All these Silicon Valley tech bros have been reinventing religion over and over again for years while believing themselves secular rationalists.

I think most who would leave have already left.

Intelligent people have an easier time convincing themselves of falsehoods because they can produce more complex rationalizations.

Those positions are racist, just not overtly so.

Kurzgesagt has a contract with Open Philanthropy (a reputation laundering vehicle for billionaires) to promote concepts related to Effective Altruism in their videos, essentially making them a propaganda outlet for billionaire egomaniacs who fancy themselves philosopher-kings. Effective Altruism is a philosophical movement that caught on in elite circles because it enables them to justify their selfishness by reframing it as focusing their philanthropy on specific causes they believe will have the greatest impact, which in recent years is mostly AI research. It gives them a rhetorical framework to pass off their passion projects as philanthropy and an excuse for not dedicating resources to things like stopping climate change, ending world hunger, or - god forbid - wealth inequality.

It’s not a good idea at all. The problems it creates are greater in both number and difficulty than the problems it solves.

It’s not either/or, it’s a self-reinforcing cycle, though it isn’t usually the drugs themselves that start it.

If you contribute to making it happen you won’t need anyone to clue you in when it does.

How the fuck do people don’t get radical or depressed?

Leaning into the former and channeling it into real world action with a community helps with the latter.

You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.

I think my desire for a small electric pickup truck might override my caution in this case, we’ll see if I get burned. At the very least I’m not going to preorder and will wait for real critical reviews after it’s released.

What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.

They’ve been promoting it recently and have several working prototypes that they’ve been driving influencers around in. There was one video with Marques Brownlee and they even let him drive it himself.

I don’t think Rossman is a leftist. He’s pro-consumer and sticks up for the little guy against big corporations, but he’s not anti-capitalist.

Abusers in positions of power use this as a means of protecting themselves. By making their victims engage in acts of abuse against others they force them into a catch-22 if they try to expose them. They achieve ultimate victory over the victim by making them adopt the ideology of their abuser, trapping them in a hierarchy within which they will do anything to maintain their position. By drawing you into their system of abuse they not only make you afraid to expose them, but rob you of your desire to do so.

When I come across someone IRL who loves AI I avoid the topic around them. My opinions on the topic are likely to offend them, so to avoid hurting their feelings or causing conflict I won’t mention them. Now, if it’s someone I care about I’ll find a way to gently broach the topic because I know that heavy AI use is causing them harm and I don’t want my family and friends to lose their grip on reality.

I was born in 1999 and am therefore completely qualified to talk about life in the 1900s. It was a lot of milk drinking and shitting in diapers.

I somehow doubt the owners of Anthropic are revolutionary socialists or even just pro-union.

My only gripe with this is that the state in its current form cannot be trusted to be an impartial judge of what constitutes hate speech. We see today that many states around the world are using anti hate speech laws to suppress criticism of the state of Israel. Giving the state broad powers to crack down on speech that it deems hateful will inevitably result in the state deciding that all criticism of its actions or the actions of its allies constitutes hate speech.

As an alternative, I prefer that hate speech be met with social consequences rather than criminal ones.

Alcohol has also just been more prevalent in human cultures dating back to prehistory. Some of the earliest evidence we have of permanent human settlements were breweries, theorized to have been built by people who still lived semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. That would mean that humans first started making permanent settlements and doing large-scale agriculture only to produce alcohol, and still mainly relied on hunting and gathering for their caloric needs. Other drugs / intoxicants have been used by humans for at least as long, but none have been so central to the development of civilization and culture than alcohol.