deciplex

Those perspectives both can't be correct!

Uh, sure they can: he saw an opportunity where he could make a difference and bring a program to light where the NSA was otherwise blatantly lying to Congress and the American people, and he took it.

There is nothing he can or could do to stop the invasion of Ukraine.

Which is to say, he didn't merely oppose US crimes. He brought them to light. Everyone already knows about Ukraine.

Probably because the US empire had deteriorated enough by that point that revoking passports for exposing the blatant lies and crimes of our government was on the table by then.

Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.

The universe itself, if bounded, might be a hypersphere.

If you're referring to the increased scroll speed with two fingers issue, that was patched within the last year.

They've yet to top Civ4 but third time's a charm I guess.

It's the worst of both words.

And it's quickly becoming the status quo.

They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?

If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.

One of the earlier examples of enshittification, before the process had been smoothed out and best practices established.

Capital follows the most profitable investments.

I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even that only profitable investments will get funded: even profitable projects might get left on the cutting room floor if they are competing for resources with projects that will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI.

And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than. But to believe that, you have to also believe that enshittification is a thing that happens in spite of being less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a hard sell.

I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.

I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.

To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.

The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.

And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.

But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.

I will refer you to my earlier post:

  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

  I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.

Our current understanding has most of the answers you seek, and compelling reasoning for why they are the correct answers.

Human memory is extremely unreliable.

This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much

Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.

At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery.

You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

I mean people have deja vu which is literally your brain misinterpreting a currently-happening experience as a memory. Medical literature is filled with tons of quirks of human perception and memory, and we frequently find new ones and new twists on existing ones.

It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).

Parent poster is being unnecessarily smug and dismissive

Can you elaborate? I tried to keep a neutral tone.

I don't know about "religiously" but did you have a better idea? Am I supposed to believe suppositions as though they are fact, for literally no reason?

How can one explain that?

She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.

(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.

I think your point is going to be lost on people who view art as a commodity to be consumed. From that point of view, replacing the artist with a machine can only result in a loss, if the person consuming the art could tell the difference in the first place. If not, then who cares if a machine or a person tuned the piano, etc?

unlike you I believe that the median United States citizen does benefit from our global military supremacy

Oh no I agree with this. I think the cost/benefit ratio is going up, but it's still less than one. I just happen to think that exporting 2x misery abroad to alleviate x misery here is not a viable long-term strategy. Moreover, I think it's hideous to celebrate it as though you're getting some great deal, even if you do get material benefits from the arrangement.

That's not a normative claim!

You should try making some. Or at least think about them.

Why is it that "creative destruction" is so celebrated here right up until you propose eliminating jobs that murder people (either in the direct manner, or indirectly by needlessly denying them care etc) and replacing them with jobs that don't do that. Suddenly all that "people will adapt, people will need to retrain" shit goes right out the window in place of "won't somebody please think of number?"

My post was long-winded way of saying exactly that: Pax Americana doesn't exist, and never existed. Apparently this rhetoric was lost on you or, more likely, you're being needlessly pedantic here in order to rebut my claim without making any concrete claims of your own.

e: Also why is it that every time I post on HN I get dragged into another stupid argument with you specifically. We need a block feature on this site.

That would defeat the purpose of our health care system and military-industrial complex.

To kind of piggyback on here since you described your experience very well, I'll give my own as a contrast to yours:

Mine seems similar. Instead of piloting a body I just am my body, and I don't perceive any screen. Instead of an "area between me and the screen" I just have a completely separate workspace of sorts where I can visualize things. But - and this is where I differ from you the most I think - in my mind that workspace is quite separate from my field of real vision. If I concentrate I can kind of overlay them, but it feels very artificial.

Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong.

He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc.

Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway should not be - controversial. I'm not terribly against the notion of a plagiarism machine but I am against the owners of such machines reaping profits from them to the exclusion of the people who provide the source material. This is theft.

More importantly, getting back to big guys and little guys: big guys gang up on little guys all the time. It's usually how they get to be big. They tend to be the ones who realize that working together against the rest of us is to their benefit. So, in the interest of pushing back on that a little, and recognizing that I am after all a fellow "little guy" (figuratively speaking anyway), I tend to support the "little guy" unless I have overwhelming evidence confirming that they are, in fact, both wrong and that supporting them anyway would be against my best interest. Neither is the case, here.

At any rate, the subtitle here references a pretty ubiquitous and, I'm happy to report, increasingly well-known and understood facet of our economic and social institutions, which is that they absolutely positively do not work for us or further our interests in any sense.

but you agree it is 50% of the problem

we elected an opposition leader who favors capitalism. unfortunately, he's a total nutbag

many such cases!

No, it's not, because this isn't a court of law. You're allowed to read between the lines here and use common sense. You don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Given the history of the US on matters such as this, it would be unusual if we weren't involved. That's really all that needs to be said.

unprecedented

Not sure what you mean by that.

unconstitutional

Not according to their Supreme Court.

including by OAS (if you care what OAS thinks)

I don't. No one should.

unapologetic right-winger Jeanine Anez, promised prompt new elections and then delivered them less than a year later

She had no choice as the alternative by that point was a total overthrow of most major institutions of government, in which chaos she and her allies would have fared even worse than they did.

The new MAS government immediately had Jeanine Anez arrested for the "coup" in 2019, and has imprisoned her ever since

As they should have. She was responsible for many deaths.

pretty much universally condemned

Not universally.