China has seen much faster growth in recent decades, which incentivizes people to work hard and have faith it will yield results. In America, the average standard of living has not improved for a long time, so instead of a desire to change things, like cutting regulation to speed up drug discovery, most Americans are quiet quitting.

In this climate, the unfortunate reality is that we're unlikely to see a popular revolution to drastically change things one way or another. Instead, we're much more likely to see regulatory capture by a small number of wealthy, powerful, motivated people. And everyone else will complain on social media, but that's about it.

The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.

Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?

Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.

I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.

A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.

It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.

All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…

However, it makes more sense to me that consciousness precedes the will to survive. And that doesn't mean the way a microbe experiences life is the same as us. E.g. the fact that we have so much control over our environment might mean we have a much more sensitive and reactive way of engaging with consciousness, whereas maybe a microbe is like an enlightened monk, just chillin because it can't do much about what it experiences anyways.

Eg we optimize for survival but without the ability to experience things, why survive?

Why would that instinct or any other preference for a course of action emerge?

Humans are conscious which means we experience things, then we develop preferences for certain experiences, then we develop skills for achieving those preferences.

Without consciousness, what is there to be aware of? And why would intelligence emerge and/or what end would it serve?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400539

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These types of problems usually persist because it's hard to know who is responsible. It's not just the customer support person or the president/governor - I assume the invisible senior leaders in-between hold a lot of power.

I'd happily support an investigative journalist who exposed exactly why these problems exist and which individual humans are responsible.