I don't know... I think some classes of drugs amplify someones shittyness. Call it Inherent Shittyness (IS). Time is a big factor, too. The longer they are on drugs, theore shitty they become.
Δ Shittyness = IS x drug amount x duration
Sometimes people get off illegal drugs and become decent again, but
I also think that everyone has a Decency score, where
Net Shittyness (NS) = IS + Decency
Some drugs remove the Decency filter such that NS = IS. If a person knows they have a high IS, and that, say, alcohol temporarily lets that show through, and they care about their perceived NS, then it behooves them to stay away from it.
I've read articles like this since I started working in silicon valley in 2012, but I haven't seen it in person. Maybe some selection bias at play, but I'm generally pretty open.
Stuff I have seen:
- LSD usage is pretty common relative to where I grew up (midwest-ish), but usually rare (once a year, burning man, someone has tried it once) even so, I'd still guess this is a pretty small minority - I guess 15% max? I'd guess mostly this is curiosity driven, reading about it, etc. I've never seen anyone seriously use it as a productivity drug.
- Adderall is more common, but that's because it's prescribed (and it works well so everyone thinks they have ADHD if they take it) - I haven't seen it abused, I've heard people talk about modafinil but have never met anyone that was actually taking it. Even in the adderall/adhd case, I'd guess 20% max? Most people I work with do not take it.
- Ketamine I don't know anyone that's tried it beyond someone in the therapy trials and non-techie druggie types.
Maybe it's more common and I'm not in the right circles, but I don't really buy it. I think it's rare and elevated by articles like this because it's salacious not because it's common. I'd guess my made up percentages are also too high.
Personally, I haven't witness any drug use in the various developer circles I've run except for ADHD meds. The number on ADHD meds is somewhere around 5-10% I would guess...
Just because you don't like the idea doesn't mean it is "fascist". I don't find using that word flippantly contributes to intellectually substantive discussion. Frankly, it is lazy. It is better to provide reasoned criticism, but that may require revisiting some assumptions you're making, and that may be uncomfortable.
Most people are not especially disciplined in interpreting historical realities through the lens of the day. The result is that we form anachronistic and sloppy views of the past. Take, for example, women's suffrage. If we view the pre-suffrage US through the lens of the radical individualism we embrace today, then we more easily conclude, that 19th century America was a "woman-hating" land and all the usual polemic. But if you interpret the vote as one vote per family, then things start to look differently. The family, and not the individual, taken as the basic unit of society as has almost always been the case, with the husband/father as head and representative of his family and its good in society, becomes the natural voting entity. Maybe you don't like that, or think it needs some exceptions, but logically, this basic idea is coherent and it makes sense.
Now, even if you think Musk's views deserve criticism, you can, at least, appreciate the idea, especially in light of what he's said about demographic collapse and the tendency of parents to be more future- and other-oriented--given that their children will need to live in that future--than atomized individuals, who have a greater tendency to live only in a self-indulgent now (celebrated, unsurprisingly, by New Age). You can expect parents with children to vote in ways that prioritize long-term good in a way that atomized individuals would not. It's harder to not give a shit about where things are headed when you have children.
It's important not to let your sensibilities and biases get in the way of the truth, or to confuse sensibilities with reason.
You can make a lot of ideas make logical sense if you create the correct framing, which you did in your post. However, your frame excludes the discrepancy between single males, who could vote, and single females, who could not vote; we can recurse, and say that single females could barely exist in the middle-class world due to social and economic norms which prevented women from getting jobs above starvation wages, and even look further into the concept of coverture, whereby marriage was a union of baron and feme in which the feme (wife) was legally subsumed into the baron (husband) and ceased to have an existence outside the home after being wed.
If all of those things are outside the frame, sure, one-vote-per-household can be made to make sense. However, don't expect others to agree to your restrictive agenda-driven narratives.
But his point still stands.. the lens of chronological snobbery is intellectually dishonest regardless of “framing”.
Our modern society is radically oriented towards the individual, and not the family. That does bias our view of how good or bad a previously family-oriented society was.
It’s hard to fully quantify the long-term implications of that change.
Throughout history we've had single marriages, polygamy, second+ marriages, combined families, divorce, matriarchal societies, and patriarchal societies. And there was certainly a time before any kind of marriage at all existed, and it's possible nobody knew who any fathers were. Throughout all of that, the individual is the only common denominator.
There is no reason to think that a single marriage is the best format, other than it happens to work well within the framework we've built up to support it over the last few hundred or few thousand years in specific countries. So the individual is it, because it's common to all.
You're going with a modern, nuclear family idea that has really only existed for about a hundred years in specific countries. Single marriage existing in its own house is recent, and specific to some cultures. As I've written below only the individual is common to all those systems.
I think humans are past pure reproduction as a basis for society. The primary thing that humans leave behind is contribution to culture. I don't necessarily mean the capital-C Culture, though that can be it. A contribution to the lives of those around you, related or not. On a local scale I have known people without children who are absolutely treasured by the community and their loss has been felt greatly when they go. Sometimes they have buildings or rooms in a building named after them. On a larger scale, our history books are full of people who were childless. Isaac Newton was. I don't think this is isolating. I think you have full buy in to the future, with or without children. But you have to choose it.
On the flipside, I have a father in law, who is a pretty nice guy in general. He's still happily married and appears to love his kids. When asked if he was willing to fly less than 5 international vacations per year because, you know, climate change is serious and he has a grandkid... his answer was a very serious "What do I care? I'll be dead."
If you're not getting service to the community or belief in a future beyond yourself, perhaps the problem isn't marriage or your concept of individualism. Maybe it's telling people they aren't worth anything, or their contributions don't matter. Telling single people they can't vote isn't going to help that.
The 10 kids while repping on his $44 billion dollar Titanic transphobes, homophobes, etc. I'm not talking about fascism as in "kill all of the people of a certain ethnic group," but there are, if you're in the study of ideology, politics, moral epistemology, etc., smaller, lower-case fascisms before people start calling you "Fuhrer." There is something in Elon's behavior and signaled preferences that very much comes across as a bio-Darwinistic, egoistic, self-maximizing project, e.g. a fascism.
That is, indeed, an observed phenomenon. I work in human behavior in Washington, D.C., in a position where I am paid to think about the causes of harassment, discrimination, and violence, and how we, if we believe it is valuable or necessary to reduce these behaviors, how they come into existence, arrange human affairs such that their costs are minimized. I am not some random left-wing hack for whom fascism is anything to the right of Stalin. Musk is definitely on the fascist spectrum.
I am so so so glad people are seeing this human shitbag for who he is. I've been telling people for years he is an egomaniac bastard with a cult of personality.
He's shown us his character as a leader so many times at this point. When he called Vern Unsworth "pedo guy", I didn't know how to square it with my image of him, so I mostly forgot about it. Took a while to realize it's who he is.
