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30 Sep 2026 |
It's less good than a golf cart.
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30 Sep 2026 |
There's always a question I like to ask: What is the antonym of good?
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30 Sep 2026 |
And if you're evil, you're not bad.
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30 Sep 2026 |
The moral question of our society, we have all these good vs. evil debates, and we're just full of badness.
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30 Sep 2026 |
A Trabbi is a bad car.
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30 Sep 2026 |
And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done.
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30 Sep 2026 |
And so, if you're evil, you're at least competent.
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30 Sep 2026 |
And the moral antonym is evil.
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30 Sep 2026 |
Most of the time, things are not even evil, they're not even good. They're just merely bad.
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30 Sep 2026 |
A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn't get many miles per gallon.
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30 Sep 2026 |
The functional antonym is bad.
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30 Sep 2026 |
So you're in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent, that's…
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30 Sep 2026 |
I'm going to get in trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think we moralize way too much.
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30 Sep 2026 |
I think it's better to be good than evil, I want to be very clear, but I prefer Goethe's "Faust" to Marlowe's "Faust."
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25 Sep 2026 |
They may say the idea is crazy, yet secretly agree with me.
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25 Sep 2026 |
The alternative is also far from neutral.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I do not know how to assign a probability to a system much smarter than any human escaping control.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I do not want one led by democratic socialists.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I do think there is a trend against democracy, and liberal societies are in some trouble.
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25 Sep 2026 |
Much of this is what we are doing to ourselves in the West.
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25 Sep 2026 |
If I had to single out one problem, it would be dementia: finding a way to slow or reverse the decline in people's brains.
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25 Sep 2026 |
But even a 5 or 10 percent probability would be pretty bad, and that understandably pushes people toward precaution.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I strongly reject the suggestion of moral equivalence between the United States and China.
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25 Sep 2026 |
When a majority votes for parties that want to end democracy, it may already be nearly too late.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I am self-aware enough to know that I am not electable.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I am a tough critic of China, and we must take the rivalry seriously, but it is too easy to blame China for everything.
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25 Sep 2026 |
We have become so pessimistic that many people do not even expect a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I am still a Vance partisan, but I worry that either would have a hard time winning.
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25 Sep 2026 |
It does not follow that we should always go slower.
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25 Sep 2026 |
The extremes will not solve that, but the center must take the reasons for their support seriously.
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25 Sep 2026 |
There is a distinction between what is evil and what is merely bad at its job.
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25 Sep 2026 |
Thiel says he may have been too harsh in responding to the Pope's AI warning.
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25 Sep 2026 |
When every gain seems to require somebody else's loss, society becomes more polarized and more zero-sum.
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25 Sep 2026 |
At the same time, I think the AfD is wrong on all three.
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25 Sep 2026 |
Germany is at the heart of Europe, and Europe remains at the core of Western civilization.
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25 Sep 2026 |
A computer program simulating me would not be me.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I once thought my talks about the Antichrist were an especially unconventional answer.
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25 Sep 2026 |
I think they systematically underestimate the scale of the problems.
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2026 |
"The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope," Thiel said, according to Politico. "There's a chance people in the US…
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2026 |
don't do tomorrow what you can save for the day after.
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2026 |
even 5 or 10% seems pretty bad
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2026 |
it wouldn't be me,
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He went further, telling Döpfner that the pope was "at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP,"
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extremely hard to catch up
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2026 |
the alternative of zero progress is "far from neutral,"
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18 Nov 2024 |
The modern world from maybe Renaissance onward has been this world of ever progressing scientific and technological development.
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18 Nov 2024 |
my intuition is that in many places, there's been relative stagnation.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And so when that slows, that's definitely felt as quite stagnant.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And the average PhD is 99% less productive than people were 100 years ago.
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18 Nov 2024 |
Under the rationalist view, you can't even talk about the end of your own life, let alone the end of the world.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And then the real critique is that, you weren't supposed to infantilize our population and not talk about it.
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18 Nov 2024 |
Humanity is not that dangerous at least in sort of the mainstream lock in Rousseauian accounts.
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18 Nov 2024 |
There has been a narrow cone of progress around computers, the Internet, and maybe now artificial intelligence.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And that's the risk of a totalitarian one-world government.
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18 Nov 2024 |
But the explanation I believe, tech got scary. We're leery of it now, we're not embracing it in the way that we used to.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And so, the kind of critique I have of Fauci is that, yeah, that's what he was scared of, I think.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And I think there is a lot in this runaway science technology that's pushing us towards something like Armageddon.
