I think the point is to start considering a back up plan and then...hakuna matata.
Cat's out of the bag. There is no legislation that will stop this. Not unless/until it has some obscene cost and AI gets locked down like nuclear weapons. But even then, it's just too simple to make these things now that the tech is known.
I sure don't know the answer but we just don't know what's coming next. Gonna have to wait and see.
I mean, there's something to be said for letting kids get away with shit.
The old version of "actions not having consequences" was not getting caught. It can be enriching to rebel a little and get away with stuff. A lot of people grow into perfectly healthy adults and look back fondly on the stunts they pulled. Personally, I don't want my kids using any drugs but I don't think the answer is to put cameras in their rooms or supervising every play date until they're 26.
Perhaps the sensible solution is to make sure there is no system where children are getting legal charges for drug use. What an incredibly stupid system. They're kids. They are supposed to be making mistakes and learning from them in low-impact environments until they're old enough to be more responsible for their actions.
I am not surprised that kids have moved their social lives online.
Well, it sounds like the numbers were just being artificially inflated in the first place. Now they're being brought down to match reality.
Side note, I don't really see how advertising can possibly be useful in this medium. We all just skip them, right? Even when I don't, I can't say I've ever purchased something mentioned on a podcast.
I have bought things advertised in podcasts. The ads raised my awareness and when the need arrived, I at least looked into the advertised option. Podcast ads are usually more about awareness, since folks usually don't even know they can click into the show notes.
Full disclosure: I work for a service that helps podcasters monetize their ad-free feeds.
Companies usually do better year after year until they reach market saturation or until the competition kills them.
Once one of those things happens, they start to squeeze blood from the stone. The quality of the product drops, the prices are inflated, jobs are outsourced or eliminated, they pivot into providing other goods and services (which will also get worse later), etc.
None of these things are mutually exclusive with that "next quarter" mindset.
I actually blame the stock market for a lot of this. Private companies can, in theory, settle for just making a nice profit year after year. As long as they come out profitable they don't need to expand. Once you're publicly traded though, you have no choice but constant expansion.
The boom and bust cycle has been happening for a long time now.
Stockholders are owners. If they suspect the company is sacrificing the long term for the next quarter, they are going to dump the stock as soon as they get a whiff of that.
The value of a stock is base on its long term value, not its short term value. Sabotaging the future of the company to drive short term results is something you'd have to keep secret.
> The boom and bust cycle has been happening for a long time now.
Is part of the problem, that people making the decisions have asymmetric incentives - the gain from the boom is greater than the penalty from the bust?
One hypothesis is that the shape of the glans penis serves to push rival sperm out of the way and behind the glans to be scooped out of the vagina.
I wouldn't call monogamy unnatural. But it may be a more recent invention for humans. We still aren't sure how long it's been the norm.
It's possible that humans used to rape more often. It's also possible that humans practiced forms of polygamy. Either way, cooperative sperm makes sense. It's one of those things where a simple mutation would provide a clear benefit over the competition.
Even with written recollections and archives, it's going to be so difficult to follow. Things just change so quickly. The irony and memes that require you to understand 5 other memes are just going to be so difficult to capture in any meaningful way.
I also think people might not care that much. They'll have an even more sophisticated and oversaturated version of the internet and I'm thinking they'll only really care about a few big highlights from our time. Whatever is contained in the Wikipedia page for Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook will probably be enough for most future people.
Reminds me of this excerpt in Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy":
"Ford!"
Ford looked up from where he was sitting in a corner humming to
himself. He always found the actual travelling-through-space part
of space travel rather trying.
"Yeah?" he said.
"If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth,
you must have been gathering material on it."
"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
"Let me see what it says in this edition then, I've got to see
it."
"Yeah OK." He passed it over again.
Arthur grabbed hold of it and tried to stop his hands shaking. He
pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen flashed and
swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it.
"It doesn't have an entry!" he burst out.
Ford looked over his shoulder.
"Yes it does," he said, "down there, see at the bottom of the
screen, just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted
whore of Eroticon 6."
Arthur followed Ford's finger, and saw where it was pointing. For
a moment it still didn't register, then his mind nearly blew up.
"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One
word!"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only
a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he
said, "and no one knew much about the Earth of course."
"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the
editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed
cough.
This is true for most people regarding any part of history. But for any part of history there are those who take a deep interest and want to piece together the minutia of what happened. The limit case of that is an actual trained historian who specializes in that part of history.
Diabetic mother-in-law is on it. Lost a ton of weight, is moving around better, and when I saw her over the holidays last week I felt she was mentally sharper than before.
