- From the article:
> They can also increase suicidal ideation.
A very close family member committed suicide, after Prozac dosage adjustments made his brain chemistry go haywire.
This happened 30 years ago, and it has been known to us that Prozac can cause this, since then.
The Guardians headline is way, way understating the real situation here.
- Its exactly this. And the majority of persons in powerful regulatory roles completely don’t get or comprehend this effect.
When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:
The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:
- people circumvent rules and go criminal
- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist
- sections of an economy die
- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
- This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)
This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria.
So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process.
I could write a long essay on this.
But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing.
Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.
- Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted.
A subjective answer is, if you have been there and know this to be real from personal experience.
A more general answer would be, as long as we humans sufficiently interact with reality, we will have a respository of life experience to benchmark against.
Once we cease to do that, and are the product of a life in front of the screen, then we won’t know anymore.
Edit: This place is relatively close to where I live.
- To add to this, it is even funnier how travel agents undergo training in order to be able to interface with and operate the “machine readable“ APIs for booking flight tickets.
What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking websites) available to us.
- In terms of economics and utility, the last 80% of effort produces 20% of the result. But the last 80% give us something much more that isn’t quantified: The feeling of having completed something of value, and having done it properly, carries an inherent value that surpasses the last 20% output. It is unquantifiable and priceless. This is when work or products become timeless and truly valuable. Not to mention that feeling of satisfaction and completeness of taking an accomplishment to that level.
- If a company’s goal is to bring rockets to mars/solve world transport logistics/create driverless cars/etc/etc, you are not going to care about what is fair or what creates pressure. You will find the persons that can get the job done. Things like preventing burn out or balancing work with personal life will be dealt within the scope of reaching that goal. Many sensitivities in this thread or considerations of whats fair and isn’t, is really irrelevant. What goal is being pursued, and how can it be reached sensibly, is what matters in the end.
- Without trying to ridicule you, asking “what social contract?” In this kind of discussion is like a first year university student asking “what’s a fraction?” in first year maths classes.
An entire section of philosophy is built on this question alone, and why there is such a thing as a social contract.
- The elephant in the room is this question:
What do we value? What is our value system made up of?
This is, in my opinion, the Achille‘s heel of the current trajectory of the West.
We need to know what we are doing it for. Like the OP said, he is motivated by the human connectedness that art, music and the written word inspire.
On the surface, it seems we value the superficial smuckness of LLM-produced content more.
This is a facade, like so many other superficial artifacts of our social life.
Imperfect authenticity will soon (or sometime in the future) become a priceless ideal.
- This is published by a website that needs to be visited in order to justify its existence. Like the majority of the web these days.
Small signals in study data are overhyped and extrapolated to make general sweeping conclusions.
I’m not saying coffee is either bad, or a miracle substance.
I am saying everyone and everything on this planet craves relevance.
- Everyone needs money, it doesn’t matter who you are and what your circumstances are. So to bring this up as an argument against someone is kind of pointless.
But someone needing money still needs to motivate the reasons-for to the money-giver. So this is perfectly valid.
I will go as a far as saying that your post portrays an ideologically skewed world-view by insinuating that wanting money is something “bad or morally tainted”.
But yes- of course the money-giver has the right to view the pros-and-cons of giving money and decide who receives it. Because the money-giver has the right to push an agenda according to their value system, by deciding who they give money to.
The open letter is about more than nixOS and appeals to the stated ideals of the EU.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.