stereolambda

Yeah, GDP with all its flaws is designed around economy based on buying and selling for prices. Interacting with other people. If you can really be rich and somehow do most things automatically without meaningfully hiring anybody (maybe only few people for simple manual labor for peanuts), at this point what is really the value of money? Except for maybe throwing minimal amounts to the masses. I can see the AI maximalist scenario taking us out of the monetary framework back into a medieval or natural economy almost.

For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.

I think the thesis would be there's a colossal structural/market failure in software. This because of many degrees of freedom, consumer ignorance, network effects and such. Compare this to physical things. The difference between the absolutely shoddiest couch sellable and the practically best one is tiny, compared to the difference between the worst software you could impose on the market and what could be achieved by competent engineers if we somehow removed the wrong incentives from capital and bureaucracy. With most software most people use, we are near the bottom of this range. I don't know if I fully buy that, even if we completely ignore whether removing these incentives is at all realistic. But would also say there's something there.

Then we can talk about how we all pay the increased cost in energy and materials, and so forth.

It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens.

Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.

Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.

This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.

I think you are reaching for the word "wisdom" (I heard about smart vs. wise a bunch of times) and are tending to define it in a... narrow way. I'd damn prefer to live the live of Plato, Roger Bacon or Isaac Newton: experience the universe in novel, rich ways, contribute a lot to humanity, give up offspring, than be "below average" smart (whatever it would mean) with 7 children.

Of course, by statistics no one of us is Plato or Roger Bacon. I'd agree that a problem with the modern world is an ideology of (objectively) crappy career or climbing some fake institutional hierarchy being a worthy substitute for family. I myself do believe that a family is one of relatively easiest (but still hard and demanding) ways to being happy [1].

I also see a lot of people here overcorrecting and arriving at some strange worldviews.

Some people are childless because of objective circumstances: what are they, damned by God via predestination to unhappiness? In the Catholic world, they have been, esp. in the olden days, a lot of childless priests, monks, nuns. If you want to at the same time value tradition and not reinventing (quoting parent) and "evolutionary DNA survival", you either have to somehow condemn Catholicism and Orthodoxy [2], or start adding some epicycles to your philosophy.

Oh, and on topic: I believe being happy requires working for it. Maybe for "smarter" people their allotted amount of work is higher. Don't know if it's nice to hear, but sounds true to me.

[1] Maybe one lure of career is that people are culturally accepting of life at work being terrible in many ways, while a poorly constructed family (one or more immature people etc.) scares people off pretty fast. Maybe because it's a more total institution and harder to escape.

[2] Which would be the OG Protestant way.

There are people still being born in the world and growing up, you know. Or discovering new interests.

"Rare" may be a low print run of some local's memoirs decades ago, or a book on the local railway, a society of firemen, people sent to a world war etc. Not something that excites the world, but still valuable to historians or people interested in local history. Even the guide to a local cave from 1960s might be printed on bad paper (so many copies perished) and contain some technically obsolete details on the then-state of nature, tourism etc.

Just out of sympathy cause I think there's a legitimate root to the religious point. Your epistemology comes across as extremely weak, with believing LLMs over scholars, and discriminating which scholars are legitimate based on agreeing with your beliefs. It would pay to at least familiarize yourself with the arguments of the other side, suspending in your mind the whole partisan angle.

Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.

What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attention, or social participation.

This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that.

The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof.

I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.

You can try to find out or estimate how many copies there were. If there are tens of thousands, it may make you feel less bad about tossing them. If people want them, they can find them and it's not necessarily your responsibility. For many books the world's need for them really diminished in relation to what has been mass-printed at one time: popular fiction like airport books, self-help type etc.

Second hand bookstores often buy. You can offer your books to them. Some they won't want, but might accept as a donation along with those that have monetary value to them. In reality, they have similar constraints of space and expected time to when someone will purchase (which could be years for even semi-known books). People have this romantic view about books, but if you want to hold any kind of personal library and don't have a freaking villa, you have to learn to be pragmatic. Even if you don't have a lot of books, get ones that you would read.

A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...

Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.

People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.

And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.

When some closed models are "retired", interestingly we might not even be able to extract all their tells. We'd be limited to people writing about them on forums (where they don't often specify version, and there's a lot of memes and confirmation bias) and I don't know, doing some statistical Bayesian guessing that given the likelihood it's FooGPT 10.5, maybe we should update our beliefs about its characteristics etc.

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.

When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.

Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.