In PG's case, he's not interested enough in social conservatism to mount an interesting defense of it. He just digs low taxes and considers wealth an indicator of merit, which aligns him with the American right.
As a programmer, I’ll never understand why people think he’s smart. If you know how to program, his articles on “hackers” are extremely sneer worthy, especially since he tried to launch his own programming language and it was a complete and utter failure.
A lot of the culture around learning how to program etc also is very much pro VC people, and often treats them with some sort of reverence. ('their time is so valuable, any idea you want to sell them must be reduced to an elevator pitch')
So it is pretty interlinked imho.
VCs being perceived as smart, important people is one of the most successful social cons since the invention of the nobility.
More experienced programmers usually know that VCs are incredibly stupid and prone to panicked herding behavior; the moment one company hits a magical (often inflated) valuation using X or in sector Y, all the other VCs practically trample each other to throw good money at something totally brain dead like restaurants on the blockchain or AI foot rubs.
The fact that these people can walk and drink without choking is a goddamn miracle, and literally the only thing they have going for them is that they have money and connections. Give them an actual terminal and they’d strangle themselves on the USB cable the moment their babysitter wandered off to get coffee or use the restroom.
Yeah, there is a big anti-capitalist/anti-mediocracy lesson in there. The VCs don't have money and connections because they are superior or smart or capable (with some exceptions of course, some VCs are capable but that doesn't seem to raise their money/connections that much (iirc they also write up guidelines which other VCs can follow for slightly more success)). They just have money and connections, which gives them access to more of both.
There story of VCs just throwing money at any silly silicon valley tech project because well, the 1 that is a breakout hit pays for the 100 which didn't is also a bit silly. And for some reason im reminded of the effectiveness of investing in active daytraders on the stockmarket.
I'm reminded of Theranos, whose medical claims were always really dubious but who raked in billions of VC cash because they had a really famous VC dude on board, and like Bill Clinton and some other powerful people.
This is turtleneck erasure and I will not stand for it. (Elizabeth Holmes is still google hit nr one of you google for 'female steve jobs' at least for me).
E: From her wikipedia page: 'Theranos's board and investors included many influential figures. Holmes's first major investor was Tim Draper – Silicon Valley venture capitalist and father of Holmes's childhood friend Jesse Draper – who "cut Holmes a check" for $1 million upon hearing her initial pitch for the firm that would become Theranos.'
Just a casual 1 mil to a childhood friend of your son.
E2: I also don't really like dumping on Theranos, which before it was all really openly revealed as a fraud was attacked as a potential fraud a bit to much by people who were more mad that Holmes was a woman than what she was trying to do wasn't really possible. Another example would be WeWork, which combined selling shovels to gold rush people with being part of the gold rush itself, with a bonus performance of [Run-DMC singing their hit song](https://www.spin.com/2019/09/run-dmc-wework-performance/) 'welcome to our concert you are all fired!' (hiring rundmc after firing people is so tonedeaf it hurts).
There are three lessons to Theranos:
1) Powerful people are credulous fools the moment they leave their lane. Jim Mattis might be a brilliant battlefield commander, but he doesn’t know shit about biomedical product development. Unfortunately for VCs they have no real skills, so they’re just credulous fools all around.
2) A female founder will get a lot more social abuse for crossing a line than a male founder. This is her defense, and there’s certainly something to it when you look at places like WeWork, where obvious bullshit goes unpunished.
3) Arguments from domain experts about how something is actually physically impossible carry no weight in these situations. FOMO is stronger than fear of losing money.
I don't know if other VCs are emulating Graham with their smug Twitter threads or if having a bunch of people desperate to get on their good side just leads certain kinds of nerds to communicate in a certain kind of way.
I don't know either, my knowledge of this is a bit outdated and pre-twitter. I just recall people speaking well of VC's during my CS edu days, and Pauls blog posts being shared from time to time. But considering Eric S. Raymond's stuff was also being shared, we were just young and stupid.
Hey now, sometimes I write compilers for fun in my free time, but at least I'm honest that I'm just doing it for fun and not because I think I can revolutionize all of programming with homoiconicity or whatever dumb lisp stuff PG is always waffling about
I totally agree -- he had the occasional good essay, but his painting analogies were just wrong and historically inaccurate. People seem to worship him because he was rich / successful, and helped get reddit started.
[He already does the](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/833969369868857345) 'being conservative now is like being gay in the 50's' thing.
