spiffage
Joined 17 years ago
Joined 17 years ago
It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family.
Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail.
My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.
And I'm forced to acknowledge that for most people, their identities do work and make them happy in ways I can only sort-of understand. And maybe they lower our society's level of epistemic virtue, but people may never let them go, and it's not obvious that we ought to try to convince them to beyond a certain point.
I like balioc's perspective here https://balioc.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/responsa/. The whole thing is good, but he responds to PG's essay specifically with:
"I could answer by saying that, in many circumstances, identity really is necessary for hedonic well-being. [...] the world isn’t set up to provide us with constant sources of utility, so it’s much better to have a constantly-accessible utility generator inside yourself, even if that generator requires some finicky maintenance."