The most annoying thing about being human right now is knowing we already have the intelligence and resources to end world hunger, fight climate change, and cure cancer, but greed and billionaires keep millions suffering instead. The wasted human potential is heartbreaking.
PabloReports: Ted Cruz called you a parasite and disparaged your work as a bartender.
AOC: It’s not a secret the disdain Ted Cruz has for people who work working-class jobs. It’s not a secret what he thinks of the waitresses, the line cooks—he thinks we’re less than him. He thinks that because he has a Harvard degree and has never scrubbed a table that it makes him better than someone who has actually had to work for a living.
I think it’s funny that he’s been taking a government paycheck for 23 years but has the audacity to criticize someone who has come from a family that had to work their way up and earn their place here.
Eric Weinstein just described the end of the mapped life.
For ten thousand years, humans had to earn the right to exist.
Pick a noun. Become the noun. Die as the noun.
Accountant. Teacher. Radiologist.
The box had a name. You climbed inside and stayed until retirement or death.
Weinstein: “Every occupation that is named is over.”
Not automated. Not replaced.
Named.
You picked a noun. It told the world who you were. Then it told you who you were.
If your future has a title your parents recognize, that future is already dissolving beneath you.
Weinstein: “A tsunami of a lifetime is coming and nothing your elders have seen is gonna prepare you.”
People hear this and assume it’s about unemployment.
It’s not. It’s about identity.
The machines aren’t absorbing tasks. They’re dissolving the categories we built ourselves around.
You spent your whole life becoming a noun. The noun is about to stop existing.
When the label disappears, what’s left of you?
Weinstein: “Get flexible. Get good on a bunch of different stuff. Learn how to think across disciplines.”
Stop being a noun. Start being a verb.
But the most important thing Weinstein said has nothing to do with strategy.
It touches something much older. Something closer to the bone.
In a world where AI is world-class at everything, what is the point of a human being?
Weinstein: “I think you should be able to just have a life. I have a golden retriever. I don’t know that it’s the greatest golden retriever in the world.”
For ten thousand years, human worth was measured by output.
How much you could lift. How fast you could think. How much value you could squeeze from a single day.
We trained ourselves to think like machines because machines didn’t exist yet.
Now they do.
And they will be better than us at every measurable thing.
Most people hear that and feel terror. They should feel something closer to relief.
When a machine can do it better, the metric dies. When the metric dies, the cage opens.
You were never supposed to be a spreadsheet. You were never supposed to justify your breath with a job title.
Your golden retriever doesn’t optimize. It doesn’t produce quarterly earnings. It doesn’t prove it’s worth to anyone.
It just lives. And you love it anyway.
That was always the offer. We just couldn’t afford it.
Now we can.
We spent ten thousand years trying to prove we were machines.
The machines just arrived to tell us we never had to be.
In 2023, Chinese researchers set out to create a 'pig depression model' — a way to reliably induce depression in pigs for medical research.
The researchers (Yang et al, 2023) confined pigs so tightly they couldn't move and left them in a dark environment without food or water for 24 hours.
It worked: the pigs exhibited anhedonia — an inability to experience pleasure — along with anxiety and reduced appetite. The researchers concluded they'd found a promising way to induce depression in pigs.
Their inspiration? Factory farms. They tried out the total restraint after noting that sows, confined in gestation crates and kept chronically hunger, "have been found to be in a depression-like state."
The main difference? After 24 hours, the researchers let the study pigs out. On factory farms they never do.
Photo: Balvik C. / We Animals
Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.
Regardless of whether it’s all talk, when the leader of our country expresses plainly genocidal intent, everyone has to do something.
For citizens of all political stripes, it means rejecting this madness. For Congress, it means taking action to rein him in. Now.
I always knew this place was an echo chamber, but I didn't know it was this bad.
I thought when I kept getting US political garbage and brainrot discourse it was just the small part of the app I was on.
But it's actually the dominant part of this app
reading a book about iran. apparently the government there is run by a Supreme Leader who has conducted mass deportations, sent forces into cities, uses state licenses to control media, labeled protestors "enemies," and is supported by religious extremists. didn't know this
I think peptides are popular because they give people a feeling of power and control.
One feels helpless when they can't sleep, stop scrolling, eat well or exercise consistently.
A few injections wrestles back a feeling of control. Evidence shows that injections amplify perceived agency (the ritual potency of administration).
This creates a dangerous situation where powerful compounds are being used less for biomarker improvement and more for psychological wellbeing.
This is what you want: closed loop.
> intervention (peptide)
> biological change
> measured biomarker
> adjustment
How most people are using peptides: open-loop.
> intervention (peptide)
> subjective feeling
> more intervention
The open-loop compounds over time. Without biomarker feedback, dose escalation is driven by subjective feelings which creates increased risk of doses with no clinical precedent.
I am pro peptide and pro experimentation. Some peptides such as GLP-1s and similar are among the most effective in the world.
Peptides (without clinical data) are among the most promising therapies available. They also need more clinical work so that we can characterize their effects, both good and bad.
Nothing is free in biology.
From the first chapter of Walden, where he discusses clothing. Here is the full excerpt:
"A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet -- if a hero ever has a valet -- bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes -- his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind."
The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: https://t.co/0phIiJjrmz
Kindness is peak human performance and high status.
Kindness requires metabolic abundance: the capacity to override primal impulses, regulate emotions, and extend empathy.
Meanness is dirty energy: high cortisol, inflammation and an exhausted executive function.