This cynicism isn't useful. You speak about how everyone wants to use every word against you, but your generalizations about people make me believe that you are the one looking for some kind of failure.
Listen, I don't know what kind of friends you are seeking, or what social groups you're in, and it's true that there are lots of people seeking power or to put others down. However, your statements fail basic logic and bias checks for in/out group bias, categorical error, inductive reasoning.
To me, it sounds like you are judging humanity based on the interactions on Twitter. I assure you, the vast majority of humanity are nowhere close to the machiavellian narcissists you make them out to be. Then again, I don't spend my time seeking power, or trying to get people to follow my socially extreme views, like veganism.
And yet, lots of people are these subjectively better humans that you describe. I say subjective because good, bad, evil... All labels, they're really just the fundamental attribution error. I recommend that you learn about categorical error and fundamental attribution error, and free yourself from the language that pushes us apart. That causes us to judge and hate.
I don't aliens that could come here would recognize profit as something real. They would see us destroying the world to eat meat. To pointlessly travel at high speeds. To drive cars around in pointless errands. To collect pointless knick knacks for social stature.
The penguin gives a stone to his mate. The human buys an F150 to attract social attention and a mate. To a hypothetical alien species, the gap between the intelligence of these two species is not large.
Collectively, we act in accordance with our biology.
I love living in small towns. Truly, I do. I lived in towns ranging from 2k to 10k, and like 90% of it is great.
But avoiding police is essential for people like me who even have slightly more melanin in their skin than the usual amount. There are certain stores I learn not to use, and I have to learn the locals too avoid in each one I live. The number of times that I'm treated well but that I'm somehow unique in my imagined racial group is unusually high.
And I want to be clear, this isn't just in "white" communities in the Midwest, but other cultures/"races" too. I don't fit in with any because I fall into the mythical "mixed race" category.
This is truly a sad social construct that I wish would die already, but yes, it's often part of the cultural nature of such places. Holding these beliefs often leads to people holding the view that their problems are caused by some external force that they can never overcome, and they end up trapped in places with low economic opportunity.
So yes, racist. And I'm not limiting this to one race or culture. It's sadly a common part of the places where I most want to live and will never fit in.
I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.
It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.
Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.
Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.
We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets pushed up by the algorithm.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow.
If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.
What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.
I think there are so many cultural pathways that lead to anti climate science today (and anti-vaxx, etc.) that it's impossible to list them all.
Generally they feed narcissism, and they must: in order to believe the anti-climate change rhetoric, you must first believe that you have hidden knowledge that makes you smarter than climate scientists (and more knowledgeable than them in something they have been studying for decades), or have some hidden knowledge that they are all lying, basically mind reading. You have to avoid the empathy and reflection that might make you understand their position, or cause you too question your own. Nowadays you even have to commit "doctrine over person" and deny the warming you see out your own window.
I think that is a bit common in programmer circles, and I have guesses as to why, but I would love to see a study in the space as to why.
To sum up another comment: it's cultural, not biological.
Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.
I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.
Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.
This tendency is not necessarily human. There are enormous numbers of humans disinterested in control of others, or their environment, etc.
Those who want control might suggest otherwise, and they might actually believe it, but that's just lack of creativity (thinking of other possible worldviews) or empathy (realizing that others might see things differently).
I'll answer. I have limited myself to vegan food for the last 17 years or so.
Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.
Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.
Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.
Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.
Lacking evidence otherwise, I would say that we have to assume the internal experience of most life with central nervous systems are remarkably similar to ours, because we are remarkably similar.
The next step is to take this into account in ethics, but I fear this is a leap that humanity in totality will not make easily.
The difference between the bison and beef cows is that the bison lived longer lives than the beef cows today. Growing new animals vs. maintaining a population has significantly different energy requirements.
I think we should fill most elected positions basically at random, and eliminate the presidency.
Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.
My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.
It's great to have a note system where you can get general information about a subject. However, such a system will not encourage you to read and recollect the information on a regular basis.
It seems to me that the only good personal knowledge management system is a self-testing tool, like Anki. When going through your daily tests, completed questions can have links to the source of the information. If you find yourself interested in studying the material again, you can follow the link, or retest using decks that you can build on the fly based on the tags of the question that caught your interest.
Personally, I just link to the original material that I found, instead of a personal note system. When I write notes, I write them by hand and regularly throw away binders of material. The handwriting was the important part, fully reinforced by constant self-testing.
The reason that this is so difficult, though, for technology, is the rate of change and how much technological bifurcation exists. Each company that I might go to will have their own stack of similar technologies with the same goals. How many languages do I actually want to know all the details of? Probably one. The ability to think as a programmer (or server administrator, network administrator, container system engineer, etc.) is the important part. Otherwise, I can learn the details of any utility on the fly as needed. It will stick with practice, and doesn't require the same level of personal knowledge management.
Learning a language, or things that don't change much (STEM subjects, for example), can benefit from the use of such a system.
We already have the language to describe someone who claims an expertise in a knowledge area without the study necessary to be an actual expert: dilettante.
And that's all that we'll actually be without memorization. There is a huge gap between someone with knowledge and expertise ingrained in their head, with a solid knowledge of the gaps in their knowledge, or understanding the layout of a knowledge realm that can only come from dedicated study of a subject, vs a dabbler or whatever level of expertise another individual might have with less stringent studies.
This same problem exists in our education system and cramming. You can cram subjects and pass tests, but research had shown that the knowledge gain from this process to be extremely limited.
Without a well ingrained knowledge of a subject, it is difficult to use that knowledge in creative thought, connecting with other realms of knowledge.
If all of these human mental processes are replaced with computation, and people no longer put in the effort to learn challenging things, then I predict large amounts of mental decline. We may already be seeing this process. Perhaps I should say... "As we offload more mental processing to computers...", Because it's definitely a process that many people are going through.
That isn't too say that computerized information is all bad. My wife would probably leave me if I didn't have a calendar app.
This ignores data that shows how many older people retired, and how large that effect is.
Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.
If I were a leader of a country that engaged economically with the US, I would be less concerned with the use of the dollar for UBI than it's current use, which is too enrich a small financial elite. A group that not only had outsized power in the US, butt also around the world, since the power of the dollar is so generalized.
It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.
My point is, what does it serve to build tanks? If the goal is to protect "our nation", then we are serving the abstractions.
If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.
Listen, I don't know what kind of friends you are seeking, or what social groups you're in, and it's true that there are lots of people seeking power or to put others down. However, your statements fail basic logic and bias checks for in/out group bias, categorical error, inductive reasoning.
To me, it sounds like you are judging humanity based on the interactions on Twitter. I assure you, the vast majority of humanity are nowhere close to the machiavellian narcissists you make them out to be. Then again, I don't spend my time seeking power, or trying to get people to follow my socially extreme views, like veganism.
And yet, lots of people are these subjectively better humans that you describe. I say subjective because good, bad, evil... All labels, they're really just the fundamental attribution error. I recommend that you learn about categorical error and fundamental attribution error, and free yourself from the language that pushes us apart. That causes us to judge and hate.