I disagree. There's no principle involved. It's all polarized partisan politics. Your "particularly dysfunctional" is extremely in the eye of the beholder. The rich and powerful silicon valley CEO/VC guys tearing the country apart over their woke crusade are just as ideologically irrational as the next twitter blue check.
This. If you believe for one second that money and power hungry people have any kind of principles, you have not been paying attention. Cancel culture, woke, left, right, center, free speech – they will say whatever to get what they want on these topics, and change their opinion the next day without any real consequences. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
Not specificially about this. But I'm trying to read some of the classic philosophy books. Anything by Bertrand Russel and Erich Fromm I like. If you want to learn more about human behavior, I can recommend reading Robert Sapolsky. His new book about (the lack of) free will is great! Furthermore, I enjoyed Homo Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Certainly goes into the topic a bit how we ended where we are not with society.
I'd read things written ~1880, which was the last time economic concentration in the US was generally recognized as toxic.
Different technologies and world economy but same underlying issue: concentration of capital being leveraged to artificially protect profit from competition.
I don't think there is any scholarly basis for the term "late-stage capitalism". It's just a meme that kids started using. Power-hungry, unprincipled people will exist regardless of a country's economic system. But people are very imaginative in attributing various social ills to capitalism in particular.
quick Google search shows that the term has been in scholarly use for at least 50 years now and means pretty much exactly what "the kids" are talking about.
You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.
"Late-stage capitalism" is just "reimposing feudalism[0]" - i.e. going back to an economic system in which the vast majority of an economy's wealth is rents charged on the use of valuable property. "Capitalism" as is propagandized in capitalist societies is an economy in which the majority of wealth is profits earned as the return on a risk-bearing investment. Being beholden to a free market economy means you have limits to your power - not great limits, but limits none-the-less.
In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism.
[0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.
Beyond the specific term, there is a "sign of the times" we are living. Nowadays the issue with political sciences and philosophy is the partisan, left-right spectrum view that it is difficult to break in in discussions (including HN).
I think it depends on the person. Elon Musk changes his mind a lot, but PG generally seems pretty consistent.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either.
My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining some problems with woke culture: https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html But it doesn't really apply to misbehaving VCs as much.
What's the specific critique of cancel culture PG made, that he's being hypocritical with? Can you give a verbatim quote that displays the supposed hypocrisy, to ensure that you're not misrepresenting his position?
My takeaway that I'll bluntly admit is based on being another one of those people who won't shut up about Robert Caro's book The Power Broker is this: the mark of true political genius is the ability to constantly take in new information that challenges your existing viewpoints, while also having the force of will to try and make your values manifest despite knowing that your views on the best way to do that will change over time. Robert Moses (the subject of the book) was an unparalleled genius when it came to enacting his will, but he was a complete idiot when it came to actually observing the world to see what the impact of his will would be. I think democracy at its best should prevent those kind of people from gaining power (but of course it doesn't).
Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.
My favorite fact from the book is that the windows in his limo did not even go all the way to the back seat, so he didn't even have to look at what he'd wrought unless he chose to. And the horrible traffic jams that were his legacy were something he likely enjoyed, because it meant more time to work in his limo office uninterrupted.
Just do what we've done since the dawn of time: hang out with friends and family, prepare and eat food together, maybe play card or board games. It feels good and it's good for you.
That's actually not that easy to do when people are expected to be living alone at a certain age. Finding a partner could be good for you but that's also not so simple. I think most people would prefer hanging out with others rather than scrolling tik tok (you might enjoy alone activities but tik tok scrolling comes out of boredom), but sometimes they have no choice. It's like the way we live is pointing us specifically in that direction, at least by default.
You don't need to be in a relationship to hang out with people. I think the issue most people encounter is that hanging out with friends suddenly gets a lot more difficult after education ends. The people you meet at work are less likely to become close friends than the people you meet at school, and as people get older, they have more responsibilities that take up their spare time, and fewer options to just spontaneously hang out.
In addition, traditionally, men tend to rely on their partner for non-professional social networking. The percentage of people who live with a spouse or partner seems to be decreasing, so men are becoming more responsible for maintaining their own circle of friends.
This requires effort. It's not like when you're 18 and you just naturally hang out, you have to put work into maintaining friendships and finding ways to meet. You have to plan things and invite people. You also have to make new friends as old ones disappear from your life over time. This is difficult, it requires conscious effort.
