I've read that short story, but can't remember enough details to search for it.
Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
Not quite the same concept, but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (published in 1909, but still pretty relevant imo) is about where this all might lead, with humans living in almost total isolation and only communicating through "the machine", which mostly sounds like modern social media lol. It's terrifying. Also really demonstrates how static human nature actually is.
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.
Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.
That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
"Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?"
The jury is still out on that one... failed "business" person who was also a "reality TV star" - and now appears to be in some level of dementia - currently in charge of the single biggest military-industrial complex on the planet...
Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children, and enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse. Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
Single mothers, and women having their first child in their late 20’s or 30’s, appear to be maladaptive.
> predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
Who is “telling them that”? Society by allowing them to open a checking account? Women’s suffrage? The reality is that other than the most privileged, a modern family can’t afford to function without both parents working. I assume you’re for raising the minimum wage to allow a family to run on a single income with multiple children? Or your solution is to send us back to the dark ages and remove womens rights?
> enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse.
There’s literally nobody who has kids as a single mother with the goal of raising them on welfare, that might be the single most ridiculous statement in this thread.
> Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
The Russian Orthodox Church is government sponsored. How’s their birth rate going?
It's definitely not true that both parents need to work. I know many families where only one parent has an income, and it is a very low income (one works as a mover for example) and they manage to eat and live etc.
Do they live upper middle class on this income? No. But they do live and have multiple children.
And I can guarantee they’re on government assistance because I know what a “mover” makes, and I know what diapers and formula cost, and they aren’t paying for multiple children on that salary alone.
I can promise you they are not. One of the families in question doesn't even get their tax credits because they are too far behind on filing. It's just the mover income. They have to make it work and since they must, they do
They don't buy formula obviously and they cloth diaper with used stuff from marketplace. To cover the two examples you gave
I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs. I never found it all that funny given that it was a reality for my family.
Yes, we should all aspire to have our children's mother at home during the child's developmental years rather than letting it be a string of minimum-wage strangers. If you can't manage that, oh well, it happens... but that's the ideal that we should all want. And wouldn't it be a hell of a world, where the single income could support such a family?
>I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs.
Someone above asked "who was telling them X". Well, in your case, it was 90s sitcoms. Not just your case, everyone's really. Sitcoms have been used to negatively portray what should be ideals since at least the 1970s.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Money has been shown convincingly to not be an important factor. Please read about it for a while and you will quickly see that it’s a discredited argument, not least because poor people everywhere have always had more children. Also, fertility rates are falling everywhere, especially in countries that are becoming wealthier.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
> Money not infertility, UN report says: Why birth rates are plummeting
> Roughly 40 percent of respondents cited economic barriers – such as the costs of raising children, job insecurity and expensive housing – as the main reason for having fewer children than they would like
That’s what I am saying: this is just utter bullshit that almost every other study disproves, as well as a quick check of the reality around the world! Hence why I suggested to read more on the topic.
Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior. People almost always say what they think is right not what they really feel. I suspect a lot of people don’t have kids because they are afraid of having ugly or stupid or sick children… would you say it out loud if that was the case for you? I am sure you would not and you would rationalize it as being about money somehow.
> Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior
1) The surveys are designed to figure out these things
2) Even if the surveys are not, the shift y-o-y, from previous statements, providing trend data. Respondents can always choose different masking reasons for their choices. Pricing becoming a standout reason speaks volumes.,
3) If you reject both those points, you can postulate any theory you like, and there will never been current data to back it up. At this point we can assume any reason, as a matter of preference not as a matter of fact.
>Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
No, but there's is evidence that the fall in birth rates is affected by all the content slop people spend their times consuming instead of talking to one another and fucking one another... and the ideas that slop puts into their heads are even worse...
Doesn't it? TV got mass adoption midpoint around 1955 - around which time when the fertility trends start sloping down (and incidentaly around the time Putnam puts the start of the decline in social capital in the US in the seminal "Bowling Alone").
It then stabilizes around 1980 and starts a second downward slop around 2010 - the time of smartphones and social media.
> I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
I'd say the evidence is inconclusive and could just as easily be explained by not telling men they needed to take on their share of the burden at home now that their women were no longer trapped at home doing unpaid, manual labor all day.
Instead, we're letting people say "gay sex includes giving a woman an orgasm instead of a pregnancy" (an actual thing I've heard a right-wing influencer say right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6uydPCX8Q ) and encouraging men to be more selfish and anti-woman.
Also who cares about a fall in birth rates? We need a fall in birth rates. Above replacement rate is mathematically unstable in the long term.
