This belongs in uplifting news

I seem to recall a line from some tattered old piece of parchment… I think it begins with “when a long train of abuses and usurpations…”

I recommend reading until the word “security”. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it has something to say about what it is our duty to do…

Ah truck-kun, we hardly knew ye…

80% certain that’s Quentin Tarantino, or were you talking about Brad Pitt? Actually, I now see that they are all wearing black shirts, so maybe you’re talking about Leonardo DiCaprio?

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

This is why p-hacking and searching huge databases for anything with a correlation to a desirable (or undesirable) trait ate simultaneously so prevalent, and so damaging.

It also clearly cites it at the bottom. Its not like this is plagiarism. Its clearly making the point that this is the new, awful truth of the world before us, and maybe we need a few avengers, like little Billy Ignore Instructions and his vindictive mom.

I appreciate your response. If you think that the invention of the internet is why we are failing as a species, that it is the thing destroying our planet, then it seems I have much more work to do. Corporate greed and political corruption are what is literally destroying our planet. I agree: talk is cheap. Go find a way to make corporations, billionaires, and corrupt politicians fear the people.

From someone who’s on the spectrum to another: To classify a difference in focus or a difference in processing as a defect is inaccurate. “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go through life believing it is stupid”. There are things that come naturally to neurodivergent brains of which neurotypical brains are utterly incapable. “Hyperfixation” is just a way of saying that we become subject matter experts faster than other people. Even the reviled “attention deficit” is just our mind getting bored of things we’ve seen before. You are an explorer of the cosmos. If someone else says you are less, just because you find it difficult to care about the meaningless monotony of social constructs, that is a limitation not of you, but of them. Fuck 'em. Find your superpower, and follow it.

I figured out that I am preternaturally talented at classifying bits of knowledge and drawing them together to form syllogisms and comparisons. This has made me find my life’s work in teaching chemistry. I get go be paid to be an alchemist, teaching the arcane secrets of the universe to students, showing them how we have learned to bend the very fundaments of reality to our will. I think that’s pretty neat.

I’m a science teacher. I have serious conversations with unserious children every day. It’s what I do.

Don’t kill yourself. Engagement with people through a digital medium is not a sin.

Also, if I mischaracterized your position in calling it nihilism, I’m sorry. It seemed like your primary thesis was “none of this matters, and to think it does is inherently absurd, so you should do nothing”. To me, that sounds like nihilism.

A take with which I disagree, but mostly a fair one. If you want to live an unexamined life, it’s not like that’s any of my business. You are absolutely correct on your read of me. I am committed to arcane esoterica, so that’s what I’m doing here. I’m here to discuss, and to learn, and I genuinely want to explore the limits of my understandings, identify my biases, and catch my fallacies, so when someone throws out some take that seems spectacularly inane, like “all technologies are tools, and all tools are the same”, I want to know if I’m missing something.

As far as why I dare to be so “absurd”: I’m inclined to wonder why you have decided that your personal nihilism means that no-one else should be able to have a serious discussion of any kind. That’s kind of sad.

You know what? They can go ahead. Fine. Good for them. They’ve shown they aren’t interested in actual argument. I agree with your point about the whole slander thing, and maybe there is some sad little invective, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, further belittling my intelligence to try to console themself. If other people read it and think “yeah that dude’s right”, then that’s their prerogative. I’ve made my case, and it seems the best they can come up with is projection and baseless accusation by buzzword. I need no further proof of their disingenuity.

EDIT: now I understand. After going through your comments, I can see that you just claim confirmation bias rather than actually having to support your own arguments. Ironic that you seem to show all of this erudition in your comments, but as soon as anyone questions your beliefs, you just resort to logical buzzwords. The literal definition of the bias you claim to find. Tragic. Blocked.

While this may be true for technologies, tools are distinctly NOT inherently neutral. Consider the automatic rifle or the nuclear bomb. In the rifle, the technology of the mechanisms in the gun is the same precision-milled clockwork engineering that is used for worldwide production automation. The technology of the harnessing of a nuclear chain reaction is the same, whether enriching uranium for a bomb or a power plant.

