It depends on what your motives are. Every evil personality you hate started out first as a subversive force. Do you know what the secret end goal of your subversive force flavor-of-the-month is?
The article describes it as a "useful analogy" but doesn't specify in what way it's useful. Seems the manner in which it's useful depends on your worldview or even your intelligence. Does it mean that predictions of crisis are all equally valid or worthless? Or does it mean that we should question how the conclusion was reached, or that we should require some minimum standard of scientific consensus before publishing such predictions?
It's not just him, it's the whole base that does this. Taking a cue from the most infamously persecuted person in history, Jesus Christ, that's what they're going for. The more hate, the stronger their resolve. Hate is the fuel that keeps the whole engine running, so low public support will do nothing to slow this process down. It will only fuel it.
Think about that photo of blood coming from a nicked ear evoking Jesus Christ on the cross. That's the photo that made him into a god and won him the election. It's all about the persecution.
That's what tariffs do though. If you have a product that competes with another that now costs more due to tariffs, you're now free to raise your prices as well, in order to maximize profit. Your product may not have a tariff, but it does have greedy shareholders that see that they can now raise their earnings because competitors suddenly aren't so competitive anymore.
Try going on a shareholder earnings call. They're free. It's company executives trying to impress shareholders. It's the only place I've ever heard people brag about how much they've raised their prices.
For me, it's getting annoying. Not every question is an excellent question. Not every statement is a brilliant observation. In fact, I'm almost certain every idea I've typed into an LLM has been thought of before by someone else, many many times.
I don't believe rigorous scrutiny and debate would have this effect at all. Most people would just get defensive and entrench. There has to be another way to reveal reality to them that doesn't result in their entrenchment.
To summarize the article, when a language has a single creator, (in this case, the person who runs the first major printing press in France,) that person has immense power to make significant changes to the language when needed. On the other hand if the language has multiple collaborators each with some influence to make changes to the language, such changes tend to be much more conservative ones.
I blame this on the CEOs and other executives out there misleading the public about the capabilities of AI. I use AI multiple times a week. It's really useful to me in my work. But I would never use it in the contexts that non-tech-savvy people, and I include almost all of the mainstream media here, are trying to use it for.
Either the executives don't understand their own product, or they're intentionally misleading the public, possibly both. AI is incredibly useful for specific tasks in specific contexts and with qualified supervision. It's certainly increasing productivity right now, but that doesn't mean it can give people life advice or take over the role of a therapist. That's really dangerous and super not cool.
I'm in the camp of people who believe that while they are bullshit machines, oftentimes bullshit can be extremely useful. I use these bullshit machines all the time now, for minor tasks where bullshit is acceptable output. Whether it's a chunk of low-quality throwaway code that's easily verified and/or corrected, or an answer to a question where close-enough is good enough.
Not everything needs to pass a NASA quality inspection to be useful.
Where does the buck stop in this scenario? My assumption is the manufacturers have already been paid, so does that mean they don't care about this? I'm thinking the individual dealer owners of the vehicles probably have to file claims with their insurance companies. So insurance rates will go up. Is that where it ends?
Why wouldn't they do it? If you had a backdoor into the brains of billions of people across the world (except China), and you were a billionaire with infinite ability to morally rationalize any behavior, what would stop you?
Even if all those factories were built instantaneously, it still results in made-in-usa prices for all Americans for everything coming out of those factories, along with protective tariffs forever. A factory can't be constructed or operate going forward in the US for the same price as in China. The moment any president drops tariffs, all those factories will shut down immediately.
Yes. And even if we could wave a magical wand and materialize a whole new city (or region) with thousands of new factories and also a workforce complete with training, and housing for them, and new universities to continue the training for them and their children, and new power plants to supply the power and water needs of this new region as well as a transportation infrastructure to support all this new economic activity. New airports, new rail networks, and new shipping ports. Even if all that could happen instantaneously, the result of all these new Made-in-USA goods would still be astronomically higher prices for all Americans. The US is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and all these factories have to pay those high prices both for their construction and for their ongoing operations. (I'm assuming here the magical wand only speeds time. It doesn't produce investment capital out of thin air.) So protective tariffs would need to continue on indefinitely so all these people could keep their very expensive jobs and all Americans would be paying the bill for it, forever.
It's not that I don't care. I don't know how real it is. Bad faith arguments and pseudoscience are ubiquitous.
When I was growing up the same types of people were saying that D&D was a demonic movement meant to turn kids to satanic rituals so I never got to play D&D. Rock music had subliminal messages that were converting children into zombies but I listened to it anyway and that's how I discovered that most adults were full of shit and straight-up lying to us. There's so much garbage out there that separating the noise from true threats is an overwhelming task for most average people.
I think you underestimate them. They'll just buy shoes from another country, import them in secret, repackage them, and sell them as American made Nike. They could easily strong-arm Nike to make a deal to go along with this. They'll do a "tour" of the "factory" that makes nothing, and MAGA will eat it up. They'll show us doubters all how wrong we were to doubt the carnival-barking-clown savior of America. And then he'll get a third term out of it.
If they only sold healthy things it wouldn't change anything. The jobs are low wage. Local businesses employed more workers and paid more than DG or Walmart do, so they went out of business. Workers had no choice but to work at DG or WM for the lower wage. Regional wages cratered. Eventually the community economically just can't afford to exist anymore and also becomes dependent on government assistance. This story has been replayed across the entire country but it happens in big cities too.
