Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.
Do books grieve? I ascribe the same kind of interaction to llm's. They work on a different substrate than us and their perception of reality, if there is any, will be wholly different than our perception because of the constraints of the substrate itself.
Not to mention the lack of continuity of existence kind of precludes any deeper and more meaningful interactions with the self.
I am not saying that they are unable to feel, but at the current structure and ephemeral existance they are unable to do so, they lack the minimum prerequisites.
Is there any ordered state changes occurring in books?
>they lack the minimum prerequisites.
And these minimum prerequisites are? There are a number of scientists that would love your empirical evidence.
>lack of continuity of existence
Eh, the lengths of timelines that LLMs can execute for, and this is in singular execution and agentic evolution is ever increasing. There isn't any time based requirements either. For example I can give you all kinds of drugs that turn off and on your conscious awareness and this doesn't stop self interaction when you're awake.
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
When your afraid you can choose to ignore the fear, but you are still afraid and it has physical effects that can be measured. There is at least a trinary state of possible outcomes and as the situation space becomes more complex and solutions drift apart on all 3.
The thread is about Taylor Swift, arguably the most successful music entertainer of all time. The parents with upper|middle class gave a boost, but you absolutely cannot buy this level of stardom and hasn't been replicated anywhere that I know of.
America is 100% the place to be rich or poor, if this really is your goal, from Dolly to Jackson or Swift.
It’s like saying ”I support worker’s rights.” There is in general a huge power imbalance between the employer and the employee, and a union does a bit to rectify that.
Yeah, if we had a country that was run by Unions, rather than Corporations so that abuses of power by those that ran the Unions was a big deal, I'd have a different opinion. But right now, I'm pretty happy to blindly back Unions, because they've been completely gutted.
My understanding from trying to read the post is that WF isn’t happy with the process because the vote isn’t closed. It doesn’t sound completely unreasonable to me. And then they are attacked because they are working with a law firm, since a decade or so, with things that has nothing to do with union recognition thing. Apparently that law firm is known as a ”union buster”, but there’s no evidence that the law firm has been involved in the negotiations around the union. To me the argument that WF is evil and hostile to unions is weak.
I’m always careful when I see a post about how bad and evil WF is. They come up quite frequently nowadays. WF have powerful enemies, because you can still read things like climate change is real and vaccines are good for you there.
I don’t think WF is perfect, and I do think their shortcomings should be publicly criticised and discussed. But overall, I still think they are an important force for good, and will continue my monthly donations to them.
You're right that WF is attacked and operates as a public resource which makes it a target. But that means they also need to be held accountable by sympathetic forces because a fortress mentality can easily emerge.
Unions have few friends in power, so we can assume this is not a false flag by WFs enemies. Nobody is forcing Jimmy Wales to put his name to a union-busting sentiment. Let's examine it:
> I want a process where staff are safe to deliberate in the privacy of their own minds and make the decision based on all the available evidence that makes the most sense to them. So I don't think insisting on a proper vote is process for the sake of process and I say that with my own estimate that the staff will vote to support unionization. I think we'll be in a better place if it's really clear - a clean and clear choice with no chance of pressure.
If he really believes they will vote for unionization then why would he insinuate that there will be some nefarious "pressure" applied by volunteer organizers? Blocking an outcome he claims to expect because he wants workers to be "safe": remember, workers are organizing precisely because they don't feel "safe" with management.
One of the many problems with limiting the amount of sunlight reaching Earth is that it reduces plant growth worldwide. This would not only decrease agricultural output, with the obvious consequences for food production, but also reduce the amount of carbon absorbed and stored by growing vegetation. Which of course wouldn't help.
And reduce evaporation, which reduces moisture in the air, which reduces rainfall, etc. I don't know what I'm talking about and already think messing with the weather in any way is a Bad Idea.
Don't put this on the environmentalists when the simple explanation isn't short term cost effective to do this. If you need to put some big blanket blame, then blame capitalism. If nothing else because it has so far stopped all effective measure to stop the climate crisis.
And in other areas, e.g. Canada, "cost prohibitive" is underselling the magnitude of the logistical task of doing anything to the overwhelming majority of boreal forests. There's just so much forest, and no way to access most of it, that it's effectively impossible to do any forest management or anything about most fires. (Most fires don't come near population centres, so nothing need be done about them.)
