I am also now haunted by the “humanism is dead” take. I guess I believe it, but what killed it is the internet, and I think we could bring it back.
I don’t think that’s it. I think he meant that humanism was created by incentives—e.g., ordinary people becoming economically and militarily valuable in a way they hadn’t historically been. The spectre, and now rising immantization, of full automation is reversing those incentives. So, it’s less a problem with the attitudes of our current elites or the memes propagated on the Internet. It’s more a problem with the context in which anybody achieving the rank of elite, and any meme on human value which goes viral, is shaped by the evolving incentive structure in which most humans are not essential to the success of a military or economic endeavor.
I see, thank you for explaining, I was misapplying jdp’s model indeed.
I do think the model doesn’t quite match reality. If humanism has already been dying, it can’t be because ordinary people aren’t useful anymore—they’re still very useful! We’ve had automation, yes, but we still require workers to tend to the automation, the economy has full employment and it’s not out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
I think the Internet has in fact been a prelude to the attitude adaptive for the martial shifts, but mostly because the failure of e.g. social media to produce good discourse has revealed that a lot of naive implicit models about democratization being good have been falsified. Democracy in fact turns out to be bad, giving people what they want turns out to be bad. I expect the elite class in Democratic Republics to get spitefully misanthropic because they are forced to live with the consequences of normal people’s decisions in a way e.g. Chinese elites aren’t.
I don’t think that’s it. I think he meant that humanism was created by incentives—e.g., ordinary people becoming economically and militarily valuable in a way they hadn’t historically been. The spectre, and now rising immantization, of full automation is reversing those incentives.
So, it’s less a problem with the attitudes of our current elites or the memes propagated on the Internet. It’s more a problem with the context in which anybody achieving the rank of elite, and any meme on human value which goes viral, is shaped by the evolving incentive structure in which most humans are not essential to the success of a military or economic endeavor.
I see, thank you for explaining, I was misapplying jdp’s model indeed.
I do think the model doesn’t quite match reality. If humanism has already been dying, it can’t be because ordinary people aren’t useful anymore—they’re still very useful! We’ve had automation, yes, but we still require workers to tend to the automation, the economy has full employment and it’s not out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
I think the Internet has in fact been a prelude to the attitude adaptive for the martial shifts, but mostly because the failure of e.g. social media to produce good discourse has revealed that a lot of naive implicit models about democratization being good have been falsified. Democracy in fact turns out to be bad, giving people what they want turns out to be bad. I expect the elite class in Democratic Republics to get spitefully misanthropic because they are forced to live with the consequences of normal people’s decisions in a way e.g. Chinese elites aren’t.