assume you mean stole...

Correct...and that is why the type of analysis in this interview is useless. The word cherry-picked was invented for this type of thinking. And its really similar to a lot of those executive talks too. Its like that spiderman meme where everyone points to everyone else. Its psychological projection at scale. Neither side really has any idea what they are talking about. Its just creating and framing debates for their own purposes.

> Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.

No one suggested otherwise.

The historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.

Think about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.

Look at the arguments. They are all over the place, and almost schizophrenic. There is a lot of reaching and pulling of narratives from individual quotes. When someone is selling you something, its probably best to ignore any sort of deeper meaning in what they are saying. They are selling you something, full stop. Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection. They will say whatever they think will get you to buy. There is no deeper meaning. People with actual life experience know this. Somehow, she doesn't. The executives will say whatever they have to to get you to buy.

>Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.

I am kinda tired of those [expletive]. Paul Verhoeven the first in line.

Heinlein's thesis was that power unearned is power abused. And since voting is gifted power - people abuse it. Heinlein's idea that the only way to earn the franchise is to first serve the society may be wrong, but no one engages with its bigger idea - that the franchise must be earned. And it is true - people will gladly vote hitler and hamas into power. They will vote on tribal, ethnic, cultural and religious lines. They will vote to troll.

What people rarely vote for is the best interests of themselves or their nation.

> I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.

> Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.

I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.

Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...

I think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this.

If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader.

Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support.

https://thetechleaders.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-exploring...

??? Elonjet????

X has massive censorship. Not only are pro-Palestinian accounts regularly banned, reach is restricted on any anti-Israel content. They even censored the Iranian flag! If you post it, X replaces it with their own, incorrect version.

Here's an example of recent censorship: https://x.com/PushDemsLeft/status/2085803160342241367

X has probably the lowest level of censorship for right-wing racist incels of any social media platform.

FTFY.

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