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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Tedesche@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat gives you hope?
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    9 days ago

    Others ITT have already mentioned people as a source of hope. For me, this is something of a paradox, as I’m fairly misanthropic. I believe most people are—on balance—good or at least prosocial. They want to get along with others and not cause harm. However, I also think we’re inherently tribal and self-centered. Our capacity for empathy within our closest social circles is quite high, but outside of them it barely exists. We tend to make good choices when it comes to those we know, but beyond that we tend to be fairly apathetic and callous.

    So, I am hopeful based on people’s desire to be good and make the world a better place for all. But our historical record demonstrates a failure pattern at scale that is anything but inspiring. Overall, I think we tend to hit at the middle of the road or slightly below it. I see the history of human civilization like a corkscrew: progress is made, but only very slowly and through many repetitions of past mistakes.

    Ultimately, I don’t have much hope. Humans perform best in small groups; in large ones (10,000+ people) we splinter and start treating each other very poorly. We evolved to function in small groups of just a few families. When we settled down and started developing our civilization (only 15,000 years ago—no time for evolution to change us), we struck out into territory we were not prepared for. Human civilization is effectively an experiment, and I would argue it’s returned mixed results at best.

    EDIT: I also think one of the chief problems with us as a species is that we are innately myopic. That is to say, we don’t truly recognize problems until they start to affect us directly. We had all the information we needed to predict the impacts of human-driven climate change in the 1950s, if not earlier. But people trying to draw attention to them were dismissed as alarmists. Only when we began truly witnessing the impacts around the turn of the century did we acknowledge the problem and start acting on it. I think the same will be true for AI, but much worse. We intellectually understand the threats that AI poses to our species, but won’t start acting on them until they actually start to take effect, and by that point, it will be too late.






  • I don’t agree children shouldn’t be watching porn. I started being exposed to it around 10 years old and I’m fine. The real issue is having the proper support structures in place. These involve confronting children’s burgeoning sexual impulses and treating them with respect, rather than trying to “preserve innocence” or “protect” them from “sin” or “indecency.” The people most concerned with protecting children from the indecency of pornography are typically the more depraved of our society anyway. As usual, the issue is more preparing children for adult topics rather than protecting them from them.


  • And to an extent, I agree that adding barriers to disaster victims is entirely unnecessary and counterproductive; I simply meant to point out that it’s not discrimination to expect people of virtually all stripes to be able to handle email access, at least in America. I’ve worked with people who have all varieties of disabilities. Only in extreme cases is it reasonable to expect a person to not be able to handle basic instructions that can help them circumvent technological barriers. If the blind can do it, what are we really talking about here? In my experience, it’s 9/10 times the lack of will, and that is probably the toughest barrier of them all.