When people complain bout "a fall in birth rates," they're a mix of capitalists who need their profits to ever increase, and white supremacists who mean WHITE people need to have more babies because society is too BROWN now.
We're about to have hella unemployment from too many people for too few jobs. We need fewer people.
Your post, youtube link and quote is quite ironic given the title of this thread.
You link to a youtube podcast of kids stating things as if they are facts, its just a podcast. I've never heard these things actually said anywhere. It means nothing.
Then your quote is taken out of context and a new culture war is created, well done.
It's interesting how common the theme of "a man being into women is gay" is among the right-wing circles, though usually it's hidden in the subtext and not just spelled out in clear like this.
Yes I'm sure reality TV did it and not cost of living meaning they have little money for entertainment and definitely will never purchase their own home.
If "will never purchase their own home" was a reason to not have kids, many more people in previous generations would've been childless.
What has changed is expectations. The room I rented in my final year of university, and that was only 20 years ago, would (I think) no longer be legal: too poorly insulated. Very cheap though, I think it was £40 a week? Even after adjusting that for inflation since then, that was cheap. But it's (I think?) no longer possible.
Expectations for things that can be bought have gone up faster than our ability to buy them. We didn't used to all expect to be able to fly somewhere on holiday. We didn't used to all expect to have a phone — and I don't just mean a smartphone, or even a mobile phone, my first partner was a bit older than me, born in the 70s, their family didn't have a landline. All the streaming services are expensive, I grew up with 4 free-to-air channels and no internet (not even a dialup modem) let alone broadband that you need to stream video, no cable TV or satellite TV. Smart bulbs for mood lighting can quickly become expensive, I grew up in an upper middle class house and yet it had one, singular, dimming switch for the incandescent bulb it took. A microwave was a fancy accessory, not standard, when I was a kid. It all adds up.
Also, our expectations for relationships have gone up faster than humans could ever change, as our expectations follow not reality but rather perception. Sure, the perception was already off when I was young, we had unrealistic body goals in high-gloss magazines and Hollywood glamour and unrealistic romances in stories and unrealistic sex in porn, but even with that the quantity one could consume was relatively limited… and now we have the highest-rated content from our always-on social media accounts, A/B tested to be more appealing than reality, and even when it isn't AI-enhanced or photoshopped, it's still the final cut to the cutting room floor of having to deal with flawed real people.
Yes, college aged men who aren’t in a relationship are avoiding pursuing one because they’re thinking about whether or not they’ll be able to afford a house some day. It definitely has nothing to do with social media and dating apps breaking human interaction.
>Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
i don't know much but 90% of medical advice is basically, drop modern life on a regular basis (walk, stay outside, hug, lift, touch, eat raw, eat few)..
it would be weird if the complex biosphere environment that made our ancestor struggle was also a key balancer that we can't replace
The "eat raw" part seems at least partially misguided, since our ancestors apparently started cooking the heck out of their environment pretty early, didn't consume much unprocessed dairy until very late, and the raw food they did consume tended to carry less pathogens than modern mass-produced food.
The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.
But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.
At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.
> I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not.
I'm lacking words to describe how I feel reading the same comment from many people online. I too felt weird seeing how much more peaceful and healthier simple bike commute made me. I remember coming home sweaty and running across angry car drivers pissed to wait for 3 seconds more than necessary in the comfort of their seat, while me doing all these efforts .. all calm, even joyful.
Same for food, it's hard to unplug from all sweet processed food, but after a month you realize your body doesn't need it. less but better food, helps sleep too..
Totally agree regarding biking, walking, trees, mountains, and will add lakes.
Though it does only lightly touch on social structures of traditional societies, you may enjoy reading "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter" by Joseph Henrich. I also found classic texts of social and political anthropology to be very worthwhile for understanding human societies. Ted Lewellen's "Political Anthropology: An Introduction" is a good starting point.
Cooked food is easier to digest. The discovery of cooking is what allowed early hominids to grow larger brains (which have higher calorie demands) and become modern humans.
Hey now... We have to evolve somehow. The folks that continue to reproduce in this technological dystopia are passing on their "just ignore social media" (or more likely, "get bored with social media") genes to the next generation.
In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.
Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.
