I love this insight, and it generalizes. Just swapping out humans with AIs won't just fix everything, because many of the biggest problems are structural or emergent.
I'm hopeful that we can use AI models to pressure test better options of social organization etc.
Democracy had enemies before the founding of the Republic. Our founders warned us that it would require constant maintenance: "a republic, if you can keep it," warned Franklin.
Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.
Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.
All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)
In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.
Abortion used to be a Catholic issue until a Republican strategist saw an opportunity.
The point is to get citizens fighting each other on things that are personally important so we're too busy to fight for things that are nationally important, like corruption or the decay of democracy.
Both parties suck because the system is broken, and both parties benefit from perpetuating it -- along with those who fund them.
>Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else.
I can see how you think this, since othering and dehumanizing responses rise to the top when people ask how Republicans can support this administration.
>Xwedodah (Persian: خویدوده xidude; Avestan: xᵛaētuuadaθa) is a type of consanguine marriage historically practiced in Zoroastrianism before the Muslim conquest of Persia.[1] Such marriages are recorded as having been inspired by Zoroastrian cosmogony and considered pious. It was a high act of worship in Zoroastrianism, and there were punishments for not performing it.[2][3]
>This form of direct familial incest marriage allowed Zoroastrians to marry their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and their own mothers to take as wives.[4] Xwedodah was widely practiced by royalty and nobility, and possibly clergy, but it is not known if it was commonly practiced by families in other classes.[5] In modern Zoroastrianism it is near non-existent, having been noted to have disappeared as an extant practice by the 11th century.[5]
I'd recommend something like Breakfast with Seneca. It's an awesome read, and should hopefully help to differentiate the philosophy or school of stoicism and whatever we have now.
We're still human, and the collaborative problem solving the ancients did still applies today. That much of the concepts survived and maintained relevance from ancient Greece, to Rome, to now lends them a certain 'time tested' quality.
Many people raised the alarm back then, and were shouted down by promises that these laws would only be used when appropriate. In 2002, very few would've been okay with tearing apart American families, parents, and children based on the color of their skin, letting women miscarry through malnutrition while in custody, etc.
Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back.
Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.
>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done.
It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.
1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.
Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.
If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.
Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.
But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.
It's incredibly difficult to stop a well-funded, 50-year plan to subvert a democracy. The attention spans of politicians, corporations, and the public are measured in days, months, or years, not decades.
After 9/11, the Bush administration was accused of abusing the crisis to expand executive power and the national security state. Those who raised the alarm about things like the Patriot Act were often dismissed as fringe alarmists.
Now, nearly 25 years later, we're seeing the downstream effects of that gradual degradation of democratic pillars.
On both sides, voters and politicians can be influenced by propaganda and campaign finance to accept small, incremental changes that don't seem dangerous in isolation, but can cumulate to crush an empire.
Every democracy carries these risks. Do we think our opponents haven't noticed?
I saw the same thing immediately. The robot arm could be calibrated to use a real slicing motion as well. They're misrepresenting the actual performance of this product.
>meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][9]
Failing to reproduce an effect doesn't prove it isn't real. Mythbusters would do this all the time.
On the other hand, some empires are built on publication malpractice.
One of the worst that I know is John Gottman. Marriage counselling based on 'thin slicing'/microexpressions/'Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. His studies had been exposed as fundamentally flawed, and training based on his principles performed worse than prior offerings, before he was further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.
This type of intellectual dishonesty underlies both of their careers.
I know someone who was concerned about depression, and went to get checked. The diagnosis was normal. They were having an appropriate emotional response to very challenging situations.
I was really surprised when I first got an iPhone. After all the hype about it being so intuitive and polished, it was just different. Some things better, some things worse.
But Apple devices take a bit longer to go obsolete, and seem just a tiny bit less invasive as they don't rely on an advertising model for revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising–systemising_theory