Toilet Paper is a lie!

Yeah in some fields like food production or medicine you want less efficiency and more surplus and reserves in times of crisis especially with climate or possible wars coming.

I don’t really know much about all this but I’d think ideally we should have at least 50% of the needed calories for a year in reserve. Presumably there should also be incentives to leave fields fallow but be able to quickly start planting food crops if there is a crisis. And less intensive agriculture should also mean less intensive fossil fuel usage. Of course we also should drastically reduce meat consumption.

Local efforts like FarmLink are awesome but maybe we should do more under something like the UN World Food Program. And you’d want food distribution to be run non-profit or more like a public utility. We are now in the time of AI where we should be able to create an objective semi-planned economy that optimizes quality, sustainability and fairness. Basically a piece of software that can plan globally in real time and offers farmers multiple options for contracts to grow stuff, or contracts to build food storage, and can manage or help to plan food distribution. You want less market volatility and some kind of monetary and food reserve to buffer fluctuations.

We should also have a push for open source robotics in farming so you can build and repair and maintain your own farm robots. This doesn’t have to be so complicated compared to e.g. 3D printers. I’m not sure how if and how soon solar powered agri-bots can become truly useful and replace big and energy intensive farming equipment and reduce fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use, but the sooner the better. I imagine patents and IP will severely hinder adaption too just like with 3D printers.

Instead it seems farmers are being neglected by governments or bought out by big agricultural corporations. Or they are co-opted by Russian propaganda to destabilize democracy.

Ok, “exhibit a limited form of creativity” :)

Maybe you need some different mechanisms / models to allow what you are describing. But I’m sure we’ll get there sooner or later.

Yeah. Russia has not just stepped back from New Start program, there are now rumors(?) that Russia is going to put nuclear weapons in orbit.

Wow. I honestly don’t understand how people think these AI models don’t exhibit creativity.

Yeah I think paying the creators generously and allowing them to make a good living is how tiktok got off the ground so fast.

I really love the vine 6 sec sketch format but I only ever watches compilations on youtube. It’s like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’ll get, but eat enough of them… :D PS: Man this makes me nostalgic about those ancient times when everything wasn’t going to shit yet

Just compare the civilian deaths: UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has verified 30,457 civilian casualties since 24 February 2022, including 10,582 killed and 19,875 injured.

In order to justify the Genocide you need to completely dehumanize Palestinians. That is the purpose of this propaganda. The same propaganda tactic has been used before.

https://join-lemmy.org/donate

It would be nice to have a “patreon” like monthy support and then an open accounting - so we know the money is split to development, instance server hosting costs and maybe admin wages. Or maybe can vote on it. I think fediverse is only the first step, we’re going to need some kind of global non profit funded by users to create federated software and content for users.

And how do you determine who falls in this category? Again, by a set of parameters which we’ve chosen.

Sure, that is my argument, that we choose to make social progress based on our nature and scientific understanding. I never claimed some 100% objective morality, I’m arguing that even though that does not exist, we can make progress. Basically I’m arguing against postmodernism / materialism.

For example: If we can scientifically / objectively show that some people are born in the wrong body and it’s not some mental illness, and this causes suffering that we can alleviate, then moral arguments against this become invalid. Or like the gif says “can it”.

I’m not arguing that some objective ground truth exists but that the majority of healthy human beings have certain values IF they are not tainted that if reinforced gravitate towards some sort of social progress.

You needn’t argue for the elimination of meaning, because meaning isn’t a substance present in reality - it’s a value we ascribe to things and thoughts.

Does mathematics exist? Is money real? Is love real?

If nobody is left to think about them, they do not exist. If nobody is left to think about an argument, it becomes meaningless or “nonsense”.

I’m not arguing for “one single 100% objective morality”. I’m arguing for social progress - maybe towards one of an infinite number of meaningful, functioning moralities that are objectively better than what we have now. Like optimizing or approximating a function that we know has no precise solution.

And “objective” can’t mean some kind of ground truth by e.g. a divine creator. But you can have objective statistical measurements for example about happiness or suffering, or have an objective determination if something is likely to lead to extinction or not.

