Interesting. One potential difficulty in implementation would be the creation of a believable decoy conversation (for the dictator to read) – but LLMs might be able to automate this.

One interesting observation in the book - Stoicism and Buddhism are similar in that both seek to eliminate anger, not just manage it. I suspect that some forms of Christianity also have this goal (but not the kinds of Christianity that has an army of professional propagandists).

It sounds like a procedural technicality. I’d bet that the governor would have signed off on it if he had been asked. So no vindication for the defendants, but I’m sure they’re happy to have the charges dropped.

Their bias is a direct response to the rhetoric from the ‘leaders’ of the AI industry, who have collected billions of dollars and turned it into BS expectations.

This essay from Brenda Conlon provides a quick introduction to the female stoics of antiquity, with meditations on how stoic egalitarian may be applied to equality between the sexes, although never really discussed in antiquity.

The only way it matters is that maybe there’s a way to escape ‘to a higher plane’. But even without a simulation, there’s always opportunities to understand the universe better and maybe make some fundamental breakthrough. Or there’s mysticism. Of those three, a simulation may offer the least chance for a breakthrough.

Given how our current society operates, I think it’s more likely we’d have the “Spacers” from Asimov. A small number of very rich people living with their automated servants.

syncretism is my default. The only reason to choose one at the exclusion of another is if conclusions are based on fundamentally different assumptions. For example, ancient stoics would borrow from Epicureans when they made a good point. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson borrowed from both John Locke and others when drafting the Declaration of Independence. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15f6pl/comment/c7m1fpn/

I like them both. For stoicism, I like Massimo Pigliucci’s work. For absurdism, Camus. Are there any modern day Camus’?

p.s. I created a community for discussing topics like these in more depth: https://yall.theatl.social/c/philosophy_of_life

I was just pondering something similar – a lot of the current weirdness seems to come from a refusal to face mortality head on. They start reaching for straws, hoping that there is some magic elixir that will save them, then getting angry when there isn’t one.

True. I see that Parliament also has a Speaker of the House with a similar role to the US Speaker of the House. I was confused why you equated the Prime Minister with the House Majority Leader, rather than the Speaker of the House. It sounds like in the UK, when a party gets a majority in Commons, their leader usually becomes PM, while in the US, their leader becomes Speaker.

The President in the USA can veto laws. In a Constitutional sense, this gives them more power than any other single legislator. They are also the leader of their party, which can make them just as influential as the Speaker of the House (House Majority leader) when their party has the majority. The public also pays more attention to the President than the Speaker. For these reasons, and because Presidents have defined terms, it’s convenient shorthand to describe a period of time.

The ‘selective enforcement’ occurred because strict enforcement would be much more expensive than what anyone wanted – yet a fanatical minority was able to play games in Congress to repeatedly block bipartisan deals for “comprehensive immigration reform” (under Bush, Obama, and Biden).

Yes this happens alot. That is also how my HOA’s rules were explained to me. Laws are often a farce – just a distraction from the raw use (abuse) of power.

The law should be revoked. I would not assume that the legislature is more legitimate than the local prosecutor who decides not to enforce. Often this situation happens when the legislature is captured by special interests who are unconcerned with popular will (and the risk of resistance), or by a national government trying to micromanage local and personal affairs.

Yeah, obviously need the first that that will kill you. We take breathable air for granted. But if you need an infinite supply of clean air, you are probably dead anyway. An infinite supply of water has many uses beyond drinking and hygine – irrigation, power, and cooling come to mind as very useful post-apocalypse.

Are there particular people or writings that are foundational to druidry, or is it more decentralized/amorphic? My impression is that it’s a revival of ancient practices that are only knows via fragmentary records of sayings or practices.

Then that’s a sign that Fox news (or whatever source) isn’t a useful source. That’s where people need to get their heads straight. Trying to fact check unsourced claims is a sucker’s game - it’s easier to make a BS claim than to fact check it, especially when the claims are produced by a billion-dollar propaganda machine.

It can be hard to identify experts, and sometimes experts are still being told what to say by others, so you actually need to identify independent experts. Sometimes we rely on institutional endorsement to identify experts, but that relies on the institutions themselves being independent and being primarily focused on promoting expertise. There are other ways to identify experts, but they can be difficult to apply until you have a lot of experience with experts. There are a lot of people out there who feign expertise – for instance, it’s common for conspiracy theorists to write long books with lots of footnotes. I’m afraid that the new generative AI systems will make in much easier to feign expertise.

One general rule is to get as much information as possible from true experts - people who work on the specific subject that they are discussing, at least in broad fields of knowledge (e.g. history, biology, computers, law). Don’t rely on a single person or team of people to be your one-stop-shop for information. As much as possible, the experts should be independent of each other. While a historian and a biologist may both work at universities, and you may learn about both of them from a reporter, they likely do not have daily contact with each other and likely have not ever met… but stay aware of ‘where they are coming from’. When an interesting topic is raised, be willing to track down the original source and learn more directly from them.

Get information from sources that treat you seriously. For instance both NPR and the Economist both focus on in-depth reporting about a wide variety of topics. In contrast, TV news tends to be full of fluff. Ignore fluff peddlers. Ignore those who talk in circles about today’s minor scandal or “breaking story”, and instead focus on those who give you information that will still be useful a year from now.

Before you can check facts, you need to know what are reliable sources. This is a long term process. If I need to go to one place, Wikipedia is a good starting point to get ‘all sides’ of a topic (usually), with links to primary sources.

A long term strategy is to build general background knowledge rather than relying on case-by-case fact checking. Especially science and history. If you have that knowledge, a lot of the spin becomes immediately obvious, and you quickly identify who is worth listening to (of course, you need to first find reliable sources for history and science, and not get caught in partisan echo chambers. Just don’t turn to politicians and TV pundits for your history lessons).

I like academics because they mainly communicate with other experts and know they can’t get away with BS, while TV hosts and politicians mainly communicate with people who are easy to fool.