there’s a bit i heard on julia galef’s podcast — i quote it at the end of this post www.interfluidity.com/v2/9258.html — analogizing trying to survive under contemporary social media as like trying to drive while on acid. you might make it for a while! but eventually you’ll crash. 1/
hopefully we find a way to come down, to a different place, hopefully better than where we started, but still someplace consistent with reasoning and accurate perception. /fin
(more easily communicated than validated, perhaps.)
@williamcb.bsky.social argues that gen-ai singularity talk is a distraction from the singularity ongoing, which we may not notice as it is the water we swim in, the only life we’ve ever known.
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Do you think democracy is a good idea? Why or why not? 1/
I ask because pretty everyone I interact with seems to self-identify as on the side of democracy, but a lot of people express cynicism about the electorate and the public’s capacity to participate in reasoned deliberation. the most straightforward implication would be democracy is a bad idea. 2/
Do you support democracy anyway on purely negative grounds? (i.e. “it’s the worst system except for all the others that have been tried from time to time”) 3/
How do you reconcile the deficiencies of contemporary publics, as you perceive them, with a claim to being a stalwart for democracy? /fin
if you are troubled by vice they've invented a device.
insiders generally tell us it’s more “veep” than “house of cards”. l’affaire lizza/nuzzi reminds us that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is castigating the “two party toxic political system”. Is she going to join, in some fashion, team electoral reform?
nuzzigate / lizzagate / pizzagate?
The best thing you’ll read about the great $140,000 poverty debate, and the fallaciousness of reasoning endemic to the kind of people who get off on calling out other people’s fallacies. by @dsquareddigest.bsky.social ht @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social @hilzoy.bsky.social
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i’m so jealous of how you’re free of envy.
that the fate of the world turned, essentially, on an office kiss, and turned very badly, is a fact of the world that’s very hard to sit with.
Do you think there needs to be any kind of consideration of an argument that the Obama Administration was simultaneously the apotheosis of the vision you suggest and an object of great dissatisfaction? Is that all racism we should simply crush and suppress, or were we maybe missing something?
we may finally wise up!
China is the center. Everywhere else is the periphery.
only democracy can make the world safe for technocracy.
you have to admit, that constitutes a certain kind of virtuosity.
these things will become tractable when we have AGI.
expiation. lustration. ablution.
pretty dumb of the United States to abandon its (however notional) commitment to universalism in favor of chauvinism at precisely the moment when a chauvinistic world order would render it an also-ran.
almost 150 years ago we invented the phone. the latest innovation has been to uninvent it, by inventing the phone tree, customer service center, etc. i now drive miles to talk to people whom, thirty years ago, i’d have conveniently phoned. it’s increasingly the only way to talk to a capable human.