

Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley [pdf] - ritchiea
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ivt5iw8utlbsyvr/come_with_us.pdf?dl=0

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eli_gottlieb
Well, the responses to _this_ are going to be just _wondrously_ entertaining.

I think there's a major distinction to make between two different kinds of
"libertarians": democratic and antidemocratic. The former realize that if they
can't convince the population of their ideas, they haven't the right to
implement those policies as state policies and probably won't succeed in a
"free market of ideas" either.

The latter, sadly, have mild or severe tendencies to believe that what other
people want simply does not matter.

I get the feeling this profile is going to be about the latter kind.

>“So you’re going to go from one D.A.O. to ten D.A.O.’s to one hundred
D.A.O.’s to ten thousand D.A.O.’s,” Mohan replied. “Then, just based off of
profit maximization, they’re going to start merging and acquiring one another.

To translate this into plainer speech: yes, there is a significant Skynet
risk, and in fact, it's of _exactly_ the "competition collapses into malign
Singleton" type described by Nick Bostrom in his book _Superintelligence_.
Which of course is derived from what _any_ remotely good economist would tell
you about the behavior of firms in the limit as competition grows harsher and
the rate of profit falls.

>“But I don’t know if we’d ever get to Skynet,” he said. “Maybe in all our
code we can say, ‘If Skynet then exit.’

I really hope Mohan is being quoted davka to make him look like a fool
meddling with forces he doesn't understand, because that's _exactly_ the note
he's striking here.

>Libertarian (and not convinced there’s irreconcilable fissure between
deontological and consequentialist camps). Aspiring rationalist/Bayesian.
Secularist/agnostic/ignostic ... Hayekian

Forgive my asking, but is this entire article going to be mostly about our
fair author, who has my deepest sympathies for having to put up with these
folks, meeting and greeting all the most insufferably wrong SV weirdos he can
find?

I mean, come on. Holding social views that refuse to make contact with
empirical evidence while claiming intellectual foundations that allow for
_nothing but_ empirical evidence!

(You may think Bayesianism allows quite lot of a priori mathematics. This is,
to my knowledge, wrong: your model of mathematics is based on the built-in
modes of reasoning your brain starts with in the first place. The a priori
isn't really _prior_ to anything: it evolved.)

And these jackasses then become our public image!

OH NO, and _then_ he met Michael Vassar, Mr. "Post-rationalist" who believes
in "memeplexes". God fucking damnit.

Well, at least _someone_ will start cracking down on SV's crackpot and nutter
tendencies after reading this profile. God knows it's necessary: for all the
smugness about how super-duper smart and ever-so-intellectual these people (in
which I semi-include myself) are, I have sometimes found them regrettably
unable to do scientific literature reviews relevant to their own problems that
I can do by... Googling through a citation web of published papers like any
other grad student.

The profile is well-deserved and I'm giggling the whole way through.

>They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up.

GOD SAVE US ALL. Remember that 90% of start-ups _fail!_

~~~
ikeboy
>Holding social views that refuse to make contact with empirical evidence

Could you elaborate? I'm not quite sure what you're referring to.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm referring to the Austrian School of "economics" held to be the True Formal
Science of Humanity among "Hayekian libertarians".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)

As noted, "Austrians argue that ... empirical data itself is insufficient to
describe economics which in turn implies that empirical data cannot falsify
economic theory".

You _cannot_ coherently mix a Bayesian epistemology and a Hayekian-Austrian
politics: the latter denies the possibility of the former (ok: it only does so
in worlds without dualistic souls... but still), while the former considers
the latter to have no likelihood function and therefore be nonsense.

~~~
ikeboy
Looking at the archived page here
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130501005618/http://blakemaste...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130501005618/http://blakemasters.com/about),
he links to The Counter Revolution Of Science
[https://archive.org/stream/counterrevolutio030197mbp#page/n1...](https://archive.org/stream/counterrevolutio030197mbp#page/n13/mode/2up)
Also, doesn't that fact that he removed the link imply that he no longer
agrees with that view? It kind of makes me suspicious when you have to go far
back to find something to disagree with. If someone is thinking wrong, they
should be making mistakes constantly, so there shouldn't be a need to dig up
old opinions.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Picking on him? Why would I be picking on him?

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scalayer
Unfortunately, the article fails to define their terms. Ugh. Interesting read
anyhow.

~~~
m-photonic
That would take another few articles.