HOWEVER, BOTH the automatic rifle and the nuclear bomb are tools, and tools have a specific purpose. In these cases, that SOLE purpose is to, in an incredibly short period of time, with little effort or skill, enable the user to end the lives of as many people as possible. You can never use a bomb as a power plant, nor a rifle to alleviate supply shortages (except, perhaps, by a very direct reduction in demand). Here, our problem has never been with the technology of Artificial Neural Nets, which have been around for decades. It isn’t even with “AI” (note that no extant “AI” is actually “intelligent”)! No, our problem is with the tools. These tools are made with purpose and intent. Intent to defraud, intent to steal credit for the works of others, and the purpose of allowing corporations to save money on coding, staffing, and accountability for their actions, the purpose of having a black box a CEO can point to, shrug their shoulders, and say “what am I supposed to do? The AI agent told me to fire all of these people! Is it my fault that they were all <insert targetable group here>?!”

These tools cannot be used to know things. They are probabilistic models. These tools cannot be used to think for you. They are Chinese Rooms. For you to imply that the designers of these models are blameless — when their AI agents misidentify black men as criminals in facial recognition software; when their training data breaks every copyright law on the fucking planet, only to allow corporations to deepfake away any actual human talent in existence; when the language models spew vitriol and raging misinformation with the slightest accidental prompting, and can be hard-limited to only allow propagandized slop to be produced, or tailored to the whims of whatever despot directs the trolls today; when everyone now has to question whether they are even talking to a real person, or just a dim reflection, echoing and aping humanity like some unseen monster in the woods — is irreconcilable with even an iota of critical thought. Consider more carefully when next you speak, for your corporate-apologist principles will only help you long enough for someone to train your beloved “tool” on you. May you be replaced quickly.

They are. Their last post on Reddit was 16 days ago.

Oh come on, my guy. This is the perfect set-up. Do I need to make a sprog account just to follow you around and show you up?

“Stop smoking those!” the people said, as Timmy dragged away.

“You know those things’ll kill you!” for the fourteenth time that day.

But Timmy’s breaks were longer, since he took the habit on,

and now he was addicted, smoking cigs from dusk to dawn.

So, when a woman stopped and said "I know a better form,

you needn’t even quit the stuff, nor need you fear the harm!"

poor Timmy went right down the street and filled his pockets full

of cartridges and flavored oils and other random bull.

He puffed away then on his vape, and brushed his fears aside,

But glycol soon accumulates, and Timmy fucking died.

I’d personally prefer the 50’s government-supplied housing for scientists, but sure, the grant would be nice too.

<s>

There are some indications that God created them more than 10000 years ago, and that they used to be as big as humans. It makes one wonder if the K-T extinction event was triggered solely so that there wouldn’t be anything big enough to eat God’s only begotten creation.

</s>

I would, but only if you promise that she isn’t a package deal with a wing-suited billionaire who’s made a deal with the police and the nearest mental health institution to forcibly incarcerate anyone who stands against his ownership of the country. If we pay for the Poison Ivy package, can we get a discount on the Mr. Freeze package, where we get a disgruntled-but-brilliant climate-scientist-cum-virologist who will spray SO3 into the upper atmosphere and synthesize a strong enough volcanic winter to balance out anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions?

Not all beliefs are equal. If you hold by a holy text that says that women can (and should) be bought and sold or are otherwise ‘lesser’ than men, or you revere an imbecilic demagogue who claims that all immigrants are rapists, murderers and gang members, then yes, the “culture” of your group will have a higher probability of any given person being an asshole than a group of randomly-selected Humanists, for example. To equivocate that all belief systems are equal from a moral perspective is deeply naive.

ETA: I am not a humanist, because I believe that there is a point at which violence is necessary and justified to protect other lives and the rights thereof.

Yes. It’s an incredibly shallow approach to politics. Humans are shallow.