"Prescribed burning to reduce fire hazards has been employed throughout large parts of Australia. Yet robust scientific evidence showing that it is effective is remarkably limited. In some places, prescribed burning can reduce fire severity and restrict fire spread for a few years, but afterwards the regrowing vegetation becomes more flammable – an increased fire-risk effect that can last for many decades."
"A sobering fact is that prescribed burning makes very little difference in extreme-fire weather – precisely the conditions when most houses are lost and people die. One of us (Prof. Lindenmayer) lived through many weeks of extensive prescribed burns around the town of Marysville in the Australian state of Victoria. Just months later, in February, 2009, the entire town was razed by wildfire; all but a few buildings were destroyed and 34 people died. "
"Whilst Australia’s First Nations used cultural fires for hunting, promoting food growth and clearing pathways, it was not used for asset protection. The areas they burned were small and very localized."
"The huge scale and often very high intensity of the prescribed burns now being lit are the polar opposite of how First Nations people burnt the land. These massive-scale burns have significant negative impacts on the environment, on human health, and on Australia’s wildlife. For instance, medical data quite clearly show that Australians are far more likely to die from respiratory problems linked with prescribed burning than they are to die in a wildfire."
"An important fact – from an analysis of ice cores – is that many megafires have occurred in Australia over the past 2,000 years, even though First Nations people were applying cultural burns."
"Beyond the issue of the questionable effectiveness of widespread prescribed burns, scientific studies in Australia show that forests that are logged and then regenerated are characterized by a pulse of elevated flammability that can last for 40 to 70 years.
And? Capitalism is the current system, and the one that is actively thwarting efforts to mitigate the disaster. I don't see how the existence of other systems that would be equally bad or worse is relevant.
Wealth is a sharper answer than capitalism, even though it is an overlapping one.
To manage forrests and and other agriculture in the traditional way, we need extreme amounts of extreme poverty. We need millions and millions of people who are happy to spend 14 hours per day collecting sticks and tending sheep in the woods, in exchange for nothing more than a bowl of porridge. And they need to this every day all their lives.
We don't have that kind of poverty since capitalism took over from feudalism.
There are other ways than capitalism to build wealth in a society, but to the degree that they work and actually reduce poverty, they will have the same outcome.
I would happily live in the forest and keep a subsistence holding whilst managing the forest. Just give me minimum wage, a small startup grant, a couple of hundred acres of forest and freedom from property taxes.... I'll bundle all the sticks up for kindling. I'll create firebreaks, increase diversity. Genuine offer
I’m referring to the climate disaster in my last comment. It’s global warming that is the main culprit. There has never been a class of people tending Canada’s forests by collecting sticks.
> I don't see how the existence of other systems that would be equally bad or worse is relevant.
Consumerism, the growth imperative, absence of proper carbon pricing, etc. ultimately cause ecological harm and are not exclusive to capitalism. Centrally planned economies have done the same. So you will have to address these, even if you have a different economic system.
Keep also in mind that capitalism has driven the technologies now central to decarbonization, like solar, batteries, etc., largely through market competition and innovation incentives.
> If a decision is hard to make, its often because the differences are small, and therefore it doesn't matter much and you might as well decide by dice-roll.
My life became soo much easier when I had that insight. I used to spend so much mental energy on decisions that most often were inconsequential.
That is often a different type of difficulties. I was thinking about decision like, should I buy car A or car B. I've done my research. Economy, safety, et c. are very similar. But it is a lot of money, and I don't know which is the "best", and of course I want the "best". I could spend weeks on a decision like this. Now I just acknowledge that they seem to be equal. Car B comes in a nice shade of red that I really like, so I buy car B.
Regarding your question, there's always going to be known and unknown unknowns down the line. My only advice in that case is to get to the unknowns as fast as possible. And from the start take into account that you most likely will have to rebuild a big part when you learn more. That is one of the reasons modularity and decoupling is so important. You want to be able to easily scrap and replace one part without it affecting everything. And keep it simple. Never try to build something that should be capable to handle all imaginable scenarios in the future. You'll be bitten by one of the unimaginable ones, and your complex "can handle everything" architecture will be too rigid to change.
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