notabee

The objects of status are quite flexible culturally, though. Cultural anthropology shows us a huge variety of ways that different cultures handle status competition. People will definitely still compete for status but what that entails could look very different from our current toxic grindset culture. Much like sports often serve as a substitute outlet for the same instincts that lead to fighting or war, that social selection will find different outlets that don't have to be literal survival battles for much of the population if we can create different material and cultural conditions.

There's so much fad diet marketing and propaganda out there, but the Mediterranean diet is one of the few that's actually backed by a decent amount of real scientific research as being healthy for most people.

The most serious vulnerability that any LLM has exposed to date is in the human brain, where a whole lot of people cannot help but anthropomorphize it and they seem to be willing to totally forego critical thinking. I think this vulnerability has existed for a long time but the mass exploitation is going to destroy quite a few organizations.

I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.

I think that fasting-mimicking diets are a way to potentially get some of these benefits through occasionally engaging these "slower speed" repair mechanisms without permanently living with bare minimum protein intake. But I also think that at this point so far we've seen fat, sugar, and then all carbohydrates villainized. I don't think that excessive protein is going to turn out to be a good idea either and it will likely also have its turn as villain, especially after all of these new high protein fad foods that are still highly processed junk run their course. People just need to balance their damn nutrients and eat whole foods. There aren't many real shortcuts to health, but we're just desperate to find them due to time poor societies obsessed with hyper-optimization.

Conway's Law still holds true. Software applications will resemble the communication structure of the companies that build them. If the companies are comprised of 90% overly verbose bullshit, so too will be the fragile slop monstrosities that they build.

Any system is going to have a free rider problem. I genuinely believe that if we stopped trying to force a large chunk of the population to look like they're busy when they have zero intrinsic desire to do anything well and will continually cut corners wherever they can, we'd reach a productivity golden age where there would be enough surplus for them to fuck off and be lazy out of the critical path. The stumbling block here is always the perception of unfairness, and it's a big one, but for anyone that really cares about their work or its quality, do you really want to always have to work with people who will only do the bare minimum to survive? Hopefully you aren't cold enough to want them to starve, but should they be forced to participate and drag everyone else down just to prove some kind of innate moral ethic? I wish that we as a society could approach this pragmatically instead of moralizing under a veneer of pragmatism.

I really hope that more people become aware of how much of our society is turning into kayfabe. Just think of the rise of all the new types of ____ theatre like this that have been coined over the last decade or more. It's not an accident or fad, it reflects something true that's happening to society at large. Everything authentic and valuable is being turned into something inauthentic, based only on conjured up perceived value and competition to fulfill the perception, and not real or useful purposes. It's all in the service of propping up systems that no longer function for the majority of people, or even for basic needs. And until a lot more people are willing to point out that the emperor is quite naked, even at their own social or financial risk, this will continue to rot everything down to the foundation.

The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.

It's baked into the foundations of the U.S. While perhaps not a cult as we describe it today, even the first puritans that settled here were considered extremists not welcome in their home countries. For such a young country, we have always had a burgeoning industry in upstart cults, grifts, and religions (but I repeat myself).

Billionaires are buying up and consolidating all of the media outlets just as a hobby, I'm sure.