__B_B__

It's interesting to see this drive, for transplanting one's consciousness or whatever into another medium according to the notion that doing so would constitute some form of immortality and that thereby something desirable would be achieved or become possible, compromise on the medium. To give up that the medium could be an entirely synthetic structure in favor of it being a biological one seems to illustrate that sidestepping of biological rules is in fact a temporary extravagance and inherently parasitic.

Well, here's your answer OP.

This modern 15 minute city notion has always struck me as an attempt to steal the branding of the old European walkable cities which went down the tubes with industrialization. A 15 minute space is all well and good, as long it's not just some mechanism for keeping me in a closed economic loop, the square footage of which I'm just supposed to grind away within for my whole life.

You could run the same experiment with any fermented drink, presumably.

"You're just so backward, and it's just so IMPORTAAAANT that you do X."

It's always the same meme article. Oh there's all these jobs but the young people are just so lazy and entitled and unskilled and rebellious.

I'm sorry Mr. "Deceptive". I don't feel comfortable providing my service to you, that service being an answer to your question, without first knowing where you live and what your birth name is, at the very least. You're fresh account with these fake credentials strikes me as typical of a criminal.

Yeah it's a great post, except for the part where he counter signals himself while trying to have his cake and eat it too. Then again, I guess it was written a couple of years before all the rebels got shit tested by lockdowns.

Which one?

All "shared fictions" are going to be supported by their affiliated versions of the four P's. Politicians, Police, Professors, Press.

In the darkness and silence of the void, no one can tickle my neurotic anxieties, or at least I'll believe so in the moments before they issue forth again from the only thing left.

Would you consider 100 trillion dollars spent on a research base 30 millions miles away which is going to tell you how to make better insulation and grooved pavement to be wisely invested?

Books are literature, literature is language, language is thought, thoughts can be beliefs, and beliefs are what inform actions. Therefore, if you want to control the actions people take, control what books they have access to.

I don't think anyone wants extinction, but they'll get it anyway and that's what makes Harari, all the multiplications and the imagined monopolies delusional. I think people are in fact full of dejection, disappointment and skepticism, including at themselves. I can only truly speak for myself though. I feel that way and I'm very much more like these people than I would like to admit, but I have to believe I can build anew beyond that in such a way that doesn't necessitate me tearing down everyone else first.

I've never been very compromising and even normal conversations with me feel like battle, often. I just try to have a good time and speak my mind. When I get harassed by police or tricked or screwed around in whatever way at least I can then believe it's not my nihilism being expressed.

What's knowledge? "Justified, true belief"? Belief me and my friends really, really believe in, with some trial and error mixed in? How self serving and unsatisfying and prone to disaster, given critical mass.

I'm not really sure where to take this from here. What do you think the antidote to nihilism is?

Sure. Reverse engineering the fall of man basically. But again to the question of why. Why be so nihilistic about life and the world that you want to do it over? Why believe that such a thing is achievable through some technological mechanism?

Well, maybe because you've seen some other technological mechanism facilitate something you thought was unachievable, like adherence to severe and rigid religious regimen facilitating group perpetuation in many disparate circumstances, and so you're just superimposing that experience onto a different circumstance and pursuing the belief of a similar outcome irrationally, which is where the shirking of feedback you mention comes in.

I'm not really interested in isolated political incidents but rather how they fit into trends across long spans of time. This dichotomy of collective vs individual is also very interesting to me, and through that interest I've determined that some people seem to believe that this plane of existence is an engineering problem. That if you for instance, want to do away with scarcity or whatever, achieve anything at all, well then all that is required is a proper catalogue of inputs and corresponding outputs with as few and as limited variables as possible, and like I said, that to acquire such a catalogue is inherently good for it enables any beneficence.

So, regarding free will and self determinations about one's own body, that is to say, one's own inputs into this catalogue, right; if your question is why would some people be so obsessive about micromanaging those aspects of your life, well that's why. It's because they believe that to do so is to master the laws of nature, and therefore to be able to reformulate the world in such a way that they estimate mankind would be happier and better off. That's the closest I've come to understanding the why of this stuff anyway, and it doesn't sit right with me because the premise is nihilistic, and it seems to me to mirror parts of my own life in which others derived their own life satisfaction from making demands of me and making me do things I didn't want to do without my consent and in such a way that I was worse off for those things having happened to me.

As long as we're talking about bodily autonomy, biometric surveillance and hypocrisy I'd like to quote Robert Scaer.

