possibly a cat

Culture is not a static system. Elements may be destined to be counter-rational for now, but a better of awareness could also destine us for a more fair and effective system in the future. Just because something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that determinism dictates it never will.

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Not everything is the worst. Just the important things.

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Nothing like a K-shaped recovery to help the rich get richer.

That’s just trading one privacy weakness for another, without being able to prove that original weakness has actually even been mitigated.

It make financial sense to provide this option, but “pay for privacy” is a questionable way to describe the transaction.

There are plenty of alternative explanations.

For a few examples:

• In such a huge universe, even if FTL travel is possible, why should we expect Earth to be a common destination?
• It is possible that only species who do not wish to colonize the galaxy will avoid the Great Filter and acquire the technology needed to colonize it.
• Not all space-faring races must be highly populous, while less populous species will encounter less of the issues that would cause a population to collapse before becoming space-faring.
• We could be colonized without recognizing it.
• Colonization itself could be inherently unsustainable.

There is also no reason to limit the discussion to a galaxy. If we assume that an FTL civilization will colonize (in a way that we would recognize), then they could come from any galaxy. Given the expanse of the universe, if such a behavior is common enough that it would stand a chance of succeeding, then it should probably exist already. And yet we do not appear to be colonized. Which is more likely: That FTL intelligences must colonize, or that we are all alone in the universe? Axiomatic reasoning reveals that the latter is statistically much less likely than the former. So it is less likely to successfully explain why we appear to be uncolonized.

This doesn’t read like science, but more importantly it is deeply flawed logic:

A person is in a car that is heading off a cliff. While they are naive of this fact, they are content but destined to an untimely demise. They are made aware of the fact and become deeply anxious.

What is causative in this scenario? Ignoring the cliff, we could say that the awareness is at fault for the person’s anxiety. But if the person were better informed about their state and there was no cliff, there would be no anxiety.

A root cause analysis would show that fundamental problem is not that the driver knows where they are going, but the fact that they are headed off a cliff in the first place.

To determine that social media is the root cause of increased teenage mental illness rates, we would need to confirm that social media in a utopian environment still causes mental illness. This is a claim without much evidence, particularly because the more one becomes informed about the world the more the will be exposed to its legitimate problems. What would be more practical, then, is to determine what incidence of mental illness occurs with awareness of these issues where social media is not a factor, and then to evaluate what if any factor remains to be explained by social media. The editorial does not take this approach, but instead appears to attempt a firehose of rationalizations that don’t converge to make a coherent thesis.

Perhaps the editorial author’s book isn’t selling well.

I expect that many other planets have life. I suspect that interstellar travel is not the only means of traveling between planets.

I am not at all convinced that foreign intelligences do visit, but I do consider it a very real possibility. If I were to somehow know they were here and nothing more, then I would feel confident that their visitation is being concealed.

It’s a wonderful topic, but I’m not particularly interested in beliefs related to it. I am much more interested in the possibilities.

No, I don’t think I have.

What instances/comms are you noticing it on?

Meaning in life does not come simply from collecting money. It largely comes from how we spend our time. Most of us spend a large part of our time at work or commuting. If fulfillment does not come from your job, then it’s going to be hard to find time to be fulfilled.

Now, some who have nothing to do at work are able to fill their time in a way that is meaningful to them - especially remote workers. But to have to give up your time, to have no challenges to apply yourself to during those work hours, and to be prevented from doing anything else that would be meaningful? That sounds like the 9th circle of hell to me.

Life is short. Few things are worse than watching it tick away in boredom.

rip in power graebae

Wobblies dropping knowledge and answering life’s biggest questions out here.

Use software with an active community, don’t install things you don’t need, update regularly, and be thankful that you probably aren’t worth using a zero-day backdoor on. Your telecom provider, on the other hand, might be - but there’s not much you can do about that!

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They’re definitely smarter than us, seeing as how we’re the ones killing the planet.