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Because if a chimp knows you are watching it, it has the ability to change its behavior. Then you have to react. It reacts to your reaction and its turtles all the way down.
The large point is chimps have 3 inch brains. Which creates upper bounds on what they can understand and control. And to survive and cope with the fact that they cant control everything in the universe they start making up stories. If only...
For some, tis not about Quality but about Control. "If x y z happens I feel safe/in control". Changing anything about it = unsafe/the sky may fall.
Same logic scales up to social level if you notice what large groups burn cash on. The only way to reduce the cash burn is to give them something else to do that makes them feel safe and in control. Which is not for the faint of heart.
My point was the regime may collapse for other reasons. Just like the USSR. There was no dearth of plans there and no lack of effort of US trying to destablize them.
Iran already has a lot of issues. If the regime does collapse over night ala Soviets/Arab Spring by just making some mistake while reacting to all this pressure, I dont look forward to the amount of gloating Trump and Netanyahu are going to do.
People created limited liability and private equity. Fiction is not something you get rid off. Its something you live with. It is a permanent side effect of how the over rated Humam Brain works. The brain makes predictions over multiple time horizons. When there are contradictions between these predictions how is the 3 inch chimp brain supposed to handle it while not splitting? Make up a story for the sake of coherence. Everyone is doing it everyday. They are all making up fictions to handle unpredictability.
Climbing ladders also works. Gets the hear pumping faster than brisk walks.
The key is factories ideally are mobile. Follow the winds. Come online and go offline when the wind blows. Use as much free energy as possible to hit yearly production targets and then take the rest of the year off.
It takes a village. Especially if the problem is systemic and not just the individual. When you count the number of people with some addiction or the other the total represents how many people havent found anything better to do within the system. Thats like finding cells in your brain that are busy looping randomly not fully attached in some useful way to the system. Ofcourse you can zap them and isolate them or remove them but the imaginative solution is reattach them and make them useful to the system in some way. Cause the brains that do will have larger capacities and capabilities than brains that dont.
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
Why does sycophantic behavior and attachement/dependence even emerge and exist in the chimp troupe?
AI was not required to produce these behaviors.
Prosocial interactions are important for certain groups to stay sane not everyone. The evidence is in the fact every culture has produced some form of monastic life. And we have major religions like Buddhism built and surving for thousands of years on foundations of detachment. Thats is not an accident because people arent all alike. Philosophy even teaches "Detachment and Flourishing" - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-8
I said your needs. Think about why you are doing what you are doing. And at what point that need is met. So if your need is financial then you say my need is to recover my costs(time you put in * hourly rate+hardware costs+energy costs etc etc) + some profit. Once you have achieved that the moat becomes less important right? If the need is not financial but this project is going to look good on my resume and get me more interesting work, then the moment you do get a better job the moat doesnt matter. So I was encouraging you to think about why you do what you do. Cuz after you feel like you have meet your own needs moats matter less.
Think about what your own needs are. Moats are only required till the need is meet.
Religions have been doing it without tech for thousands of years. The 3 inch chimp brain is not exactly immune to delusion. In fact delusion or story telling is fundamental to how it handles unpredictability.
These platforms are missing a psych dashboard. Too much time has gone into building money and attention dashboards. So things resembles a farm or a factory. People arent corn or widgets and consequence shall accumulate unless there are dignity generating/restoring processes too.
API + controlled access.
Some context would make it more interesting. How much of it was used? How much does wind contribute to full day consumption?
Just have to read the quarterly conference calls between Zuck and Wall Street. Both groups are in total denial. And will be till we never hear from Zuck ever again.
Farms need fit 40 year olds too.
Fragmentation is natural. The human body doesnt need all this infra and a grid operator/energy schedules to run. Cells dont bill each other if they over/under generate ATP molecules. There is no deviation settlement mech and no need for everything to sync to some arbit frequency. Watch how the grid changes post Ukraine drone wars where taking out generators, transmission lines and substations has become a fully automated process.
They have also built a secular seminary in Syracuse where they train managers to provide Pastoral Care.
People will judge it as long as there is no counter balancing Department of Peace with an equivalent budget. Otherwise the system is obviosly biased one way.
It is a sign that all the chimps in the troupe dont run at the same speed or in the same direction. So a bigger question always is how do you keep such a group together?
Well if chatgpt observes some kid writing decent code/analysing info well/asking useful questions/uncovering issues/showing interest even when there is no reward at hand and some one like that is needed at the bank, telco, power plant, hospital, govt dept etc use your imagination of how the story can go.
It used to be a nice Library. Now its a nice Library but with every book screaming at you as you pass by - please pay attention to me please. The sky will fall if you dont. No one has any humility anymore. Or the value of humility has dropped to 0.
As Goldhaber famously said people have Limits to how much Attention they can give anything but somehow no limits to recieving Attention. No one knows why.
The platforms have all chosen to exploit that asymmetry rather treating it with some dignity. The end result is too many people crave or think they deserve the worlds attention and all the time. If they dont get it then they now believe they are broken and failures.
So if something gets 10 views youtube doesnt tell the creator those 10 people have gone off to watch 50 other things. So people are getting a constant false signal on how much real Attention they are actually getting. Some day hopefully this will change.
Depends on the problem being solved. And how frequently the core prob changes. Cuz nothing is static in an ever changing universe.
What organization, skills, leadership is required to explore a jungle for gold is very different from what organization, skills and leadership is required to run a gold mine.
So we get explore-exploit tradeoffs, satisficing vs optimizing choices etc.
We know the answer. Whats stopping ebola or a hurricane from over running everything?
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
> people who are willing to be paid to be friends and roommates for those going through a dark night of the soul.
Once payment enters the story opportunists and exploitation enters the chat too.
Since you bring up sprituality and its disconnection from science based mental health care, its worth checking out Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylors classic work The Secular Age. Or ask your fav GPT about it. It shows us one of the reasons Religion survived across all cultures and the rise and fall of kings and empires, is because when people suffer what the mind really needs is a way to shift focus away from suffering. Thats the least that can be done. And it was traditionally done by religious systems via rituals, stories, music, dance, art, service etc. It was a way to get the entire community involved in Care.
Well read about the last years of the British Empire. They too spent a lot of time and energy giving speeches about what is "unacceptable" but that has nothing to do with what actually happened to the country after the empire wound down.
One thing I like is I can keep asking the same questions in different way till I am satisfied that I have learnt something. The system doesnt "loose patience" the way even good teachers can.