You misrepresent or misunderstood my argument

Comrade pinko barbie!

There’s no such thing as 100% objective morality.

Maybe not, maybe there is an infinity of variation of objective morality. There will always be broken people with pathologies like sociopathy or narcissism that wouldn’t agree. But the vast majority, like 95% of people would agree for example on the universal human rights - at least if they had the rights and freedoms to express themselves and the education to understand and not be brainwashed. Basically given the options of a variety of moralities and the right circumstances (safety/not in danger, modicum of prosperity, education) you would get an overwhelming consensus on a large basis of human rights or “truths”. The argument would be that just because a complex machine is forever running badly, that there still can be an inherent objective ideal of how it should run, even if perfection isn’t desirable or the machine and ideal has to be constantly improved.

There is another way to argue for a moral starting point: A civilization that is on the way to annihilate itself is “doing something wrong” - because any ideology or morality that argues for annihilation (even if that is not the intention, but the likely outcome) is at the very least nonsensical since it destroys meaning itself. You cannot argue for the elimination of meaning without using meaning itself, and after the fact it would have shown that your arguments were meaningless. So any ideology or philosophy that “accidentally” leads to extermination is nonsensical at least to a degree. There would still be an infinity of possible configurations for a civilization that “works” in that sense, but at least you can exclude another infinity of nonsense.

“Who watches the watchers” is of course the big practical problem because any system so far has always been corrupted over time - objectively perverted from the original setup and intended outcome. But that does not mean that it cannot be solved or at least improved. A basic problem is that those who desire power/money above all else and prioritize and focus solely on the maximization of those two are statistically most likely to achieve it. That is adapted or natural sociopathy. We do not really have much words or thoughts about this and completely ignore it in our systems. But you could design government systems that rely on pure random sampling of the population (a “randocracy”). This could eliminate many of the political selection filtering and biases and manipulation. But there seems very little discussion on how to improve our democracies.

Another rather hypothetical argument could come from scientific observation of other intelligent (alien) civilizations. Just like certain physical phenomena like stars, planets, organic life are naturally emergent from physical laws, philosophical and moral laws could naturally emerge from intelligent life (e.g. curiosity, education, rules to allow stability and advancement). Unfortunately it would take a million years for any scientific studies on that to conclude.

Nick Bostrom talks a bit about the idea of a singleton here, but of course there be dragons too.

It is quite possible that it’s too late now, or practically impossible to advance our social progress because of the current overwhelming forces at work in our civilization.

The Last Ringbearer (annas-archive) by the paleontologist Kirill Eskov.

Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a “history written by the victors”.[2][3] Mordor is home to an “amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic”, posing a threat to the war-mongering faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude is described by Saruman as “crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem”) and the Elves.[2]

Macy Halford, in The New Yorker, writes that The Last Ringbearer retells The Lord of the Rings “from the perspective of the bad guys, written by a Russian paleontologist in the late nineties and wildly popular in Russia”.[4] The book was written in the context of other Russian reinterpretations of Tolkien’s works, such as Natalia Vasilyeva and Natalia Nekrasova’s The Black Book of Arda [ru], which treats Melkor as good and the Valar and Eru Ilúvatar as tyrannical rulers.

Maybe that is what we need to do. “Decide” on certain moral questions based on best scientific data and our values and sound arguments and then stop debating them. Unless new scientific evidence challenges those moral edicts.

Somehow we keep going round in circles as a civilization.

You forgot the journalists who frame narratives and the intellectuals who secrete the ideology that makes it all possible.

Oh wow it has eye tracking! I have high hopes for that feature.

But what I really want is to see and use my keyboard in VR and have an optimized desktop environment to pull up some text or document website quickly. I felt a bit trapped the last time I used VR and had to refer to documentations.

There is a very interesting documentary called “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” and how they created her in 1940 as a feminist super hero.

William Moulton Marston, a psychologist already famous for inventing the polygraph, struck upon an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would triumph not with fists or firepower, but with love. “Fine,” said Elizabeth. “But make her a woman.”

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

Honestly, just 90 minutes of Summer Glau beating up annoying MAGA fascists. Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez could make it work!