Our Demon Haunted World

Carl Sagan:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

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AI: Exciting and Terrifying

I have personal knowledge that many lawyers and academics are in severe denial about how much AI is turning their professions upside down and inside out. Soon, everyone will be constantly using AI. It's going to quickly get quantum leaps better than it already is and, frankly, a lot of us don't add much value above and beyond the things AI can already do. This is exciting and terrifying.

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Walter Kirn: We Are Headed to the Era of Post-Truth

Walter Kirn:

Find something, anything, to be fundamentalist about, ideally something very, very old, because there will be no truth out there soon, none, just an endlessly shifting, windy phantasmagoria. So find a mast and lash yourself to it. Heck, even classical herbalism will do.

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When You Lose Friends for Saying Out Loud the Things You Observe

Lost any friends for saying what you actually think? None of them have return even after the legacy news finally catches up with the truth.

Things like these:

Many more COVID lies here.

People addicted to legacy news insist that the above untruths were only mistakes, not lies.  My response: if a expert in the field claims that they know something that they don't know, and that they know they don't know it, it is a lie.

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

And in the meantime, I have met and befriended numerous courageous thinkers, those who say what they think regardless of the fact that we are surrounded by fact-police, opinion-police and language police.

It's sometimes disorienting, disappointing and hurtful, but eventually you will be part of a much improved social network: people who think for themselves rather than huddling with sheep, people run in tribes. Steve Kirsch and Brett Weinstein independently described this turnover of friends here.

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