I feel the need to flesh out my recent statements on @JDVance1, so I am going to do one of my classic inappropriately long threads. If someone wants to turn this into a blogpost and publish it, very welcome. Let me begin with a bit of terminology. I am going to use the term "elitist" to refer to any ideology that either because of substance (e.g. allocating political, economic or social power to an elite) or form (e.g. being too high brow and semiotically weird to appeal to a broad public)

It's hard to know precisely what @peterthiel, @JDVance1 and his crew are after, but if you take seriously the writings they most often cite (the Sovereign Individual, Moldbug, etc.) it seems pretty clear they believe the state of the contemporary West to be so irrecoverable that accelerating social collapse is not just desirable but necessary. Furthermore, they also clearly believe this is a hard message to directly market, so wrapping it in nationalism, nostalgia and policies that they have *repeatedly publicly written will be corrosive* is necessary

My personal reflections and position on the horrors in the holy land: “Next year in Jerusalem” has for thousands of years been the refrain of Jews separated by thousands of miles and dozens of empires from their homeland. It has also been my refrain for the better part of the last decade, but my separation was imposed not by physical or social realities, but by moral ones.

Today may be the most important/culminating of my professional life. Together with dozens of colleagues and collaborators, I’m releasing/launching a series of papers, initiatives and other work. Thanks especially to one of my favorite journalists, @RanaForoohar, for her piece in the @FinancialTimes today to which this is all pinned: ft.com/content/3e27cf…

It's my honor today to announce the launch of a collaborative book project with my hero, @audreyt, "Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy": plurality.net. As you will read if you click through, this will be a unique project, mirroring in the structure of how we are creating it the values it espouses and hopefully in the process helping to both show and tell new form of collaboration, content creation, publishing, etc. We are honored to be working closely with @protocollabs and particularly @maymounkov on building

@VitalikButerin While overall I like this post. there is one very fundamental point on which I think it is just completely wrong and unfortunately much else turns on it. I hope you'll agree with me once I clarify and if not I am very happy to be on it as I think it is basically verifiable. @VitalikButerin You say that you'd like to live in Ketoland. I am almost sure this is false. 1. You don't really like to live anywhere. 2. There are many things you care about more than Keto and you are very likely to find that a) even by close to random selection you are misaligned on

Two other claims in "The Network State" that I won't write about elsewhere (because they are pretty random and tangential to the book's thesis) but that I think are also bizarre: 1) 1950s as peak centralization and 2) wokeness as core ideology surrounding US imperialism. Both have specific properties/facts supporting them and an enormous range of other data almost utterly refuting them. The are the sorts of conclusions that strike me as things one could only arrive at by allowing a monomaniacal obsession with some idiosyncrasy to metastasize

Will have more on this soon, but the #1 problem with @balajis "network state" is that it has nothing to do with a network other than that people met via the internet. It is conceptualized as a tightly ideologically aligned, almost monomaniacal group with a quasi-authoritarian heroic leader, conditioned by exit. This is almost precisely the opposite of a network, which is a loose intersection of partially aligned by diverse participants, constantly evolving and with distributed partial leadership.

Challenge to the community: both soulbound stuff and Harberger/SALSA/COST stuff kills speculative incentives. The former (mostly) kills transfers while the latter accelerates them. Design query: what's a hybrid that has about the same amount of transfers as private property but still kills speculative incentives?

Ok got a chance to take a look. As expected I disagreed with the vast majority of this pretty strongly except, it must be noted, the final conclusion, which I thought was overstated but I’m broadly sympathetic to. I don’t think more tweets on this are productive but I

https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1533937637169324032

think I owe it to @kate_sills to state my views concisely so here goes:

@VitalikButerin Let me try to nuance further. On the one hand, I don't think blockchains are necessary to "solve the double spend problem" and that there are many better approaches we will get to. On the other hand, the idea that the features that allow it to solve that problem are mostly @VitalikButerin special to that problem is preposterous. Essentially anything involving any scarcity or economics of any kind will face similar needs. Let me explain both points.

Many fallacies in futurism could be avoided by keeping in mind L'Hôpital's rule, roughly the mathematical idea that when comparing very large quantities one should focus on the trajectory rather than the end state. Perhaps my favorite-to-hate fallacy in futurism concocts extreme futures in which nearly everything is transformed by technology X and uses this to argue for (or against) the development of X today. AI will create so much abundance once AGI arrives that no one will care about inequality, so don't worry about it now as AI develops.

I used to be a “social” libertarian. By that I mean that on the issues where the average centrist democrat is more libertarian than the average Trump Republican. I am now a relative moderate on these issues (probably still libertarian of the US center but for pragmatic reasons not on principle.). Longer essay coming soon but some examples here:

I was trained as an economist but no longer identify as one. I’ll write a longer essay on why soon, but briefly: I no longer accept as true the basic premises of the field that differentiate it from other social sciences. Not to say there if nothing to be gained by entertaining These premises but that their negations are as true and fruitful as they are. I no longer believe in methodical individualism; I think social groups are just as much a thing as are individuals and that individuals beliefs and preferences

I recently recommended an essay by @keikreutler on DAOs, which was quite good. However, I did not at the time realize it was a follow-up to this piece: blog.gnosis.pm/inventories-no…. While I don't retract my praise for the second essay in the series, I want to be super clear that the contents of this first essay in no way, shape or form reflect my values. A world where the billionth bot created by @balajis and alt-right trolls must be treated with equal dignity to a unique human being is not a world I ever want to live in.

Warning: this is a very long tweet storm. Following up on @chafkin’s book, I took the plunge into The Sovereign Individual. What a ride. One of the more important/influential books of our time and one that should be far more widely read than it has been. Let me start with a very brief summary and my take, and then I’ll turn to a few more detailed thoughts.

One other thing I should really clarify and that the @nytimes piece got *severely* wrong: while I believe there are very strong sociological and even causal links between rationalism and NRx (especially in the Silicon Valley homes bases) their ideological and methodological relationship is much more complex...closer to e.g. two attracting opposite magnetic poles or to fascism and communism, etc. Let me try to explain and please bear in mind that both sides (rationalism/EA, which I am lumping together, and NRx/Dark Enlightenment, again lumping)

Here is, once again, the @nytimes piece I tweeted yesterday: nytimes.com/2021/02/13/tec…. Let me attempt to keep this relatively short, fairly balanced and yet sufficiently nuanced: 1. I think there needs to be a lot more daylight on the rationalist community. I think it is an extremely powerful, little understood group that is very problematic in a range of ways I have highlighted elsewhere. I also think the community's failure to take

I am grateful to @slatestarcodex for taking the time to respond to my critique of technocracy. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be productive, which I'll briefly address here. I suspect many fellow travelers (e.g. @audreyt @dsallentess @JohnnieM @MichelleRempel @VitalikButerin @mds49) will find the exchange fairly ironic/revealing. I'll post this as a response on this blog as well.

“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow.

For years now, people have been telling me they have versions of Harberger taxation/COST/SALSA that achieve the same thing but are less challenging for people to accept given current social norms. All of these claims have turned out to be wrong, until very recently... I heard a new version (and can't remember where now) that I think probably actually works (though need to study further). The idea is that rather than the item being constantly available for sale, it is the purchaser who takes the risk.