I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.…

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve been thinking about this and wondering what happens if he dies from natural causes in office. The GOP infighting would be tremendous and without the cult of personality to hold the administration together, I’m not sure what would happen. Vance doesn’t have what it takes, but with Peter Thiel backing him, it would essentially be a wackadoo billionaire being the power behind the throne.




  • In addition to the point about Western mythologies dominating because of cultural exports, I think there is also the undercurrent of England’s original mythologies having been “lost” and so the English were always fascinated by the mythologies of the Norse (due to being invaded) and by the Greeks and Romans (as previous “great” civilizations they aspired to be).

    Combine that with America’s obvious English influences and the influence of England as a colonizer around the world, and those mythologies gained a huge outsized influence.






  • Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to reconcile what he’s saying with the video evidence.

    Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.



  • Weirdly antagonistic tone and not sure when Silver pissed in your Wheaties, but you obviously have a hang up about him. No desire to go tit for tat, other than to say he’s been more reliably accurate over time than anyone else when it comes to politics. It’s like baseball - if you lifetime hit for .300, everyone is going to know your name.

    Also, the whole point of the article is that early voting patterns are not indicative of final results. That’s not polling analysis or data modeling, that’s just historical fact. I don’t think Silver is perfect, and he’s got problematic issues, but on this point he’s just pointing out the thing the media ignores because it gives them headlines galore for the last two weeks before the election.









  • I probably didn’t explain well enough. Consuming media (books, TV, film, online content, and video games) is predominantly a passive experience. Obviously video games less so, but all in all, they only “adapt” within the guardrails of gameplay. These AI chatbots however are different in their very formlessness - they’re only programmed to maintain engagement and rely on the LLM training to maintain an illusion of “realness”. And because they were trained on all sorts of human interactions, they’re very good at that.

    Humans are unique in how we continually anthropomorphize tons of not only inert, lifeless things (think of someone alternating between swearing at and pleading to a car that won’t start) but abstract ideals (even scientists often speak of evolution “choosing” specific traits). Given all of that, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be worried about a teen with a still developing prefrontal cortex and who is in the midst of working on understanding social dynamics and peer relationships to embue an AI chatbot with far more “humanity” than is warranted. Humans seem to have an anthropomorphic bias in how we relate to the world - we are the primary yardstick we use to measure and relate everything around us, and things like AI chatbots exploit that to maximum effect. Hell, the whole reason the site mentioned in the article exists is that this approach is extraordinarily effective.

    So while I understand that on a cursory look, someone objecting to it comes across as a sad example of yet another moral panic, I truly believe this is different. For one, we’ve never had access to such a lively psychological mirror before and it’s untested waters; and two, this isn’t some objection on some imagined slight against a “moral authority” but based in the scientific understanding of specifically teen brains and their demonstrated fragility in certain areas while still under development.


  • Thanks! I’m not sure how much is patience and how much is just being resigned to the mods making the wrong decision on this one. I think the rule change is just punishing the community for their own past failings, but I don’t really see anyone being able to change their minds on this one. And being a mod - especially on /politics - is by definition a thankless and difficult job, so I do understand where they’re coming from in part. Unfortunately they seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.