We’ve had this capacity for several decades now, and it seems ridiculous that our culture has not fully embraced it with open arms. If that’s not a sign that “we the people” aren’t running the show, I don’t know what is. Freedom my ass.
Seems like a completely normal and natural reaction to large-scale disturbing changes. Staying sane is the first priority. Or as they put it in Wrath of Khan…
Carol Marcus: “How can you think of food at a time like this?”
Kirk [eating an apple]: “First order of business - survival.”
I feel like we’re not even having the same conversation here. I explicitly object to the argument that medical measures are necessary to validate a trans concept. You say I’m focusing too much on that, then explain that being transracial isn’t valid because of exactly that.
Saying you can’t make your body change in the various ways you list invalidates being transgender - you can’t make your body naturally produce the hormones to create secondary sex characteristics, you have to artificially take them. But again, so what? I don’t think the body changes are relevant - if you’re trans then you’ve always been trans, you just might not have understood it. To me the transracial concept seems equally valid, and I don’t see how your biological objections relevantly differentiate them. I mean, you’re not even being accurate - people do modify themselves in all the ways you list. Cosmetic surgery and body mods are more than a $100 billion/year industry in the US alone. I just don’t see how you’re making a point.
I don’t think it’s weird at all. Being attached to physical objects is a totally normal part of being human. The comfort of familiarity is natural and nothing to be worried about. The personal example I can think of right away is that when a wallet wears out and I transfer my driver’s license etc to a new one, I’m aware of the same feeling of attachment. Throwing out the old one feels like a small betrayal. I think feelings like that are completely natural. In fact my childhood cuddle toy - a stuffed dog named “Poody” is still up on a bookshelf over my desk. I hardly ever think about him but he’s always up there, kind of watching over me.
Makes sense on the surface, but people have reacted exactly the same way the whole transgender concept. “You can be in touch with your feminine side but your still male” or whatever.
Are you saying hormone injections or other medical measures are necessary for you to consider someone transgender? I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t agree with that. Correspondingly why would that be required to be transracial? You’re right that hormone differences aren’t involved in race, but how does that invalidate the whole concept? TBH it sounds the same as the anti-trans argument, “it just doesn’t make sense.” I mean I can see people reacting like, “If we allow this then it would be easy to abuse.” Well maybe, but that seems like another issue. I’m just now dipping into this and trying to understand it.
I don’t know anything about this issue but apparently the presumption here is that your view is the right view and you’re just asking how to splain it to the person. My question is about the “I’ve already blocked this person” part. Instead could you possibly just limit your conversation to other subjects? It keeps looking like we’re all getting more and more isolated from each other as we develop extreme aversions to anyone not having our exact POV about everything, so we shove them out of our world. It reminds me of survivalist bunker mentality.
Ray, when someone asks if you’re a crab, you say YES!!!
Perfectly good approach if you know the subject well enough to know that the information you think you need is really what you need.
But if you were using a book in that scenario you wouldn’t open it to page 1 and spend 2 hours reading it. You would glance through the index or TOC to find the relevant section (or flip right to it because you’re familiar with the book), then skim to what you need and read just that. You could also do this with an entirely unfamiliar book if you know the subject matter. I used to write my papers like that all the time. Either way, this approach could easily take less time than crafting a good prompt and tweaking it for a second or third run to make it work.
Since the AI search is being compared with reading an entire book, it seems reasonable to assume OP is talking about a different scenario where they don’t know the subject well enough to use a simple search engine to simply look up a piece of information. They want to avoid learning the subject by having the AI teach them only the part they’re guessing is relevant. This scenario is asking for AI hallucinations, omission of subtle but important details through oversummarizing, and general inaccuracy that OP will be oblivious to since they don’t know the subject. OP might as well suggest browsing through memes.
Came here to also question this. “To the naked eye the pollution is not visible.” Is that because we’re just looking at heat in an IR camera? I know everybody hates Elon Musk but we also hate misinformation and love truth, right? I mean, cuz we are the good guys… riiiight?
Election officials: “Nonsense! If an excess of voters show up we will be happy to provide waxed paper and ballpoint pens for them to vote with.”
I didn’t read it, nor did I claim to have. It comes down to whether it’s more reasonable to have confidence in a study by a Harvard academic or the dismissive comments of a social media rando. Now go ahead and have the last word so you can give yourself internet victory points, woo-hoo! IDGAF.
Chenoweth didn’t “assert” anything, she looked at hundreds of campaigns over the last century and reported results. Her work is linked in the article - you’re welcome to critique her methodology after reading it. Null hypothesis my ass.
That second part is especially encouraging.
Made you look!
Dictators are always afraid of their own people.
Yes. Yes it was.
I love when they reveal that she’s studying nuclear physics.
You don’t choose coin life. Coin life chooses you.
Eating and drinking are almost entirely habit. I would say the main driver is parents not teaching kids to just fucking drink water. You don’t need something with fizz, color or flavor. Water’s been keeping humans alive forever.