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There's a point in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c where I realized he is a brilliant comedian, but also pretty far left, and a lot of his funny criticisms just boil down to criticizing for not being as far left as he is or wants you to be. So I don't think his mind is being poisoned -- it's already poisoned, from the point of view of someone not as far left. ;)

I think a lot of tech people lean libertarian, which is a strange double-think ground of left and right views, because the role of a technologist has inherently anti-left and anti-right components. Technology is upstream of culture, upstream of society, to work on it implies defying authority whether in the form of a single sovereign or public opinion. While much of the world is still the same, much has been remade according to man's desire, through technology, and there is still much more to be remade. And often not a collective mankind, but an individual, often male, or a small group of individuals, often male. That kind of influence is inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, but anti-authoritarian as it is highly individualistic. Yet its benefits can be made private (until someone else figures out how to do the same, anyway) or open to all according to the whim of the creator, because it's fundamentally just knowledge that once derived can be shared endlessly.

The comments about techies not going out of their domain to try and solve things is just nonsense, as cross domain work happens all the time. Applied technology is often the catalyst (and money source) that brings multiple disciplines together who otherwise would be perfectly content sitting around in academia pursuing their narrow focuses for all time (this isn't to say that such narrow pursuing can't bring great fruits). Ok, it's not the only catalyst, and maybe a lot of technologists have that habit and viewpoint of being able to do better than narrow field experts, but either they succeed and are shown to be right all along that they didn't need outside help, or they are wrong, and they fail, or they change their minds as they realize they're failing and study up and get consultants. I don't know anything about Google's anti-aging prospects but if they aren't already in contact with Aubrey DeGrey and the other biologists and doctors he's in contact with they soon will be once they realize how hard the problem is.

"After all, it's not politicians who fed the world, it was Haber & Bosch. It wasn't environmentalists who saved whales from extinction, it was whoever invented that synthetic whale-oil substitute"

The politics vs technologists is a false dichotomy. I dont know specifically about Haber and Bosch, but a lot of researchers get their funding from the government. SV would not be what it is today without government funding.

Not specific to your comment, but I feel like the whole 'how can we make the world better' discussion has become 'our side is better at it'. Who cares who's better, what can we/I do?

    ... curing death? It's not hubris. It's something we should have been focused
    on doing for at least past few hundred years. If it takes rich SV guys to
    finally do something about it, I think instead calling them full of hubris one
    should instead ask, why it was them who finally started tackling this problem ...

I totally appreciate what you're saying. You're saying "the rich SV guys are right, why haven't we been trying to cure death? Obviously curing death would be amazing! Death is awful!".

But the fact that people whose expertise is primarily in software, entrepreneurship, and/or investing, who all have, I think we can safely say, limited experience as biology researchers, the fact that these people are making predictions about when death will be cured and judgements as to which approaches are most promising, predictions and judgements that are not deferred to actual biologists who study senescence...there are of course upsides to such hubris (e.g. being unaffected by perverse incentives in the academic system in which biologists traditionally work), but surely you can see that there is hubris here?

In spite of all the caveats like how academia sucks, at the end of the day, the actual biologists who study senescence are still understood to be the experts on the feasibility of immortality. Making any kind of prediction or judgement call that isn't deferring to the acknowledged experts is incontrovertibly arrogant.

To be clear, we wouldn't be leveling this criticism if "rich SV guys" were simply increasing financial support for aging research. There are undoubtedly controversies around actors raising money for medical research (e.g. because it arguably results in disproportionate funding for diseases of old rich white people), but nobody criticizes those celebrities of hubris, either.

This criticism is because there are people in Silicon Valley who earnestly, genuinely believe that because they're hackers not biologists, they're gonna cure death by hacking biology. Even if you believe they're right, how can you deny the arrogance?

    ... finally started tackling this problem in a way that has at least a chance
    of being effective.

And this part is why this hubris is harmful: the dismissal of the efforts of anyone other than the "rich SV guys" of even having "at least a chance of being effective".

    politics is one of the least cost-effective way of solving *anything* one
    can imagine

Which way of solving institutionalized slavery, or women's suffrage, or totalitarianism do you think would've been more "cost-effective" than politics?

At least one of those was directly caused by technology, and solved by politics and its siblings, economics and war.

I moved this out of the parent comment because I really want you to read the parent comment and was worried about the wall-of-text; hopefully, you'll be interested enough to read the continuation, too.

    it's not politicians who fed the world, it was Haber & Bosch

Without diminishing their accomplishments, it's important to note that Haber & Bosch have come and gone but world hunger still isn't solved. And it will never be solved by technology alone. It's going to require politics, and economics, and unfortunately probably war. Hopefully technology can provide an important supporting role, but the realization that technology will only be providing a supporting role, that's exactly the humility I'm arguing for.

Also, in what way were Haber & Bosch representative of "rich SV guys" or techie hubris? Maciej has never seemed to me to be criticizing mainstream scientific research at all.

    It wasn't environmentalists who saved whales from extinction,
    it was whoever invented that synthetic whale-oil substitute.
    ...
    Personally, I'm getting more and more convinced that social
    changes are caused by changes in technology landscape, not the
    other way around.

Isn't synthetic whale-oil a clear counterexample to this causative claim? Surely you agree that research into whale-oil substitute was driven at least in part by environmentalism, it wasn't the invention of synthetic whale-oil substitute that incited people into caring about the environment.

And again, in what way is the invention of whale-oil substitute representative of the hubris that Maciej is criticizing?

    we didn't have liberal democracy 500 years ago not because we
    were stupid then, but because technologies that can support it

Didn't the Greeks have democracy 2500 years ago? The Roman Republic also had a form of democracy, which lasted longer than the US is old, our technology may well turn out not "support it" any better than theirs.

This reminds me of a quote from a talk I read recently:

    More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something
    unprecedented in human history.
    ... let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting
    new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.