this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I think it was Upton Sinclair who said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". I've never studied history or philosophy, but I think it's clear that if someone's class interests require burning the world down, they will do it. They are doing it - we are doing it - with regret, with sympathy, with an appreciation of the ironies. We don't need a greater appreciation of Heidegger, we need real-world social restraints on the behaviour of the powerful.
Oh yes, very much so.
The British Empire had its colonial administrators curriculum consisting of Latin and history and such. A rich 19th century heir that went into physics or mathematics were considered to be wasting the chance of a political career.
It made their colonial administrators write about their crimes in a nice prose, but it didn't stop the genocides. If anything it made them aware of what paper trails to burn after the fact, in order to obfuscate the crimes when future historians came looking.
One would lead more people to agree with the other, and make it more likely to happen. And I agree those restraints are necessary.
Wasn't Heidegger a Nazi, and his works famously avoid any mention of the Holocaust?
Hey, somebody did study history! Yet another subject that everyone asks “How will this help me in real life?” and is under attack in the U.S.
Pretty good summary about Martin Heidegger and Nazism on Wikipedia.
I’m open to anyone else who wrote about technology and the issues involved, so I can reference them instead—if you’ve got suggestions. It does suck that some important ideas came from a lousy guy.