Nothing has been conquered. Technology is providing a behavioral selection process that is effectively self-culling the populace and is going to make the mass adaptation to the next century of climate change much more bearable for all
we have certainly conquered caloric density, reducing individual caloric expenditure, and eliminating environmental hazards (though it's not evenly distributed) to the point where pockets of the population are dangerously sedentary and overfed (and thus life expectancy is declining from a previous peak)
You are being downvoted, but I am wondering if people, who are doing it are doing it reflexively just because they disagree and not because they thought it through. There is an argment to be made that there is a level of self-preservation that disappears when things become too sanitized. Case in point, during one of FL issues, people were panicking over gas and -- some -- were putting gas in unapproved containers without giving much thought over whether it is a good idea since gas can do a lot more than just power cars. Granted, some of the silly behavior is a direct result of social media egg ons/clout chase and weird level Tyler Durden accellerationist vibes, but some people simply don't know.. or care to know.
I am not saying it is a good thing, but there is something to be said about current distracted humans operating internal combustion engine. Then again, my dad already told me it is all going to hell, because I can't change oil...
No, our nature is to satiate our dopamine system. That system evolved to keep us fed, nourished, and to make us make friends and belong and have sex to make more humans. The problem is that we are now so smart and clever that we can start learning how the dopamine system works and hacking it.
This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things.
But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them.
Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die.
AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it.
Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space.
This concerns me too due to the free speech implications and the general risk of overreacting and overcorrecting. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. I think we'll see this when GenZ and GenA start entering politics.
It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen for god's sake! I think a lot of people are still in denial about this problem because it seems so absurd that a touch screen can addict people as well as fentanyl, but it's true. I see it around me all the time.
Edit:
My preferred way to go about reeling this back in would be to strike at the root and start taxing advertising the way we tax booze, drugs, gambling, and other vices. Advertising revenue is the trunk of this tree. The entire reason these systems are created is to keep people staring so ads can be pushed at them. Take that away and a lot of the motive to build and run these things goes away.
Another, which we're already seeing, is to age-restrict antisocial media. Young minds are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, more so than adults, and all addiction pushers try to addict people early.
Lastly, we could start campaigns to educate people. We need schools teaching classes explaining to kids how these systems addict and manipulate them and why, and public PSAs to the same effect. It needs to be treated like a health issue because it is.
Taxes, education, and age restriction is how we almost killed cigarettes in the USA, so there is precedent for these three things together working.
We also need to be a lot more precise in our language. The problem is not the Internet, phones, computers, "tech," AI, etc. The problem is engineering systems for engagement, specifically. If you are trying to design a system to keep people staring at a screen (or other interface) for as much time as possible, you are hurting people. What you're doing is in the same category as what the Sackler family did with oxycontin. Engagement engineering is a predatory destructive practice and the people who do it are predators. I think it's taken a long time for people to realize this because, again, it's just a damn screen! It's shocking that this is so effective that we need to have this societal conversation.
I don’t have anything to add, but just wanted to thank you for this insightful and deeply thought out response. The solutions you list do look like they would work and I hope we find the political will, sooner rather than later.
Patrick Boyle eventually comes to a similar conclusion in his video about global population decline - https://youtu.be/ispyUPqqL1c?si=7jUgVBkOvLHluPAR - but includes lots of graphs and other interesting factlets.
* warning for Americans: not suitable for those offended by sarcasm
I agree that advertising is the root of it, but some people might still pay for modern social media. They used to pay for porn, before it was available for "free" (ad supported). Some still do. I pay for YouTube to avoid the ads. I don't think I would pay for Facebook or Tiktok though. Possibly an uninformed opinion as I've never used those platforms.
Paid media is better. If you pay for a monthly subscription or for individual pieces of media, revenue is no longer tied to “engagement.” If you pay for Netflix and watch three hours a month or thirty, it makes little difference.
Ads tie revenue directly to time spent on the screen, and that is the root of all evil.
As another poster mentioned, ad revenue is often higher than what you can reasonably get with subscriptions. That’s where taxing advertising would help.
There's no way to reel it back. You said it here though:
> Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not
This is simply a genetic selective filter that will destroy some people while others make it through, and there will need to be an overall adaptation against finding fake slop debilitatingly addictive. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food, opiates, etc and other things some can resist and are able to abstain while some can't. I used to worry so much about these things in aggregate but I realized it's too pervasive to eliminate and impossible to change people's nature when it comes to resisting it or even worrying about it as a problem to avoid, so simply resisting better than others and having children that hopefully are able to overcome and avoid by way of finding more value in real experiences is the only successful outcome.
If one has to really really think hard about and try really really hard to overcome, then they're probably just not going to make it... and we all know for many people avoiding addictions comes easy. This chasm of reaction to stimulus means there will be divergent outcomes. It can't be any other way.