"Fetuses confronted with an amniocentesis needle invading the uterus exhibit defensive motor behavior. Intrauterine needling of the fetus causes full blown stress-related increase in plasma cortisol and B-endorphin levels, with modulation, of the stress response slower than the adult. Fetuses can also learn to adapt their behavior to control the environment. When presented with a sequence of different voices through headphones, an infant will learn to access his mother's voice through regulating the frequency of sucking on a nipple. The evidence for learning by the unborn fetus in utero, by the premature infant in the pediatric intensive care unit, and by the normal full-term newborn is overwhelming. They learn through implicit conditional memory.

The assumption that infants in all stages of development do not experience pain, do not register arousal with threat, and do not process a response to traumatic stress is clearly outdated and invalid."

Even a cursory familiarity with the positions of those in opposition to abortion would yield the delightful semantic response of "not your body" when presented with the equally semantic argument of "my body my choice".

Utopians like Harari don't actually have any ideas about even the most fundamental questions like the nature of consciousness, the nature of free will, whether it is right to force someone to do something they don't want to do, or what is the significance of freedom of association.

They rely on that poverty of discourse for validity and probably find disagreement, debate and the constant tension of these questions to be irritating and they want it to end, so their propositions simply assume a position on these things then assert some moralistic or otherwise utopian vision of plenty to be derived from them at some undefined point in the future. This is what irrational and religious people do in order to justify their own power, because ultimately that's what really matters to them.

So is this an implicit admission that what passes for "politics" is not conducive to a functioning organization?

Some people are just dazzled by the promise of being able to manipulate reality in whatever variety of ways they can imagine using comparatively little effort, and just don't think any deeper into it than how much they might personally enjoy that.

It's kind of like the rush a highway robber might get from realizing that people do what he wants when he points his weapon at them.

Ah yes, ye olde genetically engineered crop product TM. Don't worry boys. Just plug the genomes into the database and the computer will fix it. Guys, Victor Glushkov told me that if we just plug the economy numbers in, the computer will fix it and everything will be efficient again. We just need all the informations and you need to stop doing whatever it is you're doing so we can get back to what we know works, so stop being so self indulgent.

You're assuming "the world" and "society" to be harmonious concepts but in the worldview of the author they're not, and therefore, for him, there is no contradiction.

You will see it in the way he describes working together to meet basic needs at the end of point 6. He says society is a system for meeting needs. The world presents a set of problems and society presents a set of solutions through it's behavioral demands.

The rest of the article is just him rationalizing the demands and the repercussions of not meeting them but the underlying assertions he is making are these:

That humans are not a part of the world. They are just in it and afflicted by the requirements of being there. That society is a social technology which partitions us off and functions to preserve us therein. Therefore any demands it makes or repercussions it inflicts are legitimate and bound up with your survival and that the sooner you get on board, the sooner you will be "a better person".

Another dead give away is the fact that "better" is a completely subjective evaluation, but he kind of buries the lede on that one and goes on to talk about "society" in the singular, probably knowing full well that the reader will just project their own subjective definition.

If the only reason to do anything is because other people think you should, you better hope they have empathy for you.

Well let me put it to you this way. He whines about proof of work, as is popular to do. Proof of work means to expend resources to produce a true statement such that the cost of lying is prohibitive, because producing an accurate record is better than producing nothing, given the same expenditure.

Cost of refutation is a related rhetorical concept. If this worthless article is going to can a few common critical tropes, all previously addressed, even by other technologies in the same space it aimed at, why should I do anything other than respond with equivalently low effort?

Because you want me to expend the resources? I thought wasted resources were bad? That's the premise of the whining after all, isn't it? Disingenuous, worthless article, preying upon stupidity, fear and moral outrage, which just happened to be filed within days of most cryptos dropping 25% in price, roughly, in the middle of a bear market.

And?

It's the logical conclusion derived from the conceptualization of humans as programmable machines and education as their programming. After one accepts that belief, the issue merely becomes one of economy. Managing costs.

Well, you're seeing one of the problems with systems based on consensus expressed in grocery prices now. Refusal to adopt the faith for any reason increases harm exponentially.

The notion that, if everyone just went along with things, then they would be better off, is why some people argue that free will doesn't exist and more to the subject matter, it's also why agriculturally productive land has been more and more centralized and industrialized, over the last few decades especially, in the name of creating this giant system of global food distribution which so many are now reliant entirely upon and which has also now just shit the bed.

Whining about proof of work. Check. Whining about ransomware. Check. Ponzi scheme. Check. What an organic article and opinion.