Patrick McKenzie

Well, what did you do about localization?

You didn't do enough about localization yet.

You hate name group of people here.

Like,

Don't you see the disparity in death rates between demographic A and demographic B?

Why haven't you fixed that yet?

You have killed so many people, etc., etc.

And no one in government, no one who is making that moral calculation says, I have responsibility for killing people by doing nothing.

The person who is doing anything has responsibility for killing people by taking up the burden of doing something.

And it is a absolutely morally defensible thing, which you will see over and over and over again in our discourses.

You touched the problem, and so you've immediately taken liability for any number of sins of omission because even at the scale of the largest companies in the world, you have not allocated infinite resources to this problem.

And also, the stealing a march on the government and embarrassing us will be held against you.

And so you can point back to the Cambridge Analytica thing where...

Um, Cambridge Analytica is like shorthand for, uh, there was this one time back in the day where, um, the news media in New York and the government in, uh, uh, DC and places like it, uh, talk to each other a bit and convince themselves that a small team of people with budget of approximately $200,000 have rooted the United States presidential election.

Now, rooting the United States presidential election, perhaps on behalf of a foreign power, would be an enormously consequential thing.

Good thing that did not happen in the world that we live in.

However, people believe very passionately in that narrative.

And as a result of that narrative, they did very aggressively attempt to clip the wings of tech and tech's core businesses.

Like say advertising, right?

If I look at the experience of the last hundred years and a little more back to the flu pandemic in 1918, if you read histories of the flu pandemic, a vastly less wealthy, vastly less technologically sophisticated nation with many less people involved in the actual fixing of this problem, competently executed on nationwide vaccine campaigns and other various measures.