Well, the responses to this are going to be just wondrously entertaining.

I think there's a major distinction to make between two different kinds of "libertarians": democratic and antidemocratic. The former realize that if they can't convince the population of their ideas, they haven't the right to implement those policies as state policies and probably won't succeed in a "free market of ideas" either.

The latter, sadly, have mild or severe tendencies to believe that what other people want simply does not matter.

I get the feeling this profile is going to be about the latter kind.

>“So you’re going to go from one D.A.O. to ten D.A.O.’s to one hundred D.A.O.’s to ten thousand D.A.O.’s,” Mohan replied. “Then, just based off of profit maximization, they’re going to start merging and acquiring one another.

To translate this into plainer speech: yes, there is a significant Skynet risk, and in fact, it's of exactly the "competition collapses into malign Singleton" type described by Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence. Which of course is derived from what any remotely good economist would tell you about the behavior of firms in the limit as competition grows harsher and the rate of profit falls.

>“But I don’t know if we’d ever get to Skynet,” he said. “Maybe in all our code we can say, ‘If Skynet then exit.’

I really hope Mohan is being quoted davka to make him look like a fool meddling with forces he doesn't understand, because that's exactly the note he's striking here.

>Libertarian (and not convinced there’s irreconcilable fissure between deontological and consequentialist camps). Aspiring rationalist/Bayesian. Secularist/agnostic/ignostic ... Hayekian

Forgive my asking, but is this entire article going to be mostly about our fair author, who has my deepest sympathies for having to put up with these folks, meeting and greeting all the most insufferably wrong SV weirdos he can find?

I mean, come on. Holding social views that refuse to make contact with empirical evidence while claiming intellectual foundations that allow for nothing but empirical evidence!

(You may think Bayesianism allows quite lot of a priori mathematics. This is, to my knowledge, wrong: your model of mathematics is based on the built-in modes of reasoning your brain starts with in the first place. The a priori isn't really prior to anything: it evolved.)

And these jackasses then become our public image!

OH NO, and then he met Michael Vassar, Mr. "Post-rationalist" who believes in "memeplexes". God fucking damnit.

Well, at least someone will start cracking down on SV's crackpot and nutter tendencies after reading this profile. God knows it's necessary: for all the smugness about how super-duper smart and ever-so-intellectual these people (in which I semi-include myself) are, I have sometimes found them regrettably unable to do scientific literature reviews relevant to their own problems that I can do by... Googling through a citation web of published papers like any other grad student.

The profile is well-deserved and I'm giggling the whole way through.

>They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up.

GOD SAVE US ALL. Remember that 90% of start-ups fail!