Bishizel

I think it’s obviously a mix, however, an algorithm that maximizes purely for attention or time on site causes a lot of issues.

Sometimes people are seeking something that is beneficial, and maximizing that is fine. Lots more times, people are mostly responding to angry posts, or falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole that they cannot critically think their way out of. Maximizing the attention of those people is clearly negative.

So does society share some blame? Sure. Does an algorithm that maximizes some people into very bad places share some blame? Absolutely.

I think the main problem of all these “alternative” sites is that there really are just a fuckton of shitty people waiting to go in at the very beginning. So even if people have legitimate concerns and the desire to build fresh, they are quickly pushed out by real cesspool denizens.

The problem is we incorrectly assume that if we build something other cultures will just use it. Really we would need to build a good waste system in a really fucked area, then use that system to clean the area up over 2-5 years. Let the example show a better or improved way.

This example stage is something we often fail at when attempting to export solutions.

At most stores each individual piece of produce has a scannable sticker on it.

Re-using glass containers is actually an extremely low chance of contamination. We have had easy glass sterilization techniques for a long time (most dishwashers have a sanitization cycle). Further, your shelf life won’t be significantly reduced, unless you just don’t clean your containers.

The underlying argument you were responding to wasn’t really greenhouse gas focused. The discussion was mostly about plastic waste in the oceans and our environment. While it is possible the greenhouse gas budget is better with plastic, this doesn’t address the problem of accumulating forever waste within our environment.

It isn’t exactly victim blaming when the HOA wouldn’t authorize the repairs (several articles looked into this). You can’t just go do the repairs without approval in these buildings.

They also do it via loans, so instead of paying aide every year, they just hold loans over their heads to get those countries to fall in line.

I think a lot of people are doing this same thing (I know several personally). Getting 2 hrs back a day is amazing, and after having it for a year it is really hard to give up.

> I don't mind meeting up with other employees on the occasional fun team-building outing, but I really don't want to work in an office again.

I think this is probably where a lot of companies will settle out; wfh, but with monthly or quarterly workshops/meetups for teams.

The problem is that the req to live within 100mi doesn’t allow workers to fully engage in location arbitrage in the way the workers would like.

I think most people want a better work/life balance, which is what all this ultimately represents. I imagine the eventual long term settle is somewhere more in the “wfh, but with team gatherings for a few days once a month” in a lot of industries.

I think it’s tough to assign value like this. People argued that the internet had no real value for basically all of the late 90s.

It came to fruition because it’s creating vast new wealth in a fashion that is directly competitive to old wealth. It’s also easy because climate change is a real, pressing existential crisis. Take this with the caveat that most people won’t think past the headline, so lots of people don’t get to the obvious conclusion of “the way we generate power is the root problem”

Lowering to zero doesn’t solve the problem, but it would help give us a longer runway.

But should we focus our efforts banning things that won’t change the way people have to live? That seems like an easy way to fail.

Further, Bitcoin is not the main issue. BTC being clean or dirty is based on the underlying issue of dirty power generation. How about we ban dirty power generation instead? Attack the actual, underlying problem.

The main argument against crypto is actually an argument against the way we generate power. If our power generation wasn’t so dirty, this argument against crypto goes away.

Banning crypto isn’t going to fix the root cause.

I mean, this type of thinking was applied to the early internet as well. “No one will ever buy anything over the internet, people want stores!”

The same lack of imagination is leading to most of these takes.

I fully agree. Philosophy is full of irregular thinkers whose only common trait seems to be the willingness to go into absurd depth about an idea.

What is always interesting to me is how you can spend a large amount of study in the subject and still end up finding out about a new philosopher (I’m going to read some Deleuze now.). For me, David Lewis has been the most interesting philosopher in the last 50 years. Maybe Thomas Nagel as well.

Pain (among other experiences) exists as a gradient compared against both your average experience and any outlier experiences (good or bad). A result of living in a more comfortable, advanced society is that things that seem smaller to someone on the outside are bigger on the personal level. These people aren't inherently weak or soft, it's just that the worst thing or day they have experienced is pretty good in a global sense, but pretty bad in a personal subjective sense.

Two things; Adding more energy to a system doesn’t tend to produce (calm, sunny, scattered showers). I believe mild weather is a low energy outcome. Also, humans like predictable weather. Weather becoming less so, good or bad, will make things harder.

The 1.4 to 2.0C range is where we are going to start seeing large scale crop failures. Also massive fish die offs in the ocean. Unless we drastically change trajectories, this will occur during the lifetime of your children.

