catchclose8919

We should focus on iterating vaccines faster, probably making cocktail-mRNA-vaccines with multiple strains and formulas updated every ~6 months, and helping all countries get access to the best vaccines, like open-source mRNA-vaccine tech and all the others that showed promising (compensate patent holders a couple billions etc.)

We're so incredibly dogmatic in our thinking with this, just like it took >1 year to figure out that most of the time ventilators don't help (those that can be helped can so with only oxygen), we still have this lingering belief that COVID isn't here to stay.

We should accept death as part of life and just iterate faster on things...

And it's much much nastier problem that they won't have even the remotest chance to engineer their way out of that we really don't like to think about.

The problem of being left behind! Of being a laggard civilization/species/etc. That will manifest either in pseudo-predictable ways when humans meet other civilizations and it goes like with the conquistadors and amerindians (conquest and extermination, minor asimilation). Or it goes in an inconprehensible for us way but probably still really bad when Earth-origined-super-AGI meets X-origined-super-AGI that is more advanced than it and either canibalizes it or preemptively extincts it before even making contact, for its/their own self-preservation.

Any slow down is a silent cosmological civilizational technical debt trap in a way! At least by temporarily increasing risk of extinction by wrecking some parts of our life support systems a bit we can have the hope of whatever comes after us (I don't believe much in the future of bio-humans beyond 2-5 generations from now) has at least a fighting chance to engineer their way out of the mess we're leaving them, and at least they'd have their science well sharpened and minds battle hardened by the trials!

...at least write a nice novel/biography/whatever to be found together with the bodies decades later :) Create some enjoyment opportunity for others too, don't keep it all to yourself :P

Which is a very good thing since his work looks like it might actually bring value, and it might otherwise get drowned in the noise made by the other fouls!

Good luck & keep it real!

Well, that would be insanely valuable since it would open up theoretical physics to machine-approaches (AI/ML). I know many are disgusted by this, but I'd love to see a PhysicalTheory-fold equivalent of Alpha-fold chew throw all modern theoretical physics and rank all theories on a possiblity-probability score or sh like that, since the amount of stuff a human would have to go through is already too much...

And the fact "the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable" doesn't mean uninhabitable.

And "to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them" people can also simply choose to care less, focus socially on accelerating tech development and individually stay entertained while competing in the new worldwide casinos and global-events-betting-markets etc. or playing games in the metaverses whose outcomes results in real-world-money redistributions.

> we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population

Maybe your definition of "sanity" is a bit bit constrained and needs to be adjusted then :) To keep the optimism up, maybe future challenges will usher in an era where we finally evolve psychology and psychiatry beyond the pseudoscientifc nonsense they are today, and we replace the "war on drug" with "full access to BOTH drugs and safety information about using them" + a culture focused more on using them for freely managed performance enhancement instead of plain aimless entertainment and "feeling better".

I see a lot of future's problems as opportunities tbh... and challenging stress to force us evolve faster if we modulate it right. This is what I care about most now really, working of figuring out how to "modulate things right" to be able to squeeze the positive after effects even from clearly destructive events like wars and genocides.

One man's hell is another man's heaven I guess: I've always dreamed of finally seeing the opportunity to push the masses out of this mentality combo of christianity/islam/buddshism and other maladaptive crap that paradoxically combines well with eco-scientims or passive-observe-but-not-influence-science. (Real scientific progress was/is always engineering-driven and theories come after evidence they are derived from... the modern "use theoretic speculation to design experiments" is a dead end, all interesting experiments were designed by a desire to "engineer something" even particle accelerators emerged out of desires to build-devices-to-measure/separate/produce/concentrate some isotopes or particles etc. in the hopes that at least they'd be interesting for poisons or guns.)

Let's start engineering cool solutions (pushing reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce warming, using modern biotech to completely extinct tropical disease vectors to keep the newly-becomed-tropical areas human friendly), then engineering solutions to the new cool problems that the first solutions generate and them on and on and on faster and faster and faster!

