cj9

It's 1930 again

It's interesting how machines now mirror our relationship to sanity.

Just under the surface of human consciousness, we are constantly hallucinating and predicting what we may occur next. We are good at discarding what doesn't align with our working model of the world before reaching awareness and taking action. It's our attempt to conceptualize reality. Considering how un-grounded from reality humans are becoming, the fact we have to balance our nervous systems, the mistakes we do make day-to-day, and how minor physiological changes (from poison to injury to drugs to random chance) can disrupt the process, it doesn't take much for humans to make a major mistake or enter a psychotic state.

It wouldn't surprise me if a systematic approach to solve these problems with LLMs could be applied to human/hybrid teams.

Some people comment whatever random crap comes to mind as if every thought is interesting to others.

It attracts attention though...

They just need two trillion dollars in donations first!

> I hope you learn to appreciate that

It's condescending because you are implying they have defective reasoning, or are ungrateful, or unaware of what to be appreciative of in life when you literally know nothing more than what's written in their comment. No idea of their situation but enough to assume they need to "learn" appreciation somehow. The lack of any other reflection or empathy shows it's not a sincere attempt to connect.

It's pointless because as your reply shows, you are projecting your issues into someone else's life by giving them faux concern and advice, instead of sharing to empathize and giving practical advice from experience.

This would be an example response to your grief, in your style:

"You're able to write a comment on HN. You're lucky. I hope you learn to appreciate that.

Why? I lost function in my hands. I would trade places in a heartbeat, no matter how bad the rest of my trade partner’s life might be. You don’t think a functioning body is something worth appreciating?"

We could go on forever like this, rationalizing everything away, when people are simply expressing how they feel. Actually it might be slightly damaging more than pointless, everybody loses when comments are like this.

> Israel needs to exist until Arab countries become developed democracies

A country engaged in genocide needs to exist for your personal benefit? To carry out an obviously failed dream which was sold to the masses as the only viable option to be "safe" from extreme regimes and beliefs?

The West created and supported terrible individuals and dictatorships in the entire region, publicizing them to craft false narratives as a means of controlling the masses, despite it giving these people more power and connections. This fueled instability and showed how to become an effective enemy. It's beyond irony that the most dangerous of these threats have roots from direct funding and weapons from the USA/West, while groups and civilians became more organized and extremist directly in response to Western interference over decades. The evidence is clear, modern "wars" are driven by vain political "optics" and individual enrichment. You can't think outside the narrative and rhetoric of these systems and then conclude external action is going to make you safe.

We covertly and overtly mess with their lives, country systems, and leadership. We fund terrorists, criminals, and mercenaries to get our desired result. We invade and fight however we please, insert whoever will benefit us, then retreat on a whim, after destroying the infrastructure and systems of democratic response except for protecting access to what we can take (oil), without a plan for the country or citizens. We leave it to fester, forget the country exists, then later wonder why a country in shock and decline ends up being controlled by violent groups. We then pretend to wonder why the hardened citizens who fought for/with/adjacent/by-proxy for us and lost everything (loved ones, community, home, sense of belonging and safety) suddenly become radicalized. Then we use that as an excuse to start interfering again, or even wipe them out, on repeat. We also respond far harsher to any perceived interference with both hard and soft-power, such as killing civilians (including children), trapped in a country now run by these terrorizing dictators that we either directly supported, trained, or influenced.

By crazy mental gymnastics, many people then believe the conclusion to this is we are clearly superior beings living in the optimal societal system, ignoring the fact that these are humans just like us doing very predictable human things. This gets extended to an extreme belief that we must (and can, and have the right to) eradicate entire groups of people or races and/or re-educate to our way of living. The hyper-rationalizations of our actions to arrive at such flawed logic appears to be a symptom of the system which has been capitalized on for decades; such a complex and abstract atomized society forces us to find a coherent internal narrative that feels safe, aligned, and connected to (the hyper-real) external reality.

Closer to home, our own citizens died in failed wars based on lies, meddling, false-flag operations, scaremongering, and fearful rhetoric. Yet we still believe what we see and fail to question how a lifetime of this leaves us brainwashed into unquestionably feeling superior. It requires active effort to critically question our beliefs in such a system. Those that can't cope watch our own politics and media become extreme, hateful, doomer rhetoric, to be angered into attacking people in our own countries for being slightly different, family even. It's an unnaturally inflated feeling, engineered to heighten the primal fears of anything "other" than what's declared to be correct.

We aren't led by example and we don't have good discussions. Education is to generate workers and self-autonomy, not to provide enlightenment or for personal development. Many never play fair and are praised for it. The past is somehow simultaneously irrelevant and yet paramount, so we are trapped in a loop of exploitation which sucks the life out of culture. We have no vision from the future that doesn't involve despair or escaping the planet. We are at the mercy of "markets" that have no centralized control, planning, or true backups and fail-safes, as the entire system is designed around the idea of self-enrichment rather than human safety and security. Safety nets are illusions or are under threat. Very few seem to know or care.

