That's a very confused reading of thermodynamics, and going from stability landscapes to political systems to literal energy consumption is not a credible leap.
The real problem is psychology, not energy. As soon as you get one predatory narcissist/sociopath in a culture, and they're allowed to act freely, they will, with absolute inevitability, take advantage of everyone else's trust and cooperation and destroy any culture of mutual good will.
Energy is irrelevant to this. It will happen at any level of technology.
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker.
Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.
It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.
This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile?
(Most of it isn't.)
Art is on a sliding scale from "Fun study and experiment for the sake of it" to "Expresses something personal" to "Expresses something collective" to "A cultural landmark that invents a completely new expressive language, emotionally and technically."
All of those options are creatively worthwhile. Or maybe none of them are.
> What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile?
Because it is a human making it, expressing something is always worthwhile to the individual on a personal level. Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least. Which is why a lot of people just find enjoyment in creating art even if its not commercially succesful.
But in this case, the criteria changes for the final product (the music being produced). It is not artistically worthwhile to anyone, not even the creator.
So no, a person with no talent (self claim) using an LLM to create art is much less worthwhile than a human being with no/any talent creating art on their own at all times by default.
>Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least
I think that's the point though. What op did was rewarding to themselves, and I found it more enjoyable than a lot of music I've heard that was made by humans. So don't be a gatekeeper on enjoyment.
How am I a gatekeeper? I provided my own opinions; you are free to enjoy what you want or disagree with me. If you want to get into an objective discussion of why you find it enjoyable more than human works or what is art, we can do that but I do not like the personal slights.
I was discussing it on the basis of music with the commentator and the actual product. Sure if you want to go all Andy Kaufman then yeah the .html and this discussion is art but I wasn't talking about it in the original context of the conversation.
I can though, that's the whole point. I chose to quit Facebook and Reddit. I chose to stop drinking alcohol. I chose to keep smoking weed. Some choices are better than others, from certain perspectives, that doesn't make them any less my choices!
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.
It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.
The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.
But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.
Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.
Note that gambling is currently the only recognized non-substance-related addiction in the DSM-5. As a society we speak of things like 'tiktok addiction', 'gaming addiction', 'food addiction' and 'porn addiction' but none of these are real recognized disorders. That is not to say that certain behaviors cannot be maladaptive and hard to quit, but this is not enough to make something an addiction - we don't call hypochondria a 'cleaning addiction' even though it might look like one.
There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.
Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.
If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.
I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.
I'm sure your specific church is lovely, but depending on the church, "personal failings" may include such gems as "being gay", depression, autism, PTSD, poverty...
Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.
Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
Manufactured consent as a notion always felt like projection to me because of its advocates. As it was a notion pushed by people who insist they know "the interests" of people who are "voting wrong". All the while disregarding the fact that if we could rely on others knowing the interests of others better than others then aristocracy would be a superior system as the nobles being more educated would know the interests of the peasantry better.
So do you believe that propaganda doesn't exist, or doesn't work, or that only ever accurately shows the truth? Because as I see it you must believe that people cannot be misled by propaganda to deny the possibility of manufactured consent.
its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.
The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.
Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.
This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.
That's a type of capitalism. Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose. Extractive capitalism doesn't get to pretend its all of capitalism, we just assume that because its been active throughout our entire lifespan.
US hegemony has permitted and encouraged shareholder primacy, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in order to facilitate the growth of its markets. However we'd be blinkered to assume that this is the only way capitalism can be. Its a choice we make and we deserve this outcome where we've enslaved a generation of children to be eye-balls for ad impressions for silicon valley startups.
We could make other choices but then we'd be personally less rich and see less growth. Do we really think those extra zeros in very few people's portfolio's are worth this macabre world we've created?
> Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose.
And those were replaced by profit seeking enterprises, that is capitalism. Sure some try to create such benevolent entities, but the profit seeking ones out-competes and replaces them over time, that is how capitalism works.
So you can temporarily have a nice company here and there, but 50 years later likely it got replaced by a profit seeking one. The only way to get pro social behaviors from these is to make pro social acts the most profitable via regulations, but its still a profit seeking enterprise that doesn't try to be benevolent.
yeah that's because we allowed aggressive takeovers, especially leveraged ones. They got replaced by extractive capitalism due to a lack of regulation, not just because "capitalism".
The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy. Letting that happen is a choice, letting it continue is a choice.
Yet if you advocate for regulation you are immediately attacked by billionaires and massive companies and people who think those two groups benefit them more than the regulations protecting them. These groups bring unbelievable sums of money to bear to influence policy and public perception to make sure they are as under-regulated as possible.
“Regulation” is a four letter word in the US. Look at the hostility we see on HN whenever it comes up with AI .
