Is this really that precise? Reading through these 10 points, many of them seem quite vague to me. Phrases like:

[. . .] a structural renewal of a wider movement for social autonomy [. . .]

or

[ . . .] emancipatory defence [sic] of the need for communal constraint of harmful technology [. . .]

could mean a million different things, for example.

How can this be projection? Silicon Valley’s culture brought us fraudulent medical tech, cryptocurrency scams, industrialized wire fraud, illegal taxis, and DRM juice machines. A paragon of honesty and integrity if I ever saw one.

I saw someone do this in teaching program evaluation materials once. Except the teacher did it with the word brown and stretched it into three syllables.

Br 👏 ow 👏 uh 👏 n.

I remember thinking to myself “America is doomed.” Sometimes I still think about that teacher when I see people get tilted over dumb, made-up shit on social media and turn into reactionary morons around election time. Br 👏 ow 👏 uh 👏 n. America is doomed.

Word guessing machine.

Before you buy one, look up how much replacement parts cost for whatever new machine you are considering. I had to get a new one a few years back because the filter in my old one kept getting clogged, and could not be replaced. You had to replace a larger part that cost almost 200 dollars.

A long time ago I did some volunteer work for a companion bird sanctuary, and the number of people who got a bird as a pet and were totally unprepared for the care required was astounding. Almost all the birds at that sanctuary had some sort of serious behavioral issue because the people who got them just could not keep them cared for. You should probably talk to someone with experience keeping birds before making a decision because experience can be terrible for the bird if you are not ready.

His presentation of psychology leaves me with the impression that he is someone who is not well educated in the field. And I am saying this as someone with a background in a field that is very close to psychology.

His explanations of human experience and society rely on psychoanalysis and he only seems to cite more recent work when it reinforces his view point. His general approach to understanding human psychology is outdated.

<—-1800’s——psychoanalysis—-1900—behaviorism—-1950s——the cognitive revolution—-present day psychology—->

Petersons view of the mind and society is stuck in he past.

Peterson retreats to a politically convenient solipsism whenever challenged on anything. He is not a serious person.

He also has good presentation skills. Well worth the watch

What does dystopia mean to you?

In this particular case, the things I find dystopian are the tendency of a disconcertingly high number of people to allow a tech company to mediate (and eventually monetize) every aspect of their social lives. The point I was making is that if this tool were to experience widespread adoption, even putting aside the massive surveillance and manipulation issues, what will inevitably happen is that a subset of people will come to rely on the tool to the point where they cannot interact with others outside of it. That is bad. Its bad because, it takes a fundamental human experience and locks it behind a pay wall. It is also bad because the sort of interactions that this tool could facilitate are going to be, by their nature, superficial. You simply cannot have meaningful interactions with someone else if you are relying on a crib sheet to navigate an interaction with them.

This tool would inevitably lead to the atrophy of social skills. In the same way that overusing a calculator causes arithmetic skills to atrophy, and in the same way that overusing a GPS causes spatial reasoning skill to atrophy. But in this case it is worse, because this tool would be contributing to the further isolation of people who, judging by the excuses offered in this thread, are already bad at social interactions. People are already lonely and apparently social media is contributing to that trend allowing it to come between you and personal interactions in the face to face world is not going to help.

This is akin to having sticky notes to remember things, just in a more compact convenient application.

I really disagree with this analogy. It would be more appropriate to say that this is like carrying around a stack of index cards with notes about people in your life and pulling them out every time you interact with someone. If someone in my life needed an index card to interact with me, I would find that insulting, because it is insincere and dehumanizing. It communicates to others "I don’t care enough about you to bother to learn even basic information about who you are.

The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the application

I really cannot stand this bromide. We are talking about a company with a track record of using technology to abuse people. They facilitated a genocide (by incompetence, but they clearly did not give a shit). They prey on people when they feel bad. They researched ways to make people feel bad (so they will be easier to manipulate). They design their tools to be addictive and then manipulate and abuse people on their platform. Saying "technology is neutral is the least interesting thing you can say about tech in the context of the current trends of silicon valley. A place whose thought leaders and influencers are becoming ever more obsessed with manipulation, control and fascism. We don’t need to speculate about technology, we already know the applications of this technology won’t be neutral. They will be used to harm people for profit.

A tool that keeps track of people in your life and gives you small talk cues seems dystopian in its self. Relying on that you would just further isolate yourself from others.

Thinking about it, I am pretty sure I would immediately despise anyone who used this tool on me, even apart from the fact that they would be putting me into a meta database without my consent. I would despise people who use this tool for the same reason I despise people who crudely implement the strategies from “How to win friends and influence people”. Their interactions are insincere and manipulative.

The average of all the serious guesses in this thread.

This has largely been my experience as well. I work as a statistician and it seems like the folks who arrived at data science through a CS background are less equipped to think through data analysis. Though I suppose to be fair, their coding skills are better than mine. But if OP wants to do data journalism, of the sort Pro Publica is gearing up for, then a stats background would be better.

Probably statistics. A lot of journalists seem to struggle with stats so that could give you an advantage. You can pick up a lot of programming skills in a stats program. You can even lean into statistical programming if you want. I think you’d have to seek out the more advanced programming side of a statistical degree but it is there and I think stats is harder to learn than the coding skills you need for data science.

Prenda law. A legal outfit that would seed porn and then sue downloaders for copyright violations. The idea being that people would settle to avoid being publicly humiliated by their porn viewing habits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

I think when most people say something like “technology is making the world worse” they mean the technology as it actually exists and as it is actually developing, not the abstract sense of possible futures that technology could feasibly deliver.

That is clearly what the author of the piece meant.

If the main focus of people who develop most technology is getting people more addicted to their devices so they are easier to exploit then technology sucks. If the main focus is to generate immoral levels of waste to scam venture capitalists and idiots on the internet then technology sucks. If the main focus is to use technology to monetize every aspect of someone’s existence, then I think it is fair to say that technology, at this point in history, sucks.

Saying “technology is neutral” is not super insightful if, in the present moment, the trend in technological development and its central applications are mostly evil.

Saying “technology is neutral” is worse than unhelpful if, in the present moment, the people who want to use technology to harm others are also using that cliche to justify their antisocial behavior.

Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.

I wish they’d offer an llm free version with no cap on searches. Their products are too expensive and it feels like it is mostly to pay for the llms. I can’t justify paying that much for a product I am never going to use.

Not a youtube channel, but there is a podcast called serious trouble that covers legal events and provides a sober, detailed analysis of the law that is relevant to the cases they cover. They mostly focus on legal cases surrounding politics, but are also following the Drake/Lamar defamation case. I like it because a lot of the coverage of Trump’s legal troubles is characterized by hand wringing or wild speculation and serious trouble stays focused more on the facts and likely outcomes of cases.

Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.

Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.