This is provably wrong. Preventative public health measures against for instance cigarettes and nicotine reduce uptake, reduce consumption and increase quitting. [1] In the case of smoking, this also cut second-hand harm/death from smoking. Similarly, preventative measures have first order and second order benefits for alcohol and other drug consumption.
Just giving up on those who show higher likelihood for addiction is a travesty. Failure to eliminate an addiction is no reason to give up reducing its harms, both to the person themselves, family and friends, and wider society.
It appears that the current content systems have some correlation in lowering the fertility rate; in that case they will be self-limiting after all, just not in the way OP mentioned about the other vices. It will be interesting indeed how things look after a generation or two.
This seems ridiculously fatalistic and weirdly binary way of looking at things. Best I can start with is 'why?', because to a simple person like me it could be any number of ways..
My hypothesis is: Humans are social and need social interaction to thrive. However we are not wired for the diversity of interacting with 7 Billion people and all the derivatives.
We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.
But humans don't, in any meaningful sense, interact with 7 billion people when they use social media any more than they interact with the entire population of their city whenever they go out. And most people living in any reasonably sized city - to use that as a real world analogue for social media - aren't only interacting with small, high trust social networks of the same culture and beliefs, and they manage just fine.
Your hypothesis (which seems more and more common) seems to me to be a "just so" story, but it doesn't correlate with what I've observed of real human behavior.
1) People choose to live in the same city so they have that in common
2) 7B don't all interact together, thats not the point. The point is that its random who you talk to as most social media is anonymous.
Combine this and you have low trust + low chance of having similar viewpoints/culture/beliefs.
Manage just fine does not mean everyone is happy, and in these major areas like NYC people always seem to congregate with the groups they share the most in commong with.
This is all a bit above my head. But the effects a compiler has on the computer are certainly not deterministic. It might do what you want or it might hit a weird driver bug or set off a false positive in some security software. And the more complex stacks get the he more this happens.
Incorrect. LLMs are designed to be deterministic (when temperature=0). Only if you choose for them to be non-deterministic are they so. Which is no different in the case of GCC. You can add all kinds of random conditionals if you had some reason to want to make it non-deterministic. You never would, but you could.
There are some known flaws in GPUs that can break that assumption in the real world, but in theory (and where you have working, deterministic hardware) LLMs are absolutely deterministic. GCC also stops being deterministic when the hardware breaks down. A cosmic bit flip is all it takes to completely defy your assertion.
Are they, though? Obviously they are in some cases, but it has always been held that a natural language compiler is theoretically possible. But a natural language compiler cannot be deterministic, fundamentally. It is quite apparent that determinism is not what makes a compiler.
In fact, the dictionary defines compiler as: "a program that converts instructions into a machine-code or lower-level form so that they can be read and executed by a computer." Most everyone agrees that it is about function, not design.
> AI isn't just another tool
AI is not a tool, that is true. I don't know, maybe you stopped reading too soon, but it said "AI systems". Nobody was ever talking about AI. If you want to participate in the discussions actually taking place, not just the one you imagined in your head, what kind of system isn't just another tool?
What the hell? You can't comment like this on HN, not matter how right you are or feel you are. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. These guidelines are particularly relevant:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. Please do your part to make this a welcoming place rather than a mean one.
Christians don't drink or use contraceptives? I think you have to have a pretty extreme "no true Scotsman" attitude to make such a claim. Even the drugs claim is pretty specious.
> Beyond restricting maternity coverage, many groups’ policies state that they won’t reimburse for prescriptions, routine doctor’s visits, contraceptives or mental health or substance use services. Coverage for medical conditions that predate someone’s membership is often excluded, as well. And health care sharing ministries aren’t required by law to limit out-of-pocket costs or maintain large cash reserves to cover members’ bills the way insurance companies are.
I'm not sure where your numbers come from. In my region job prospects are not much better for a liberal arts grad than a high school graduate, and much, much worse than someone with a trades education.
This is solved with humans. Mens Rea is usually required for successful prosecution. A taxi driver who takes a fare to a bank, who then robs the bank, is not prosecuted. A getaway driver is.
To avoid nitpicking, op probably should have said knowingly facilitates, but this is conversation not legislation and 99% of readers probably understood that.
Nobody who seriously read and understood the literature in a given field would issue a blanket dismissal of all the experts in that field. My experience is that reading papers and research leads one to understand WHY the professionals get it wrong - because you start to understand the nuances.
I'm not saying you issued such a dismissal, but the comment that started this thread did so.
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