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March 30, 2020 - February 24, 2021
The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents.
But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.
economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis.
It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second.
It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans—not jobs.
😬😬😬
What then will be the fate of the stragglers? American voters might conceivably agree that taxes paid by Amazon and Google for their U.S. business could be used to give stipends or free services to unemployed miners in Pennsylvania and jobless taxi drivers in New York. But would American voters also agree that these taxes should be sent to support unemployed people in places defined by President Trump as “shithole countries”?28 If you believe that, you might just as well believe that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny will solve the problem.
:3
Do you think people should choose their government rather than blindly obeying a king? Do you think people should choose their profession rather than being born into a caste? Do you think people should choose their spouse rather than marrying whomever their parents select? If you answered “Yes” to all three questions, congratulations, you are a liberal.
!
our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of “free will.” Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom—they are based on calculation.
mmm
If new treatments for extending life and upgrading physical and cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological castes.
Politicians are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the human emotional and biochemical system. They give a speech, and there is a wave of fear in the country. They tweet, and there is an explosion of hatred. I don’t think we should give these musicians a more sophisticated instrument to play on.
People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.
Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package.
angry outbursts just make things worse. It’s better to work with your own feelings while allowing things to cool down. In the meantime, limit your contact with the person in question, and if contact is unavoidable, be terse but polite, and avoid sensitive issues.
On other occasions people see God as a stern and worldly lawgiver about whom we know only too much. We know exactly what He thinks about fashion, food, sex, and politics, and we invoke this angry man in the sky to justify a million regulations, decrees, and conflicts. He gets upset when women wear short-sleeved shirts, when two men have sex with each other, or when teenagers masturbate. Some people say He does not like us to ever drink alcohol, whereas according to others He positively demands that we drink wine every Friday night or every Sunday morning.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).
A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. “Well,” he answered, “I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.”
Yet even suicide doesn’t prove an absolute commitment to a single story. On November 13, 2015, the Islamic State orchestrated several suicide attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The extremist group explained that it did so in order to take revenge for the French air force’s bombing of Islamic State activists in Syria and Iraq, and in the hope that France would be deterred from carrying out such bombardments in the future.18 In the same breath, the Islamic State also declared that all the Muslims killed by the French air force were martyrs who now enjoyed eternal bliss in heaven. Something
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lmao :D
