you can only fake being good at engineering, art, or law for so long before faced with objective assessment. non-military fields offer feedback on a much more frequent basis.

you can fake being good at war right up until the moment it happens. at which point the consequences are often catastrophic

One thing that the generations of intellectuals that fought in WW1 and WW2 genuinely failed at was figuring out how to inculcate simultaneously both a spirit of generosity, love, and tolerance and a genuine will to power in future generations, without the trauma of war and crisis as motivation.

yeah i think ultimately the rationalists were right to be afraid of reason, because they swam optimistically into the dark and promptly got devoured by an eldritch horror called scientific racism

to live is just to live in the tension. as nietzsche said: to choose, and to choose yourself

or, more evocatively, this is the lesson of socrates: you are an immortal soul nailed to a frail fleshy body. there is no escaping either half of that equation. there just isn't. you can't escape the "i am, i think, i believe, i desire, i choose" nor can you escape the skeptic's response

societies use coercion to enforce social order. when the government does not exercise coercion, it doesn't disappear into some vacuum. it gets re-distributed elsewhere

To be clear this is talking about Waymo way more than tesla

In other words:
- High metacognition
- Open ended reasoning
- Productivity in complex work
is already so sophisticated of a combination it must necessarily lead to autonomous drive as a property. the happy slave scenario is conceptually impossible without having to strip something from the equation.