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Varun Adibhatla's avatar

A friend recently told me about meetings of liberal elite circles in the Hudson Valley / Berkshires gaming ways and people to manifest cultural artifacts by appearing on the Joe Rogan Show.

It reminded me of Council of Eldrond in the Fellowship, a gathering of Free Peoples (Men, Dwarves, and Elves) trying to mount a response to Sauron ... without the presence of the Hobbits.

"Attention" as Ezra likes to say is this world's new currency. It's more like the Ring.

Whoever bears it carries a sort of narrative burden that only a figure can Trump and his Nazgul can endure.

Abundance is part cul de sac and part Valinor, "a fading memory in a world increasingly shaped by mortals."

....when what is needed is a resonant coalition of Men, Dwarves, and Elves brought together by the small Hobbit folk and their longing for the good life in the Shire.

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Venkatesh Rao's avatar

Yeah this sounds too plausible unfortunately

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PAtwater's avatar

Our old hobbit friend is going to DC soon to give a talk on a shiny elven stage, give a yarn about winning the water data wars

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PAtwater's avatar

Ah I see where you're coming from better now

This piece o erestimates though IMHO the centrality of Ezra, yglesias, Noah etc in the existing regime

Those early career bloggers weren't all that critical to the regime wherein proceduralisn run amok was / is the default

More just part of the much larger river of ideological and administrative currents

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Jake's avatar

It presumes to perhaps more agency and influence. But nevertheless they are emblematic of the type of mainstream thinking of the moderate left over the past decade or two. Where they didn't have influence, they merely described and promoted the narratives of those who did drive forward. Also it is worth considering how much of the democrats ideology is not driven by seminal thinkers, but is the emergent phenomenon of the Discourse of politics, journalism, wonks, the academy and others. Major books and other meme sources may strongly influence this, but aren't steering the ship. No one is.

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Mike's avatar

This is extraordinary. I haven’t read the book but this is precisely the opinion I have of it.

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Jeff's avatar
Apr 20Edited

Seems obvious to even the least interested observer that this book was borne out of the same precepts of the Biden/covid-era way of doing things, that is: high choreography, shrouded substance, ephemeral. The authors are more interested in laundering ideas from the existing zeitgeist than forming conclusions of their own, because that would require actual conviction and taste.

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Promise Tewogbola's avatar

Can you continue sharing the link to your chats? I got a lot of value the last time you did that - as it allowed me to continue the conversation in a direction informed by my own curiosities

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Venkatesh Rao's avatar

This one got a bit too messy to share broadly but here it is https://chatgpt.com/share/67fab4a4-af88-8002-a32c-094801cae59b

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Clive's avatar

Somehow I missed the header that this was AI assisted but I realized it was AI almost immediately because the voice sounded like my own conversations with chatgpt lol

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Clive's avatar

I wish it would tell us what books to read instead!

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Todd M's avatar

So, I'm curious, given what you fed to the AI, do you think this analysis is particularly insightful? Fair? Useful? To my eyes it reads as a bit of a polemic, one that I might consider to be in bad faith if it came from a human.

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Venkatesh Rao's avatar

lol I specifically told it to be polemical. It’s certainly useful to me.

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Venkatesh Rao's avatar

I consider the book and the orchestrated campaign to shove it into the narrative as an entire bad-faith circus

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Todd M's avatar

Ah, so this is closer to your actual opinion, as supported and filtered through an LLM, rather than you using an LLM as an oracle where you had the potential to be surprised by the judgement?

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Venkatesh Rao's avatar

More like support fleshed out for my intuitive opinions. It actually came up with all the good ideas by itself, like the silences section and the insight that thus is a permission architecture book, not an idea book. It’s like hiring a lawyer to file a lawsuit.

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Jake's avatar

Having watched the authors recent interview with Yglesias - I think they'd actually agree with with the notion that it was permission architecture. That was part of their intention.

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