People are generally in agreement against lower wages and higher property prices, but when it comes time to sell the store, they're gonna sell to the highest bidder. If that bidder wants to put in something that has the effect of putting more locals out of business and lowering regional wages, it has the effect of extracting wealth from the local community. But that's the next generation's problem. I want my cheap stuff now. I want the highest price for the assets I'm turning over to the 1%, which only wants to extract wealth from the community long term.
I believe there's no way to resolve this except to use the tax system to put society back in balance. Regular workers need to be able to afford to live a normal life again. The Dollar Generals of the world have become too good at wealth extraction. They look good in the short term, but over time through extremely low wages they drain local communities dry until they become a husk of what they were. Then people can't afford to fight against Dollar General and Walmart any more. They need the lower prices to survive, but in making these bad deals they further impoverish their own communities.
The people who say they want to "keep the coffee shop character" are focusing on the wrong thing. That's a bad strategy. They need to be looking at the long-term economics of their communities and bringing that danger to the forefront. It's not about character. Character doesn't pay the bills. It's about wealth extraction. About lowering regional wages to the point your community becomes dependent on government assistance and can no longer afford to shop anywhere else but Dollar General.
What he means is that according to the graph if you call yourself an "independent thinker" then you can't be an extremist. You are automatically a centrist. All the dots on the "independent thinker" half are all centrist. None are left or right. An interesting bias that he's admitting to. Made me roll my eyes and stop reading right there, and just skim the rest for all the "independent thinker" tropes.
If you want to feel superior and virtue signal, just label yourself an "independent thinker." It's so easy.
The speed at which anything progresses is impressive if you're not paying attention while other people toil away on it for decades, until one day you finally look up and say, "Wow, the speed at which this thing progressed is insane!"
I remember seeing an AI lab in the late 1980's and thinking "that's never going to work" but here we are, 40 years later. It's finally working.
Because that is a short-sighted system where society is incentivized to, over time, concentrate all property and power into the hands of fewer and fewer wealthy individuals and corporations, until eventually one day there is no more mom-and-pop. Mom-and-pop is shrinking and will continue to shrink because of "wealth-neutral" policies. Just like what's happened with agriculture. You can't buy a ranch or farm today if you're not a millionaire, and eventually the same will be true of all property that is resource-constrained.
It's helpful to pop in to Facebook from time to time just to try to understand the insanity going on in the world. I can see the constant flow of misleading content that's driving the seemingly irrational decision-making and I can then understand it. I steel myself against the propaganda as one does, but if I were spending even one hour a day reading that sewage that's pushed at regular people every day, and I believed in even a fraction of it, I would probably make the same insane decisions as them. So it actually reduces the anxiety, a little bit, to at least know where it comes from.
There might not be much of a difference in your mental health condensing 2-4 years' of rage into just one week.
Perhaps another strategy could be to maintain an awareness of the motivations and tactics of publishers/content creators, and that could be enough as an inoculation.
I imagine a clown on the street trying to enrage me, and I being aware of what it's trying to do, instead just laugh at it.
Today I walked into a restaurant with a cable TV news channel blaring on about the "invasion of men" into women's college sports. They offered no proof, just a continuous barrage of commentary. As I waited for my sandwich I watched one after another, with just continuous outrage. No proof, no on-site reporters, no B tape, nothing at all to support the claims being made. It was like watching bad science fiction of an alternate universe. I chuckled nervously as I looked around and wondered if the others there actually believed it. None of them were laughing.
If you're a citizen of a democracy and you only focus on you, then when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly. Or maybe you don't vote and thereby cede control to your neighbors to make decisions for you over the environment in which you live. Assuming you decide to vote then, and since you don't live in a vacuum, your vote will be based on whatever random stuff leaked through to you during the time you were "focusing on you". Actually it's not random. It's whoever spent the most time and money on the propaganda that influences/buys your vote.
It's easy for people who get paid to think to overthink things. He's overthinking it.
It's hard enough for people to communicate as it is. Now we're being asked to research the ancient history, etymology and moral underpinnings of words and phrases when all we really want to do is communicate with our colleagues. I think it's okay to use any word or phrase as long as everyone knows what it means, and accurate communication has been achieved.
People who find themselves with more time and money than sense on their hands have the privilege of writing articles like this. That's wonderful. Good for him. I'm happy for him. The rest of us can just carry on like we never read that article because although it's quite interesting, it's also absolutely useless.
The context is a personal blog. You don't have to say the word "opinion" explicitly. If it's on your blog, it's your opinion.
The problem with saying it's virtue signaling is that when you resort to ad hominem attacks, you're conceding the argument. Attacking character concedes the argument being made. Well I don't concede. I have a good argument against it. My argument is that nobody cares about the etymology or morality of a word. They care about its meaning and context. People don't learn language by reading etymologies. Nobody cares one way or the other about the morality of the first person who said it or popularized it especially if it happened a hundred years ago. We don't need to look up the etymology of every word or phrase before using it, and asking people to do that is unrealistic and unreasonable.
Is it virtue signaling? I don't know, and I don't care. His character doesn't matter to me. It doesn't affect whether or not his idea is a good one. It's a bad idea, and leave it there.
Don't worry about it. It's an opinion. Agree or disagree with it. But to feel morally inferior because of someone else's opinion isn't an argument. It's revealing that you have issues with self esteem. If you want to put forth an argument about why he's wrong, or crossing a line, or making an unrealistic proposition that everyone everywhere should stop using a word or phrase, that's absolutely a valid response. But people making the claim of "virtue signalling" are not making an argument. They're making a baseless ad hominem attack.
If someone else's opinion makes you feel morally inferior, that's your problem. And a problem best kept to oneself I would think. Not aired out in public like dirty laundry.