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18 Nov 2024 |
you can identify it with the good aspects of the Roman Empire, certain political aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, individuals.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And the Christian intuition I have is, I don't want Antichrist, I don't want Armageddon.
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18 Nov 2024 |
If you had a JFK as president on amphetamines going mano a mano with Khrushchev, it worked.
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18 Nov 2024 |
There was a bunch of easy discoveries to make.
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18 Nov 2024 |
You can say there's some parallel between the decline of the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire, but the differences are surely…
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18 Nov 2024 |
But you can also criticize them for not being apocalyptic enough.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And then Girard's intuition was that it's almost like when a knowledge becomes too real and too close.
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18 Nov 2024 |
But I would always maybe go back to the apocalyptic specter, would be Antichrist or Armageddon.
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18 Nov 2024 |
It was, however, roughly, the right protocol if you thought it was a bioweapon.
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18 Nov 2024 |
you're just a robot in a ever smaller cog, in an ever bigger machine or something like this.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And now, nature's cupboard is kind of bare, and you have to reach really hard to make a modest discovery.
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18 Nov 2024 |
the implicit solution to existential risks of all the other sorts is to lean in to a sort of very non-democratic, one-world state that will…
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18 Nov 2024 |
And even as rigorous a subject area as mathematics in some ways has devolved into something close to literary theory, where one…
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18 Nov 2024 |
My political, social intuition is that it's the height of your responsibility because that is just, in effect, hitting the accelerator…
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18 Nov 2024 |
Maybe it doesn't become a godlike intelligence, which is some of the sort of futuristic transhumanist nonsense.
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18 Nov 2024 |
I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both.
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18 Nov 2024 |
I do believe the effective altruists are winning the argument.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And if you regulated drugs, if you regulated video games like the FDA regulates drugs, we'd still all just be playing Pong.
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18 Nov 2024 |
It was perhaps downstream from Christianity, if the promise of Christianity is a physical resurrection, then science could offer that too.
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18 Nov 2024 |
in some sense, the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do.
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18 Nov 2024 |
I think that's the most accelerationist thing possible.
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18 Nov 2024 |
if Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that's a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of…
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18 Nov 2024 |
It's timeless, internal, the particulars don't matter, the speeches people give don't matter, Thucydides makes them up.
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18 Nov 2024 |
I think it's on par, let's say, in the computer world, I think it's on par with the Internet in the late 90s.
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18 Nov 2024 |
something like Hegel is just a pale shadow of the Judeo-Christian sense of history.
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18 Nov 2024 |
The hyperspecialization disguises a certain type of decadence where you have these narrow experts saying how wonderful they are
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18 Nov 2024 |
I always try to be more on the protect side.
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18 Nov 2024 |
If you go too progressive, you get to something like Marcion or Marx, but if you say it's all in the Old Testament, that's somehow not…
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18 Nov 2024 |
And in some sense, the scary answer is there's some truth to all of them.
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18 Nov 2024 |
But the overarching explanation that I've come to think is a very important one is just this idea that, in some way, science and technology…
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18 Nov 2024 |
atheists and fundamentalists disagree on the secondary and relatively not so important question of whether or not God exists.
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18 Nov 2024 |
you could say that the New Testament God is the first progressive because the new supersedes the old.
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18 Nov 2024 |
So there was this strange return of the mythical in this very in the equations of the physicists.
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18 Nov 2024 |
There are important things that will happen that are different from things that happened in the past.
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18 Nov 2024 |
There's existential risk of bioweapons or dangerously engineered bioweapons, maybe of AI and killer robots or autonomous weapon systems…
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18 Nov 2024 |
If nuclear weapons can rain down fire and brimstone and destroy the world, and then we have a biblical tradition that maybe doesn't say…
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18 Nov 2024 |
One way to quantify this, even if we say the rate of progress in broad fields is the same as it was 100 years ago, not that it's slowed.
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18 Nov 2024 |
And as a libertarian, I always like to say it's too regulated and the FDA regulates the drugs too much.
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18 Nov 2024 |
we will avoid Armageddon by having a one world state that has real teeth, real power.
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18 Nov 2024 |
That there were these apocalyptic risks and maybe going very slow was better than racing towards Armageddon.
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18 Nov 2024 |
It was not the correct protocol for some kind of flu.
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18 Nov 2024 |
it sort of clears the field, it's like the Lord Acton line, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
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18 Nov 2024 |
There are all these parts of our society that feel lame, slow-changing, low energy, low testosterone, nothing is going on.
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