E: [ow god](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/736601729920208896), he did defended the 'gay marriage leads to bestiality' argument (in a roundabout way) in 2016. (tbf, he prob was talking about the min wage bullshit argument, and not gay rights, but that was also shit (there is a good argument in there against min wage, in that it drives up inflation, which hurts rich people a lot more, but that would be giving the game away))
I live in the part of the world where wages get inflation corrected. So, no, poor people aren't hurt by inflation, only people who have money stored get hurt by it. Guess what poor people don't have.
Imagine if we actually performed Pauls thought experiment, and raised the min wage to 1000 bucks an hour. That would also mean other wages would rise, and prices would rise. After that, not much would change, apart from a lot of people losing savings.
And I don't know why people upvote me, perhaps they just upvote me not because they think I'm right, but just because they like me. We are post-post-post rationalists, being right or wrong doesn't matter only posting does, now go back to r/drama.
(E: This is all pretty ironic in a way, the whole 'min wage drives up inflation and rent, why isn't the left thinking about that?' is a slatestarcodex/themotte talking point (I even saw people complain 'the left isn't thinking about about how this will drive up rent etc' while the people I knew who were leftwing were talking about that (in regards to UBI, but also raising min wage like effects) at that same time, but anyway, I wasn't saying what you were thinking I was saying, have fun figuring it out, if you ever get over us being the most evil people you know).
lol sorry about that. I tbh hate my tendency to use a lot of parentheticals, it just matches a certain type of sidebar thought pattern which I have a lot.
that's funny because i'm pretty sure you're the one who introduced me to the concept of rejection-sensitive dysphoria. between that and the (imo engaging and entertaining, but definitely unique) way you write, i just kinda assumed you had it too lol. but i'm not a psychologist, ymmv, but maybe worth checking out! that said the only medication i use is not prescribed, i like myself the way i am even if i could prolly be more "functional" if i got a script, so knowing i have adhd is more of a neat fact or interesting self-insight than anything. still glad i know tho!
I have not been diagnosed. A friend of mine laughs every time I bring up 'I might not have it'. It does explain a lot of things however. I also just think the meme is funny.
You really need to stop posting here for a while. I'm a bit worried about you. You seem to be having some sort of weird obsessive internet moment. I have seen the pattern before, where one person is mad about something, which is vaguely related to something others are mocking (in this case the post-rationalists vs, the more standard people being sneered at). The mad about subject doesn't get a strong reaction by most, which causes the one person to double down. And eventually starts to break down and try to make themselves into the villain to both sides. You seem to be trying to do that latter [part here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mi0dnv/me/gt1wsl4/). So for your own mh, best to step back a bit. Of course, I could totally be wrong, and you are doing fine, but I have seen enough people go semi mad on the internet and trying to post through it (for some reason goons suffer from this a lot, it makes reading a lot of SA threads pretty bad), burning more and more bridges along the way to not post about it (sometimes the people were also just young teenagers, or just on drugs, not on the right drugs).
I haven't posted much about post-rationalists because I don't really care that much for them (and don't think they are that bad compared to SSC/Themotte/LW (I also don't know much about most post-rationalists apart from having read a bit of ribbonfarm a few years ago), at least they can think in 4 dimensions not 2. So I don't know what you are trying to do here, trying to get me involved (and yes I saw the r/drama post which they made of you, and yes r/drama sucks, but I dont know enough about liminal to know who is wrong here, don't even disagree that much with her idea you linked, apart from having an exception for people who just go into a community to start shit and the various types of nazis (who can initially send in nice friendly people who just push the boundary a little bit and create room for worse neo-nazis etc). It is just the [geek social fallacies](https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/), the ageold 'should we punch nazis or not' debate).
So to recap, I don't know enough about these people (subtext: and don't care to learn more), I'm more worried that you are starting a one man war and that it will lead to dark places which are bad for you personally. (some of your recent submissions have a weird obsessive quality to them), and yes having some weird somewhat popular (5k) twitter people make a thread about you can be bad for your mental health as this will just lead to bad faith attacks (as seen by the r/drama poster trying to start stuff). Which is made worse when you don't get the communal support you hoped (from sneerclub). Anyway, might want to take some time away from staring into the abyss (or whatever counts as your personal abyss, I know I certainly have gone down weird rabbitholes and eventually just went 'nah, this was all a waste of time, nobody cares').
Anyway, hope you are doing ok.
If I was making an argument who's crux was "poor people have more cash than rich people", I would definitely feel at least a small flicker of hesitation before hitting send.
But less wealth in total, and they generate more of their wealth day to day from labour, the amount of which will be increased due to the method above.
