John Timaeus

I believe so that I may understand.

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

If Western Civilization loses its faith completely, it will not be "post-Christian" it will be "post-civilization".

[Roger Scruton Quotes @Scruton_Quotes]

"If we examine the leading conservative thinkers in our tradition—Burke, Hegel, and Tocqueville—we find that their message for our times is the same: we must maintain the sphere of free association, in which institutions grow into something greater than the sum of their members. And we must refrain from conferring the business of community upon the state, which intrudes into the sphere of civil society only to destroy it"

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

Girard was right, it is a religion based around the worship of victimhood

[Link🇻🇦 @ZeldaZealot]

Oh my self hatred…

Mass libtard suicide is approaching.

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

Consent based morality is an absolute disaster

[Link🇻🇦 @ZeldaZealot]

Oh my self hatred…

Mass libtard suicide is approaching.

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

Poor Americans who attend church regularly are happier than rich Americans who never go.

Behavioral scientist William von Hippel thought he'd made a coding error. He hadn't.

"Regularly attending services has a bigger impact on your happiness than wealth," he writes. "Money buys a fair bit of happiness but connection gives you more bang for the buck."

What's happening? Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name.

Von Hippel is direct about the cost: "I suspect that wealthy, educated urbanites are paying a steeper price for their lifestyle than they realize. Many of us have paid too great a price in connection for our increased autonomy."

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Why is the AI backlash growing?

Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society.

GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.

Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility.

I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago.

Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation). Most of this was predictable.

Almost none of it is good.

All that said, I honestly believes some future form of AI might be great. But Generative AI has hurt more than it has helped, and been managed irresponsibly.

It’s no wonder many people have had enough.

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

@FormerlyFormer The worship victimhood is the religion of today

[Ozymandias𓆏 @0zmnds]

Caspar David Friedrich

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

I think we should stop calling them prompts and instead call them spells. It is more honest about the magic thinking that surrounds AI.

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

Great essay by @FeserEdward on the parallels between theology and physics, the limitations humans face in both:

https://t.co/zFHc3ozPoR

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

@saveusculture We used to have full operating systems with a graphical interface that would run with less than 4MB of RAM. Now 4 GB isn't enough for Windows 11 to run smoothly

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

The morality of "consenting adults" leaves no room for children. Consent based morality are the values of the last man

[Carlos That Notices Things @QuetzalPhoenix]

@eugyppius1

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

In retrospect, the monsters of our era will all have been known as champions of compassion

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“The tiger that rips men open is following his nature; the real criminal is the man who unmuzzles him and launches him on society.”

Joseph de Maistre

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

The reason I dislike pop science figures like Neil de grasse Tyson so much is because they are attempting to replace God with math.

[A Time to Keep @no_grave_]

They say cathedrals are patterned after the forest canopy

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“In modern England it is dangerous heresy to point out that human beings neither are nor ought to be equal.”

Sir Roger Scuton

[zeta @zeta_globin]

something I'm slowly coming to terms with is that maybe the old school royal society way of doing science where it's just a hobby of the rich might actually be better because making people's livelihood depend on producing scientific results is neuroethologically doomed

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Thread of some surprising things that are older than other things

Notre Dame predates the Maori settlement of New Zealand

[More Births @MoreBirths]

The greatest unfairness with Social Security is not that we don't control our funds. It is that full time mothers, who may have given decades to "paying into Social Security" by raising children, may have little earned income and little benefit. That discourages motherhood! 1/2

[John Timaeus @FallenModernity]

The premise of being able to measure human flourishing is flawed but if we have to, this is preferred to GDP.

[More Births @MoreBirths]

The Baby-Money Index (BMI) beats GDP
There is a new metric that is much better than GDP for comparing nations! The "Baby-Money Index" combines national income (GNI) and fertility rate (TFR) to produce a better measure of a nation's true health. (via Atoms vs Bits)
🧵!