Will be interesting to see how strong the controlling forces can be - enough to make you miss things in direct perception like in the book, or only softer effects further up the cognition layer stack
Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.
The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing
Per Turchin model, the declining population in China has created conditions for more elite-adjacent positions for all those STEM PhDs, preventing overproduction
“It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.”
Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.
Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.
Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.
Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization.
That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.
Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power
It corresponds with the qualitative observation that violent revolutions are usually led by the “middle class”. This itself corresponds with versions quantitative theories like Turchin’s Structural Demographic Theory.
It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.