We would be, if not for Devo

Going the whole distance in QWOP

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I don’t know if the type of matter matters, rather I’m basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things

There’s a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.

Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I’ve yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

The heat hasn’t killed me yet

“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”

He deserves to lose every dollar, it’s the most arrogant business move in history and he disrupted thousands of lives of workers with good jobs in the process. Unfortunately it’s only like 10% of his net worth, he’s the one who will suffer the least relatively speaking.

Well that’s an even older decision:

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law.

The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution contains a right to habeas corpus in Boumedine v. Bush. The Lincoln thing was never fully litigated and was probably unconstitutional.

The point isn’t to have it be a lie detector but a factual claim detector. So you have an neural network that reads statements and says “this thing is saying something factual” or “this is just an opinion/obvious joke/whatever” and a person grades the responses to train it. So then the AI just says “hey this thing is making some sort of fact-related claim” and then the warning applies no matter what.

Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.

I’m not the biggest fan of smoked herring myself, but thanks.

The problem with this argument is this very article, which is also backed up by interviews with John Kelly, Bill Barr, and others. Everyone verifies that that Trump wanted to do all the crazy stuff from prosecuting Hillary to executing former members of his administration for speaking out against him, but they’d just delay until he’d get distracted and move on to something else. Again, these are people who eagerly signed up to work for Trump, and changed their mind based on their experience with him.

This next time around though, Trump will try to hire people who are more likely to be yes-men. What happens then?

This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.

Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:

1. He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
2. He first contacted Glenn Greenwald, who now spends his days showing up on Tucker’s show to spout straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda

One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.

X requires login to view tweets, and can only get away with this because they tricked users into believing they’d allow free access while they were growing as a platform. Let’s not do anything to help them.