All of R Bruns's Comments + Replies

These quotes show how anti-progress and reactionary Tolkien was. He hated machines, he hated housing construction, he hated innovation. He would condemn humanity to be tenant farmers ruled by a warrior aristocracy at a medieval tech level, forever. If you want to live in Tolkien's utopia, move to Zambia.

Basically, Tolkien is very much like the Unabomber. He saw real problems, but his proposed solutions are destructive. He was a master of using the bouba–kiki effect to incept his worldview in the minds of millions, so he did far more to stop progress than the Unabomber ever did. He bears significant responsibility for the productivity slowdown, and for your rent being too damn high.

1kodemannen
Wait what?  Can you elaborate on this?
2Nathan Helm-Burger
I mean, I think you are right about him being anti-progress and fantasy-proposing terrible 'solutions' to real problems. I don't think you are correct to give him so much credit for productivity slowdown. I think his effect is quite a bit more minor than that. I think the productivity slowdown is mostly due to weird unanticipated long term downstream effects of our government structure, land use rules, tax structures, and a tendency towards veto-ochracy.

The tech-using superheroes all have 'tech bro' as their backstory, but this has almost nothing to do with the plot or their on-screen actions. They are occasionally shown doing product launches etc. because that it a thing that tech millionaires do, but all of the on-screen action is defending against change, not causing it. And the 'tech going wrong or being exploited' outcome is approximately 100% of the portrayal of events, there is almost no screen time on an invention making the world better. 

See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRi... (read more)

Despite the inaccuracy, I used 'monkey' rather than ape for the connotations and imagery. And yes, our ancestors were never completely solitary, but the general trend is that we went form something kind of like an orangutan to something that could be ordered into the trenches of WW1.

2ChristianKl
Do you have any evidence that we had ancestors that were as solitary as orangutans? Why do you believe that any pre-homo ancestor was more solitary?

It may not be as memetically optimized for the modern LW audience as ingroup-written rationalfic, but I recommend reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It is (one of?) the first-ever 'engineer uses technical knowledge to fix a primitive society and instill modern values' stories.

Fixed, thanks for pointing that out.