naeemtee

Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language.

Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.

I got GPT-3 to take your story and complete it. It's slightly terrifying.

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Short Story

In the not-so-distant future, we’ve trained AI to predict the probability you might die on any given day. But it’s trained on so many factors, and reads so many inputs, that no one really knows how it works.

So the story is of a random person who suddenly observes their meter jump from the usual 0% to a cautious 3%. Then over the course of the day, it slowly climbs to 20%, and onwards.

No one knows why, and no one can help them. They get a call from their boss, who sends them home early, rather than risk their safety in the office. Strangers offer to take them home. A stranger on the street offers to trade cards with them, and promises that his card can help them.

The meter shows up at 30% on the subway, and the narrator tries to hide it, but it’s too late, and the people around them are already looking at them suspiciously. The narrator tries to call their spouse, but they can’t get hold of them. They go home, but their spouse isn’t there.

By the time they get home, the meter is at 40%. They try to call for help, but the police are already there, waiting. The meter hits 60%, and then 100%.

The police tell the narrator that they’re sorry, but they’ve been watching them for some time, and have seen no indications that the narrator is a threat. The narrator protests that they’ve been trying to call the police, but now the police just say that the meter made a prediction, and they’re just going by the numbers.

The police tell the narrator that they’ll have to detain them, for the next 24 hours, to prevent them from doing anything rash. The narrator protests, but the police ignore them, and cuff them.

The police take the narrator in, but they aren’t taken to a normal jail. They’re taken to a special prison — a prison for people who might die.

He spends the remainder of his life in that jail cell.

Pakhi means bird in Bangla. Bangladeshis also used to be Pakistani, so they're probably fine. ;)

One thing that isn't captured nowadays is that a lot of what "couldn't scale" before - i.e manual work, the type of which you described - is now much more scalable due to how much easier it is to automate tasks at scale.

It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-scale manual operations, because you can do so in a predictable, revenue-positive way.

I'm impressed people keep making the "option not to use it" argument. Our lines of communication are monopolized. "Just don't use Facebook/Twitter/Amazon" is an irrelevant argument since there are no alternatives.

Short term economic damage is a) hard to measure and b) meaningless

Sweden’s betting on long term recovery in light of second/third/etc waves. As much as it detracts from the catastrophic fear and loathing narrative, it has sound economic and epidemiological foundations.

YC is a crapshoot. We had the most impressive metrics in our interviewing class and killer recommendations and didn’t get in. The ones from our interview group that did were astoundingly dumb.

There wasn’t a single successful entrepreneur amongst the “partners” who interviewed us.

Here we are a year or so later flying at 7 figure revenues thankful we didn’t give up nearly 10% of our business to an incubator that’s a shell of its former self.

Yes, except we’ve replaced beans and rags with Big Macs and Nikes

“Essentials” is flawed in your argument. Americans in 1919 actually had to struggle to survive.

Obviously the context of the discussion is regarding the monopoly of political information by the FAANG. Why would software engineers at banks have any relevance here?

You would have to live in a ridiculous echo chamber to disagree on the political leaning of the industry based almost entirely in San Francisco

No, jacobush, the majority of people in the US will not die of obesity.

So a rigorous 4 year degree in a highly technical engineering stream doesn’t make him an engineer, but the script kiddie high school dropout making crypto apps is?

Give me a break. Tim Cook is more engineer than 90% of people who call themselves one.

Anyone know of any open source libraries that are even remotely close in quality/effectiveness as Grover AI?

He's from India. Statistically speaking, he might be right, although judging by the fact he dropped out of school he's probably in the upper echelons of society.

Tried something similar recently (contentfly.co) where we have writers set a minimum rate and the market anchors around that.

It’s been pretty interesting.... the rates have gone up but not as high as we thought.

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a must-read

I'm sorry - this advice, and most of your comment, is bad advice.

I struggled with social anxiety for 10 or 15 years before I "cured" myself, and advice like this is what buried me. Reading books and going to a therapist can supplement your efforts, but if that's your main approach you're going to waste years - and when you talk, you're going to sound like a robot attempting to be human.

