The counterexamples given above were caregivers, health workers, and those are ones which I think are easy to see as mostly doing good.
But given that we're on a tech forum, I think most people should reflect deeply on the companies they work for and the systems they exist in. If those companies are not already mostly doing evil (as the companies which employ a majority or near-majority of tech workers are), then they're probably venture-capital funded or owned by investors, which means their goal is to maximize profitability over any real metric of doing good. So they will be doing evil in the future, if they're not already, because doing evil is necessary for competing with other companies also doing evil.
Reflecting on a top-level comment from another user about OP using the basic technologies to do things people would often use other tools for, I noticed wild.gr doesn't even use google fonts or other tracking scripts. Its fancy text effects in the hero ("Wild & alive" "& raw" etc) are done entirely with SVG!
Most would certainly provide more data to Google for convenience
We do need art but do people need to choose that as their career path? Traditionally perhaps, was an artist part time, was art made communally as leisure?
Some had rich patrons and there were travelling bands of entertainers...
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
If the prediction is that AI will be able to invent the future. If we give it data from our past without knowledge of the present... what type of future will it invent, what progress will it make, if any at all? And not just having the idea, but how to implement the idea in a way that actually works with the technology of the day, and can build on those things over time.
For example, would AI with 1850 data have figured out the idea of lift to make an airplane and taught us how to make working flying machines and progress them to the jets we have today, or something better? It wouldn't even be starting from 0, so this would be a generous example, as da Vinci way playing with these ideas in the 15th century.
If it can't do it, or what it produces is worse than what humans have done, we shouldn't leave it to AI alone to invent our actual future. Which would mean reevaluating the role these "thought leaders" say it will play, and how we're educating and communicating about AI to the younger generations.
Is missing out a variable. It's an action. An action e.g. it has been brought up.
Idea + idea2 + action
Merely encountering someone with an idea different to one we hold shouldn't lead to a breakdown in communication. It needs an action to e.g. discuss the idea, and this action is controllable. Most of the time we do not quarrel with people even though they are different than us.
Often we are not the ones who can control this, but we can control our reactions and stop participating in the quarrel should one start. (That's easier said then done as its all emotions by this point!)
There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard. This idea says that any call to understand the other (empathy) is therefore toxic and harmful and that it's a choice which suppresses our important story. (Usually we just say they are impossible to understand and so "other" them, which leads to de-humanisation as only humans can be understood). Often our pain needs recognition but to reject the idea of understanding another seems to lead to a worse world in any reality.
Now whilst to deny understanding is utterly fundamentally wrong in any and all rational belief systems, there is actually some truth to the idea! It will cause pain and effort to understand another. It does weaken one's own ideas and certainty about things. If I try to understand someone who opposes me on some important idea that I have, it will change me somehow. Maybe I will have less attachment to the idea, maybe I will find other ideas, maybe I will reject the idea, maybe I will not. These side effects of understanding can be dangerous.
It's Von Daniken's books that lead me here:
Why do people think funny things. What are the processes to believe things? What are the processes and ideas which keep people from changing their beliefs. What do people really desire? How are people manipulated and how do they manipulate others? How can people in a cult come out of a cult? How do cults work? How do people change the ideas inside them? How do I tell what I believe in? What does "ideology" mean? How can I tell where what I believe in comes from? How can I talk about different ideas with others?
> There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard.
I think the problem is in wanting to convince the other party to change their mind, except that humans untrained in presenting arguments just switch to campaigning instead.
Academia has always been where new ideas are seeded, germinate and flourish; this means that a lot of campaigns for change come from academia. It always has, probably always will.
The problem we have had recently (Moreso in the last 10 years or so) is that academia itself has tried shutting itself off from ideas; it's why there's safe spaces, and why people have been prevented from presenting talks at campuses, etc.
This new approach is resulting in a lot of "Nope, we won't even discuss it, nor will we allow you to discuss it to third parties".
Leading us to be in a thread about von Daniken, making fun of people who have a belief that meets a higher bar for evidence than the clear majority of the world.
The people making fun of the theories aren't even self-aware enough to realise that they interact daily with the rest of humanity who have even wilder beliefs.
> How can I tell where what I believe in comes from?
I believe (hehe) that this is where Cogito Ergo Sum came from.
Often we think someone is 100% sure but they only appear that way to us. Trying to change someone's thoughts by arguing with them never works.
Nasty quarrels might indicate an amount of uncertainty, or an amount of inability to articulate a thought. We often have ideas we don't really know why we have them, so we can help others to try to explain things to us in a way that helps them understand why too.
A "nasty quarrel" requires more than one side, and this other side is also responsible for the quarrel.
I think its wise when trying to talk about difficult things to first identify and agree upon the small things you can both agree upon.
If a conversation becomes heated it's no longer a conversation and you should get out before it gets worse. If you feel it's leading into fire and can still be salvaged you can then go back to these shared things and start again.
However a real conversation about ideas will also challenge and change your own view of the world. You might find your own ideas changing. People generally find this a psychologically painful process and will subconsciously resist such a movement. Generally we prefer to label the other as different, alien, us vs them. Having a quarrel is therefore even more likely as it means that your own psyche is protected from encounter with the dangerous other. Understanding that this also applies to the person you are talking with can also help reduce tensions and increase empathy. Again, starting from common shared baseline will help.
Dark mode - turning off the transponders and also coordinating their movements together to overwhelm any reaction. Some ships painted fake names on their hulls.
If one or two get caught but 10 make it through then ${game_theory}. This is very rare with modern blockades and global shipping.
According to Tanker Trackers on twitter. I dont think they have a blog or news area, their tracking of global shipping is very interesting to see patterns related to geopolitics https://x.com/TankerTrackers
If you are interested in this kind of information, Tanker Trackers on twitter always gives interesting insights into global tanker movements and geopolitics. https://x.com/TankerTrackers
Wikipedia allows anyone to edit and contribute! (although many users don't know that and a smaller than miniscule amount of users actually do.)
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