Which is why our democratic systems need to provide solutions because they're places where we still have power. I'm from the UK and an increasing amount of our economy is locked up in exploitive equity extraction, much of it US based. Its really bad in some fields (e.g. care homes, foster homes), where the entities are straddled with such debt that the orgs "have no choice" but to charge sky high rates while paying peanuts. At some point I'm sure it will break and our politicians will "break the rules" in order to reign in private equity and sour their investments.
It used to be the case that we permitted these excesses because they guaranteed our security, but now that recent US governments have shit the bed on that one; there's considerably less of a need to tolerate it.
It's been going on since forever. The first people the British enslaved were their own kind, they just managed to create a society where citizens enjoyed the authority, and naturally the fruits of pillaging half the world did trickle down back then.
If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
> The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy
So they did out-compete them? You saying they won using unfair ways doesn't change the fact that they out-competed the other companies.
Capitalism will use any means available to out compete others, I don't understand why you try to argue against this. You just say "but if we restrict the means available its fine", that means you agree with me, so I am not sure what you disagree with.
Having more money doesn't necessarily mean "out-compete". Its not that they're delivering a better product, more loyal customers or better branding. Its simply that they put down more capital at a given point, and were allowed to buy the company, despite its owners not wanting to sell. In most cases they didn't even have money, its simply because they obtained significant financing from money brokers by selling them on plans of sociopathy.
> I don't understand why you try to argue against this.
because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad". We get to make choices, we're making shit choices. You don't have to upend the whole system to undo these choices, you just have to have the spine to regulate and break up existing structures.
> because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad".
I never said "capitalism bad", I said it optimizes for profits and that it gets better at that over time, that is not bad or good, that is just what it does.
but it does that because of US hegemony empowering its equity to be extractive. We've lost a lot of organisations in the UK due to aggressive and leveraged buyouts. That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
I appreciate your position but I can't help but feel like it's like saying cars are crap because they breakdown too easily, when in practice; you're constantly red lining them.
My point is that it doesn't have to be like this, but its a choice that we as society make, and we could choose to not make it.
> That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
That capitalism needs to be regulated or it results in these toxic outcomes is core to capitalism, yes, that is what we are saying. There is no benevolent capitalism without regulations.
its almost as if its what I've been saying the whole time, but adding the context of where the line is, where MySpace seemed healthy and TikTok is unhealthy. Lean startup culture is an equasion that produces sociopathy, I've always hated it and I think its relatively disgusting how it was embraced at the time.
I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
> I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here, you said Facebook and Myspace didn't have these issues so its not capitalisms fault. But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today, so your original statement would make it seem you want less regulations and think things will just sort out themselves.
Or do you really think going back to 2005's regulations would fix things because internet was less toxic then? Internet wasn't less toxic then since capitalism was different, internet was less toxic then since it takes time for capitalism to optimize a system.
> But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today
sorry, what regulation are you talking about here? Afaik regulation in the US is pretty much the same back then as it is now. Worst case scenarios are usually slap on the wrists like when Snapchat lied to its users about ephemeral messaging and got fined a pathetic amount.
> No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here
or how about the idea that you've misunderstood my position and instead are shadow-boxing a monsterised impression of me that isn't real.
I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
Also on the off chance you lean considerably left, it might help to understand that I have experience of the USSR. So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me. Been there done that, ancestors deported to Siberia. We could maybe try regulating first?
> I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
> So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me
Read my post, I didn't say "capitalism bad", I said its good from the start. Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
> But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
Because I'm making the argument that lean startup culture is one of the biggest factors in creating this problem and early Facebook and MySpace were around _before_ lean startup culture.
> Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
Oh it only works one way round I see. Por que no los dos?
well my mother was born in the USSR, so I don't have to accept Lenin's position because my people suffered his "inevitable outcome of the system" for the choices he made.
I'd rather fix up this existing system then day dream about a glorious socialist revolution that always seems to end in blood.
Citing Lenin for a critique of capitalism's trajectory is a little bit like asking a prosecutor to write the defense's closing argument. He was a smart guy, but he wasn't some disinterested analyst writing a symposium on capitalism versus socialism; he was a revolutionary leader trying to build up support and justification for overthrowing the system.
But even if we overlook his inherent bias, he was just plain wrong. He wrote that capitalism had reached its final stage through imperialism, and that, as you said, state capture via financial oligarchy was inevitable. That was over 100 years ago, and history has produced welfare states, labor protections, financial regulation, the SEC, Germany's codetermination laws, even the Nordic social democracies. None of those should be possible under Lenin's framework for capitalism.
(Disclaimer: I'm all for common sense regulation of capitalism.)
You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
The VOC and EIC would like a word. While under these so-called 'Judeo-Christian values' Europe was wildly antisemitic, colonised most of the known world, and subjugated, genocided, and enslaved indigenous populations. The UK even wrote a slave bible. Slavery in the US also happened while these 'values' were held in high regard.