E: this is also drug dealer erasure ;)
yes, living paycheck to paycheck, and suddenly the paycheck increases 100 fold from one month after the other. There is one month (well a bit more, as adjusting all prices takes time (Some people probably even make money out of it, I made a nice 5 bucks when the [gulden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulden) was replaced by the euro, empty coke bottles costing less recycling collateral than which they paid out)) where it hurts yes, but after that not much has changed. And I'm talking about a one time inflation effect, not a constant one. Remember we are talking here about raising the min wage once (and about two situations at the same time, the sane small increase, and the extreme position like Paul said of it being raised a 100 fold).
The poor person with 2k in their checking account will be hurt less (in absolute amounts) than the person with enough cash in their checking accounts to pay [for a tesla twice](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/29/tesla-double-charged-some-customers-for-new-cars.html).
And we already agreed that this wasn't hyperinflation ("as long as it's not literally economy-destroying which is bad for everyone"). Lol why are you r/drama posters always the source of stupid bad faith drama.
Because in relative amounts they would be hurt slightly more in the short term, and in this theoretical situation on the long term it wouldn't matter much (in the extreme 100 fold situation), in the 15 bucks situation they would be helped (as this will not drive up all other prices).
Common misunderstanding of the LTV as presented by Marx
You have in mind an idea much closer to early 19th century disputes about international trade and in particular David Ricardo’s introduction of “comparative advantage”
It’s not for nothing that even critics describe Marx as a “minor post-Ricardian”: Marx, wrong or right, was well aware of comparative advantage in his formulation of a Labour Theory of Value
A better example, though far from perfect, would have been the Marginal Revolution of the late 19th century
Marx doesn’t think that trades can’t be mutually beneficial, he thinks - to put it very roughly - that the nature of industrial capitalism skews those trades towards benefiting one party in the trade more than the other - hence class, alienation etc.
Marxism has a long and complex history, but none of what you just said is true of the original texts, besides perhaps the preamble part of the communist manifesto, which is a minor work in actual Marxist thought
Certainly Marx doesn’t see exchange as a zero zum game, what he attempts to demonstrate is an alleged disequilibrium transactors in that exchange
Your use of the word “exact” here is particularly wrong: in Marxist theory it is a general consensus to the point of being platitudinous to insiders that workers benefit from exchange in short term increments but that the nature of the exchange is still exploitative. To wit, in Marxist theory it is almost universally acknowledged that the conditions of employment as a worker are in a state of constant flux which deprives them of the deserved fruits of their labour even if they benefit from the exchange. There are a lot more details to this thesis but it’ll do for now.
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I don’t really care about your opinion, which is wrong. I refer you back to my previous comment that points to the fact Marx was well aware of comparative advantage, to the point of being referred to as a post-Ricardian. Have your opinion, project it onto whatever you want, it won’t make it correct.
Marx thought that a revolution was inevitable and just, but that doesn’t imply that there aren’t alternatives vis-a-vis regulation. That isn’t my topic here in the first place. I’m simply correcting your errors about the history of Marxism and the Labour Theory of Value.
I will note two final things. First, from your post history you’re obviously coming in here to pick a fight, and I really don’t care for that attitude, especially when it comes from a place of ignorance. Second, it’s very clear you’re spouting talking points I’ve heard a million times before which - even if originally based in real fact - are at this point games of telephone which bear no resemblance to actual scholarship.
Marxists don’t think capital is inherently exploitative, they think that the conditions under which industrial capital is instantiated render capital exploitative. This is the meaning behind the term “material conditions”. In Marxist thought the problem is private ownership of capital rather than its ownership by the collective.
Marxists are not averse to capital in and of itself. What they say instead is that collective ownership of capital is the proper state of society. In Marx’s own interpretation - though this is not universal amongst Marxists - revolution is how this state can be achieved.
As for your demonstration, nothing of the sort occurred in this conversation. I will note that you’ve moved from a discussion of the LTV to an (alleged) demonstration of the fallibility of advocating revolution, which is sometimes called “moving the goalposts”. I’d ask you to take a less strident tone and try to read what we’ve talked about a second time with a fuller understanding of how I’ve made counter-arguments, both historical and conceptual.
Im confused how this thread even got here btw, after I made an off the cuff remark on how the reductio at absurdum didnt work that well if you actually tried it (with as a subtext, the case against raising the min wage is actually that it hits people with more money/resources more than people with less (and a secondary subtext that raising the min wage isnt enough to reduce income inequality problems, as a lot of things will just adjust to crush poor people more (Moloch!))).