You hope you and they will be able to handle these changes, but there are going to be a lot of downstream effects from warming and sea level change.

Effectively this is going to require massive and coordinated action. We are going to have to rapidly develop and share the tech, and scale it quickly.

It is also insane how long humanity has ignored this issue. At least we have seemingly moved from ‘12 years left for real action? Hah!’ To ‘Oh shit this is happening and maybe we have that 11 years’

While the co2 levels and temps have been higher in the past, rate of change is the most important factor here. You incorrectly assess the risk by ignoring the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to move those numbers.

The problem is that most of our food chain is going to have major issues adapting at a speed that matches the rate of change. Pesticides and chemicals are certainly problematic as well, but moving the global needle so much over a 100-250 year timeline is a huge issue.

I would think it's because, while physical pain readily heals, psychological pain doesn't seem to heal nearly as effectively.

While solitary confinement isn't considered torture today, there are psychologists who, after studying the effects of such confinement, have started trying to get it labeled as a form of torture.

That would be expecting someone who is 19 in the late 2000s to actually read a newspaper.

Just because some people younger than Manning have a better grasp of where they stand on the war and its morality doesn't mean that Manning actually had, or should have had, that same understanding at the time he signed up and joined the military.

People come from different situations. I care a lot more about politics and our general situation as a country now than I did at 18-21... honestly I just didn't give a shit until about 25. Then I became interested and decided I needed to be well informed. Are there people older than me who are still uninformed? Yes. Are there people younger than 25 who give a shit about these things. Yes.

Nothing requires that Manning have developed these interests before he joined the military.

Also, while it is "your view" that these things should be thought about before joining the military, I can guarantee you that every person I knew going into the military when I was in high school did not think about these things at all. It was mostly two reasons, economic, or their family expected them to enlist as that's just what people in their family did.

While the army and the world might be better off if people thoroughly examined these issues before enlisting, that's just not the current state of things.

I don't think it's necessary that he "know or should have known" what he was getting into. We have shitloads of people with top secret clearance in this country. In order to view certain documents for various jobs, it's just a clearance you have to have. There isn't a requirement to know the larger picture, and where you stand, with any specific accuracy.

Do you believe it's plausible to change your views? I think the most likely situation is that he thought he knew what he was getting into, and, through his access to lots of top secret documents, ended up learning more things, and thus changed his mind.

I mean seriously, have you never gotten into a situation where you learned information that changed your mind?

I would highly recommend the first three books he wrote in the Culture Series. Consider Phlebas, A Player of Games, and Use of Weapons.

I enjoyed all of the series, but these three really made me realize how amazing the author and the concept of his universe really was. Consider Phlebas is told from the point of view of someone who despises the Culture, which, as an introduction to the series, provides a really unique viewpoint both within the book, and is also generally an interesting literary tool.

A Player of Games is my absolute favorite. I've given copies of this to several friends. It addresses the human problem of what does one do with themselves in a post scarcity existence, especially when advanced AI can just run and do everything.

Outside of the Culture series, I also highly recommend the Algebraist and Feersum Endjinn (sp?).

edit: I forgot to include "Against a Dark Background" in the outside Culture series recommendations. I've read that one a few times, it's quite good. At one point there was talk about making it into a movie, but I haven't heard anything about that in awhile.

This guy deserves it. The Culture series is a fantastic work, I wish he could have finished it (he stated last year that he figured around 3 or 4 more books would cap the series). And, while I loved the Culture series, his other sci-fi was often as good, or better.

If you love sci-fi, and for some reason you haven't heard of this guy, do yourself a favor and read a couple of his books.

While that is speculation on the lawyer's part, it's also speculation on your part to assume he did something especially wrong. That's the problem with this type of monitoring(and revoking), it turns each case, as well as public opinion, towards guilty until proven innocent.

Not to mention, if I remember correctly, just being a known associate of a terrorist (i.e. talking to one) is enough to revoke or deny a foreign visa. To me, this whole situation seems more like a "he talked directly to a terrorist, revoke his visa because he's a 1st degree contact in that terrorist's social network (not looking at what his profession is or what the purpose of the contact is)" than any other possible situation. It's not about what the US is getting from this specific revocation, it's more that they likely have a specific set of guidelines in place and this guy got swept up in an inaccurate net.

Asking for "Best Philosophical Books" is pretty much like asking for an opinion, everyone will have a very different view. That being said, here's my view!

John Stuart Mill - "Utilitarianism" (Kant be damned.)

Thomas Nagel - "Moral Luck"

David Lewis - "On the Plurality of Worlds"

Plato - "The Republic"

Aristotle - "The Metaphysics"