PorterBHall

Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?

It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.

Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.

When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

What saddens me about this topic is the large amount of hatred coming at cyclists from drivers in the opinion page of the local newspaper (Seattle Times). Why not have some gratitude they are not contributing to traffic, not taking up parking, not polluting, etc. It comes across as pure madness.

I’m in the middle of this right now. They detail a scenario that starts off pretty convincing but takes a turn into a sci-fi feel when this fictional model starts strategizing on how to escape its containment.

The core argument is that these models aren’t crafted as much as they’re grown. They show examples where models display not desires but preferences (e.g. lying and cheating to testers) and that the AI companies aren’t able to control it even interpret those preferences.

If LLMs get to a super intelligence phase (big if there), the gap between its capabilities and our understanding of it grows even larger.

Is it the end of the world or just Davos?

I love this because it explains so much about the human mind. Rationally, it was the medication. Emotionally, it was Jesus.

When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction".

This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.

I have to wonder, too, if this partially describes why "Make America Great Again" has been such an effective slogan. The greatness that most Americans long to return to is a time where a larger middle class was able to more easily pay for health care, housing, and other needs.

“Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.”

Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

It was a different world when you were a kid. People weren’t as incendiary in their speech.

In the United States, stochastic terrorism is neither a statutory offense nor a term of art in criminal codes; it is an analytic label used in scholarship and practitioner writing to describe probabilistic risks of violence linked to rhetoric. Recent legal and critical surveys stress that usage is heterogeneous and contested, and that the concept's value lies in describing a structure of communication and harm rather than in supplying a justiciable element test.[7] By contrast, U.S. incitement law is anchored in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which protects advocacy short of speech that is intended to produce imminent lawless action and likely to do so. Stochastic accounts often concern non-directive, cumulative rhetoric whose effects materialize unpredictably, making the Brandenburg imminence and likelihood prongs difficult to satisfy absent clear exhortation.[2]

It’s unsettling to think that humanity has lost knowledge it once had, but it happens all the time. Anyone here know how to harness a horse to a buggy?

Gen Z discovers nostalgia.

True that a majority of the electorate voted for and should have expected this, but Presidential approval rating is in the cellar.

I think your take makes sense. Thanks for laying it out. I worry about the containment aspects of this. Sure, the capex for this is coming off corporate balance sheets, but a bad event could wipe away a lot of stock market value, which would trigger a deep recession given that AI spending is really the only thing keeping our economy afloat at the moment. It feels like we’re in a doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t moment. I see breadlines in our future whether or not we achieve AGI. The only question is whether or not we’ll have to deal with some added existential risk.

I came here with a similar thought. Given that we don't have a really precise definition of that transition from living to dead, I wonder if this could be it.

Only the prices paid by my side are unfair or absurd. The prices paid by their side are justified.

Meanwhile the lines dividing us become deeper and wider.

Wedge issues, deployed by both political parties, do exactly this.

Wealthy donors express their political desires by funding politicians who become dependent on their continued financial support.

The voter gets just enough small wins on these wedge issues to keep them somewhat happy. The wealthy preserves the status quo since that’s how they became wealthy in the first place. Our democracy ossifies in the face of new challenges.

If voters across the spectrum viewed campaign finance reform as a key issue, we might have some hope in changing things.

I live in a somewhat small community (~25k) and I commuted into the city on public transportation for about 15 years. 10 years ago, I started working from home full-time.

I often see the people I used to commute with around town. I recognize them and remember them, but I’ve never had any interactions with them.

When I see them, I’m surprised by how much older they look. Then I realize I must look older to them.

Currently, due to the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare, health insurance companies are prohibited from setting rates based on individual risk (except they can charge higher premiums to tobacco users). Before the law, ensures would typically put applicants through a health screening that would determine their rate. People with pre-existing medical conditions could be denied coverage or charged higher rates. Women routinely paid higher premiums than men.

I'm a nope for space flights. I'm a nope to time travel. I'm a nope for snorting nanobots.

I guess I'm just too 20th century for all that stuff.

Fair point. We _currently_ exist in a time of choice, but that is only due to the recent availability of effective birth control methods. Some choose to do it the old fashioned way and let the fates decide when and if they become parents.

Personally, becoming a dad was the single best thing that ever happened to me. I haven’t loved every minute of it, but it added abundant love and purpose to my life and gave me what I didn’t know I needed. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

But I’ve been lucky in this regard. I was deeply conflicted going into it. But all of that doubt left me the moment I first held him in my arms. I don’t know if circumstances were different whether I would’ve had the same experience.

And the scariest part about becoming a parent is that there’s no way for you to try it out. I had been an uncle for decades before becoming a parent. Those experiences are not the same.

The choice to become a parent, or to not become a parent, is one of those choices in life that requires a leap of faith. There’s no way to explore the counter factual.

But, for those of you on the fence, let me say this. We all come from a long line of parents. I believe that there are certain rewards placed in our brain by evolution that are only unlocked by becoming a parent. Nothing can help you understand your parents and the love you did or didn’t receive from them quite like loving your own child.

I read only as far as the abstract. What would motivate an adult to feign ADHD symptoms? Is it access to prescription drugs? Disability benefits?

Or leave it as is and let it become a honeypot for people who don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics.

Yeah. This was a regretful click.

I love this. It seems like conspiracy theory on a Universal scale.

I heard a podcast interview with the doctor recently who said that we have technology that can be implanted into someone who is at risk for dying of sudden cardiac arrest that will prevent it from happening. It tends to add a few years onto someone’s life, but it also consigns them to die slowly and painfully from congestive heart failure. The doctor said his patients grasp for anything that might extend their life, if even only for a few months. He often feels conflicted about installing these devices.

Thank you for sharing that link. This whole question has been on my mind a lot lately. I am 55 years old, and my son is 11. Both of my parents died in nursing homes. I don’t yet know how I want to die, but I have a good idea of how I don’t want to die. The idea of being in an institution that essentially holds me prisoner while depleting anything left I have saved for my son keeps me awake at night. I’d rather take a long walk into the woods on a cold night, but I’m afraid that I will lose my nerve and miss my chance. I hope that time is still a few decades away. Sallekhana seems like a more intentional, natural way to die than the way most Americans do today.

Before you wave this off as a “both sides are just as bad” issue, consider that the reason Amazon started down the path of displaying tariffs is likely due to a long-standing company value of putting the customer first. It makes sense that, as customers, we would want to see the impact of tariffs on our purchasing decisions. We would also want to see how much the sales tax is and how much the shipping cost is.

The problem for the Administration, however, is that they’ve been telling the American people the tariffs are not a tax on consumers, but rather a tax on foreign countries. This is a lie.

So we have a situation where the administration is intimidating Amazon into going against its own values so that it doesn’t expose the lie the Administration is still telling the American people.

I agree with you that Amazon‘s decision to bend to the administrations demand is just business. There are millions of dollars in military cloud infrastructure contracts that could be rescinded as retribution. And we see that the justice department is used by the president in ways that are far outside the norm.

But do you believe this administration is acting like any we’ve seen in living memory?

I agree! I try to remember to prompt as if I were writing to a colleague because I fear that if I get in the habit of treating them like a servant, it will degrade my tone in communicating with other humans over time.