Thread by @yashkaf

I'm rereading @DouthatNYT's "The Decadent Society" and taking notes for a long review I want to write. In the meantime, you can follow this thread for random thoughts and hot takes as I go through it.

Decadence = Economic stagnation, institutional decay, cultural and intellectual exhaustion and repetition at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.

Doesn't necessarily lead to immediate collapse — Rome survived for 400 years after Nero.

Douthat is an American conservative, Catholic, NY Times columnist — ancient and lumbering institutions that are certainly decadent. So while his diagnosis it true for the world he lives in, that's not necessarily true for Westerners outside these institutions.

The antithesis is someone like @balajis, paying pseudonymous Indians on 1729.com crypto rewards for tasks on the way to "immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life". Or even Rationalists making their own vaccine at home:

https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1358510097165672449

Douthat subtly makes the case that the Apollo program was a religious project. The space age was abandoned not for mere technical difficulties but because we lost faith. On first reading I thought the religion stuff is shoehorned, but now I believe it's an important lens.

Ross wonders whether Trump will end decadence in a collapse to authoritarianism, and also tweeted on the first day of the George Floyd riots that this may be the end of decadence. Of course, both were entirely decadent — he should have had the courage of his book's conviction!

The chapter on stagnation covers Fyre Festival, Theranos, and Uber as examples of how much "innovation" is purely fantastical. Maybe that's why Doge is mooning — people want a fantasy that can't be punctured by reality because (in Doge's case) it never pretended to anything real.

A discussion of economic stagnation since the singularity was cancelled in the 1960s, a theory covered in detail by Thiel and Cowen. He talks about the US, Europe, and Japan, and it's interesting to ponder whether the same stagnation would afflict China.

Some reasons proposed by Thiel:
- Low hanging science fruit picked.
- Hyper specialized fields with small groups of experts gatekeeping.
- Education/apprenticeship are ponzi schemes.
- Politics.

Hard to see why China would necessarily escape those once it's done catching up.

"Going from 6% to 70% [high school] graduation rate in three generations had a dramatic effect on productivity... but this kind of change can happen only once."

Haha only if you believe that schools today are actually *educating* their graduates and not just *certifying* them.

Lamentation on the lack of "technological sublime", wonders that united the world in awe like the steamship or moon landing. I think a part of this is the change in the media — if we landed on the moon today the NYT would write about cis white males colonizing it. Awe is uncool.

mRNA vaccines are certainly a sublime technology with vast potential, and the media coverage of them is 5% admiration, 15% hostility (e.g. the brewing IP theft tragedy), and 80% pure bullshit. We're wondering why the FDA doesn't approve them instead of experiencing 𝘄𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿.

Good point that lack of innovation is self-reinforcing. People become bearish on the benefits and bullish on regulation (c.f. nuclear power), frauds and monopolies proliferate, smart people become investment bankers instead of inventors. It's a multi-layered vicious cycle.