I think your observation is valid, but - perhaps from very understandable frustration - overwrought, and unfairly characterized as a specifically American foible.
Success always has many fathers, failure is always an orphan, anywhere. At least I am recognizing failure, if only to disown it!
(And if I rightly feel shame now, even without personal responsibility, can I not be allowed some sober pride in equal measure in other circumstances?)
That tone you detect is deliberately over-the-top: it’s breathless as a satirical technique. The author entirely agrees with your concerns; they’re mocking the corps and the researchers, or rather, letting them mock themselves by pretending complete credulity.
The article even concludes with advice on how best to shoplift, given what’s been learned!
For me I would have preferred a slower, more thoughtful and researched approach - but make no mistake, this writer ain’t “corpo-friendly” in the least.
Fine, it’s all my fault. Neither me nor my state voted that way, I’ve protested like hell, but nonetheless at your insistence I accept personal responsibility for the policy choices of the federal government.
What do you propose I do?
Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
- Greeks of which time? Those of mythical setting, rooted in the Bronze Age? Those of the several centuries when it was an oral history? Or those of the many centuries of it being a written work (during which a myriad of interpretations were put to pottery for our perusal)?
- What about non-Greek interpretations? The long Hellenistic and Roman epochs gave us a vast number of syncretisms…
- Famously (among classicists) the works themselves (more the Illiad here) are a historical muddle, including both surprising Bronze Age accuracies (Ajax’s shield; digamma implied in the meter) and clear Iron Age anachronisms (how chariots are used).
> all you need to do to become stronger and more "manly" is to exercise, sleep well, and maintain a nutritious diet.
One also needs to be handy, humble, kind to and protective of the weak, trustworthy and able to keep your word, and not a coward, moral or otherwise. You know, have character.
I have “TDS” specifically because these all are lacking, so lacking it is as if by deliberate abdication, among those leading the new masculinity cult in America.
Thinking, thesis and synthesis, syllogism, poesy or prose: in all these things I am far better than an LLM.
But even were I not, I would still insist on doing them myself. An abnegation, an abdication of yourself, to do otherwise. A little suicide. If I speak to you yet you act a mere frontend for Claude, what’s the point of you?
But for coding? Sure, if the tool works. But I expect its ideas will never be new.
Ah, friend, America was importing people from Africa. Indeed “import” is rather more apt in this case than the several other you’ve ignored (e.g. the mass immigration from Vietnam at the finish of that war).
What a horridly dull country it would be were your understanding nearer the truth; what a betrayal of its dream to wish it as you see it; how silly you would seem to your know-nothing antecedents so lumping “Europeans” as one (it is an irony that in their comparatively more nuanced racialism they at least understood a little more of that continent’s ethnic and cultural diversity).
> we never were really communicating that well to begin with?
We were not. A majority of humanity has been merely semiliterate since at least the advent of radio. As this came before secondary (high school) education became ubiquitous, I suspect that sublime, true literacy has only ever belonged to a minority.
And, of course, language is wholly imperfect to its purposes, a perpetual kludgery, even when commanded by the purest poet.
The bicameral hypothesis seems impossible to me. Consciousness must precede language, no? The invention and use of the latter is impossible without some theory of mind, which requires first a theory of self. Therefore language cannot be integral to the advent of consciousness.
Unlikely. Adaptability of the language to new concepts as well as ease of adoption for second language learners matters. English - indeed every other candidate global language (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) - excel Chinese in these respects. I’d wager that even we’re American hegemony to go the way of the UK, English will persist. It may become more Indian or Singlish, but this demonstrates its strength.
And I suppose this world-historically rich Afrikaner is prepared to pay the high personal taxes required for such a scheme, no? Words speak loud than actions, no? He will not be troubled by the skin color of recipients (“universal”), yes?