So this is the male version of the trophy spouse stereotype. Focuses on lifting and courting, has an education just to check off a box, writes pseudointellectual drivel to pass the time.
Just as likely to be replaced by a fresher model in a few years.
I'm actually not pushing for anything, and since I wasn't following antivaxxers this is all new to me. I guess this was my 10000 moment for the day (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
Not an anti-vaxxer, but comments like this are even better antivaxx fodder :)
I understand where you are coming from, but the ultimate goal is to stop COVID, not get everyone a jab in the arm. If the jabs (legitimately) stop working we should stop the jabs. Compliance with COVID rules isn't a goal unto itself.
Vacccinating mice is a fun idea to think about, but you'd have to develop vaccines for squirrels, raccoons, and pigeons shortly after the mouse one. Also think about all the unintended consequences (your food vaccine getting into waterways, for example). So yeah, this is the kind of idea that makes antivaxxers look sane.
True. This one hit close to home for me personally, but I can say with confidence that therapy can make things a lot better.
There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.
P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.
And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture.
It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do.
The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
If your birth country isn't India or China, a masters could significantly speed up the process of getting a US green card. For India or China you'd wait a decade anyway.
There are even to this day quite a lot of houses in Russia with this exact setup. My grandparents old house had an oven stove and radiators. They replaced the oven stove with an electric boiler sometime in 2000s but kept the radiators.
Americans lost two skyscrapers and still talk every year about how the country was scarred. Yes, it was terrible, but imagine a country literally burned by fire from the sky, and future generations continuing to suffer through birth defects. The sheer magnitude of the suffering perpetuated in the name of "freedom" and proper values is staggering.
But, to play devil's advocate, isn't this exactly what we should want, long term?
I think the end goal is for Black and autistic people to be thought of as people first and foremost, and their differences would take a back seat. This is the only way we can be one big happy family. Wouldn't the best way to accomplish this be for the rest to realize that they actually have something in common with the marginalized groups?
Imagine a white supremacist who learns they had a Black ancestor. That would transform their whole world view.
Same with autism: neurotypical people being able to relate to quirks that cause social exclusion isn't something to shut down. We should be celebrating the normalization of these things because that is how they stop being markers of the "other".
Sometimes I wonder what the people who are up in arms about being "not properly" Black, autistic, etc. have as their end game. Perpetual exclusion of the marginalized groups for sympathy points? I think many would gladly trade those points for greater inclusion.
Fun is maybe not quite the word I'd use. The juxtaposition of all the wording about "defense" and menacing-looking characters that would definitely be the villain and not the hero in any comic book or movie is... unsettling. Even if it's a self-aware joke about their public image (like the squid giving the whole Earth the hug of death), it's maybe gone a bit too far?
Won't we figure out at some point how to input the fun into the brain directly, bypassing the usual senses? At that point, what's the use for galactic colonization? Math/fun can be maximized most efficiently by plugging into the Matrix instead.
Artificial bodies. Our deep-seated bias towards compassion has led us to subvert natural selection through medicine (and I say this as someone who likely would not survive a few centuries ago). We will continue to decline physically as a species and require more and more interventions immediately after birth. At some point we'll probably do away with old-school reproduction altogether.
But what about Plato's cave? You say that a mind arises from a healthy brain, but let's say we put a perfectly healthy brain into an environment where it cannot experience the same kind of stimuli that the brains riding in our bodies do. Would it still be healthy? Could we relate to this intelligence, and would we consider it to have a mind?
I'm no expert, but I wonder just how much of the distinction is entirely artificial and the only fundamental difference between our intelligence and what we call AI is the set of input data, and the rest of the difference can be attributed to scale. After all, scale has an effect on cell-based wetware too. Does a cat have a mind? Could one pass for a human?
I think our sense of right and wrong actually has a lot to do with evolution. Indeed, it's one of the things that drives our evolution as a species.
Self-preservation is very important, and anything that puts it in question tends to elicit a very negative visceral reaction. However, I do think you mischaracterized what I said. Not putting one's survival first and foremost is not always horrific in the grand scheme of things. We tend to call people who sacrifice their life to save others heroes. In the end, continued survival of the group outweighs the survival of an individual in human societies.
So far we have a working method for maintaining and evolving culture by way of knowledge transfer as well as replacement of the bodies that run this "software". And yes, it is absolutely "co-designed": our neural patterns shape the way we think as much as the collective knowledge does. With immortality the author is proposing to do away with a significant driver of cognitive evolution, and it's unclear to me what the benefit of this is, other than pandering to a selfish desire of self-preservation.
I also agree that if immortality was a thing humanity would still continue to evolve. It would just be a very different path, and it's not clear that it would be better.
There are basically two viable next-gen messengers: Telegram and Signal. One has an open encryption protocol and a founder who is much better connected in Silicon Valley.
I have to ask: but why? The author correctly concludes that the human mind is software, but then their survival instinct gets the better of them and they don't carry this thought to its logical conclusion. And that is: death is a feature, not a bug.
The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred.
In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.
Just as likely to be replaced by a fresher model in a few years.