Unfortunately, I can't accept the climate change narrative because I've been doing my own research.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
Trump should sign an executive order to appropriate the money for himself. Then all the other rich folks will learn what it feels like to be on be on the losing end of government wealth redistribution. I think Trump would deserve the money as tuition fee!
This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."
Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...
Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other possible narratives which you haven't even heard of?
My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays are made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.
Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps in the data.
Not to mention that many correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality.
The very idea that causality is always simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!
In my experience, I can't recall reading a single paper in the social sciences describing causality as "likely a self-reinforcing feedback cycle" - Even this language sounds unscientific. They're always trying to prove causality. It seems like nobody ever tries to prove "Likely a feedback cycle" because nobody likes these ambiguous answers.
I suspect this is because science almost always has a financial goal behind it and people want definite answers. They want to be able to use the data to craft a narrative like "No, drug X definitely doesn't cause condition Y."
> This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."
That doesn't follow. Yes, there are going to be multiple interpretations of the data, however the data must exist otherwise you're just pulling claims out of thin air.
Being asked to provide the data is just an easy filter for people who just say things, who only have the narrative, like "the earth is a flat disc" - okay, show me some experimental data that would show this to be true.
But people have data. A lot of empirical data from their own lives. When something resonates with someone, it just means it fits the data they collected in their brains.
Most people aren't stupid. If they sound stupid, it's often because they have not heard a better narrative which fits their data.
Our society completely disregards the wisdom of old age. We probably meet hundreds of thousands of people in our lives. We collect both quantitative and qualitative data. That's statistically significant.
This is scary. I always reject PRs from bots. The idea of auto-merging code would never enter my head.
I think dependency audit tools like Snyk should flag any repo which uses auto-merging of code as a vulnerability. I don't want to use such tools as a dependency for my library.
This is incredibly dangerous and neglectful.
This is apocalyptic. I'm starting to understand the problem with OpenClaw though... In this case it seems it was a git hook which is publicly visible but in the near future, people are going through be auto-merging with OpenClaw and nobody would know that a specific repo is auto-merged and the author can always claim plausible deniability.
Actually I've been thinking a lot about AI and while brainstorming impacts, the term 'Plausible deniability' kept coming back from many different angles. I was thinking about impact of AI videos for example. This is an angle I hadn't thought about but quite obvious. We're heading towards lawlessness because anyone can claim that their agents did something on their behalf without their approval.
All the open source licenses are "Use software at your own risk" so developers are immune from the consequences of their neglect.
Interesting reading this. It reminds me of my time in cryptocurrency sector. I suspected that some team members were paid by Ethereum folks to sabotage our project. Why do I suspect Ethereum? Because our project founders ended up switching to the Ethereum ecosystem and ignored/suppressed better solutions from their own ecosystem. I think there's something about tech hype which attracts these kinds of people who like to play dirty.
You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something but your country isn't the best thing to die for.
The problem with your country (at least the vast majority of countries) is that it doesn't care about you. It's just too big to care. It has almost nothing to do with you.
I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people feel some affiliation with their country. For the vast majority of people, the relationship is akin to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend who takes your money and ignores your existence.
It only reciprocates for a tiny number of people at the very top; everyone else is delusional.
The slots at the top are extremely limited. The country should never be the focus; people should engage with local community instead. The country can only be appreciated in the context of a local community.
> You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something
It's very easy to die "for something" when you're already dying. The question is how much of your life you're willing to give up for something by dying right now.
People talk about "dying for your country" as if it's all one and the same, but some people die for the people in their country and some people merely die for the interests of their state.
Imagine your country is a nice place with nice values might be hard to imagine for Americans. You fight so that it remains that way for future generations. Countries can cease to exist.
I get it but I don't buy this. You don't need to fight for this. You just need to live according to your values.
My ancestors' country had (and still have) nice values. Used to be under the control of France, then switched to British control, then back to French control. This happened without any war or fighting. Nothing changed for the people. They even kept speaking French. Many got rich still; just had to decide which parasite to pay tax to.
Before they learned this, they had actually fought wars against the British, but for what? The British later ended up protecting them. Protecting their own tax proceeds, really...
