How are you going to get them back to ~~the farm~~ a retail job once ~~they've seen Paris~~ tasted cult power?

I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.

Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.

Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.

And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.

On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.

The Golem and The Golem at large are two excellent little books about how science and technology actually works. History of science, so heavy on examples (as the historical subjects tend to be) and light on theory. Several examples of what today would be pseudo science but was treated seriously at its time, because they didn't know what we consider basic knowledge (and you can't get it from first principle...)

Good for anyone interested in science or technology, but perhaps particularly useful for the cultists (if they can be persuaded).

Philanthropy can't change the power structures, philanthropy is a band aid that soothe the conscience of the philanthropist.

Aaron and assorted developers can't give the villagers power, because they only have power in relation to the villagers, not in relation to the world trade system. If they want to give the villagers power they need to change the system that gives the villagers a fraction of their earnings per hour.

But then you are back to the usual options. Thirty years of boredom, trying to change the system from within? Protest world leaders and get beaten by police for your troubles (or even sentenced for destruction of police equipment by smashing your face into it)? Join a communist party and play spot the fed?

I guess it's better to join a philanthropy cult, where billionaires can pay you to hang out in a castle and discuss the problems with the poor over some overpriced ethanol.

And did it appear he needed any help from dorky software engineers personally going to villages to “help out”?

I once saw what I think was a BBC show where an Englishman visited cool tribes and lived with them. Tough, outdoorsman.

The only episode I saw he was in Mongolia and it had what I think was unintentional humour. The local vet - who had been the local party representative during the Communist era and now held some other title - placed him in a family that could need a hand during migration, as their teenage daughter had a disability. So on he went on horseback and he made it there with just a bunch more pauses then the Mongolians would have preferred. But once there, the best his hosts could say about his efforts to help was "Well, he is strong. And he is trying."

By the looks of it, the Mongolians could not believe how a big, strong guy could be so utterly useless.

Soviets were in theory democratic councils but were in practice ruled top-down (except in the very beginning, according to Emma Goldman in her book "My two years in Russia"). So I don't think there is much similarity there.

On the other hand, charter cities are according to Wikipedia essentially areas where a more advanced economy "helps" a third world country by "temporarily" taking over governance to develope the area. In other words: a colony.

And in the historical part of their video I missed the other parts of the industrial revolution. You know the taking over other countries to get cheap raw materials, cheap labour and captive markets. Surely just an oversight that they forgot to mention how colonialism has worked before and its role in why poor countries are poor.

Isn't "pandemic preparation" one of their longtermist causes that they grift money to? Shouldn't they have been able to show some results?

It looks like they combine the hubris of an anarchist or a communist group that talks about being the vanguard of the proletariat while being like five people (and Steve only comes for the snacks, and Mike is probably a fed) with the methods of an upper class philanthropy association that has gala dinners and discuss the problems of poverty (Upper class twit voice: is it that the poor are stupid, of bad stock or just lazy? Maybe all three!)

Somehow it's not beneficial to their mental health, or anything else really.

I hesitate to ask, but information hazards be damned.

In that worldview, what are cis gay persons? Also intersex or something else?

I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn't bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.

After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!

Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.

He also writes: "The entire human body, faced with a strong impact like being gored by a rhinocerous horn, will fail at its weakest point, not its strongest point."

If a rhino comes at Yud, he can use his mighty cranium, which is not his weakest spot, to defend his weak meat parts. Since the rhino horn only impacts his head and not his weak points, his body can not fail, and thus he lives.

Reminds me of Cyrano de Bergerac's Travel to the Sun, where the protagonist encounters a thin chain carrying a great load. Since all links of the chain were equally strong, it couldn't break as chains always break in there weakest link. De Bergerac had the excuse of writing his sci fi in the 17th century (he also features some pre-Newtonian physics), Yud lacks such an excuse.