>Does the Marxist theory say that I'm unfairly exploiting the potter and all my profit comes from underpaying him for his labor?
Well, if you're receiving profits from the threat of violence (via renting out the property) rather than your labor, what would you call it?
Is there anyone else who gets to use force to take the fruits of someone else's labor and not call it "exploitation", or do only capitalists get this privilege?
If I replaced the word "property owner" with "the state", does that change anything?
> He (or at least his followers) very definitely claims that selling labor to capital rips off the seller by the exact amount it is profitable for the buyer, with inevitability.
Where do we say that?
You're getting confused between 'profit' in the use-value sense (as in, I swapped something that is useless to me for something that is useful to me) and 'profit' as surplus value.
Let me put it in different terms to see If I understood it.
Theories assigning objective values to commodities based on factors like labour only gives them quantitative values based on those factors, yet objects have the aspect of qualitative values that can heavily add to, or drastically modify it's expected values from purely quantitative perspectives, making the theories wrong in practise.
Is this accurate?
I am trying to arrive at the idea that zero sum trade games are optional and the idea that they are inevitable is an illusion, while retaining the idea of an independent reality outside the minds of people playing the trade games.
For that to be true, Objects must not be comparable, as I asked before.
>Do objective impersonal criterion exist that people can choose to subscribe to or not?
I think I got my answer.
As I gesture at elsewhere in this thread, I think their major error is just a conflation comparative advantage and the Marginal Revolution
As I’m sure you’re already well aware the two are very often brought up side by side in particularly lay arguments against Marxism. My supposition is that they’ve seen the two brought up side by side like this and don’t really get that they’re rather different ideas introduced several decades apart from each other.
It’s a problem I’ve had in lots of these conversations: a lot of people just pick up the vague idea that very clever economists have managed to discredit Marxism entirely with a few talking points. They don’t actually need to *understand* the theory that grounds those talking points, because the very clever economists have given them all they need. This is even a thing with economics grads in my experience: they spend so much time doing hard sums that the talking point dogmas their profs dust off to spice up a lecture just go unexamined and accepted.
> I have never once seen him show an ounce of skepticism for right wing claims. About anything! Trans issues, "cancel culture", academia, any of it.
Climate change ?
NSFW: This is probably a naïve question…so what is up with these
nerds and picking on trans people? Transhumanists ought to be natural
allies, of convenience if not conviction, since bodily autonomy and free
association should both be both huge things for these guys. It
may seem a little flippant, but if the government makes it hard to live
safely for someone who has very reasonable drives to change so that
their external appearance/representation matches their psychological
reality, then how are the “jack-booted thugs” going to treat people who
want to do recreational brain surgery on themselves or upgrade to robot
arms?
I’m sure more well-informed people than me have written on the topic,
but google already (mostly) seems to find this idea coming from US
conservative writers with their hair on fire insisting that both
transhumanists and transgender people are out to kill god, america, and
baseball.
I think it might be another case of super rich people needing a reactionary bogeyman to deflect from actual problems. Are we losing civil liberties because we have ceded political power to a managerial class who caters only to the interests of the financial elite irrespective of party? Or is it because of cancel culture emanating from college campuses and maybe that strange new group you never were taught to be aware of growing up... maybe they're the reason your free speech is threatened? Maybe the reason the democrats are listening to this new group is because they're liberal elites who don't care about your "common sense" prejudices, not because it's the only issue they compromise with progressives on without sacrificing the power relation to their donors.
For a similar reason, you have people who once identified as libertarians such as Peter Thiel then speaking at Republican conventions and selling surveillance systems to the government, and whose endgame is to have their own floating islands where they can be immortal monarchs. Their idea of "liberty" is no different from having dominion over others without government interfering, quite similar to how it was at the end of the Roman empire: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/openeconomy/two-notions-of-liberty-revisited-or-how-to-disentangle-liberty-and-slavery/
I'll assume you're familiar with (at least the existence of) queer transhumanist thought here and are asking just about the reactionary wing of transhumanism. It might help here to extend your question to ask why neoreactionaries don't support virtually any use of tech in service of marginalized people. Short answers don't do this question justice but we can very roughly say that they believe that hierarchies are inherently good and that those who are at the top of the hierarchy can best use that technology to drive their idea of progress. There is a lot more here (and I would actually love a quick overview of neoreactionary responses to left/queer/black accelerationism but I am allergic to primary sources in this area) but I hope this is a good starting point.
All good points.
Is pg NRx? I kind of viewed him as a baseline bland know-it-all tech libertarian, but in terms of what the fash think, yeah, they have absolutely no hang-ups with being inconsistent as long as they get to put the boot in on the vulnerable among us, do they.
