"Is it blasphemous to love the drops of dew on the haze-blurred branches more than some formal religious idea? I say it is not. It may be said these are my Bible, the visible evidence of God - if so, I do love Him."
Charles E. Burchfield
AI will disproportionately benefit ADHD minds because it externalizes the boring, parts of cognition like planning, sequencing, drafting, remembering, prioritizing and amplifies the parts ADHD minds often cook at: rapid association, novelty-seeking, pattern recognition, emotional intensity, and divergent synthesis
@nickgcardone@Squattocrat@nise_yoshimi nice, thank you. I see a lot of history recommended here but have never quite managed to crack anything really compelling/riveting
If you eat meat, you support this & take part in it. You enjoy it and pay greedily for it. It is evil, and you know it is evil, and that you should stop
In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
—
The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.
So are the sandwiches at Logma good or is it just a tiktok thing. Because a lot of London sandwich places (rogue sarnies, dom’s subs) are utterly bland
@IkkyusDen New Iraqi/Iranian coffee place which just opened near me! Has gone incredibly viral for its sandwiches, which I’m curious about, but wary of trusting sandwich hype again
@ballmatthew Hey Matthew, your writing made me so much sharper as a product strategist and was always really, really illuminating. I treated it like a bible while running several strategy projects last year.
Congratulations on this move, makes me v v excited to see what's coming next.
boomer origin stories are always like "Finally at 35 years old I decided to get serious with my life -- fortunately there was a national shortage of hedge fund analysts"
@yonashav Exactly the same, my job is this rather than coding, and so their utility is: widening my hypothesis space and the things in it, but *not yet* good at deciding what matters
@maybeTuring@pangram Agreed! I use it in my job for exactly that purpose.
& used 4.6 to stress-test arguments while writing this - also about 'tools for better thinking': https://t.co/3OTeHyCqcn
imo we need tools to force skin in the game & employ meaningful friction rather than dopa-gaming
@maybeTuring@pangram If no one can tell, then in the first instance it’s maybe it’s passable.
In the long run, it still matters, because you get less good at asking interesting/novel questions. At that point you a) have nothing interesting to say and b) no interesting way to say it
@maybeTuring@pangram It matters if you’re arguing in favour of meaningful friction, if only bc using AI to write that argument is inherently undermining!