It’s good to periodically prompt your chatbot about something you know exceptionally well, just to remind yourself that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

“You have to be the kind of person who can make the best out of a Tuesday. You know those people who live for the weekends? They're wishing their life away.”

—Drew Marvin

People have the unfortunate tendency to regard an opposing argument not as a different perspective, but as a symptom of madness, stupidity, or evil. So, instead of addressing the argument on its own merits, they jump to diagnosing the "malady" that produced it.

Social media amplifies the extremes. AI amplifies the averages.

A tribe’s collective stupidity is proportional to its demand for purity. The more closely a group must agree, the more must be trimmed from each brain to make it fit.

AI is an amplifier of creativity, not a replacement for it. Without developing talent of your own, it’s worthless, just as zero multiplied by a million is zero.

I appreciate that R&B, and hope you're well too. I actually recorded an episode yesterday with Megan Murphy. It should be released soon!

Social media on April Fools Day is about as trustworthy as social media on every other day.

“The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.”

― John Ruskin

Warren Buffett’s test for how fortunate you think your life is. For an even wider perspective, draw a marble not just from the pool of 8 billion living humans, but from the 100 billion humans who ever lived.

shorturl.at/9IY8F

The way time speeds up as we age, and our lives accelerate toward death, is like the way a person in freefall accelerates toward the ground. But time speeds up largely because there’s ever less novelty as we age, so by doing new things, you can deploy a chronological parachute.

If System 1 is intuition and System 2 is reasoning, then System 3 is asking AI. These can offer mutual oversight like the 3 branches of US govt; intuition is the Executive (it acts), reasoning is the Judicial (it reviews), AI is the Legislative (it proposes). Here's how I see it:

(This statement is also true of itself, but only slightly.)

On social media, everything good is overhyped, and everything bad is overblown.

The “handle” is a value system to direct our logic in a healthy & useful way. It’s made of principles like integrity & humility, feelings like love & curiosity, instincts like intuition & creativity, and faith in the importance of what we think & do.

“A mind that’s all logic is like a knife that’s all blade. It cuts the hand that wields it.”

—Rabindranath Tagore

The Metaverse failed because we're already living in one.

Partisans routinely contradict themselves because their opinions are not sincere expressions of belief but strategic attempts to gain advantage, and thus, like battlefield positions their principles change day to day depending on where their allies and enemies are.

"No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does."

—François de La Rochefoucauld

We have Schrödinger’s opinions: we don’t know what we believe until we’re asked. This is why we should write even when chatbots can write for us; interrogating yourself on the page is how you learn what you think and realize who you are.

I think writers who don't use AI have a problem with writers who do because they consider it cheating. The same is not usually true of coders.

Coders have no problem using AI to produce code, but writers often have a big problem using AI to produce writing. This is because coding is telic—it’s done to produce something else—while writing is autotelic; it’s done to produce writing.

Cancer death rates fall to historic low - as types with biggest drop in fatalities revealed The charity Cancer Research UK said death rates had fallen 11% in the past decade.

Unlike bad things, which tend to happen suddenly, good things tend to be built gradually, so are rarely newsworthy on any particular day. Thus, bad things dominate the news, even as overall the world gets better (albeit too slowly for us to notice).
news.sky.com/story/cancer...

“In a sound democracy, our rulers ought to be changed routinely, like diapers for the same reason.”

—Dick Nolan

Politics in 20 seconds.

Yes. The grim truth is, we can't even know whether other people are conscious! But we have to live as though we do.

A: [says untrue statement about C]
B: “Actually that’s not true.”
A: “Why are you supporting C?”

This fallacy is so common, and so fundamental to online discourse, that I feel it should have a name. How about “straw fan fallacy”?

Consciousness is not thinking but the feeling of thinking. So, unless neural nets can somehow jump from producing cognition to producing sensation (a huge leap), more data and compute will make a smarter zombie, but will never give it a ghost.

For aeons, the confident quickly wound up dead unless they knew what they were doing, so we evolved to equate seasoned confidence with competence. But today, there is rarely a price for being wrong, so our attraction to confidence now attracts us to the most confidently idiotic.

100 years ago in London, “knocker-uppers” earned sixpence a week shooting dried peas at windows to wake people for work. The job was eventually lost to automation, which was bad for Mary Smith here, but good for everyone who came after.

rarehistoricalphotos.com/knockers-up-...