shrubby

Yes.

Aleksey Yurchak coined a term Hupernormalisation and it works here too.

We know the reality, yet leaders keep telling us via TV, social media... that everything is fine.

We know that they know that we know.

Fake world? Matrix? Escape from the freedom?

This is brilliant! Immediately forwarded to the boss.

From the casinos (Natasha Dow Schull and Addiction by Design) to Stanford and BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab fast forward to AI to hyperboost the addiction and that's where we're at.

Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.

His book was so good. Real agent stuff!

And I took some math in university before dropping out of CSC decades ago, so it isn't too hard, but my hunch is that with the BSs students the statistics in decent level would've been too much anyway.

Dunno really.

I'm a bachelor of social services and healthcare from applied side so if statistics we're mentioned they must've been in the small print.

I started thinking about this percentage on decision makers around the world and got a chuckle.

I've been trying to talk about the median vs. mean with a bunch of politicians on themes around the zillionaires, wealth or consumption and for most parts they're clueless. Or the ones with degrees still go with the normal (mean that skews the normal) as they're afraid.

I just happened to get a copy of naked statistics yesterday, as I feel the human traits of poor comprehension of probabilities can be enhanced to at least some extent. And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

If there are better entry-level books on the matter I'm happy to take some recommendations.

M4 with 32 gigs and a 1 terabyte here and how I wish this could run Linux properly.

Windows sucks and MacOS perhaps even more, but we're locked in.

Perhaps soon everything will be reversed by AI and we can use whatever OS we wish on whatever device we supposedly own.

Yes. Nietzsche once said God is dead and I guess the time has come to say "the systemic change is dead".

Our destiny is not decided by a abstract superorganism, but a handful of people given godly rights create the rulebook. And to take us with them in the pursuit of suicide.

Yup.

I have once gotten a copy when visiting somewhere abroad as a teenager, it had a blue car on the cover. We didn't have those.

I have been amused by this memory occasionally while doing the middle aged version of maxim.

When do the locked old apple pads open up for Linux?

After spending most of today circling around maxims I appreciate the application.

Though I must state that the pic almost had me closing the tab before reading.

Here's another venting out, somewhere near Categorical Imperative https://kohlbergs7.org/epm/

Or basic humanity

Okay, I wanted a Pixel because of GrapheneOS, but thanks Google for wiping that desire.

It's also poverty holding back millionaire consumption.

There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.

But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.

My cringe has been handcrafted and vegan. Pure human slop!

Damn right:D

I was just saying yesterday that we (Finland) could take the bullet and create a luxury resort for all the zillionaires in the world.

Connect them with each other and populate their air-gapped "Internet" with like-minded authoritarian AI-bots and create special news like Don and Vladimir are being fed to keep them from tantrums. A win win for everyone!

Ooh, and mental health services. Plenty of mental health services as we're so poor of a race that even our richest can't afford enough therapy to feel alright!

We're afraid of the zillionaire tantrums, thus this should be a coordinated effort.

I'm seeing it from both sides of the isles that people are being fed up with the overlords.

But currently the zillionaire tantrums control the future so you're right.

Yup. Make the flyers pay the infrastructure costs based on the environmental effects. It's not too complicated.

Most people on the planet can avoid flying alright.

The addicts cannot? Or who cannot? Anyone with money cannot?

Homo fricking economicus for you alright.

Yes! Why bother doing anything differently, when the current method has been so perfect for us

Sadly these days this seems like the least worse of the three major regimes.

Root cause is the human biases and lying due to cognitive dissonance? And alcohol is a symptom that's easy to grasp.

You’re talking about waterfall management by laws and I’m talking about individual consciousness and the capability of understanding our biases? I guess that explains the perceived differences.

I stated earlier that I really don’t have the resources for this discussion in extent, but I’m leaving a draft for a blog post based on this too. I’ve been creating a matrix of different human habits to perform the cost/benefit calcucaltion. For alcohol and for practically anything individuals do.

I’ll try to sum it up here really quickly and hope for you to provide the pluses, should you have those, for alcohol. You already mentioned with strong emphasis that its normal thus right. And I don’t think either of the “facts” that we’re used to doing something (like smoking, before it was approached with honesty) or because others are doing it (like social media on the predatory and attention wrecking platforms) are good reasons, but I’ll accept that these are pluses to you.

So based on the homo economicus narrative we are rational and will make a rational choice, right? Then this matrix (a quick draft, for reference only, I hope you give me more minuses here than the buzz, the norm and the herd instinct) should work as the guiding light. https://imgur.com/a/NgV6dt9

Then we have the homo ephicus (ethical human with a twist of brutal praxis) that knows that human “mind” is actually an intuition making decisions and strategic reasoning and excuses and post-hoc justifications (thanks Jon Haidt & Hume) we use to lie to ourselves and to our societies.

So with the lingo of THN: normal =! right

human =! reason

human === lying

But sorry, I can’t do this more clearly as the homo economicus world is putting immense pressure on the cog, I’m positioned to be. I’ll keep you in mind should I have the time to make this bit better.

Yes. 100 percent agree. The addiction industry requires us to be desperate and wanting an escape, so that they can brainwash us into complicity and brain fog from hangover or doomscrollin.

Escape can be done with a lot of things, most of those aren't as harmful as alcohol.

Even in substances there are some with very light harms compared to ethanol, but "this is what we've always been doing".

Banning something that has so huge disadvantages, but has been lobbied just like cigarettes is exactly the kind of society I want to live in.

But the choice is not mine, so in that way I win.

It's a social norm and a poison from my POV and just like pfas or plastic in the drinking water I believe it should be controlled and the lobbying banned. Then we'd see the true wish of humanity.

Now our needs are manufactured, not around our wellbeing, but for what "must" be lobbied and advertised.

The norm is manufactured. Just like the addictive algorithms and almost any other thing in this world of pseudo-free will.

Even the likes of Joe Rogan are bringing up the issue, with many others so I see some light in the tunnel for my society, but so far you're right. Your side seems to be winning.

I'm tempted to start the full deontology and Jellinek model on substance abuse on this, but don't have the effort now.

If we perform a cost benefit analysis on alcohol the downsides are plentiful and then some.

And the pluses are practically masked versions (taste, buzz,...) of the two major things that make human do anything: what others are doing and what I'm used to (which are pretty shit reasons to do anything IMO) it basically boils down to addiction. Not chemical, but functional and social.

Then we return to the cost benefit analysis and start figuring out how far the lying disease has progressed. The fierceness of the debate feels like a good indicator of this usually.

I'd be tempted to explain this more in depth, but I have stuff to do.

And the substance abuse is a progressive lying disease so once we figure out "this has gone too far" the threshold for abuse has been crossed a long time ago in most cases.

First the close ones see the problem and the individual in question is the last to see it. Thus a lying disease.

This.

In a healthy society there would be no need for intoxicants with so severe harms (BBC list for substances by harm is a good reference) and thus no exposure for a addictive substance.

Now the norm decides that, almost without exceptions, we must all be exposed.