In the meantime, media institutions, information networks, technology, land, assets, and infrastructure is sold to anyone: designated enemies, adjacent enemies, known terrorists, convicted criminals, dictators, psychologically unsound individuals, etc.

Evidently it's never about making life better for people in the world, never mind in our own countries, and deep down we all know this to an extent. Individualism generates uneasiness from the lack of a primal sense of belonging. We try to mask it constantly with activity and thought, by seeking instant pleasure, ego-massage, and reinforcing our own narratives. Distraction, escapism, and lack of community isn't a model to force on the world. We aren't developed or psychologically sound so much as simply being rich, which allows some self-autonomy - both things we refuse to export anyway as we want money and power. So the whole set of arguments that we are spreading the means of being "stable, civilized, democratic democracy" is absurdly illogical and hypocritical.

Structured systems, open information, and collective action are the foundations of democracy. All have been under constant threat, from dismantling "bureaucracy", attacking access to information and banning/shaming protests to outright murder. With less restrictions and oversight, the scope and scale of power increases, reducing inherent stability and increasing the risk of collapse. The foundational aspects of modern democracy such as freedom of information and communication (without monitoring) is either a farce or constantly under threat.

We have not learned to be critical and aware vs being naive and ignorant, probably because it's scary and highlights how much energy will be required to change. Most choose to instead engage with the controlled reality, which bombards us with crafted actions and media to fuel the primal fear of any "otherness" being a threat, which justifies it to be controlled, exploited, or destroyed. They can then declare to you _why_ you are scared, and how it justifies whatever action that benefits them personally. The outcome doesn't matter to most, anywhere near as much as being told "it was a success" or "we are safer now", "don't worry we have all the answers" etc. Even if we don't believe, we are forced to listen because they hold access to the critical information and means of accessing it to make a decision either way, whilst they actively spread misinformation to deceive us. Our current "democratic" are more rotten and corrupt than the Soviet era.

I'm appalled at the rapid decline of what made the West something I'd recommend and be proud of sharing to developing countries. What we really did was export spying, weapons, technology, information, warfare knowledge, and terrorism. We train and support populations to become militarized, angry, and poor. The shocking state of things is evident and obvious now we have access to so much information. It's becoming less forgivable to ignore the reality hiding under the surface. We only have our ongoing example of society to offer to the world, and from the outside it's a shockingly obscene, hypocritical, primal, self-interested, short-sighted, performative, based hyper-reality that claims to offer personal freedom and federated power, but actually gives corporate freedom, secret alliances rather than competition, and centralized power.

I believe it's the fear of true reality feeds a divide. The primal response to viscerally defend the existing illusions when safety is threatened seems to be strong: double down, ignore all the previous failures, ignore what we can see with our own eyes, ignore the lies and manipulation, believe the false logic, subscribe to a specific way of thinking, and frame arguments about millions of human beings right to exist outside our country through a lens of how it indirectly affects a perceived feeling of safety (and oil prices of course). This happens by giving up a sense of self and becoming part of an invisible system of directed mass psychosis, just like a cult. It's cults, addictions, criminals, and exploitation all the way down. Lucky breaks allow some to struggle less, mostly at the expense of others.

Writing this makes me realize just how screwed up the situation is.

If you think about it, telling someone who's depressed because they are not enjoying life or what it has to offer; "survive and prosper as much as you can in the meantime", simply because their generation will potentially live a lifetime longer than the current life expectancy and things are always changing, is absurd.

"Life is long", "things will get better", "you never know what will happen", "luck works in mysterious ways", and other false platitudes offered to someone deeply suffering, gives the impression that it's out of their control despite still being their responsibility. It could be read as "you have a lot longer to suffer yet and I offer no concrete reason why it shall improve, or reasons to have hope for now or that future, but trust it'll be fine". Often what follows is "if faith doesn't work then that's a sign of the sickness or your unwillingness to get better".

The chance that quick fluff like this will help someone as if they haven't thought or tried basic things like just carrying on (which they are already doing every day anyway), is near zero. Especially on such a forum (problem solvers, thinkers, higher average intelligence). Yet the chance of subtle dismissive nature of people who take time to make a fuss or signal care but not to truly understand, is extremely high. It's frequent and damaging long-term.

My suggestion would be to speak your personal experience if you have it, or spend effort to clarify and empathize how people feel. If not, it's honestly best to not say anything.

> just

Ah it's that easy is it? Just do something else, just find new community, just move, just be happy, just blame others for their issues and just trivialize possible solutions.

What a pathetically condescending thing to say.

The type of rhetoric from someone who undoubtedly knows nothing and has no experience, is sickeningly embarrassing.

What a condescending and pointless thing to say.

> What I do know is that I wish he could have known how many people would miss him.

Personally, that's not comforting. The real issue is the lack of reciprocal effort and understanding.

Generally, people miss how others make them feel and the benefit of knowing them. I rarely see people miss or grieve the individual.

If grandma had wheels, she'd be a bike.

Enough to build an appropriate mental model for a brain set up to tackle problems this way.