In today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with Paul, a zoomer mathematician and software engineer currently finishing his master’s degree.
Paul first encountered me as an edgy teenage communist and thought my views were morally contemptible. Since then he has moderated in much the same way I have, and now promotes the adoption of technocratic Singapore-esque power structures.
Topics include:
Paul’s development from teenage communist into Post Left apathy through Chapo Traphouse and Cumtown
Paul’s background as a children of South American immigrants
The Paraguayan War and Pope’s dispensation for polygamy
Anya-Taylor Joy is very hot
Peronism vs. Pinochet vs. Francoism
Treatment of Japan after the end of WWII
Paul’s perspective on AI art as a STEMcel
Does Paul worry about AI taking coders’ jobs?
Walt’s work as a consultant facilitating work between coders / business SMEs
Will entry level STEM work lose its intellectual rigor?
Tech layoffs and hiring freezes and the economic causes of this
How companies like Uber get people addicted and then jack up prices
Future of remote work vs. corporate efforts at RTO
Walt’s perspective on Universal Basic Income given macroeconomic trends
How companies fuck you via hidden fees, price discrimination, and subscriptions
The conservative argument for a UBI administered as a negative income tax
Would a UBI destroy human vitality
What’s causing Zoomer men to drop out of society?
How men living with their parents too long can cause a natural friction
Why Paul sees Singapore as an ideal technocratic society
Industrial Society and its Future and Ted’s thoughts on the Power Process
How AI algorithms exacerbate the threat of modern dopamine traps
How Substack resembles the “old internet” by facilitating discovery and curation
Walt and Paul reminisce about when Google was good
How Elon is suppressing Substack on Twitter
Google is a natural monopoly because nobody is using duckduckgo
How clever creators can manipulate the algorithm to grow super fast
Soyface as a social technology revealed by YouTube algorithms
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Neural networks as a potential model for human cognition
How a Large Language Model approximates the Jungian collective unconscious
Is intelligence just an emergent condition of complexity?
How high verbal IQ guys can dominate in STEM by having decent communication skills
The social skills of Paul’s STEMcel classmates compared to other zoomers
The Brahmin Question in tech and growing animus towards Indian Americans
The relative advantages of working at a startup vs. a large corporation
How the leisurely nature of many STEM jobs facilitates job stacking
The Anti-Work movement among Zoomers
Do coding bootcamps have a positive reputation in the SWE community?
Is tech heading in a more credentialist direction?
Negative sentiment towards the tech industry
How spergy STEM guys are misunderstood as Patrick Bateman types
How talking to artsy mean girls on the Red Scare subreddit helped Walt develop a way of talking about difficult issues to women
The tendency of internally diverse communities to splinter
How esotericism and posting coal is helpful for driving away entryists
Paul and Walt’s shared history of arguing anonymously on 4chan as a teenager
2024 isn’t an interesting election year
Biden vs. Reagan as geriatric figureheads for their staff
Biden’s incompetence at “playing the role of President” / managing the narrative
How to combat the gerontocracy
The relative inexperience and declining gravitas of middle aged people
People act like Hunter Biden is in his 20s
How the Alt Right guy in Succession captures how Liberals respected the AR
Walt’s experience using steroids in amateur powerlifting training
How post-cycle therapy makes you empathize with girls on their period
The modern use of amphetamines and how Adderall made Walt unable to dream
Why can’t stupid people figure out how to get their own Addy rx?
Impacts of Adderall on intelligence and empathy
The rampant use of amphetamines by the Nazis
How Walt got addicted to creating AI images and this induced mild psychosis
The Tetris Effect
How Large Language Models can be used to explore the collective unconscious
How the parallel development of dragons across civilizations demonstrates the existence of primordial imagery / genetic memory
How AI image generation using negative prompts might provide insight into the unconscious or early evolutionary psychology
How Paul left communism after becoming apathetic / more personally successful
How Paul gradually discovered that the margin on labor is justified
We’re too hard on Marx in retrospect
All power structures tend towards oligarchy due to the inevitability of factions vying over scarce resources
The danger of any entity having control over infrastructure like railroads and AI
Politicians are underpaid and this creates corruption via book / speaking deals
How randomness is an underrated heuristic and was successfully used by Athens and Venice to prevent tyranny
Episode 22 : The Post-Left, AI, and Tech Jobs with Paul