I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we’ve only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that’s ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world’s natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone’s hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

All you people screaming and crying about “woke” this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn’t matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what’s “natural.”

The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it’s conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating “cold” end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it’s identical to the beginning states.

I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.

How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

You’re still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that’s not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.

You’re always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.

These are emotional people with absolutely no care or enjoyment for reason or logic or learning how the world works. I believe strongly that the way our brains develop as we grow, be it influences from environment or genes or upbringing, just can go in radically different directions. Kind of like how some people have no internal monologue, or some people can’t visualize images in their mind, I think some people can’t comprehend the world outside of a very “mystical” interpretation, even when taught how physics and evolution work, they still will see those forces as expressions of a mystical universe with a personal, subjective God who is trying to communicate with them.

You absolutely cannot reason with this kind of perspective because it’s not one of reason. The MOST you can hope for is getting them to feel something, and in this I have only ever found common ground in things like expressions of love for the universe or the beauty of nature, but that’s like one person going to the baseball game to watch the game, and the other to eat the food.

I’ve had a lot of reptiles and as a result, a lot of reptile bites.

Almost every time I’ve been bit it was an accident or a response, and as soon as the reptile realized it had human skin in it’s mouth it would release. Even herbivore iguanas have a lot of pretty sharp teeth and I’ve had some unique looking bite marks, but they almost never bite intentionally.

Parrots meanwhile… they are evil incarnate, at least to me. I’ve never met a parrot that didn’t bite me hard enough to let me know it could easily amputate parts of my body if it so chose. Meanwhile I see them loving and cuddling other people, people who say things like “He’s really very loving, he never bites anyone, he’s perfectly safe to pet!”

Fun fact, german shepherds bite more people annually than any other breed!

shows off super-villainesque face scars

And the vast majority of bites are from animals improperly socialized or cared for, and then of course police and military duty. My shepherd bite was from the family dog that my father abused pretty severely.

the new system is not there yet.

I’m glad at least one other person gets it, where we’re at and what our actual situation is.

My worry is about how bad things are going to get before the “new system” begins to solidify. We have like, three or four different serious wildcards that are so unpredictable that I can’t fathom what the next four decades are going to look like. We’re about to see the fastest and most profound changes to society in all recorded history, but we still have brains that were developed in the Ice Age for surviving bears and wolves. We’re not the rational, thinking species we think we are and we’re about to collectively run headlong into that reality for the first time as a species.

A lot of the population in the developed world right now has crashed headfirst into this societal “wall” of isolation and hopelessness, with feelings of being wedged between issues that encroach from all sides as they doomscroll every day.

A lot of people right now are creeping over the “ironic” boundary when talking about ideas like the end of the world, ending their lives, the end of humanity, etc. People just want the discomfort to stop, and for many people it feels like the only way out is absolute chaos and doom because our system is now just too complicated and politics and sociology is too complicated and emotionally challenging to actually focus on and address in a serious, problem-solving way. Much less having the mental fortitude to actually stand up for your beliefs against the inevitable mountain of resistance you will face for having ANY kind of stance or opinion.

It depresses people in large scale, it makes people behave weirdly.

And this was all happening before covid hit and just shook the damn soda can.

a technology that has the greatest potential for destruction that any humanity could theoretically produce: Artificial General Intelligence.

The part that should be making us all take notice is that the tech-bros and even developers are getting off on this. They are almost openly celebrating the notion that they are ushering in technology akin to the nuclear age and how it has the potential to end us all. It delights them. I have been absorbing the takes on all sides of the AI camp and almost as worrying as the people who mindlessly hate LLM’s to the degree that they are almost hysterical about it, are the people on the other side who secretly beat it to the fantasy of ending humanity and some kind of “the tables have turned” incels-rise-up-like techbro cult where they finally strike back against normies or some such masturbatory fantasy.

It’s not real to any of them honestly, nobody has been impacted personally by LLM’s besides a few people who have fallen in love with chat bots. They are basking in fan-fiction for something that doesn’t exist yet. And I’m talking about the people who are actually building the things.

