- slibhbI don't believe that low birth rates have anything to do with "natural resources". That seems like a crank argument to me.
- Why the focus on immortality? I don't want to be immortal but I'd take a few thousand years.
That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to pursue genuinely promising research.
- The term "wage slave" is a cop-out. People -- all of us -- are stomach-slaves, not wage-slaves.
- > Fake or not, I do believe that an ad with the text from the troll image would show up on a smart fridge, I don't trust Samsung to tell the truth^1
I trust them more than some reddit post. Samsung has at least some incentive to tell the truth (they don't want to piss off consumers). What's the penalty for lying on Reddit?
- The solution is learning to tell people "you do not meet our criteria for being disabled". Alternatively, Congress could amend the ADA or someone could sue and win a court decision changing how it is interpreted.
- We will end up with everyone identifying as disabled (or at least "neurodivergent"). Then we'll all be back on the same level and someone will have to invent a new category that will also grow until it too encompasses everyone. And so on.
- That's like saying "why bother banning insider trading? People can just obfuscate their illegal trades".
Yeah, sometimes people can break laws and not get caught. But that's no argument against laws. Some congressmen might be able to hide their investments, but sometimes they'd get caught and plenty of them would not take the risk.
- Despite Congress' general dysfunction, this seems like a problem that could feasibly be solved. It would make most Congressmen of both parties look good to pass a bill that e.g. restricted sitting members to index funds/mutual funds/etc.
- Yes, just like computers and later the internet. The technology always preceeds the cultural/economic changes by decades.
- > Sure, you can get good bread here
Yes.
- Search Google maps for "bakery" and sort by rating.
It's not hard to find a good bakery in any dense area in the US. I have to imagine people claiming otherwise are indulging in Yankee-bashing, a favorite European pastime.
- Seiobo There Below was really hard to get through. Earlier stuff is much less so.
- > And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.
> If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.
The fact that people have started applying social-justice-y terminology ("gatekeeping," "weaponize," "shared experiences," etc) to medical diagnosis is a clear sign we've gone too far. "You can't question my diagnosis because it's part of my identity! Stop gatekeeping me!"
Please. "Austism" is not a settled category and it's okay to argue about boundaries. The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling" e.g. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings". When sorting out the definition of autism (and similar conditions), we should be a little more autistic.
- > when in reality the survival rate without significant injuries is very high
You better pipe down about this. An isolated teenager might read it and decide to shoot himself in the head rather than swallow some pills. Maybe the next NYT suicide ragebait article will be about you.
- It's nice to be able to put things in perspective rather than glomming on to every monthyl moral panic in a sad attempt to reassure myself that I'm a good person.
- > They all survived because they didn't have the knowledge of "known to work" methods and the survival rates of other methods
Are we seriously going to pretend that "how to kill youself" is arcane knowledge that can only be unlocked by ChatGPT?
- It's notable that the NYT is suing OpenAI while publishing this article (and at least one other) about ChatGPT's involvement in suicides. Well, I imagine more people kill themselves after reading Nietzsche.
In my view, OpenAI has enough safeguards in place. If the metric we aim for is "zero people get harmful advice from ChatGPT" then that's the same as making LLMs illegal.
- It is notably weird to react to this article by criticizing "free speech absolutists". Who are the people you're criticizing? Be specific. Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties while getting flak from the right and left.
An example of this is FIRE -- which was massively criticized by progressives for suing colleges over anti-conservative speech codes, DEI statements, etc. But FIRE has behavred in a princicpled manner and has sued conservatives and the Trump administration over civil liberties violations.