The Church views the person as primary, the most important, rather than the tools and applications of these tools. They see that technology and the use of technology forms people, it can literally change societies and people.
One example would be asking your buddies for a lift to the airport. Now we use an app. And then afterwards a year or two even thinking about asking your friends for a lift, or offering your friends to drive them is inappropriate and wrong. That reduces the connections between people, it reduces love.
A positive example would be the web2.0 social network, forums, message boards, communication increase. An explicit example is this submission, it's on the Vatican's website! A neutral example might be the medicine industry - new weight loss drugs improve the health of at risk people but at the cost of making them dependent on the industry and reducing personal agency in their change.
There are 2 main factors that the Church thinks wrt tech 1. Tools and technologies are not amoral, they have a moral component; against the argument of "this tech is innocent, it's how you use it". and 2. What we do, what we pay attention to, forms us. Our tools shape ourselves and the societies that we make us.
It's not anti tech, anti science or reactionary, it's pro person.
I remember asking some school friends to help me move and I would buy them beers in the pub afterwards. Turns out I could have spent less hiring a semi-pro "man with a van" than buying a group of thirsty young men beer for the night. Not sure how that ties in with my original comment but I found the memory funny!
We can flag it if we dont want to see it and I do for many general news items. Personally I don't mind this one as it's directed towards technology and AI.
Also noticed this. Maybe we are starting to see well written articles by people in the format of badly written AI Slop for engagement purposes. "Well most articles read by people look like this now, so why dont I?"
The classic salesman tactic is that the salesman has to love the product. The best conmen have to con themselves first. They are basically method actors.
In our tech sphere we see this in tech hype circles where the early investors have to become believers and make new converts which turns into feedback loops of hype.
It helped me to do only try to understand myself in the moment or conversation than the other. It is not easy and most of us do not know ourselves.
It's actually kind of hard to do. You try to pay attention to the words you are saying, the thoughts you are thinking, the emotions, the feelings, the body posture of yourself. But it's got to be easier than trying to understand another.
Doing this eventually lead to a better perception of others. But by then I didn't need to try to do it. I'm still no where near as perceptive as the author of this submission but I've improved. However its a bit like a muscle and needs to be exercised or made into a discipline or habit and I have atrophied over time. I do still have my memories of this though.
One thing I noticed by observing others is that most people do not understand themselves. And I include myself in this group almost all the time too.
I should get back into this, thank you for your comment.
There appears to be a pattern of posts where "I'm 16 / 17 etc" as a prefix gets the hits. And rightly so!
It's very good that young people are engaged. It's encouraging for us grey beards interested in the future of technology and a healthy action for us old people to encourage younger people.
As my beard gets greyer so my pattern recognition library of samples gets bigger and it has recognised a "I'm 16" prefix to popular HN submissions!
as a non smoker, I followed Gwern's micro dosing experiments with nicotine. Small 0.5mg 1/2 tablet doses when doing a task I wanted to reinforce.
Then I found myself taking a one or two of these 1mg tablets during the day when driving as I want to increase good habits when driving. Then habitually whenever I felt like it, sometimes with a coffee and a book. They were the weakest mg you could get, and there was no direct feeling of their effect. I did feel increasing anxiety which lead to physical symptoms during this time, but the tablets didn't seem to make any direct effect on the anxiety, I didn't take the nicotine to calm down and I didn't connect the two together (its only now writing this comment that I'm thinking they may be connected)
So it was definitely addicting, however, when the box ran out, stopping seemed to be instantaneous and painless. I did quit because I realised I wasnt using it as I wanted to initially and it was becoming a habit. I do remember a couple of times looking for the tablets, checking to see if there wasn't some in the car. mild. The feeling of anxiety is gone now too.
So I'm not sure if I would say I was addicted, but maybe I was. It was certainly habit forming!
I'm having some trouble thinking about how this works. I guess it's about who is eligible to be in the process - the "pool of people" or "population".
It reads as if a group of people chooses another group of people from a larger pool to make a smaller pool of people and repeats. Does these pool of peoples change? Can someone be in multiple groups? etc
Are there any more descriptive or animated examples of how this works?
In the photos of the rack of phones, they all have stickers on them. Is that the front camera and light sensor or microphone? Why would they cover those up?
One example would be asking your buddies for a lift to the airport. Now we use an app. And then afterwards a year or two even thinking about asking your friends for a lift, or offering your friends to drive them is inappropriate and wrong. That reduces the connections between people, it reduces love.
A positive example would be the web2.0 social network, forums, message boards, communication increase. An explicit example is this submission, it's on the Vatican's website! A neutral example might be the medicine industry - new weight loss drugs improve the health of at risk people but at the cost of making them dependent on the industry and reducing personal agency in their change.
There are 2 main factors that the Church thinks wrt tech 1. Tools and technologies are not amoral, they have a moral component; against the argument of "this tech is innocent, it's how you use it". and 2. What we do, what we pay attention to, forms us. Our tools shape ourselves and the societies that we make us.
It's not anti tech, anti science or reactionary, it's pro person.
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