Hacker News Reader

Comment by downWidOutaFite | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. There's no principle involved. It's all polarized partisan politics. Your "particularly dysfunctional" is extremely in the eye of the beholder. The rich and powerful silicon valley CEO/VC guys tearing the country apart over their woke crusade are just as ideologically irrational as the next twitter blue check.

View on HN

This. If you believe for one second that money and power hungry people have any kind of principles, you have not been paying attention. Cancel culture, woke, left, right, center, free speech – they will say whatever to get what they want on these topics, and change their opinion the next day without any real consequences. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

> Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

Good reads/resources about this? I started reading "What's Our Problem" [1] but find it difficult to find "non-partisan" resources nowadays.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...

Not specificially about this. But I'm trying to read some of the classic philosophy books. Anything by Bertrand Russel and Erich Fromm I like. If you want to learn more about human behavior, I can recommend reading Robert Sapolsky. His new book about (the lack of) free will is great! Furthermore, I enjoyed Homo Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Certainly goes into the topic a bit how we ended where we are not with society.

I'd read things written ~1880, which was the last time economic concentration in the US was generally recognized as toxic.

Different technologies and world economy but same underlying issue: concentration of capital being leveraged to artificially protect profit from competition.

I don't think there is any scholarly basis for the term "late-stage capitalism". It's just a meme that kids started using. Power-hungry, unprincipled people will exist regardless of a country's economic system. But people are very imaginative in attributing various social ills to capitalism in particular.

quick Google search shows that the term has been in scholarly use for at least 50 years now and means pretty much exactly what "the kids" are talking about.

So we've been in the "late stages" for at least 50 years? Is there any sort of falsifiable hypothesis there?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+cap...

You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.

"Late-stage capitalism" is just "reimposing feudalism[0]" - i.e. going back to an economic system in which the vast majority of an economy's wealth is rents charged on the use of valuable property. "Capitalism" as is propagandized in capitalist societies is an economy in which the majority of wealth is profits earned as the return on a risk-bearing investment. Being beholden to a free market economy means you have limits to your power - not great limits, but limits none-the-less.

In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism.

[0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.

Beyond the specific term, there is a "sign of the times" we are living. Nowadays the issue with political sciences and philosophy is the partisan, left-right spectrum view that it is difficult to break in in discussions (including HN).

I think it depends on the person. Elon Musk changes his mind a lot, but PG generally seems pretty consistent.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either.

My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining some problems with woke culture: https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html But it doesn't really apply to misbehaving VCs as much.

What's the specific critique of cancel culture PG made, that he's being hypocritical with? Can you give a verbatim quote that displays the supposed hypocrisy, to ensure that you're not misrepresenting his position?

My takeaway that I'll bluntly admit is based on being another one of those people who won't shut up about Robert Caro's book The Power Broker is this: the mark of true political genius is the ability to constantly take in new information that challenges your existing viewpoints, while also having the force of will to try and make your values manifest despite knowing that your views on the best way to do that will change over time. Robert Moses (the subject of the book) was an unparalleled genius when it came to enacting his will, but he was a complete idiot when it came to actually observing the world to see what the impact of his will would be. I think democracy at its best should prevent those kind of people from gaining power (but of course it doesn't).

Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.

To your point: Moses never learned to drive, was chauffered everywhere. So he never directly experienced the horrors he wrought.

My favorite fact from the book is that the windows in his limo did not even go all the way to the back seat, so he didn't even have to look at what he'd wrought unless he chose to. And the horrible traffic jams that were his legacy were something he likely enjoyed, because it meant more time to work in his limo office uninterrupted.

Yup. It's just another moral panic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com