You seem to think that because Climate change is a messy topic with one real explanation, every other messy topic must also have a single true explanation. No, it doesn't work that way

People can't change between white and black skin. "Racism" exists in the US. Your gaslighting is embarrassing.

Yes, some people are mixed ethnicity or "white passing". Yes societal views changes ("Italian used to not be considered white"). At the end of the day, most people fall into one of the categories and don't get to change that.

And now you have another situation where "there could be many causes for the change X".

And you think that because Climate Change followed that pattern above, X must necessarily have only one real cause, and that cause is your preferred pet theory.

Does not sound like a convincing argument.

The paradox of tolerance is real. And more practically, it's impossible to guarantee representation of all viewpoints because there are an infinite number of them.

Of course we also have Ronald Reagan to thank. And that administration spawned the career of John Roberts, which we can now see as a through line to the destruction of The Court.

When interest rates are high, capital shifts to yield-generating, interest-bearing investments. They give higher returns with less risk.

So basically the ROI of biotech becomes less competitive compared to alternatives. You have the same number of people/firms chasing a smaller supply of investment dollars.

(And in California where the most profitable crops are perennial fruits and nuts, probably outright stealing water from the aquifer or state irrigation system.)

But your body is just a robot suit for replicating nucleic acids and you can follow an unbroken chain of those chemical reactions all the way to the first microbes. Which were still "optimizing for survival" without any intelligence beyond following chemical gradients.

If you say that means even microbes have some amount of qualia then I can't dispute it. Pure physicalism may necessitate panpsychism of some form.

Nuclear deterrence has been a mixed bag at best: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Myths-About-Nuclear-Weapons/

More likely, the simulation was just very poor and the results are nonsense.

The LLM weights are not intelligent. But if you give an agent a mutable memory store and allow it to iterate, it is obviously intelligent. Not massively - it's constrained by the context window - but definitely somewhat.

The confusing thing is that their language ability far outpaces their true intelligence, and humans aren't used to that. Normally those things are highly correlated, so it tricks us.

Clearly other animals have "phenomenological experience" i.e. consciousness / qualia without being as intelligent as humans (or necessarily "self aware"). Many people believe consciousness is simply a side effect of intelligence rather than the other way around.