If your personal religious beliefs help you be a good person then that's great for you, keep believing. But historically it doesn't appear that more religious societies are more moral societies.
Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.
Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.
What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.
This is what google shows: 7 deaths out of 24K vaccinated individuals.
"An Indian government committee and subsequent investigations concluded that the seven deaths were most probably unrelated to the vaccine itself. The reported causes included drowning, snake bite, intentional ingestion of poisonous substances (suicide), malaria, brain hemorrhage, and viral fever."
This was in a trail for the HPV virus so presumably they wanted subjects who were not yet sexually active. Girls were chosen because HPV can affect the cervix. So you vaccinate them, and then follow them up for maybe 15 years and see how it turns out.
Enrolling young children in a trail like is always going to ethically hard to justify. And it's well possible they chose India instead of California for this reason. However the protocol makes sense.
I worked in clinical trails for years, believe me the LAST thing anyone wants is problems like these because you'll end up losing billions.
To market something in EU or USA you need EMEA or FDA approval. They will check every single piece of paper and can tank your entire decades long project.
Respectfully, you're blowing this way out of proportion, this is just more "billionaire hysteria"
Deaths of "many girls", when the parent comment said it was at most 1 out of 2300 participants (a suicide)? Those numbers might, however, be untrustworthy. I don't know India well enough to know how much to trust statistics compiled there.
Your article is careful to never explicitly state correlation between the vaccine and those seven girls deaths. Without such a link, your argument falls apart.
> So answer me honestly: Did that same billionaire (Bill Gates) and his organisation (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) do the same exact trials in his home country (USA)? "clinical trials of unproven vaccines on thousands of poor minor girls, without consent of then and their parents"
This accusation is toothless. You would need to show two things:
- There were actual unacceptable risks or side-effects from the vaccine under test (your article completely fails to show this, and if you believe it does, then you are simply a victim of clickbait formulations)
- The study was done in India because of risks to subjects deemed unacceptable in the US (and not simply because it was cheaper)
What the article does show is that there was shoddy handling of consent. Which is valid criticism! But it is also somewhat unsurprising given the low literacy rate at that time and place. And this alone is simply not sufficient foundation for your accusations.
> So WHY did BMGF and PATH not take INFORMED CONSENT before giving a dangerous experimental drug? Why were the minor patients MISLED on what they were being given? Why was no medical insurance provided to the patients unsuspectingly undergoing this risky experiment?
First: Your only source that you keep citing found no harm in trial patients linked to the drug. What they did found was a shoddy consent process, with high likelihood driven by efforts to keep costs low.
What your own source primarily blames are local regulators allowing this.
> 6. Is it okay to avoid doing clinical trial in home country with consent, but ethical to do it in another nation on poor unsuspecting minors without consent?
First: absolutely yes. If it is ethical to do a trial in one country, it is ethical to do it elsewhere. Why wouldn't it?
Secondly, clinical trials on Gardasil were done in both the US and Europe before 2008 (see source above).
> I can throw more and more facts and links here. But you already know the game is up, don't you?
I just explained how the sources you cited so far are insufficient to sustain your conclusions and accusations.
But this sentence alone makes me highly suspicious that you have your view set in stone, and that you are cherrypicking and misreading facts to fit it.
This is foolish. You should always ask yourself what information would be necessary to change your view-- my personal conclusion is that nothing really could, because you want to sustain your witchhunt more than you want to know the truth.
Personally, I came into this somewhat curious if there truly was some hushed up medical disaster in India caused by the Gates foundation, but by now my answer is a pretty conclusive no.
Your primary point is "the study harmed participants, and Gates is responsible"
But your own report contradicts this, and finds the deaths unrelated.
You also argue that Gates is suspect, because HPV vaccine trials were only done in India. This is also false, I sourced that already in the previous response, you did not comment on it.
You keep coming back to the same Indian Parliamentary committee report, which explicitly finds that the girls deaths are completely unrelated or "unlikely related" to the vaccine, and then keep accusing the study of "killing schoolgirls".
You are either arguing in bad faith or lying to yourself here.
Unless you can actually state with a straight face what kind of evidence would change your outlook ("Gates responsible for harmful study"), I see no point in continuing this argument.
It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town.
Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in.
It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?
Sociable if you’re dumb like prince Andrew. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot. Said he was inane and a fraud who could only respond with stupid adolescent comments. Maybe somd like that sort of person and think they are fun. No doubt lots do, the guy down the pub who’s a laugh. Appeals to similarly dumb folk.
'...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'
Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".
(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)
Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.
“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
The real problem is psychology, not energy. As soon as you get one predatory narcissist/sociopath in a culture, and they're allowed to act freely, they will, with absolute inevitability, take advantage of everyone else's trust and cooperation and destroy any culture of mutual good will.
Energy is irrelevant to this. It will happen at any level of technology.
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