My wife has been worried about her mental acuity declining over the last few years and I kept saying I felt like the diabetes was taking a toll on her brain. Perhaps it was? And perhaps it's slowly reversing a bit?
Last year my wife got the “you need to lose weight now or else” speech from her doctor. Diabetic signs starting to appear in her numbers. I was terrified for her.
12 months of Wegovy and she is down 52 pounds, and all diabetic signs have disappeared. Her doctor is thrilled.
And, (not that this matters much to me) her looking like a million bucks is a nice bonus too.
Losing weight when body has extra fat to cushion caloric deficit can improve a bunch of indicators, for me it's eliminate acid reflux -> better sleep -> less fatigue more sharpness. Losing weight without much fat can do the opposite when body feels full brunt of deficit. Worse sleep, more fatigue, less accuity. I wonder with how accessible these drugs are going to be, if general productivity is going to crash leading up to summer beach bod weather as more people cycles on and off every year.
Also anecdotal, but I have a close pre diabetic relative taking it for past 6 months without any positive effects. Looks like it doesn't work on everyone while I see success stories everywhere else.
The only reason I sometimes hesitate to agree with this line of thinking is precisely because we have the ability to think about free will at all.
I can take a moment right now to consider whether I want to lift my right hand over my head - to no benefit of my own. I can also consider how free will plays into that and decide to lift my left hand instead, stay with my right hand, or lift no hands at all.
When you have the ability to do that, I think you have free will. At least, you have the closest thing to free will anyone can ever have.
By the way, I wiggled my right foot. That was my decision after my comment.
All of your thoughts of lifting your right hand or to wiggle your foot were downstream of reading my comment. You can definitely have thoughts before making actions, but you don’t choose to have the thought. It just appears!
Any one of a number of things, one of which is volition.
The majority of people are capable of determining both proximal and ultimate causes/motivations for their actions. They're influenced by external stimuli, sure, but humans are capable of directing their thoughts deliberately to, for example, perform simple mental arithmetic.
Every time someone thinks "What's 20% of 38?" or "How do I spell conceive?" or "What's the quickest way to Dave's house?", they are triggering a mental process. They are choosing to focus their thoughts in a particular direction to get a result that they will then use in future decision making.
It's not relevant what caused the thought that led to them making the decision; the decision still gets made and acted on by the person. The sequence of thoughts from the decision point to the result/abandonment is volitional.
You cannot hear or read "What's 20% of 38?" and choose whether to process it or not. Your brain might resolve that into the correct answer, an incorrect answer, or a refusal to answer, but your brain just does it. If it's not your brain producing the sensation you call "volition," what is? If it is your brain, then what mechanism causes it that's neither deterministic nor random?
If that was true, then all mathematics teaching would be both impossible and superfluous.
You don't choose whether or not to process the audio, but you absolutely do choose to do the mathematical processing to arrive at an answer. If that's a struggle to contemplate, increase the complexity of the problem until you can't reach the answer in one step, and then you should see the chain of thought.
As above, that's a separate issue and irrelevant to this once. Once a choice has been made regardless of the drivers of that initial choice, there is conscious direction of thought through the resultant process.
Same question again: do you really have no experience of logically and consciously working through a process?
The drivers of the initial choice (and really every choice thereafter) is the entire question. The universe has deterministic processes and it has random processes. The brain has deterministic processes and (potentially) random processes. Neither type of process creates room for anything resembling "free will." There is nowhere in the known universe for this to occur.
No of course I experience the same thing you experience. My argument is that it's an illusion, and it's one that you can actually peel away yourself.
Close your eyes and clear your mind -- you'll find thoughts simply emerging. Eventually, the thought to give up and open your eyes will occur to you. You didn't choose to have that thought prior to it appearing. Following that first thought, you might then give up, or you might have another thought not to give up. One of those thoughts will just immediately become the next behavior. In either case, you didn't choose those impulses prior to their appearance and you didn't choose which one ultimately turned into behavior.
So not only is there zero believable physical explanation as to how and where free will could exist, the subjective evidence doesn't pass even a basic "close your eyes and observe your own cognition" test.
Your experience of cognition isn't universal, and asserting a universal law based on your subjective experience is tenuous at best. There's a reason we've been discussing these exact ideas for millenia, rather than settling it all immediately. Other people report very different conceptualisations of cognition - why is theirs an illusion and not yours an ellision?
> No of course I experience the same thing you experience.
