Biologist123

I don’t know about you, but for me, little could be worse than being stuck in a doomsday bunker.

The devil’s own horseman, whipping the horses on: “faster, faster, more compute! But I might also just ride this carriage over the cliff!”. Laughing maniacally as he goes.

Which one is it, Dario?

Corporate law.

Fair enough.

Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.

That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.

I don’t think I’m necessarily caught in a doom loop news cycle. My reading habits are around philosophy, sociology, anthropology, technology.

That’s not to say I’m immune to clickbait!

> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.

I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.

I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.

It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.

And the rest you squander. (RIP George Best).

Blimey. This surprised me. But I see Labour also run one.

I suspect more influential is gambling industry lobbying and sinecures.

> As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis.

I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.

People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.

Ummm, whose that?

Are they serious when so much of training was on illegally acquired data?

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Is this a new record for enshittification?

Eh? The more standard view is that Clegg put in place efforts to ward off regulation as long as possible…he’s as popular as Jimmy Savile in the UK.

Err…becuase we speak Scottish not English.

I guess you have to turn it on. Might be handy for things like electrician courses, DIY jobs, maths homework etc. Maybe one day even surgery!

Well done. This is precisely what the future will look like. I’ve hacked together my own version of this using N8N whereby I feed in tasks via text or photo through telegram and it outputs a to do list. At some point I’ll link it to my personal wiki and then have it action tasks. This was just a fun project, but one design decision is to keep third party services away from commercially sensitive emails.

Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!

The UK has land ownership inequality comparable to South Africa and Brazil. Quite something.

Maybe add climate change is real but there’s little we can do to stop it/change the systems which result in it.

Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.

Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.

There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic:

“The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uses_of_Disorder

Great idea! May I ask what the information source is?

Thanks. V helpful. Especially the point about dopamine hits.

Can I sketch out one future of news for input?

- Personalized

- No adverts

- No hidden dopamine hooks

- Assigns probability of accuracy

- Explains relevance to you personally

- Explains emerging news events and context, highlighting propaganda/news manipulation where relevant.

Very interesting. Could become a geopolitical and trade football between Europe and US. Tariffs anyone? Ultimately it’s a question of power: will Europe allow its citizens to be predated upon? My guess is probably.

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.

One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.

[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]