Side rant: I fucking hate the phrase “unseasonably warm/cold”.

It gives the impression of a one off aberration that will go back to normal. We haven’t had a normal season in decades, maybe we should just admit we broke the seasons instead of tiptoeing around it.

Forget 1914. Try 1905. George Cove’s solar electric generator is remarkably similar to modern solar panels.

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

I’m sure, but a watch is 1000% more convenient if you don’t need any normal smart phone functionality (social media, games, internet access, media player, etc…). Its simpler to not have the option to use those features at all than to blacklist everything.

On top of that, it’s less likely to get lost or dropped/damaged like a flip phone. Probably has better battery life too. For small form-factor messaging + GPS its the most functional package.

One bad thing doesn’t make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.

And I don’t know that it’s overstated and it’s not at all perpetual. Look at… everything these days. People “disagree” with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.

It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.

I mean it’s the same use; it’s all literacy. It’s about how much you depend on it and don’t use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can’t read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.

The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn’t built for that. It doesn’t have “knowledge” or “reasoning” at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.

It can’t ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you’re doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it “write a book report on Romeo and Juliet”, it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can’t extract your thoughts.

Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there’s no reason most people couldn’t get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they’re given, it’s not a personal failure if they weren’t taught these skills or don’t have access to ways to improve them.

And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that’s perfectly fine. Getting there isn’t an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn’t improve these skills, it atrophies them.

It doesn’t push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We’ll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.

LLMs work by extrapolation, they can’t output any better than the context you give them. They’re used in completely inappropriate situations because they’re dead easy and give very digestible content.

Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you’re writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don’t need an LLM to fix that.

We’ve had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept (“hey Google, define [X]” or “what’s the word for when…”).

This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.

If you have access to those tools but can’t/won’t use them then you’ll never be able to effectively write. There’s no magic substitute for literacy.

The reason it feels like that is because it’s addressed to someone who you don’t know personally, even if you know them professionally. You never really know if a specific reference would offend them, if their dog just died, how “this email finds” them, etc…

And in the context of both of you doing your jobs, you shouldn’t care. Its easier to get day-to-day stuff done with niceties even if it’s hollow.

That’s just the tone tho. People trying to insist they give a shit when everyone knows they don’t is what bothers me. If you’re firing someone don’t sugar coat it.

In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn’t quite the same thing.

If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I’d agree. I’d probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it’s generally comprehensible.

Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.

Putting aside whether or not that’s anathema to the cause, I’m not sure how you’d “other” them in a meaningful way. The reason it works for the right is that they target groups who’s members are publicly visible and can’t voluntarily leave (LGBT+, minorities, foreign religions, etc…)

If you target a group of people for their beliefs (something not overtly visible), they can either relabel their group or plausibly claim their beliefs differ in some way. We already do this for fascists and nazis, but very few people are going to outwardly admit to these ideals. Now they’ll just say they’re “extra-constitutional”, “alt right”, “Christian patriot”, or any other hat a bigot wants to swap out for far right authoritarian.

You can’t “other” them where they already proudly claim a majority (white + Christian) so what are you left with?

There might not be an easy alternative right now.

People tend not to internalize a problem until they can personally see it, and a lot of these problems (deportations, cutting education, handcuffing the CDC, etc…) might not affect them until things get truly bleak. Unless of course they do something reckless like directly cutting funds that goes directly to their wallets (Medicare or Social Security).

Spreading awareness has always been a huge problem. Activists in Tsarist Russia had the same problem of trying to reach out to uneducated rural peasants and their efforts didn’t go smoothly. And of course this was before everyone had hand held disinformation machines in their pockets.

I don’t have a magic bullet but we do have some things going for us. It’s not yet illegal to spread radical ideas, our targets are generally literate, and we still share a fair number of cultural references.

The following is my best guess at advice, I’m just as open to ideas as giving them:

The tricky part is that mainstream social platforms are a non starter. You’d never outweigh the echo chamber. In my opinion digital organization is secondary at best because anything can be suppressed at the whim of server owner, ISP, or government.

So as dumb as it sounds, go forth and talk to people in real life. Be sure you’re educated on what you want to talk about (read your history and theory, know what political buzzwords actually mean). Try to avoid activities that insulate you in your own comfort zone, and gravitate towards ones with wide appeal and low barriers to entry.