The "madness" is imo a (maybe rough) transition to a more fertile era of though, science and engineering...

It's not taboo, it's just basic antropo-ecological mechanics: if you don't focus on growth the other who will and will do more of it will outcompete you out of every niche. So selective pressure will increase the number of growth focused civilizations comparative to others.

We actually need more growth and we need to think outside of nature's and Earth's box... We have the technology to practice closed-circle-agriculture and that only needs power (more nuclear + more renewables) + raw materials (more extraction, more oil but less of it burnt as a fuel), let's just forget about maintaining the "natural balance" and put serious research work into techniques for manipulating and tweaking so called chaotic systems... There absolutely no reason why Earth can't support even a 10 trillion humans population if we just quit on "nature" (keep it just in small reservations), and go full nuclear (imagine 1+ billion reactors!) and fully embrace semi-synthetic food (sure, first iterations on sythetic proteins were carcinogenic as hell, but we know how to solve such problems now, or how to avoid them with bugs and closed-circuit-shrimps and lab-grown-meats etc.).

Yeah, a couple tens of millions might die of extra cancers and other pollution induced illnesses, but we can compensate by accelerating population growth (baby factories/camps can work if campaigns to motivate people to reproduce more don't work - though I'd guess we're good enough at the technology of brainwashing and economic incentivization by now to make masses of people do anything if we put our best efforts into....).

We just need a solid serious global responsibility frameworks instead of our anemic "globalism", so that if anyone just dumps X tons of eg. mercury in the ocean, they don't receive just sanctions but also swift targeted assassinations of all guilty parties +/- a sprinkle of tactical nukes for good measure and punishment against "pissing in the pool"...

Let's be honest about it, most developed countries are making geo-strategic decisions in the context of +7 C in <= 100 years... we're just not being f honest about it! (Avoiding it is off the table, just as well as "zero covid" was off the table since month three of the f pandemic and we should've just accepted that it's gonna become endemic and most measures are waste of resources.)

Let's accept that "massive" climate change will happen, and that our goal is how to slow things down and how to avoid it being an actual disaster for HUMANITY!

(It will be a disaster for many other species that we'll go extinct as we'll probably massively increase use of herbicides and fertilizers and GMOs in order to satisfy humanity's material needs against a backdrop of populations displacements and fertile lands distribution shifts. But it doesn't have to be a disaster for humanity... ugly as it may be, it's a live-and-let-die universe and irreversible biodiversity loss will happen, but humans are quite capable of not only maintaining but also accelerating, as it's our duty to, technological and scientific progress, as long as we don't stupidly turn against each-other! We have and entire universe to infect and conquer ffs, let's just not kill each other in the next century!)

With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.

So the productivity multiplier advice is this: learn to cope and be productive at doing the kinds of work where flow is impossible/unfeasible!

(This way you'll not be already tired and behind when you get to the work for which "flow" is possible...)

And yeah, psychologist REALLY suck at naming things!

And one of the reason to avoid ever discussing about "schizoid personality" with people who aren't trained psychologists since they're 90% likely to think you're talking about the wrong thing :|

Just that you can't engineer it so that only such use cases can be enabled by it, and most people using it will be "muh, stop advocating vaccines to me, wanna keep my blood pure" or equivalent types :| I probably have less faith in humanity than you do :)

That's perfectly OK too: some rooms don't serve their purpose anymore and need to be disbanded and replaced with other sets of rooms.

But imo Twitter still has a very good signal to noise ration if you use it for keeping up with things (NOT for friendly networking, it was never intended for that) and/or disseminating content that you find harder to spread on other channels.

And that's another argument against such social media "carpet blocking" features, people will just block whatever is "too difficult to understand" because they'll probably identify it as "malicious" and lock themselves into simplified "cartoon reality" bubbles where everything is simplified and ADHD-friendly and easy-to-digest.

