It's why there was a moral panic in the 1800s over Jane Austen style fiction, in the 1930s over radio, and so on.
Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different to playing computer games 12 hours a day, doing endless marathons, watching sports, investing, or many similar activities.
you can do something else while you listen to the radio or smoke pot (e.g., clean your house, hang out with friends or family, with weed you can even read or program)
phones and books both consume your attention, but a book at least demands a bit of effort to follow and might introduce you to new ideas or vocabulary, even if you're reading pulp fiction
on the other hand you can scroll twitter or insta or watch tiktok absolutely mindlessly, and doing so will tend to become a habit all while it chips away at your attention span and your willpower
weed can make boredom feel ok too, and can certainly affect attention, willpower and memory, but if used in moderation it can also magnify your curiosity and sense of wonder, help you introspect, etc
cannabis is a powerful entheogen and it deserves far more respect and restraint than it currently receives
smartphones give us enormous powers but they can also exert massive power over our minds and actions, they too should be treated with caution and used with far more restraint
cannabis might make you lazy or suggestible, and it can even be dangerous for some people or if used irresponsibly, but it won't spoon feed you mind-melting pablum or ads or propaganda or spy on you
Books, TV, the internet, cell phones all have the potential to benefit you. They often don't, but it's not the medium that's the problem, it's our own choices - except the spying on you bit. That's 100% a problem with TV, the internet, cell phones and now even books.
Yesterday I saw a TV ad for Meta suggesting that with VR you will be able to stand in a small conversational circle with Socrates.
Yea, it will be educational.
But skepticism aside, with a personal instance of AI some benefits could be significant. Just having a personal AI critic to read your writing and give feedback could be a huge benefit -- or if not your writing, your thought process.
Queue the spying on you part.
So yeah, targeted ads and spooky tv sets are annoying at the least but the poing is that the infrastructure could easily support 1984 style monitors.
Regardless of the purpose of current usage, this is infrastructure for a surveillance society. That is the issue. The infrastructure is not going to go away unless we rip it down [down to and including transport layer] and rebuild with privacy and other human rights protections as a primary requirement of ubiquitous networking. DARPA was not concerned about these matters so all these fall under the 'operators discretion'.
I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction.
The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued.
This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
If a store thinks I make more money than you, I might for example be told they've got a return policy that is much more generous than what they'll tell you. There are places where you will wait longer on hold, getting repeatedly bumped back to make room for people who have a better "consumer score" than you do.
The data is handed over to the state and locked away until it's useful to them. It's can get you arrested or questioned by police when you've committed no crime. It can get you sued for things which should not be crimes but are. It's used by politicians who carve out the borders of their districts specifically to limit the ability for your vote to make any difference.
That data is used to target you with lies and misinformation. It allows you to be targeted by extremist groups. It can be used to decide if you get hired or not. You could be turned down for housing because of it. There are millions of things that might prejudice another person against you. Your lifestyle, your politics, your religion, the people you associate with, your sexual history, your medical conditions, etc. You can't know who is accessing your information or for what reason, or know how accurate that data is, or know if/how it is being protected.
It's a gross violation of your rights, which yes, sometimes is used to manipulate you into buying something you might not have bought otherwise, but increasingly is used for much much more and once the intimate details of your life have been taken from you, you can never take them back or prevent them from spreading.
However much you enjoy the products that are spying you, you can't ever say if the benefits outweigh the costs. You aren't even allowed to know what the costs are or when you are paying for them, and there will never come a time when you have paid in full and it can no longer cost you something else.
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/hello-barbie-the-cree...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/26/hackers-c...
The book looks good btw! And I'm checking out her TED talk. If you're secretly an AI book ad pushing algorithm you just got me...
Paraphrasing, one of the best quotes in Turkle's book: ~We have evolved voices over millions of years to convey information, feeling and nuance. But [young people, who won't answer the phone] want to text instead.~
I mean tech is a double edged sword but I'm guessing the positive like police having a job beating people up without being filmed by some phone outweigh stuff like your roomba uploading your floor plan.
Of course, human nature and corporate greed don't change. The difference is scale. In the past stores had to know you were rich to treat you better. They weren't checking your bank account balance at the door. Now they can and increasing do exactly that.
Same with real spying. Maybe you in 1980s china you had to watch what you said around your neighbors. Today you have to watch what you say while alone in your own home. It's just even just what you say today either, but everything you've said or written over decades that can be mined. You don't have to go to the other side of the globe to see historical examples of how this would have been abused either, Joseph McCarthy would have loved to have this data.
