Jonathan

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@valerificent Customer demand: still high somehow

[Jack @GayLaVie]

Removing my mask to take a sip of my iced coffee at my lesbian bar job interview.

[Jonathan @jwp756]

It should be not weird to bring a book to the office and read it while I’m waiting for my AI to do stuff

[Jonathan @jwp756]

Mass affluence as long as you don’t want to live in a safe walkable city

[VB Knives @Empty_America]

Everyone is obsessed with getting into Harvard.

But in Mass Affluence, you don't actually NEED to go to Harvard.

Extraordinary material lifestyles are available to a broad swath of Americans, most of whom never came within 500 miles of an Ivy.

[Jonathan @jwp756]

The difference is that a billionaire can afford all of that, plus family size housing in a safe walkable city.

[teo @teodorio]

It's incredible how fast the utility of money decreases after a certain level of wealth. You can get the exact same bag, clothes, personal trainer and almost the same flight experience with a good business class and only make a couple hundred k a year.

[Jonathan @jwp756]

Our culture is completely fixated on the romantic relationship as the only path to personal and emotional fulfillment. This clip isn’t doing anything new or countercultural.

[Brad Wilcox @BradWilcoxIFS]

more of this please

[Jonathan @jwp756]

Edward Feser should be put in a lab and studied to determine how one person can be so reliably correct

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

It is indeed. The trouble is that too many who claim to be defending it today are doing no such thing, but instead peddling what Chesterton called a “deaf and raucous jingoism,” the counterfeit of patriotism. By soiling true patriotism, they give aid and comfort to its enemies.

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@BartschKayla I saw this too

[Jonathan @jwp756]

I don't understand the phone addiction discourse. Phones aren't that interesting. If you're on your phone it's probably because you don't have that many other interesting options of things to do. I don't buy the idea that phones are the root cause of all these issues

[Jonathan @jwp756]

The doing is the point. The goal of learning, for example, is not to outcompete some other person or thing in the production of better output. It is to know.

[Gregory Conti @GregoryConti19]

What will be the point of actually getting good at anything as AI continues to advance? There will be no striving, just lotus-eating. A life of mere consumption is what awaits us unless we pause.

[Jonathan @jwp756]

Both of these people annoy me somehow

[Jon Finkel📚💪 @Jon_Finkel]

being married is funny because you'll be chilling, having a bowl of cereal, and your wife will say

i hate these bowls, don't you?

and you'll shrug becuase you don't care and she'll say

i do, they've bothered me for a while now. we need new bowls.

and you'll shrug again because you have honestly, not once, ever considered the bowls at all

then a few days later there will be all new bowls in the kitchen.

and you'll be eating the same cereal in a different bowl, chilling, and she'll say

i love these new bowls

and you'll shrug again because you still don't care but she's happier and the cereal is still good and you didn't do anything at all

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@BridgetPhetasy @credenzaclear2

[Jonathan @jwp756]

I think about this tweet a lot

[🅱️askerville @WB_Baskerville]

Ancient Greek science be like “I barely consume any water and it takes me all day to write an email. AI consumes tons of water and it writes a thousand emails per second. Therefore emails are made out of water.”

[Jonathan @jwp756]

No because if people are spending more time at home there’s going to be some more fundamental explanation of why they are doing that, and if anything here explains the decline of those things, it’s going to be that more fundamental explanation

[Cole Jaczko @colejaczko]

is this genuinely the explanation for decline of everything - friendships, excitement, spontaneity, dating?

[Jonathan @jwp756]

Humans aren’t tools. We don’t exist to be used. There’s nothing bad about being useless, and I doubt very many people really fear it. Rich people get to be useless and most people don’t seem to fear winning the lottery.

[Gregory Conti @GregoryConti19]

If you asked people their fears, many would list their top two as
(1) dying, (2) being useless.

(1) corresponds to AI going badly.

(2) corresponds to AI going "well"

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@credenzaclear2 I find not being in nyc more unsettling than being in it

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@asteriskmgzn So I think the article makes a good case for the importance of agency and the pursuit of excellence but it’s not clear why that needs to take the form of compelled labor where someone will pay you for the product rather than, say, allowing one’s own curiosity to flourish

[Jonathan @jwp756]

@asteriskmgzn that overhead, then I now have *more* time to do what I truly do, which is vastly more important for my sense of personal identity than the wage job, which I don’t even really want people to associate with me at all.