I didn't realize that for a long time, and the longer I didn't do it, the harder it became to reestablish old friendships and make new ones. But it's absolutely possible to do it, if you put in the effort.
And it's very worthwhile. It's much more enjoyable and fulfilling and relaxing to cook with somebody, go for a walk, or play Mario Kart in person, than to scroll Instagram or play an online shooter.
> I think most people would prefer hanging out with others rather than scrolling tik tok
However both introversion and the hedgehog's dilemma can complicate this presumption. I think I'd rather say that most people would prefer hanging out with others in some fashion where they are safe from constant drama .. but the reality is that getting along with other people — including close friends and perhaps especially family members — takes a lot of effort and emotional labor.
With our current ubercapitalist society (definitely in the US but it affects the rest of the globe as well) and poor social understanding of mental health, many of us simply lack the resources to constantly expend said emotional labor and connections often fall away as a result.
> I think I'd rather say that most people would prefer hanging out with others in some fashion where they are safe from constant drama .. but the reality is that getting along with other people — including close friends and perhaps especially family members — takes a lot of effort and emotional labor.
I think they are wrong. We are fleeing X because a lot of right winger's mental model for appropriate political discussion with liberals is mostly mean trollish harassment, purposefully putting people down and trying to make people feel bad so they can "drink liberal tears". It's not good faith counterpoints. Avoiding that is not censorship of ideas.
By googling “your body my choice” I can find pages of left wing news articles but no examples whatsoever.
Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech? People are allowed to out themselves as whatever they want, which is a good thing. The examples you’re linking to have 0 likes on them, so I wouldn’t be all that worried about anonymous teenager provocateurs who are trying to get a reaction out of people.
Personally I’m spending less time there not because of overt racism specifically, but because even innocent posts end up pulled by trolls into adversarial, low-information stupidity.
I’m not trying to convince you to join Bluesky though, if you prefer X I think both Bluesky and X are better if you continue to spend your time there!
> Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech?
How can you say this with a straight face? I am genuinely baffled by people who hold this view.
Just because you say that your platform is all about “free speech” doesn’t mean it is and there are clear actions that X/Elon took which go against that claim.
The primary of which being that posting “cisgender” gets your post flagged and demoted in the algorithm and that Elonjet was banned. How can you seriously claim free speech absolutism when there are direct examples showing the very opposite.
They don't owe the repo any updates, if there are none. As long as you have no evidence of foul play, you're just a run of the mill conspiracy theorist.
It feels almost selfishly evil to buy cars that increase your safety at the expense of others. It also promotes a race to the top, bigger and bigger cars over time, which is indeed what we have seen in the US market over the last 30 years. Does SUV safety ratings include the likelihood of killing others?
I feel the "Race to the top" is also happening with car head lights. They are much brighter nowadays. It's nice for the driver of such a car, but super nasty for other road users. It's almost as if you need tainted glass to go with it (but then you dont see the road users that do not have these super bright lights)
Nope. Only safety for the people in the car is considered. Volvo is quite vocal about wanting to produce a car that is safe for the people outside the car. They have a target that no one should die from a (new) Volvo crashing into them by some year in the future. They want to use auto-braking systems and external airbags iirc.
The horde of right wing blue checks that dominate all popular political tweets is not a filter bubble. It is a user-hostile feature that makes organic political interactions impossible on the platform. It turns a peer-to-peer network into top-down broadcast.
unless you have two enormous networks where one happens to be libertarian/right leaning and the other is mostly very left. both have huge audiences and can likely thrive just fine on their own. i don't particularly think it's healthy, but it seems like that's just how humans are.
I think that if you have a neutral social network and a politically-charged social network, the neutral one will attract more eyeballs. People like to see ideas challenged and debated. Heavily-moderated and single-sided networks (Mastodon, Truth social, etc.) are simply boring compared to celebrity drama and political clashes on twitter.
What you have in the modern internet is that left-leaning users avoid networks that aren't moderated in their favor (in a conscious attempt to prevent moving the overton window), which leads to right-wing takeover (and eventually death of the social network because there are only right-wingers, see the graveyard of reddit alternatives). This trend would have been reversed a decade ago.
Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent
