Harvard professors "debating" yarvin, reporters engaging in technofascist groupchats and tech guys sincerely discussing ai as though it's an app not an ideology are all imo making the same mistake. They miss a simple, inherent exception to the free exchange of ideas: "Ideas" against free exchange.
E.g. someone "arguing," like yarvin and rufo do, for the "proposition" that some claim is invalid due to its origins in the woke cathedral rather than its content, is not actually arguing. There is no proposition. They are deploying the aesthetics of argument to assert unfalsifiable slurs as facts.
Not that there's always anything wrong with that! In dumb fights between real people it's cathartic, and their own business. But harvard and other powerful institutions of mass attention are letting this artificial intelligentsia (as Ruha Benjamin describes it) hide among real debates, enabling it.
If a vc "argues" their ai product will soon transubstantiate from metaphorical monkeys with typewriters into a literal mind with autonomy, thoughts, even rights, they aren't really arguing, and certainly not about ai. They're asserting a tendentious concept of the mind, the very thing that argues.
Again nothing's necessarily wrong with that kind of rhetoric in a futurist tech sales pitch or whatever. But it is very sad how vulnerable to such intellectual scams and cons are leaders at ivy league schools and national newspapers like the new york times. They are getting rolled and we'll all pay.
Basically, I have empathy for the people really in this fight, even if they're fancy harvard or times people lol. But there's an easy heuristic they aren't using to filter out "arguments" that are dangerous for them to empower: Is this an argument against argument? An anti-idea idea? Then fuck off.
Realizing my point here was a sort of tactical extension of this: www.offmessage.net/p/how-libera...