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elindbe3

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So you're arguing the first one, never implement technology to save labor because people deserve the dignity of work. How far should we take this? Should we burn the tractors? We could create lots of new jobs for agricultural laborers. Or perhaps the government, instead of handing out welfare, could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again.

IDK I think it's quite cowardly if ebay is not willing to be consistent in what they are willing to sell. For example, if they can find a few people that are offended by violent video games, then all violent video games should be taken down from eBay. If I'm offended by the Communist Manifesto then it's time to take all copies of it off the site.

In fact they could even automate this. They already have a report item button. Whenever someone clicks that and marks the item offensive they could remove that whole class of items.

I can't really discuss the directly perceived experience of anything other than myself since I have no way of accessing it. I have no way of knowing if you have directly perceived experiences, but I would assume you do since I can see certain characteristics in you.

For what it's worth, I actually do think that a collection of people (such as the United States) has directly perceived experiences. That's something that would be quite difficult to prove, and I believe those experiences would be very different from ours. Similarly, I think the directly perceived experiences of a housefly or an amoeba would be very different from my own as well.

I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is:

* directional/goal oriented

* exhibits higher order patterns / behaviors which are greater than the sum of its parts.

A riot would probably be the easiest example to start with. You get a group of mildly angry people together and they can become enraged and do things they wouldn't normally do. Not only that, the anger of the group can rise and fall together. It's like people synchronize with each other and the riot becomes this living agent of chaos. Basically a human is a higher order pattern on top of cells and biochemistry while a group of people can exhibit higher order patterns like a riot.

When you get to the nation state level you can see higher order patterns as well. For example the BLM protests. A single even triggered this burst of goal -oriented activity among millions of disparate individuals like a wildfire. Or it's like the country, not just the people in the country but the country itself, became enraged.

And I'm not just talking about protests and riots that's just an example. If you look at history, there are lots of other examples of collective, higher-order, goal-oriented activity at the nation state level. Groups building cities or opening up areas to farming or setting up trade networks or going to war. Sometimes these actions are based on the will of one person like a king but other times they are the result of thousands of individuals coordinating autonomously.

And if you have a way to get people, on a mass scale, to stick to a reduced calorie diet long-term then you may have a scientifically proven solution. Until you have that you do not have a scientifically proven solution. You have a method of weight loss which only works as long as people stick to it (which scientific studies show they won't).

We don't have a scientifically proven method to greatly reduce body fat over the long term. (Yes, that includes calorie counting, keto, or whatever other fad diet.) Until we do there isn't much that officials and healthcare providers can to except give out diet and exercise advice that people won't follow.

You don't have to study. I never studied and I passed some whiteboard interviews and have a steady job. Sure, higher paying jobs (such as at Google) might have more difficult interviews which require some study but at less competitive companies you can do fine if you have a decent background in logic and problem solving.

Also, I have to agree with the other commenter here that it could be way worse if professional credentialing starts to be required. Then you have to shell out big money and deal with way more bullshit requirements than just whether you can write code on a whiteboard (e.g. boring classes, standardized tests, diversity quotas, etc.)

Yeah I think I would feel differently. I would be much more upset by a guillotine outside my house (that's almost KKK levels of hatred) than people thinking I'm dumb for one reason or another, especially if I was the person who brought good electric cars and reusable rockets into existence.

IDK Elon gets some (deserved in my opinion) love. Jeff seems to be the butt of more of the "kill the rich" rhetoric such as the guillotine outside his house. Personally if I was a billionaire, I would do everything possible to keep my name out of the media and pop culture.