Start a woodworking club with some like minded friends or join a book club and offer suggestions. Running group, bodybuilding, birdwatching, whatever… If you want to do some good for your community, join a mutual aid network.

Try to know the narrative these people are living in, even if it’s a fantasy. Avoid trigger words they’re primed to react to, keep it simple and let them draw their own conclusions. Not everyone will be receptive, some people are just assholes.

It’s not sexy but it’s also not that hard to point out glaring injustices in the world. Most people can at least see that far and agree that something needs to change, starting that conversation is first step.

Being reactionary to a nazi salute at a presidential inauguration is warranted, reasonable, and useful.

Being reactionary to my 70 year old neighbor who ate too many paint chips as a child because he had a Trump sign in his lawn for 2 weeks before the election is less useful.

Being reactionary against an anonymous stranger in your own digital echo chamber is pointless (assuming their bad argument isn’t also in bad faith).

It’s not necessarily a lack of education, I know a really smart surgeon, generally very reasonable, who fell for this stuff.

If you’ve never seen the echo chamber this guy lives in you don’t understand how bizarre it can be.

On the surface there’s a lot of influencers that can say truly regressive lies, and make them sound innocuous. They say it with such confidence and mixed in with truths and half truths. It can be hard to see the fallacies and misinfo even if you know what to look for.

There’s a constant drip of cherry picked stats and talking points designed to reinforce what he’s feeling. In the back of his mind he knows those support his case but he doesn’t really have an original source to reference. He tries to say them with the same confidence that he heard them with, but they’re not based in reality and look pretty ugly without the professional window dressing.

There’s videos where people do deep dives on this stuff (I can try to find one if you want). You could probably also experiment with it yourself if you have a VPN and a fresh/virtual device to make an account on.

I’d agree that your reasoning makes sense but is reductionist when talking about America’s two party system.

I grew up in a conservative town and I personally knew lots of people that were truly, deeply compassionate people. Christian in the truly radical, hippy sense of the word. Except they had one issue, abortion made them sad.

It wasn’t any ignorance of the issue or believing in satanic baby eating, but a philosophy arbitrarily picked by their community. They didn’t hate anyone getting an abortion, they just had some utopian vision of a world where they didn’t happen.

Since abortions were framed as murder and one party promised to ban abortions and the other party expand access, they were told there was only one ethical choice.

So their one line of thought trapped them. I could argue up and down the ballot on issues they agreed with, how the economy should be handled, prison reform, etc… but that one stupid idea held them back.

They’re still good people, and voted 3rd party a few times when the mood struck them. But I don’t think wanting one bad policy (with the best intentions) makes them bad people.

So I’d say yes. In that instance, with those people, it’s generalizing to say they were on board with any of the hateful policies. They were held hostage by their single issue, and the right’s rhetoric made damn sure they could never wriggle out.

What if the system is designed to keep you ignorant?

If you want to come to that conclusion in a political postmortem 20 years from now I’d fully encourage it.

The problem is that right now the house is burning down and shaming people for playing with matches won’t save us.

This is the political awareness equivalent of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

People are overworked, lack childcare, have poor healthcare, come from underfunded schools, never get exposed to diversity, etc… Just because it’s possible to escape those conditions and doesn’t mean it’s natural or easy.

Saying people are dumb and lazy is a thought terminating cliché, you have to view that as an extension of the problem.

Right but this isn’t the conclusion of a world war yet. I don’t doubt that the problem gets worse after people are forced to participate or be complicit while atrocities are committed.

There’s a series of miniscule steps from being ok with a hateful statement to being ok with dangerous people being rounded up to being ok with dangerous political opponents being rounded up to being ok with gas chambers.

Assuming that everyone who ignores the first step is a full fledged Nazi isn’t putting faith in people to change or even resist. Plenty of people stepped out of line in Germany and paid the price.

The real lesson after WW2 is that the Nuremberg Trials were far too lax and narrow in scope. Germany’s populace (while on the cusp of swinging far right) went through the most thorough denazification. It’s still putting up much better resistance than the United States (which had basically no punishment for nazi sympathizers) or Italy (handwaved due to surrender).

Fully agree that we can see the obvious fascists at the top and the rot seeps down. But idk that I can call 77 million people who casted one ballot Nazis.

My (maybe optimistic) perspective is that the rot has shallow roots. These days you don’t need thousands of dedicated grunts to print flyers and hang posters. Just get one billionaire with a social media platform and a few dozen managers and you can broadcast anything you want.