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YackerLose

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AI is developing backwards. The simplest organisms eat and find food. More complex ones can smell and sense tremors. After several steps in evolution comes vision and complex thought.

AIs that can't smell, can't feel hunger, can't desire -- I do not think it can understand the world the way organic life does.

Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”

Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.

This analysis totally ignores the power of snappiness. Of being laconic. It's the sort of stuff that works in the walled garden of academia but completely ignores the state of reality, where the average person is so bogged down by information overload that the gist is all they ever desire. I think a pie chart or an infographic is infinitely more powerful than a "Stage 4 argument".