Which, believe me, is much worse than your (OP) presumably current state of looking like an awkward mute.

HTWFAIP is like the "cold showers" of social anxiety advice. I'm confident most people who recommend this book (which is literally everyone) haven't actually read it. It's popular advice because it's popular advice, not because it's actually useful.

Dale Carnegie's books were meant for everyday corporate workers to advance their workplace and sales communication skills - not for socially awkward developers who lack base social cues. Not only that, it was in a time with completely different social nuances - unless you really want to be an idiot carrying around a notebook of everyone's birthdays and asking questions 80% of the time your mouth opens.

Social anxiety isn't cured by reading books on emotional intelligence and deep diving into the way you say things. Most self-professed "introverts", particularly developers, spent most of their lives playing video games and sitting indoors. They're not well-rounded people in the least.

When you start slowly morphing your life to be more well rounded - taking part in group activities, getting hobbies, physical activity, etc. the social stuff takes care of itself. Your goal shouldn't be to excel at small talk - your goal should be to get to the point where your life is so cool you don't give a crap how you interact socially.

Burying your head in books and overanalyzing your social interactions isn't going to solve your social anxiety. Go play soccer.

I've been fortunate in building a consultancy that's grown pretty quickly almost entirely based on this insight (https://superwork.io). We've helped some companies basically 2x just by dumping their existing SaaS-based processes.

The days of one-size-fits-all SaaS are numbered.... most companies can find massive efficiency gains through smart deployment of tools like Airtable and Zapier with turnkey automations.

There used to be a time this wasn't feasible because the only option was to hire a development team and deal with legacy software - we don't have that problem anymore.

We'll probably let the price hang eventually, but an open market would actually result in the writers getting paid less.

Our biggest competitor pays writers 0.7c/word lol

Why is the alternative nightclubs and counter-strike though? Why not, getting a good nights sleep, reading books and lifting weights?

I run ContentFly (http://contentfly.co).

Our ultimate mission is to democratize marketing so any and every small business on Earth can use it.

There are several things wrong with this line of thinking (as others have pointed out), but I'd like to draw attention to a less salient point you made:

This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.

It's interesting that you're portraying the openness of European society in a strongly positive light, given the high levels of abject loneliness prevalent primarily in the west.

Communal living has been a staple for much of human existence, the level of isolation most people in western Europe and North America (and now, much of east Asia) face is a direct result of European "openness" (which spread through east Asia via the British originally, and destabilization + American media later).

The biggest risk to the future of the West is the lack of strong families. That's where India, above all others, shines.

And that is somewhat a good thing. Diversity of thoughts makes up for a good country. Shows up in the GDP. India is far ahead of both Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This argument is ludicrous. India isn't ahead of Pakistan and Bangladesh because of "diversity of thought". That's so reductionist I'm frankly astounded.

Sorry for the late reply - they're contracted, and primarily native speakers from North America :)

Not to shamelessly plug, but this Upwork monolith (and the general sub-optimized gig economy right now) is harmful not just for the freelancers themselves, but also the clients (from a price optimization perspective).

We're trying to solve it with a blind marketplace model at ContentFly (http://contentfly.co/)

For example if you want porn of your high school crush? You gotta train your own deepfake for that

Who says society is going to shit?

And as I said, your argument isn't new. It's been long debunked. The same argument was made in the midst of pax britannica before ww1 and ww2. People argued that nations were too dependent on each other for wars to break out. Hell, people argued that germany would never attack the soviet union since most of germany's oil/resources came from the soviet union.

Bingo. Nation states drove society, and they'll continue to drive society.

Ah, EngSci - the most freakishly difficult undergraduate curriculum on the planet.

in EU you can't just declare bankruptcy and run free afterwards.

Incorporate in the US?

It's a lead generation tool - same space as Clearbit, just further down market.

Lol. Kissinger. Right.