You’re getting downvoted because a large number of people who spend their weekdays voting on internet comments are not working.

Working is easy. Maintaining a predictable and comfortable work environment for a team of people also trying to get through their day while meeting larger goals for the company is very, very hard. The interview process is where the actual decisions are made by managers like myself, because I am responsible for a dozen people’s lives and workdays, I have to make sure anyone I add to their daily necessary interactions isn’t going to be a massive piece of shit who will disrupt everything.

I will always choose lower qualified people with better attitudes than people with sparkling resumes who seem “off” or like they’re going to be a problem.

I fully expect to also get reamed in the voting process here, but if you feel the need to attack this basic fact of life that the needs of the existing and working team outweigh your unique personality and identity, you’re exactly the kind of person I screen out at hiring interviews.

so all they’ve got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.

This sounds good on paper, but the actual hiring decision is almost always based on interview vibes, sorry to say.

I have spent years in a professional environment, I can safely say that 90% of all the serious, disruptive issues we have on teams come from people who have unusual personalities or strong sense of entitlement and have to have things on their own time-frame expectations. or people who rub other team members wrong and this is where a manager who is perceptive and emotionally intelligent is critical, and why having those social skills puts you in a favorable position for advancement.

I would actually rather have someone with lacking qualifications who can learn to do the job and makes everyone else comfortable, than someone who irritates everyone but doesn’t need much help with the work. One is far more detrimental to productivity and meeting goals than the other. I can train you to enter data. I can’t train you to stop being a freak around women or to understand that you can’t expect schedules to revolve around your rent checks or the latest fight you had with your SO. I will always do my best to help everyone but if one person is dragging everyone down, they’re the first to go.

politics are still politics.

Whenever you have more than one person at a time in an environment, you have politics of some form or another.

People who proclaim how much interpersonal politics bothers them will have a much harder time getting ahead because you don’t get out of the political game unless you’re willing to compromise on a lot of things we work for.

But it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing game, just getting a LITTLE more comfortable talking and socializing can have massive benefits to your professional life.

But who you know hiring has to fucking stop. It is intentionally making worse decisions because you don’t like someone as much as someone else.

As someone who has spent years and years in a position of authority, I can safely say that 90% of ALL disruptive work issues have originated from people rubbing someone else wrong, or someone being massively entitled and unable to listen to others or respect those over them. A massive part of your responsibility as a manager is to make decisions based only on vibes, about who you think is going to mesh with others.

I know it sounds really unfair, your merit should stand on its own, but if my paycheck and my team’s paychecks and thus all of our survival depends on the team getting along to do the damn job, then you HAVE to understand the challenge and set your ego aside to make a good impression and maintain that persona. It’s shitty but so are a lot of challenges in life.

It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle

I did this when I was a manager with the people who wanted opportunity for advancement. I prepared them and told them that getting comfortable public speaking and being around strangers and selling yourself are all critical components of being seen and respected by upper management when the time comes for me to fight for a raise or advancement.

Because the harsh truth is that you don’t climb without being seen, and you’re not seen unless you can speak publically and feel comfortable in your own skin. I’ve seen some deeply introverted people climb to great success but this is because they had a strange combination of extremely sharp skills in critical fields in the company, and they weren’t shy, they were just quiet, when they did talk they shot back zingers and deadpan one-liners that made the people over them either laugh or shrivel.

So whatever “personality type” you think you have, you simply do not rise without playing SOME aspect of the social game, it will always be like this as long as we live in a capitalist society.

It absolutely is like this in every corporate setting.

The key difference here is that if you don’t play the game at TechCo Incorporated and spend the next ten years just entering data and being passed over, people will say “That’s corporate life for you” and give you support and sympathy.

If you don’t play the game in your academic field then you’re “wasting enough money to buy a house” and that tends to raise people’s ire or at least interest. It brings to mind all kinds of negative stereotypes in your own mind and makes you ashamed to be someone who doesn’t want to play the social game.