Again, the tech isn't the problem. It's great that was can film police abuses. It's great that we have GPS. What we don't have are regulations that prevent the abuse of our data which is collected and disseminated at an unprecedented scale and never goes away. there exists a permanent record of what you've said, what you've done, and everywhere you've been. We're going to see it used to hurt people more and more often. There are already plans to use this data to attack people who have gotten abortions. It could very soon be used against those in homosexual or interracial relationships as those too are now at risk of becoming crimes.
If your insurance rates go up next year, you won't be told that it was because people in your area spent more on fast food over the last 6 months than last year. you just get the highe4r bill.
What I fear is that we'll end up with a digital caste system where people are treated very differently based on hidden scores that follow them everywhere.
In general, with a more open system, you might also have more hope to redeem yourself, or at least evaluate effective options.
I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction.
The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued.
This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
But the idea that the media forms and platforms play no causal role and it's all on us and our choices is nearly indefensible imo
Some do make it a lot harder to make beneficial choices than others for sure! Some are specifically designed for it.
People claim these systems dont shut down as you are still digesting body fat, but they for the most part do shut down and somewhere in doing that they heal very quickly. I have done it a few times (for NSAIDs and other pain killers having done damage to gut and stomach and when i get glutened giving me ulcers in my gut).
A benefit is that things like food dont rub against the ulcers which are basically like little cuts and that helps too heal too during the fast. You can go on having pain for months or years trying to deal with them in another way. Remember to dose some losalt for potassium and sodium ( your electrolytes ) while you fast to limit the dizzyness and fatigue. Im not sure magnesium powder would be a good idea due to it being tough on the stomach normally... it would stop the muscle cramps you will get... but it might stop the whole thing working ... i never used it while healing ulcers and lining damage .... but i have more recently when fasting to lose weight and it does make it easier .. magnesium tablets or capsules would be a terrible idea though those are really tough on the stomach and have a lot of added ingredients in the fillers and capsule depending on the company. Smaller fasts would also help. Good luck.
Based on what it's doing to your lungs and circulatory system, I'd put it more in the "it rocks, until it doesn't" category.
It is doing that for decades which messes you up eventually.
But my point is that you can run reasonably fast in races with fairly low running mileage. Do most of the base and tempo workouts cross training on an elliptical machine or something, and save the running for interval workouts.
True enough. I too have read "Born to Run", and would suggest that most modern humans aren't adapted to it (certain populations certainly, but most not). Although I have hit reasonably good times, I don't count myself among that population. In high school and in my 30's, I certainly was in the 90th percentile of runners, just by the numbers. Individual races, definitely higher. I love to look at the form and economy of top tier runners, and frankly, I'm not built like that; I could never perform like that. I'm bound to break down eventually, and I'm pretty good at running.
> on an elliptical machine or something
This is not running. This is training for running by not-running. Dress it up how you like, but it's how people like me save the damaging work for races.
Hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, duels; a lot of this stuff is if not banned then at least restricted and regulated.
Are we not tired of that story? So what if humanity does not go to Mars? Is dad going to be unhappy about our efforts when everyone is dead?
Our culture is a joke of wishful thinking and emotional abuse to achieve someone else’s goals disguised as essential application of agency.
How terrible if humans lived a completely different agency than kowtowing to yesteryears industrial necessity to rebuild the world after humanity destroyed it.
Grigori Perelman has achieved more of note than any of us; I know about his accomplishments and none of yours. He did it all with paper and pencil. IMO our low effort consumerism and industrialist slog is destroying our imaginations and keeping us from better ideas.
I'd argue that the chemical withdrawal effects of marijuana, are nothing compared to habitual smoking, alcohol or other "hard" drug use. But there are still some chemical withdrawal effects.
Personally I've had Minor irritability after not having an edible for a few days if I've been consistently having them nearly daily for few days. But I've also realized this, and moderate use more to only once or twice a week, and only 5-10mg at a time. I've grown to like the feel of 5mg in the evening overall. Accounting for the blah feeling the next morning/day.
I played it twice, and do not regret it.
I've heard professors say something to the effect of "students a decade or two ago used to be more productive". I don't have trouble believing that; so would I (I think) without the potency of modern entertainment. It's harder to do stuff while eating such good electric lotuses. :p
On a psychological level, perhaps. But it is pretty obviously not so when it comes to physical risk (if one smokes in whichever form).