Other comments seem to indicate that he has, um, *devolved* as of late.
I don't know Graham well tbh. While writing that I did consider that he's not NRx in the sense that Thiel is, but I think he's cut from basically the same cloth in that AFAIK he shares a lot of the fundamental beliefs that drove people like Yarvin and Thiel to NRx. In any case, the other responses you got may be closer to PG's views but I wanted to explain more of how right-leaning transhumanists in general can come to fight against others having the rights they want.
> I would actually love a quick overview of neoreactionary responses to left/queer/black accelerationism
Nick Land [thinks](https://web.archive.org/web/20170719223141/http://www.xenosystems.net/re-accelerationism/) that leftist accelerationism is a contradiction in terms, because he considers technological/economic deceleration to be an essential feature of the left:
> Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire. Described less figuratively, it is the recognition that the acceleration trend is historically compensated. Beside the *speed machine*, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator, which gradually drains techno-economic momentum into its own expansion, as it returns dynamic process to meta-stasis. Comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as *progress*. It is the Great Work of the Left.
> ...
> A detailed appreciation of “Left Accelerationism” is a joke for another occasion. “Speaking on behalf of a dissident faction within the modern braking mechanism, we’d really like to see things move forward a lot faster.”
I think this point of view is generally shared by the sorts of techno-commercialist neoreactionaries who reject modern democracy for not being libertarian enough. I'm not sure about the ones who are more focused on hierarchy or racism, but I would expect that they don't consider leftist accelerationism important enough to respond to.
Ah, that's a bit underwhelming but I guess this is more or less the point where I always feel like that about Land's philosophy. Aside from the abhorrent aspects it feels so anticlimactic, like he builds it up so much and put his entire life into his works and then at the end we essentially get "society is turning everyone into sheep, man!"
The linked article is full of cliche characterizations of the left.
It also cries for TERFs who are victims of the trans-rights movement,
and describes ACLU attorney Strangio’s statement clarifying that
pseudoscience should be discredited in a healthy information climate, as
“censorship” without attempting to support that claim.
If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part
of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff
attorney named Chase Strangio. Named one of the 100 most influential
people on the planet by Time magazine last year, Strangio is the ACLU’s
deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by
this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set
of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares
question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry
Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer
contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves
transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,”
Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this
claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is
100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an
ACLU employee to endorse. Strangio later deleted the tweet, explaining
that his intention was not to call for the government to ban Shrier’s
book, but rather “to create the information climate for the market to be
more supportive of trans self-determination than the alternative.”
The piece then immediately frames the issue of trans rights as
“allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school
sports”
Strangio is of course perfectly entitled to his views about the
fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females in
high school sports, and to advocate for an “information climate”
suppressing books he doesn’t like. What’s puzzling is why someone with
such pro-censorship inclinations would want to work, of all places, at
the American Civil Liberties Union. Not to put too fine a point on it,
but it’s like a carnivore joining the staff of People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals.
I am very smart
Puzzling, that is, until you realize that—like so many other
institutions whose worthy missions we naively assumed to be
inviolable—the ACLU is no longer itself. The organization known as the
ACLU is now led by people beholden to an ideology purporting that the
essential function of the Constitution has been to serve as a blueprint
for white supremacy, and that its broad free-speech protections are not
a tool of emancipation for society’s underdogs but rather the handmaiden
of their oppression.
[deleted]
NSFW: This is probably a naïve question…so what is up with these nerds and picking on trans people? Transhumanists ought to be natural allies, of convenience if not conviction, since bodily autonomy and free association should both be both huge things for these guys. It may seem a little flippant, but if the government makes it hard to live safely for someone who has very reasonable drives to change so that their external appearance/representation matches their psychological reality, then how are the “jack-booted thugs” going to treat people who want to do recreational brain surgery on themselves or upgrade to robot arms?
I’m sure more well-informed people than me have written on the topic, but google already (mostly) seems to find this idea coming from US conservative writers with their hair on fire insisting that both transhumanists and transgender people are out to kill god, america, and baseball.
What a curious thing to post on 3/31, the international transgender day of visibility. Surely must be a coincidence.
The linked article is full of cliche characterizations of the left. It also cries for TERFs who are victims of the trans-rights movement, and describes ACLU attorney Strangio’s statement clarifying that pseudoscience should be discredited in a healthy information climate, as “censorship” without attempting to support that claim.
The piece then immediately frames the issue of trans rights as “allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school sports”
I am very smart