Thanks for posting this. It makes me think—”Oh, someone is finally mentioning this”.
Observation : I think that your model rests on hypotheses that are the hypotheses I expect someone from Silicon Valley to suggest, using Silicon-Valley-originating observations. I don’t think of Silicon Valley as ‘the place’ for politics, even less so epistemically accurate politics (not evidence against your model of course, but my inner simulator points at this feature as a potential source of confusion)
We might very well need to use a better approach than our usual tools for thinking about this. I’m not even sure current EAs are better at this than the few bottom-lined social science teachers I met in the past -being truth-seeking is one thing, knowing the common pitfalls of (non socially reflexive) truth-seeking in political thinking is another.
For some reasons that I won’t expand on, I think people working on hierarchical agency are really worth talking to on this topic and tend to avoid the sort of issues ‘bayesian’ rationalists will fall into.
I think you probably should think of Silicon Valley as “the place” for politics. A bunch of Silicon Valley people just took over the Republican party, and even the leading Democrats these days are Californians (Kamala, Newsom, Pelosi) or tech-adjacent (Yglesias, Klein).
I think you’re interpreting as ascendancy what is mostly just Silicon Valley realigning to the Republican Party (which is more of a return to the norm both historically and for US industrial lobbies in general). None of the Democrats you cite are exactly rising stars right now.
What happens right now is Silicon Valley becoming extremely polarizing, with those voices in the Democratic coalition having the most reach campaigning strongly on an anti-Musk platform.
Thanks for posting this. It makes me think—”Oh, someone is finally mentioning this”.
Observation : I think that your model rests on hypotheses that are the hypotheses I expect someone from Silicon Valley to suggest, using Silicon-Valley-originating observations. I don’t think of Silicon Valley as ‘the place’ for politics, even less so epistemically accurate politics (not evidence against your model of course, but my inner simulator points at this feature as a potential source of confusion)
We might very well need to use a better approach than our usual tools for thinking about this. I’m not even sure current EAs are better at this than the few bottom-lined social science teachers I met in the past -being truth-seeking is one thing, knowing the common pitfalls of (non socially reflexive) truth-seeking in political thinking is another.
For some reasons that I won’t expand on, I think people working on hierarchical agency are really worth talking to on this topic and tend to avoid the sort of issues ‘bayesian’ rationalists will fall into.
Thanks for the comment.
I think you probably should think of Silicon Valley as “the place” for politics. A bunch of Silicon Valley people just took over the Republican party, and even the leading Democrats these days are Californians (Kamala, Newsom, Pelosi) or tech-adjacent (Yglesias, Klein).
Also I am working on basically the same thing as Jan describes, though I think coalitional agency is a better name for it. (I even have a post on my opposition to bayesianism.)
I think you’re interpreting as ascendancy what is mostly just Silicon Valley realigning to the Republican Party (which is more of a return to the norm both historically and for US industrial lobbies in general). None of the Democrats you cite are exactly rising stars right now.
This seems right.
What happens right now is Silicon Valley becoming extremely polarizing, with those voices in the Democratic coalition having the most reach campaigning strongly on an anti-Musk platform.