If the people are strong-willed and have a strong sense of community and know what is actually important, the owner country doesn't really matter. People won't obey laws they don't agree with anyway. They'll just manipulate the local authorities to report whatever they want to higher ups. What is the parent country going to do if they don't get the results they want, kill everyone in the country?
It's like having a donkey, you know you can't win with it.
It's the reason why US failed to maintain control in Iraq and Afghanistan. The people didn't need to fight to reclaim their country. In spite of massive military power asymmetry. This effect works with large populations and small populations. What more proof do we need? Fighting exists just to sell weapons IMO.
It's crazy to me that everyone assumes that you have to obey authority. People forget this only happens with consensus. You can just pretend to obey, do the bare minimum and let the authorities blame bureaucracy. Anyway these big governments have real major bureaucratic struggles internally anyway so they're used to it.
If your values are non-violent and you're value producers, that doesn't happen. Sure, there can be situations where the land itself is valuable and the people on it are only a liability, but usually the value is in the people themselves.
I think you underestimate just how well national pride works on people. It's an amazing proposition - you get to identify with the struggles and achievements of millions of people over decades just by being born in some spot. This can be useful/motivating in moderation, but it's obvious how dangerously easy it is to abuse by nationalists. Russians rather feel mighty dying in a pointless war than admitting they will never be a superpower. Americans would rather reminisce about the 1950s than doing anything to fix the many ways we've stagnated. Humans are willing to accept a lot of suffering instead of feeling humiliated.
Exactly, where it crosses into ultranationalism, it's a coping drug. You may be a nobody on all other scales, but darned if you can't stand under the flag of your country and truly _be someone._
Good point. Meanwhile you can often lead a good life if you're willing to forego status and try to be objective about your accomplishments. Let others believe what fantasies they want. It's always a fantasy anyway.
Everyone is clutching onto narratives and blind-spots.
All this work to solve one website's problem... You can be sure MANY other open source projects are facing the same issue. It's just not a viable solution. There is something wrong with Google. Google has to fix it.
The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them.
All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.
Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
> Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically.
Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale.
Customer support is expensive.
Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)
Which examples? Lots of times it’s not a forced monopoly but just that customers want the monopoly because they are best/cheapest. Take Google Cloud that people complain about its lack of support. Yet people sign up even if there are thousands of competitors.
Yes, but it's not just personal moral failings, the system itself is corrupt. Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth. It shouldn't be all-or nothing. This is the result of our debt-based system. This is deeply abnormal. Rich people should be comfortable in every way and should have the surplus to take a moral stance without risking to lose everything. You can see this play out very clearly with OpenAI. Sam has enemies. He may have done some things that he fears would catch up with him if he loses power. It's always like this with the most powerful people; they usually end up making Faustian bargains which put them into extreme all-or-nothing situations and they take the entire world for a ride with them.
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth.
That does resonate to some extent, when I see people of actual merit (or at least, people who have done things with actual merit) like Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, lining up to suck meritless people like Trump off.
The problem is, once the rich people have secured their fortunes through self-abasement, they never seem to use those fortunes to redress the humiliation they've suffered. That makes your argument a hard sell. Would Bezos and Musk and Cook and Huang and Dell and Altman and Soon-Shiong and Zuckerberg and Mickey Mouse -- all the figures from the famous Ann Telnaes cartoon and more -- still be as supportive of Trump if they didn't have to be?
Yep great point. I guess this is the most extreme case. This dependency that billionaires have on the government is a symptom of the same effect and it's terrible regardless of which party is in charge, just negatively impacts different people. The same dynamic of government dependency flows down to everyone else.
It's because the government can print money. The government is the ultimate fallback, if interest rates increase and money becomes scarce, these big corporations need the government to provide big contracts to back them up to get through that tough period.
This is what I mean by all-or-nothing situation. These big corporations NEED huge, constant inflows of cash to stay solvent. The system is always full of debt; the liquidity is always under threat of being sucked out rapidly... So all these big companies are terrified of such event. They need to know that if money gets scarce, they've got a reliable stream they can draw from and the only reliable source of money in times of monetary scarcity is the government.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
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