Kattywumpus

I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.

One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move.

But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.

This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.

This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.

To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.

I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.

Interesting, especially because GPT-4o still can't tell you how many R's there are in "strawberry".

I was just re-watching "Westworld" recently, and there's a moment when Aaron Paul's character Caleb is having a telephone conversation with a sympathetic HR employee who tells him that he didn't get the job.

"Listen, Caleb. Your application was very strong. Unfortunately, our strategy group just hasn't found an opening for you."

Caleb sighs, and says nothing.

The HR employee gently asks, "Caleb, are you still with me?"

"Ok, thank you. Is there anything I should be working on to make myself a better candidate?"

"Like I said, your application was very strong. We just don't have anything that would be a great fit for you right now."

"If I'm not a good fit, is there a different shape I could squeeze myself into?"

There is a pause.

Caleb asks, "Hey, no offense but... are you human?"

"I'm Shaun," the voice says. "I can help you with all kinds of resources... anything else I can do for you today, Caleb?"

This feels a lot like that.

Let's just do away with the justice system entirely since social media seems to fulfill its functions perfectly.

As I pointed out above, this is really 20th century thinking. Social media allows for a kind of mob behavior that has shown itself antithetical to the kind of market liberalism most of our current assumptions are based on.

Or did you not notice that Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users had literally been systematically erased from the internet yesterday by hounding their service providers?

It's bizarre to see the liberal left I grew up with now defending a kind of insane market fundamentalism and corporate control of the commons of free speech without even blinking at the contradiction. I think that liberal left I grew up with is dead.

We need a name for what it has become, and where they are taking us.

We really need a better vocabulary for talking about this sort of thing than the 20th century terms of fascism, communism, and liberalism. I don't have the words yet, but we need to start inventing them.

We are in a new era, and our disasters won't look like theirs. People who shrug away this kind of censorship with the magic words "private company" are in a dangerous form of denial.

> For God's sake, is this where we're headed? Just ban anything that sounds offensive?

Headed?

I think about this a lot. We are the first people in human history to see the planets up close, so to speak.

For thousands of years, humans stared up at the sky and watched these luminous dots change position over time. They made up stories about them, tracked them, designed instruments to turn these blurry, luminous dots into slightly-less-blurry luminous dots.

But in this long human journey of thousands of years, we are the first generation to actually see these dots of light as the worlds they are. Us. You and me. So many thousands of years of ancient dreaming and wondering, going all the way back to our hominid ancestors, gazing at the night sky in wordless wonder.

And we, our generation of humans, are the culmination of this journey of imagination.

What they could only imagine, we know. For the first time in history, in my lifetime, we've visited every planet in the solar system. Any planet you see in the sky? We have photos of it. We've mapped its surface, or visited it directly. You want to know what sunset on Mars looks like? You don't have to guess.

We take this all for granted. I don't think we even appreciate the legacy we inherited. It feels like there should be a Planet Day, where we all celebrate the knowing. Where we symbolically link hands with our ancestors across time, with everyone who ever squinted up at all the little sparkles on the big black ocean and wished they knew what they were.

A day when everyone looks at at least one photograph from every celestial body we've seen, and appreciates the gift we've been given. And then maybe looks at the best photos we have of exoplanets, and realizes that we are in the same position today that our hominid ancestors were, wondering what these places will someday turn out to be, and who we will be when we finally know them.

> I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.

You're swearing off the internet entirely?

> We don't store any of the images uploaded or generated. Once the toonification has finished running no images are kept on our systems.

I imagine this is all in good fun, but this disclaimer doesn't rule out data being derived from your face and stored or sold later.

I want to thank you for linking to the articles, even if you disagree with him.

Calling an observation "offensive" and punishing someone for making it, is not refuting it, or even addressing it. America's tradition has always valued free speech and open debate, and it seems many people on the left no longer value these things. I do find that chilling.