So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.

Same goes for anyone saying all gambling is the same.

This is because bacon is more like cigarettes than most people assume, even if far less dangerous in practice.

Like another example is "sugar is poison." which is also structured as a factual equivalence and also gesturing at something real and also designed to land as a stronger claim than the evidence warrants.

If you want to simply go by societal resilience from biorisks then switching to more easily controllable substances like plant based meat for protein would be an absolute win.

The Trump admin acts like it is on cocaine. Many people - and I think this can be a highly rational preference - prefer predictable more evil of chaotic less evil.

It will be the reverse I suspect. Eventually we will see that LLM quality is lower when it is training data from 2014-2020 and will chalk it up to human limitations and the data not being written with a laser-focused goal of training better AI.

This isn't true, but it feels like this when the entire engineering world order seems to actually run on single-point-of-failures where one CEO just messages another when some 3rd party is down. And reputational risk here is completely safeguarded because as long as everyone is down you are fine. Use a service everyone uses and it goes down = no reputational risk. Use a more robust architecture and make some mistake = massive reputational risk and everyone asks why you don't use what everyone else uses.

Blind leading the blind and all that.

E.g. - "Rape is illegal and prosecuted, so how can we have a 'rape culture'?" - "That's not rape culture, that's just individual bad actors" - "People criticizing women's clothing choices is normal social interaction" - "Rape culture is a partisan feminist concept like [insert dismissive comparison]"

The parallel is that both involve:

1. Demanding an impossibly narrow definition (complete silence vs. systematic legal tolerance) 2. Dismissing patterns as "just normal social behavior" 3. Focusing on whether the most extreme version exists rather than whether there's a meaningful phenomenon worth discussing 4. Using the term's political associations to avoid engaging with the substance

The irony is particularly sharp when you argue that "telling someone to shut up" is quintessentially social while simultaneously arguing that coordinated efforts to damage someone's reputation/livelihood for speech don't constitute a distinct social phenomenon worth naming.