It really doesn't sound like you do. Other people experience a decision making process -- one where they pick the impulse to follow or deny -- that is at least as valid as your immediate blur from thought to action. Many people are capable of having thoughts without acting on them, or of weighing up multiple thoughts, or of chaining together multiple thoughts (carry the 1, rotate this cube in your mind, etc.) towards a goal.
Thankfully my argument doesn’t actually hinge on subjective experience, yours does.
My explanation is dependent only on the known laws of the universe and biological systems. Your argument is effectively that those don’t matter because your subjective experience seems different. I disagree that’s what even your subjective experience really is, if you decided to pay close attention to it, but again it’s not actually important for my argument.
This was a somewhat reasonable debate before we came to understand that decisions, behaviors, sensory processing are done by the brain (or the biological system more holistically). Now we do understand that. So now in light of that, where does your phenomenon take place?
The universe has two kinds of phenomena, as far as we know: deterministic and random. Neither leaves room for free will. So again: where does it happen? Is our understanding of the physical universe wrong? Does thinking not happen in the brain? Is the brain exempt from physical laws?
Is there a better option that I’m failing to imagine?
To break the walls down on this thread, interested folks probably want to look at the question of qualia and the knowledge argument before they start wondering about free will in particular.
Not relevant. You need not know what someone else’s subjective experience is to know that it would violate all understanding of the physical universe for them to have free will.
“The wall” doesn’t come from any dispute around the subjective experience or the objective physical nature of the universe. It comes from the (understandable) discomfort with the conclusion and the necessary corollaries of that conclusion.
Totally relevant. You claim that someone having free will would violate all understanding of the physical universe. This is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.
If, however, information which is non-physical information exists, like TKP suggests, then we have evidence of an ontological jailbreak. If one such jailbreak exists, it suddenly seems much more absurd to claim others can't for some reason.
TKP doesn’t suggest “non-physical information” exists. It suggests that some information cannot be relayed through means other than direct personal experience. When the actual blue light hits Mary’s retina, that is net new information, and information that could not have been conveyed by numbers on a monochrome screen. It is very obviously physical: the text “blue light has a wavelength of 450nm” conveyed in light at 700nm is a totally different piece of information that will be processed by the retina and the brain totally differently from an actual beam of 450nm light.
Critically: in either case the brain will process those photons hitting the eye with a combination of random and deterministic processes. This is a physical fact, not a thought experiment, and so I think warrants a stronger rebuttal than simply asserting, “this is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.” If it’s not a physical fact, explain what other non-random and non-deterministic process is happening.
What specifically is absurd? That your subjective experience disagrees? We can reliably and trivially produce all sorts of illusions in which your subjective experience loses touch with objective reality.
> Don't worry guys, I teach 8th grade. You're not missing much.
> A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.
A lot to unpack here, but it sounds to me like you don’t like or appreciate rap music, which says more about your own individual music taste than the quality of BLP Kosher’s music or this particular track.
I think the production is on point and the track low-key slaps, but that’s just my opinion.
I like rap. In my opinion, rap music embodies the last vestiges of individuality and creativity that rock and roll pioneered. Rock is now just a snake eating its own tail. All the soul is gone.
I wasn’t trying to be disparaging to you, and I guess I was responding to what I perceived as a slight against him on your part. If I made unreasonable assumptions based on word choice/context clues, I apologize.
What about him strikes you as odd compared to rap artists you’re a fan of, or odd in what respect? I’d be inclined to agree, as I don't typically assume Jews are big in rap, but there’s definitely a huge precedent in Beastie Boys.
I love tons of strange rappers. I think what rubs me the wrong way about Kosher is that he feels inauthentic in several ways.
A supposedly Jewish rapper talking about killing people and embracing that lifestyle seems weird to me. The fact that he looks awkward and uncomfortable when he tries to somewhat dance to the beat strikes me. And the way he speaks also seems very much like a put on. Like he's intentionally trying to speak in a stereotypically black manner but it doesn't come natural to him.
Generally, I get the impression that he's a white skater kid with a shtick. And being Jewish feels like part of that shtick to me.
Happy to be wrong, and I don't hate the guy. I'm not going to go around knocking people for liking him. But it does feel like something you like in middle school and then grow out of, only to go back and wonder why you enjoyed it.
Cat's out of the bag. There is no legislation that will stop this. Not unless/until it has some obscene cost and AI gets locked down like nuclear weapons. But even then, it's just too simple to make these things now that the tech is known.
I sure don't know the answer but we just don't know what's coming next. Gonna have to wait and see.