The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
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The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
Emerson made clear that the desire to conform not merely to those around you but to one’s prior views on a subject can be just as limiting and indeed hobbling.
A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.
The stifling regime of disclosure and punishment for authentic intellectual risk-taking that we impose on would-be leaders leaves little room for capable and original thinkers whose principal motivation is something other than self-promotion, and who often lack a willingness to subject themselves to the theater and vicissitudes of the modern public
... See moreAmid the campus protests across the United States in 2024 following Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Gaza, a growing number of student protesters began concealing their faces with scarves and masks. Their rationale was that exposure of their identities would jeopardize their futures, from depriving them of job opportunities to facing criticism
... See moreThe employees at Google who resisted leveraging the machinery of their company in service of building software for the U.S. military know what they oppose but not what they are for. The problem that we are describing is not a principled commitment to pacifism or nonviolence. It is a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything.
The work of Singer, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, and taught at Princeton for more than two decades, was attractive because it seemed to have solved the puzzle: well-being, whether of humans or sea otters, was all that mattered. But this approach provided cover for a generation to avoid more thorny questions about what constitutes a life
... See moreHe found that an investment approach that purchased shares solely in companies run by founders would have earned an excess annual return of 10.7 percent, or 4.4 percent more per year than a portfolio that included all companies, founder-run and otherwise, even when controlling for various other factors including industry and the age of the
... See moreOur geopolitical adversaries are ruled by individuals who are often closer to founders, in the sense Silicon Valley uses the term, than traditional politicians. Their fates and personal fortunes are so deeply intertwined with those of the nations whose authoritarian regimes they oversee that they behave as owners, in that they have a direct stake
... See more“great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them,” and that the engineer “cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors,” or “argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.”
Herbert Hoover