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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

My example to follow in this domain is Max Levchin: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”

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This is a prisoners' dilemma/tragedy of the commons dynamic[0]: any improvement per megadollar donated is of limited benefit to donater specifically, because it's spread out over the entire aristocracy[1]. So it's actually affermatively wrong to willingly donate any money to welfare projects, versus spending that money to bribe (sorry, 'lobby') politicians to impose welfare-directed taxes on the entire aristocracy (and thus deprive the more sociopathic 90% thereof of the ability to opt out of donating to the local homeless shelter, and gain a stragic advantage thereby).

This is the same reason why it's prefectly resonable for a corporation to engage in Google/Facebook style adware and spyware deployment (or any other unilateral only-not-crimes-because-the-law-hasn't-caught-up) provided that they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using. (This is not hypocricy, this is appropriate response to a molochian incentive structure.)

0: internal to the aristocracy[1], not aristocracy vs lower classes

1: substitute a different term for "uppermost upper class" if you prefer

> provided they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using.

For it to be ethical it must be highly targeted and explicit. When it's not, in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)

Just for an example-- Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.

Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.

> in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)

Yes, fair. I'm not talking about the signalling/optics side of it at all. If they're not trying to criminalize it then they're not trying to criminalize it, regardless of whether they succeed in convincing people otherwise.

> Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.

A relevant example would be someone who is lobbying for mandatory disclosure of source code, but not providing source of their own software until legally required to.

> Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.

Yes, and my point is that it's not hypocritical to use dark money for that, since to abstain would weaken his position even if he's actually sincere. On the hand, from a PR/signalling perspective, abstaining from dark money is not a effective signal, because there's nothing actually stopping a campaign that intends to reneg on it's promises from sending the same signal, if it sees that that would benefit it. So insisting on ideological purity just disadvanges Lawrence-Lessig-like campaigns relative to openly malicious ones, without actually filtering out secretly malicious ones.

> So it's actually affermatively wrong to willingly donate any money to welfare projects

Too late to edit, but I wanted to clairify that I'm talking about strategicly wrong (less effective than something else they could be doing) rather than morally wrong (of negative effectiveness).

When the French revolution came along, it swept away the aristocrats regardless of whether they were abusive or kind and paternalistic to commoners. Mobs don't frequently make moral calculations the same way that individuals might.

I think the argument is not to curry favor with the mob, it is to take preventive measures to ensure the mob never forms by investing in society.

I don't think he's talking about paying favors to avoid the pitchforks. The idea is collaborating with the community so they improve their lives and the revolution isn't necessary. Some will do it out of selfishness, others from real believe in the community.

I think the logic is less “Give money so the pitchfork folks won’t come after you personally” and more “Give money so there’s no need for a revolution”

The presupposes that it was possible to exist as an aristocrat in that society and not be structurally abusive, which is not at all obvious.

This is about preventing the revolution from starting in the first place, but once it starts, the mob is very proper to ask themselves why we need aristocrats in the first place. What purpose do they serve? Why do they suck up all the air in the room and actively harm us?

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