19 April 2024
I was listening to Lex Fridman's interview with Guillome Verdon, aka Beff Jezos. After a certain point I felt that I understood Guillome. I can place him on the shoulders of his influences.
The e/acc movement is fun and kind of cute and I like it. But it got me thinking about his views, which helped crystallize in my mind some of the mixed feelings I have about Elon Musk as well.
Firstly, Guillome seems to be a classic libertarian. And it was enlightening to hear him unironically present everything through that lens. We've all read Ayn Rand. The fountainhead was a very influential book for me and my favorite book when I was 20.
But there are some big logical inconsistencies, and especially just practical problems that are very obvious to most when they start thinking about actually running the world along libertarian lines.
The big one is the belief that every problem will be solved by the rational market in combination with the better angels of our nature. There is this joke about libertarians: Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand and Rand Paul walk into a bar to have a drink. There are no regulations whatsoever. The next day they're all blind because of methanol poisoning. In reality, people are not all benevolent and will try to get away with shit for personal gain.
Some salient examples are cigarettes, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry and especially opoids, Oxycontin and Fentanyl, and the Oil & Gas and Chemicals industries and how much they have always tried to dump toxic waste into the environment. Regulation is the only known way to stop these chronic bad behaviors.
Secondly, I don't think Guillome is himself fully there. Later on he admits that what he's doing is aimed at 'bringing balance to the force'. In other words, taking an extreme point of view to balance out an opposite extreme point of view.
I don't think I fully disagree with that, and I've been known to do it myself in conversation. But I also don't fully approve of it. There is a role for satire, and that surely can get people thinking and create positive change. But I feel there is some sort of optimal dose of satire, and we have far overshot it.
I just haven't seen any evidence that any polarization contributes to convergence on an optimal point in the middle. In my view, people who are influencial should be encouraged to share their real view with its necessary nuance more often.