Agreed. It’s a damn shame, because there are a lot of interesting ideas at play, lost in the miasma of geopolitics and acceleration. If only we could slow down, build/scale probabilistic hardware, and carefully test and validate which problems are best suited to each mode of compute.
But nah, let’s be rapacious, anthropomorphize “AI” into an awe-inspiring entity, and thrust it into all the orifices.
To be fair, the world has a bit of an extinction problem.
Trumpelstiltskin, ever spinning gold into shit.
I’m rather surprised at the audacity of leaders, thinking they can contain the chaos they are stoking. I suppose Iran and Gaza may give them hope, but I think they are way too confident in the propaganda machine despite its successes to date.
Perhaps our best chance of spurring change without careening into civil war is to encourage folks to move to battleground states. That’s what I did during term 1.
Sounds like you consume useful information. I wager she uses socials as many: to compare herself to others, perusing a mix of ego-affirming and ego-damning content. These are powerful emotional hooks and oscillating between those states can be confounding. Add a dash of fatalism, which is not hard to come by in this culture, when at a low, and I think it easy to see how one might capitulate.
There are a lot of people out there that think their personality traits are inherent and that their physical attributes are static. In fact, my brother was one of these people. He passed away at 40 years old due to morbid obesity. I attribute his downfall to capitulation by way of comparison. He came to think the hole was too big and that his genetics were too poor to make changes, despite me providing an example to the contrary. Sadly, my parents fanned the flames of his dissonance with their own identity-bound delusions.
So, my guess is that you have developed a healthy personal philosophy and have not surrounded yourself with the type of people or digital content that renders that philosophy dissonant.
And, void for binaries.
Not directly related to the original comment, but generally, I must disagree with the assertion that caring about differences in intensity is problematic or warrants the assumption of “justifying bad behavior”. I’d argue, that in most cases, failure to juxtapose two distal scenarios is more dubious and spurs a breakdown in communication. It seems commonplace now, amongst a set of the population, to cast all loosely related things into one bucket, details be damned. This is a dangerous mode of groupthink. It represents an over-correction that pushes the pendulum-of-social-discord to new heights. I also think it emblematic of the current political divide. Assuming intent, and classifying it as akin to some greater evil, only “highlights” that one party is tugging emotional hooks to make an obscure point seem clear. That’s religious bollocks. Words matter and differences are important. Good-bad binaries are born from our ideological past, to assert control or prepare us for battle.
“why are you defending bad behavior from being compared”
He quite clearly is comparing them and saying one isn’t as bad, in his tongue-in-cheek opinion.
“why do you care?”
Many are quite simply fatigued with the torrent of false equivalencies plaguing modern discourse, whether for dramatic effect or not. I think it sometimes comes from a good place, but more often, I suspect it to be self-serving, group-selection, othering behavior. The sanctimony with which some connect the dots clouds broader context. Effective communication requires giving the other party some grace.
I speak to some folks who have worked on university campuses over the past 20 years. Beginning, in earnest, around the year 2010, this type of behavior has run amok. I do think it started with good, well-reasoned intentions but metastasized into a nebulous search-for-meaning, a weary reaction to the declining state-of-the-world. Yes, identifying bad behavior can be a positive, to move society away from our more basal instincts, but oversimplifying in this manner is not helpful; it’s inflammatory. It’s like fighting fire with fire, which may work for a time, but ultimately, it’s a stopgap, feel-good, short-term solution that runs the risk of exacerbating the original problem.
Fact of the matter is, we are living during a time of extinction. Siloing into groups is probably inevitable, and I think manifestations of the culture war are a symptom, driven by environmental factors and bad actors. But, humans should be intelligent enough to maintain a broad context window and resist the temptation to reduce the complexities of cause-and-effect into emotional binaries. Failure to do so is likely to narrow one’s perspective; again, a useful feature for powers managing a population but tragic for individuals aiming to survive.
TLDR: I drank some coffee and wrote some stuff. No offense intended. For more about “thinking in binaries” check out the essays of Montaigne.
I hypothesize that insular “family values” is the time bomb that stoked their egos insofar as to blind them to the real machinations of this world, and now their minds are but a cloud of dissonance, deflection, and denial. It’s sad really, to witness the fallout of decades of propaganda.
Ditto. Mine are now virtue signaling how anti-Trump they are when they always pedaled “voting for your wallet” and other Reagan-era bullshit. I don’t blame them for being so obtuse, but god damn can it be frustrating to see the hypocrisies bubble up while they demand adulation.
Right. Productivity tools, like AI or bloated frameworks, can both lead to mountains of slop. I don’t reactively take issue with AI, especially if it eventually produces better work, but I will always choose the more transparent approach. I take umbrage with deceit and will stay away from systems that seem to be careening toward manipulation and more hierarchical, gatekeeping bullshit.
We all need to contend with the possibility that these intelligent systems become far better than most people and adapt accordingly. It doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our FOSS ideals, if that applies to you.
Though, I completely understand the reactivity, as we watch many peoples’ life trajectories become financially irrelevant, and the oligarch’s prime the population for a return to manual labor, while dangling that utopian carrot.