It strikes me as surprising that George Hotz is religious. Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.
The danger IMO comes when people tie their religious belief too strongly to political movements, or think that just because there is doctrine around a certain aspect of human culture/life, there is no questioning it or investigating it further. A healthy skepticism (especially over one's own beliefs) is central to a good life IMO.
I went to Catholic school growing up, and I did not see anything in religion classes that involved updating models of the world that conflicted with data. In fact, it was the exact opposite.
A religion compatible with the scientific understanding of the world would be one that is open to amending its assumptions at anytime. At least that is my understanding of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataism
A weird pseudo-religion.
Alternately, once you've had your fun with the more-complicated aspects of human technological advancement, you arrive at the gordian knot of religion-- the one construct nobody has managed to truly reverse-engineer. (I think this is what attracts the schizophrenics-- they believe they've succeeded where everyone else fails.)
To your point, Catholicism is very binary (pun intended) in terms of ideology. Little wonder it attracts the computer-minded.
His syncretism of Christianity with Bronze Age Pervert in this very blog post should immediately remind people of Umberto Eco:
"One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism."
BAP wrote a book popular in right-wing circles called Bronze-Age Mindset. In the late teens, it was reviewed in a couple of the usual places by conservative figures. BAP has lost a lot of steam since then, and it doesn't look like he'll lead his group of Frogs and fringe-heads to direct action, even though he fetishizes the warrior class.
BAP and his fellow travelers were early believers in Trump and grew disillusioned. They were consistent champions of Putin as well -- after all, he appeared topless on a horse and learned karate. I can only imagine that Russia's military failures in Ukraine have made them seek other idols.
The good thing about BAP is that he knows his sources. He has mastered political philosophy and read the original texts to a depth and degree that jokers like Yarvin cannot aspire to.
Like Yarvin, BAP wants a strong man. He does not believe in democracy. He does believe in racial superiority and inferiority. While I happen to disagree with him about a lot of issues, including those, for all the usual reasons, if I were to engage him on his own terms, I would simply point out that authoritarian regimes like those he idolizes have really obvious weaknesses.
Those include the inability to maintain high-quality, transparent communication under a punitive regime, and the inability of a kleptocracy to inspire the kind of collection action that wins wars.
BAP is chasing a pipe dream.
Democratic leaders can easily fall due to scandal. Authoritarian figures cannot.
China can commit the enormous mistake of its zero-COVID policy precisely because its leaders will never face a reckoning at the ballot box. Russia can stagnate in kleptocracy for the same reason.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has controlled the Russian Federation for 22 years, starting in 2000. He has signed laws that will allow him to remain in office until 2036, at which point he'll be 84.
His chief opponent, Alex Navalny, is imprisoned in Russia. Navalny's party is not allowed to participate in presidential elections. Navalny survived one attempt to poison him, and another attack in which he lost 80% of the vision of one eye when an assailant sprayed a chemical on his face.
So sure, you can believe that Putin was elected democratically if you want. He'll be elected democratically until he can no longer force Russia to elect him democratically. He resembles an African president-for-life like Mugabe much more than he does a democratically elected leader. If you believe Putin's claims, it would be useless to debate it further.
That's a false dichotomy. In a western democracy, do you vote for the things you believe in, or do you vote for one of the few representatives that pretends to approximate your beliefs closely?
> Democratic leaders can easily fall due to scandal. Authoritarian figures cannot.
Is that true? What if the people likes authoritarians? What if it doesn't care about scandals? What if it democratically decides it doesn't want "free and fair elections" anymore? If the majority wants "the wrong things", the outcome will be poor. Democracy is not the distinguishing factor, it's not inherently good or bad, functional or dysfunctional.
> So sure, you can believe that Putin was elected democratically if you want.
The proceedings may be illegitimate, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians would have elected Putin over Navalny again. Of course there is an opposition in Russia, but it's not a majority and in any event Navalny isn't all that popular.
No it's not, actually. Democracy devolves power to individual citizens in ways that allow them to impact decisions about collective action. In western democracies, citizens have many ways of impacting collective action, which include speaking out and rallying others to their cause. It is common in places like Russia and China for citizens to be jailed or killed for speaking out about government policy. Therefore, those countries are undemocratic not just in how they approach voting, but about the civil rights they recognize and protect ... or trample.
> Is that true? What if the people likes authoritarians? What if it doesn't care about scandals? What if it democratically decides it doesn't want "free and fair elections" anymore? If the majority wants "the wrong things", the outcome will be poor. Democracy is not the distinguishing factor, it's not inherently good or bad, functional or dysfunctional.
Given that authoritarian figures control the media, information and feedback loops that are available to citizens in their countries, how would you even know what "the people" like? You can't know; you can only speculate. Authoritarian states systematically falsify voting results and other expressions of popular will. They obliterate the feedback loops because they are afraid of what people would say. That's one crucial property of an authoritarian state. To put it bluntly, you have no idea of knowing what people want under authoritarianism, and that should trouble you.
> The proceedings may be illegitimate, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians would have elected Putin over Navalny again. Of course there is an opposition in Russia, but it's not a majority and in any event Navalny isn't all that popular.
You have no way of testing this hypothesis. It's an opinion without evidence or the possibility of evidence, and I will treat it as such.
You should ask yourself why Putin is so afraid of running that experiment himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed
A guy who amusingly rejected the label "fascist", instead wanting to be called a "super-fascist".
It's kind of fascinating to me; it feels like another fork one can take in response to burnout -- something I know they all ran into at one point or another.
this is just my perspective as a passive observer trying to be objective as best i can, so take all of this as you will (and at the same time who am i to question their faith? how can i know that george hotz wasn't actively religious prior to recent broader developments?)
Are there are other prominent young tech people who are openly into NRX? I hear about Yarvin and his Thiel funding spreading themselves around, but I haven't any idea if it's actually taking hold in tech circles.
I did not expect to see the bible references here.
Also his presumption that we would think the bible is the closest thing we have to an origin story also suprised me. There are hundreds of origin stories that have been part of the tradition of different cultures throughout the millenia.
Surely this is true for most of modern Western culture, but it seems to hint that he’s gone down the concerning path of seeking mystical metaphors in the bible, to not acknowledge the above in a post otherwise about corporate management.
> Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.