> who wishes to maintain himself

This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.

Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:

Never pay a human again

Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?

Nietzsche also described it well when noting there are those who deem themselves nobles and feel they are righteously above the laws and those who derive their identity from suffering under the same laws.

I think you are interpreting the quote incorrectly. It is not that the prince should be immoral, but rather that he must understand political reality is often filled with perfidious actions and motives. He must recognize that within his principality, there will be those ready to backstab him to gain power. His duty is to the continuation of his principality and the preservation of his own power.

This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.

What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.

Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.

This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.

I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.

TLDR: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".

> The powerful are just living an alternate life...

So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".

"Us commoners" ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics, and then go out and buy whatever stock we think will go up without a second thought to any of that idle chatter.

Cheetahs ate my face.

Do they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!

Some of these SV "founder mode" people do speak like sociopaths. It's probably a good base for success in the industry.

"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"

I'm tired of cheats.

Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.

How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.

Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".

I call it pissing in the pool.

I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.

Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )

The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.

But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.

Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.

Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.

This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.

>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?

The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.

It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.

It is possible, but sadly the alternative is easier.

Hard to say Flock is the worst... There's a lot of competition. I'll throw Toka into the ring.

https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...

He's the embodiment of the banality of evil. Just can't avoid being cliché.

I have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape

Had to google his name. Welcome to the Egghead's lair, Mr. Bond.

They really are the grift that keeps on giving.

He also organized/hosted a reading club for discussing Evola, the fascist/nazi occultist.

The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.

In my perception, VCs don't really care about goals. They care about a convincing argument "if you give me money, I'll give you back more money". Note that it doesn't matter if that statement is true; it only needs to be true in aggregate to keep the VCs behaving the way that they do.

Pure greed; and most people think it won't apply to them. It'll monitor "the others"

Some of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media.

He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.

Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-ap...

Why dont you read the article?

Who says it isn't? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41698-026-01276-6

"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped.

History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.

Curing cancer is such a lazy goal. Finding out how to make everyone smarter is a much better one.

That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?

Yeah really

How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing

They call it "goal orientation".

I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.

SV is a paperclip optimizer, except instead of maximising paperclips, it maximises human misery.

I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com

> Does SV now optimize for evilness?

Since when has it not ?

Called it! [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765

Making world a better place by so lo mo

They’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.

Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.

One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.

It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.

Pretty solidly false. Some have a thesis. Some have rules about what they will not invest in.

The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.

This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”

And thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.

Why would they answer honestly on that test? It's quite obvious what the "wrong" answers would be.

Well... you would be surprised on how many "successful" people, i.e. people with immense wealth, fall into these categories.

These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.

It seems we are successfully screening for people that do.

How do you get that implemented where they are the very types that run the show?

People don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency.

For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.

I'm sorry but this is such an unhelpful knee-jerk reaction.

When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.

Well that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time.

You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?