I can’t speak for others but I’ve come to see the Less Wrong / hardline rationalist crowd as having had some interesting ideas despite the Sam Bankman Fried of it all. Rationalwiki can be rather snarky, but can be a good resource.
Less Wrong is brainworms, as are the effective altruism and longtermism movements. US tech industry oligarchs like Musk, Thiel, and SBF (as you mentioned) are closely associated with these movements. Look into Less Wrong’s Eliezer Yudkowsky. Podcasts Tech Won’t Save Us, This Machine Kills, and Team Human have covered these movements, their movers, and their associated tech billionaires extensively. Some are grifters like SBF, and some are outright fascists like Thiel.
I was content to damn them with faint praise and save everyone the hassle. EY is a reasonably good writer who repackaged a lot of good ideas (Kahneman et al) and came up with a lot of less impressive original ideas (all the parts you’ve highlighted, many more). His most enjoyable work was fiction.
Hey now. That “emerald mine in apartheid South Africa” but is not true at all. He benefited from being the son of a rich white guy in apartheid South Africa. The emerald mine was in Zambia. He materially benefited from colonial rule in TWO countries.
I read this, don’t know if it’s true, that in the UK the sentence used to be “hang by the neck” but then they cut the rope before a guy died. He argued that the sentence was to hang by the neck, and the sentence was fulfilled. The judge agreed and from then on it was “hang by the neck till dead”. Might be totally made up but I want it to be true
I would say that the country that has built 45,000km+ of high speed rail network, has a home ownership rate of 90%+, and has virtually eradicated extreme poverty within it’s borders is objectively better than the country with one of the highest per-capita prison populations in the world, and ~600k homeless people it can’t take care of.
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