Then people outside the bubble trying to transmit complex messages would just give up communicating, then you get two groups of people not communicating and this sooner or later leads to violent conflict.

Sure we need to work harder to fix discrimination etc. But in the end just as people exist people who think they shouldn't exist also exist. Fortunately reality doesn't always match what people think "should be", for both sides.

The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room" when the room if full of s*t / toxic people: if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (eg. "let see how you ignore a punch? how about a tank? how about a missile?" it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much).

P.S. just upvoted you ;)

I'd advise against doing more search on these topics if you want to sleep well at night and/or if you don't think you're already on one "naughty list" or another ;)

Planting a dirt bomb in a civilian inhabited city is way beyond war... 99.9% soldiers fighting in a war would not participate in anything similar to this... Even when a city is bombed to the ground, that generally happens well after beginning of a conflict and most people have been at least given one chance to run away or surrender... Most people who plan their lives well enough have a decent chance to at least evacuate vulnerable people from war zones (at high cost, sacrifice, but still).

The propaganda people currently trying to blur such lines are CRIMINAL imo...

> like the Khmer Rouge

Not sure how well this (or anything else) worked for them... afaik they ended up massacring a large part of their civilians population because they were paranoid and couldn't figure out who to trust, or had crazy ideas about who the ideal future citizens should be...

Yeah, sure, torturing enemy fighters to give away military secrets probably works just fine, just don't do it on a large enough scale or you'll just motivate the enemy to faith-to-death instead of risking to get captured... and this would likely nullify any advantage you'd gain.

There's a big gap between "regular war" and "total unrestricted violence and terror", that's why we talk of "war crimes"...

Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").

As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply.

But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians".

Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!

I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)

Torture and atrocities asside, I'd imagine most organized crime syndicates run tighter ships (eg. the standard dissolve the bodies of torture victims + kill the "torture service providers" too at regular intervals then re-recruit new ones etc.) ...this seem so beyond sloppy it's clearly a political s throwing play.

In all seriousness though, it seems that we're starting to follow this philosophy too far and applying it closer and closer to the territory of black-marbles / unsurvivable-black-swans. Or maybe it's just politicians that know they have the risks externalized from themselves so are more inclined to play lethal force games.

But, even beyond this, there's great advantage in fully excluding a certain risk, because then you can totally stop thinking about contingency plans for it, and you gain mind-space that can be used for something else... Eg. if you're missing flights 10% of the time, then you need to dedicate mind space for knowing how to book a flight from the airport, or how to re-arrange your schedule to accomodate not arriving on time somewhere etc. etc. And these "contingency plans" add up and swell. Or you don't make them, but with a 1-10% failure rate of things you're living in constant stress and anxiety because things actually do fail/ break for you... Lower stress and freed mind-space may be worth it a lot, and this is way people do things over-conservatively and pay for non-crucial insurance etc.

Every time humans try to "make some sense on what they can't fully make sense" a subgroup of them uses it as a tool to concentrate power... all old is new again...

Then again, the previous version of this, political ideologies, almost (or is still trying to get us) killed via full nuclear war, so this shiny new thing can very well be a "black marble"...

My pet conspiracy theory is that "the smoking people in dark rooms" wishing to kill any hopes of truly autonomous (eg. self-financing) decentralizes systems invented the "Web3" term and associated cocktail of host-killing ultra-aggresive virulent memetic weapons and stealthly gifted it to the unsuspecting community of people trying to combine "de-centralized autonomous oraganizations and platforms + de-centralized financial infrastructure"... now the fools have took the poisoned candy and are killing themselves and others with it while attracting all the vultures there are (con artists etc.)!

...then again, the internet was also awash with weird cult-like ideas at the beginning then it normalized to something that's at least clearly useful to everyone.

Guess they just have one of the buggiest locale detections in the world :)))

EDIT+: ...or maybe too many Chinese users leave their proxy/VPN on when using their site too