Mike Caulfield

This is a very good point. Naziism being normalized in our party is giving the opposition endless ammo and also a free pass to do more Roman salutes. All you people who got this guy where he is today, congrats.

It's true of course that this works to the benefit of bad actors. But the spiral also pulls in people who are legitimately concerned about the chaos they see. Bad information and deceptive framing leads to movements that take that urge to fix and pervert it.

Conspiracy theories led to precinct voting which led to a mess, which may lead to more conspiracy theory forever until the end of time.

One of the things we looked at with CIP was "vicious cycles" of misinformation and policy. Failures lead to conspiracy theories which lead to bad election policy which lead to more failures which leads possibly to more conspiracy theory. And so on. November is looking bleak.

kind of crazy that if you have enough money and don't like what you see in the media, you can just buy up every film studio, news station, and social media app and change it

Whose instead of who's (or better, who has)

I do this all the time in tweets but also I don't write headlines for The Independent

Makes me think everything we've built is so much more fragile than we may realize.

This is absolutely wonderful news, glad to see Bluesky is still gathering up some of the best people and I do hope they'll get "mayor" into his title somewhere

THE ACTUAL MAYOR OF BLUESKY?!?

Sam Altman on X: "Here is re-post of an internal post: We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear. 1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else: "• Consistent with applicable laws," / X Here is re-post of an internal post: We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear. 1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else: "• Consistent with applicable laws,

Sam Altman just said he has tweaked his deal with the Pentagon and wrote a list of things he says are part of it, and he chose to include this really great line:

"One thing I think I did wrong: we shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday."

Every one of these should be structured like The Gong Show

This guy took Dirk Gently and turned two of the most beautifully melancholic pair of works of Douglas Adams and turned it into frenetic sophomoric bullshit so I will always retweet max landis hate

Yeah, a lot of people are firing up traditional anti war rhetoric and I'm not sure that fits here. You can't argue their plan won't work, because there is no plan, and they have no desire to make anything work.

Maybe I'm trying to defend my "I'm lending people Blu-rays as praxis" position which in itself is a politicization and rationalization but the way we've rearranged politics to be entertainment for us is a horrible horrible thing and we need to start somewhere

These are people who used to be brilliant at talking about things and now it's like the dopamine pathways have been rerouted, addiction metaphors are overstated but reminds me of when you watch people w addiction it's not just they do one thing a lot, it's that the other things spark no joy anymore.

One of the things I noticed with people I know who have fallen down that path is that we used to be able to have good conversations about films as films, and they've just lost some of that ability to riff on a film without the gravity of politics sucking them in within five minutes.

Riffing is great, it's fun and makes you feel alive. It's not a great approach to discerning the morality of bombing Iran.

One of my deeply held beliefs right now is we probably have to get a bunch of opinion-havers who care more about riffing than reality back to talking about movies, TV shows, video games.

Like, instead of imagining some secret life of this person, the better thing to ask is whether people who are in an environment that feeds them Stew Peters and lack the critical capabilities to understand what Stew Peters's game is should be in charge of anything political at all.

This is maybe adjacent to your point, but the idea that this is all wink wink nudge nudge hides the more disturbing aspect of this all: That we may be about to elect someone swimming in a vat of online conspiracy theory and bigotry and who is too clueless to realize that is what they are consuming.

The reasons for that are valid and important and probably immovable -- since we are a two party govt (and many states are essentially one party rule) there's lots of laws to make sure that parties don't lock people out but as a system the whole thing sucks.

When I say the US does not have political parties in any real sense what I mean is in any functioning democracy a specific party could push this guy off the ticket, we can't, and that's bad actually.

Similarly I can't look at the rhetoric of Altman and the actions of Altman and conclude anything other than the language was in service of something else.

For example, Musk talked a lot about technology and ethics (Twitter files, etc) but none of that was really about technology and ethics., but about using that language as a battering ram to his personal and political advantage.

I should say, to be clear, Anthropic acts like they have real beliefs about *technology and ethics*. Other companies have beliefs about other things (politics, money) which they use the *language* of technology and ethics in service of.

To some extent Anthropic is like the Rand Paul effect in that I do believe many of Anthropic's leadership's underlying beliefs (about things like sentience and AGI) are wrong, but they do in fact act like they *have* beliefs, and it's not perfect but I'll take it.

SCIF now stands for “Some Curtains In Front”

Eye movement desensitization: a new treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder - PubMed The use of saccadic eye movements for treating post-traumatic stress disorder is described. The procedure involves eliciting from clients sequences of large-magnitude, rhythmic saccadic eye movements while holding in mind the most salient aspect of a traumatic memory. This results in (1) a lasting r …

The relationship between quick eye movements and PTSD is so fascinating. We've known about it for 35 years and still don't understand it fully. share.google/DoJ8mF1TcZyB...

It's too bad because you're right on the math of this, and it's a pretty important point. Venezuela was less than 2 months ago and people are still talking about this new action as if there were actual foreign policy goals in play here.

I think this is correct.

anthropic is a public benefit corporation created primarily by the extremely ideological rationalists who started to leave OpenAI when it stopped being a nonprofit