I saw him perform 26 times in my life, and still those were rookie numbers. Still I thought there would be so many more too. Thanks for all the music, Bobby Weir.
I've been doing pretty much the same thing since 2019. The only big change I made was in early 2023, when I started saving a new version of the long txt file each day. It works very well for me but I recognize it isn't the right system for everyone!
I won't be providing my full name and email without more information, like at least a peek inside. Interesting legal argument regarding the brand though.
The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part: 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living.
I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.
Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.
I think the point is a bit more nuanced and has to do with the authors conception of the self. He argues that even if you got immortality and lived a great life at some point You would stop being You so you might as well have died anyways. I think it’s a bit silly. But if you believe that enough alteration of the self results in its death, a sort of Self of Theseus, then I think it’s a consistent opinion.
> His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of "boredom, indifference and coldness", or they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. Either way, the You that wanted immortality doesn't get it. You just die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.
I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.
Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.
Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).
It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science.
Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."
The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.
I think it's simpler than that. They believe in what they believe specifically because it contradicts the views of people they dislike. I guarantee you that the person you were talking to got a real kick out of you wasting so much of your time trying to explain a position.
However, these people do have a weakness. They feel good when they win the attention economy and the emotion economy, and those are actually really easy to subvert with a little out of the box thinking.
"I'm glad they've finally figured out the cause of autism."
"Chemtrails?"
"No, they said it was Tylenol."
"I don't think so. Did you know that the number of chemtrails the government has put into the air has increased 7-fold since January?"
My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.
The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.
I suppose I am fortunate that I don't know anybody who is that far gone that cares deeply about me.
However, the people I use this trick on aren't strangers. They are regular acquaintances that have conspiratorial views, but think I am one of the "good" ones. When these people tell me things like it's just a difference of opinion, you can tell that they derive strength and satisfaction from their ignorance.
My goal isn't to convince them, it's to stop them from reaching into their bag of conspiracy theories when talking to me. In that, it has been wildly successful.
I can see that your approach would be effective at shutting down conversation and stopping people from telling you their wild conspiracy theories.
I think that with my experience, I've had to recognize how fragile some of the most important incentives are. Like the safety that underpins trust. To have trust, it needs to be safe for people to be wrong. That means I often have to listen respectfully to views that I find abhorrent, in order to get to the point that I can share my own thoughts fully.
I think providers of so-called "answer engines" will read the writing on the wall and find new ways to support content creators in order to keep their databases fresh, relevant, and centered on human perspectives. I also think that to see how the economics will play out, you only need to look at similarly centralized systems like Apple's App Store and Google's AdSense.
Because the providers will act as a single tunnel that all content passes through before reaching the end user, the tolls they collect will be large. So, I don't doubt that there will still be opportunities for content creators to earn money as answer engines siphon off more and more of the web's traffic, but expect those opportunities to be broadly low-paying, falling decidedly in the "side hustle" category.
AI providers will want to incentivize content creation. There will still be a glut of ready providers, and little reason for providers to make anything but small, nominal payments.
I've been using the voice chat in ChatGPT more and more frequently. I'm curious now to see how the costs associated with this would work through the API on some user-facing features. It's a cool update at a glance.
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