I am generally pretty drawn to radical and weird experiments in living, and thus sympathetic to people who get sucked into a lot of things that turn out to be bad ideas. but thankfully, it was pretty obvious to me from the public-facing materials that this place was all about forcing people to abandon comforts and I have a well-ingrained "no! i like things i like!" reflex.
why are philosophers bad if they get paychecks -- don't all intellectuals need patrons? why is it necessarily true that philosophers working for AI companies won't have a positive influence on the world? Why does fiction matter but philosophy not? I'm not even a philosopher, but her contempt stings.
and the real thing is just that, like many commentators, she does not like Bay Area culture and does not think AI people's thoughts on AI are any good. she is a classical liberal version of this rather than a lefty version of it, and she's erudite, but it's still basically "East Coast/analog good, West Coast/digital bad." there's often specific things to learn from people like this, but there's no point imitating or updating on the one-note contempt.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199212369 the nice thing about Deirdre McCloskey is that, while validating all my beloved preconceived worldviews, she can also teach me many new facts! Like Kant having a (romantic?) best friend who was even more punctual than him!
it is fine if i enjoy introspection (and self-help and discussing feelings and so on) and people like her find it "self-obsessed" or "adolescent."
otoh I believe that, given that introspection is fundamentally a hobby, it's worth actually enjoying it, being grateful for the time and freedom to do it, and being judicious about who you want to share it with.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26752 "The Oversight Game: Learning to Cooperatively Balance an AI Agent’s Safety and Autonomy". incentivizing an agent to defer to the human when risky and act when safe.