pols45

Who is asking you to be sure in the first place? Why do you need this certainty? Farm animals need the comfort and stability of the farm to survive. They "flourish" within the parameters some one else sets.

In the Elephant-Rider model of how the mind works, people are talking to rider And the elephant.

The elephant just needs some feel good stuff, to momentarily focus shift away from all the unpredictability in the universe, it has no control over - in this case it is being fed - well the story teller who is not sure about anything is atleast "diligent".

When you let go of the story, and realize the elephant is not under your control and can never be, the ride is much smoother. And that's the only story, no SEO game needed to promote the Truth. And truth is - you are just along for the ride. Don't act like a farm animal thinking you are healthy based on how many eggs you have been told to lay. You are a chimp. All animal domestication protocols break down sooner or later when dealing with chimps. Cuz the chimp mind has an elephant in it. Taking it for a wild ride.

This is why religions have survived the fall of kings, empires and nations. When system starts collapsing under the weight of its ever building contradictions, they allow for stabilization, repair and continuity.

But with the arrival of the printing press and then the internet info tsunami, those older stories and rituals (which act as sync mechanism for large groups over different time frames - daily-weekly-yearly touch points) start loosing influence. This is happening without a good story/sync replacement (see Philosopher Charles Taylor's The Secular Age).

So look to HBO/Netflix/Pixar or the WWE. One is interactive almost real time narrative/emotion resonance/ritual engineering and the other is a deeper slower process. Those are the kind of spaces where potential breakthroughs will come from. Not the totally clueless science or tech world.

The UN's sustainability development goals/WHO data shows most countries in the world hardly have ~1 therapist for every hundred thousand citizens.

The goal they set was ~15 per 100K. Barely a handful meet the goal and even then the quality of care in urban and rural areas is night and day. So we are such a long way away from actually providing mental health to the majority.

OpenAI type systems can really change the story. So good to see them releasing data about what is going on at population scales. Try getting data out of a therapists and priests about how many people they have actually helped and how many they could not. If you can't get it, labelling what they do as "an uncontrolled social experiment" doesn't do anything useful, because in many cases there is no one else stepping up to the plate.

The modern apps are full of unnecessary features not because anyone asks or even uses these features, but because its become easy for devs to roll them out.

I use Signal only for initial contact/handshake. After that its on private client not touching any cloud. If Signal dies tomorrow, its not the end of the world.

As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.

The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.

Think about what would have happen if the Manhattan Project was run by the private sector. As soon as national security/infra becomes a risk the state will start getting more involved whether the private sector wants it or not.

The banking system/telcos/utilities in most countries have the State providing some kind guarantee to keep the lights on in case something unpredictable happens.

Every kid is shown silicon valley and taught being an intermediary/middle man is the path to success. Every kid can see margins running an oil ring, mine, farm, factory or hotel are less than running a platform by a huge factor.

So who is going to want to be a producer in such a system? When the balance in an economic system tilts from production to middle men it makes the whole system unstable.

So silicon valley has pushed the whole world into an unsustainable unstable state, of everyone falling over each other trying to be middle men.

What is working is temporary. They are not blind to it. They just don't know how to do anything else. It's a runaway train.

Just like the British East India company. No one designed it. No one controlled it. No one could do anything when it collapsed. The Free banking system is a similar story. Everyone thought running their own money printer was a great idea. Why doesn't it exist today? Silicon valley will follow the same trajectory. There is a reason its CEO ran to DC to bend the knee. Cause they know their survival is based on maintaining middle men status. Which can break any day the political winds change or another TikTok appears on the horizon from outside SV.