They're citing "their friend" and posting other stuff from the daily mail. Like... No.

Not to say it isn't necessarily untrue, but some guy on twitter saying "my friend says so" isn't very convincing. Bigly if true though!

https://www.yorku.ca/science/research/schalljd/wp-content/up...

Yeah all that criticism doesn't go into any detail about actual methodological flaws or issues with the results... It just complains about language and is pretty sanctimonious for such weak and generic citations. Like, those are the sort of citations I'd give as an undergrad and trying to pad a paper to make it seem more authoritative and well established than it is lol.

Were any of the criticisms NOT centered around their irresponsible use of language and about the actual methodology and results? How they cultured different neurons to play pong is pretty amazing by itself to me.

But thousands of times more gruesome than that!? That's wild. I've watched Cartel vids where they slice open and expose the vocal cords laterally as their victims wail, creating otherworldly sounds.

But that's like... MAYBE 0.5x as gruesome as torturing some poor helpless child or tossing infant into a barrel of acid. So if you've got stuff that's 1000x as gruesome, I can't even comprehend! Please post.

It is quite an amazing psycho-social phenomena, inextricably linked to a low SES and impoverished social capital; I hope to secure a grant to make my PhD students shit out a bunch of papers with my name on it soon.

Don't worry, all the confounding variables have been accounted for. We can't release any raw data though, so sorry but it's to protect confidentiality. Could we reasonably anonymize the data? Oh nooooo, I'm so sorry you're breaking u --

It must be really difficult living in an area of the world where the Government tortures your child, dismembers them with a chainsaw, and dissolves them in a barrel of acid if you don't pay your taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupara_bianca#Examples

:(

It's like looking at the copper wiring on the motherboard, or the pins of the CPU, when what you really want is the logic from the networked gates (transistors).

Yet it seems we are many, many decades away from being able to extract that in any comprehensible or definitive way.

I need to stop reading neuroscience articles. There's always big proclamations, Like "the neural circuitry behind arithmetic has been discovered!" then you dig into the meat and it's mostly guesswork and hypothesis based on correlated activity and connectivity, no logic to be seen.

This paper did blow my mind though, I hope to see more creative stuff like it:

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_...

pdf here:

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900...

I just don't understand why it would be on the front page without AI??

Unlike my android phone. My youtube ads change noticeably in response to whatever I've recently googled, it's very unsettling how dialed in they are.

My daily driver is Linux though. I do agree that's what you should be using if you want to be free of these dystopian shenanigans.

If you tell her "OH FUCK SIRI THERES SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE CALL 911 OH SHIIIIT!!!!"

Will siri use her chastizing tone not to speak to her that way and ignore you?

I feel like it would be hillarious if she did. She's also dumb as a bag of rocks in my experience so I suspect she would. Bitch can't even reliably play podcasts.

So now we're talking about a 12.5% increase in wages, in exchange for the entirety of the net profits.'

The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits. So I imagine of those 2M employees, a huge amount aren't exactly getting a living wage even after that 12.5% increase.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-wh...

In a similar sense, can you reasonably object to being eaten by a man-eating tiger?

We create corporations who's utmost responsibility is feduciary in nature, we make capital the lifeblood of our society, and then act shocked and horrified when capital trumps human life, and corporate interests hold similar priorities?

Seriously. How did anyone think gutting the workforce and the ability to do safety inspections in a reasonable manner would turn out in any other way? How did the regulatory agencies think this was acceptable? The quote by Cixin is the only explanation.

That disaster I cited in Quebec was many years ago, yet a scathing report was released that effectively nothing has been done to meaningfully/substantially regulate the railways. An entire town was wiped from the map. What business is it of theirs if they are ground to dust by industry? Ultimately we are all meat for the machine :)

America is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital. Gutting all of those jobs and making it so that they only have 30 seconds to inspect each car (which is pretty much impossible to do due diligence) makes it so that they can rake in a ton of cash.

Sure, accidents will go up. Small little towns will find themselves doused in carcinogens or burned to the ground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...). Politicians will use it for photo ops. Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs.

I don't think it's "gutting" America. On the contrary, I think it's the heart of America, and what makes it so powerful and hegemonic. You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs.

I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.

When I'm alone I kind of like... stop existing? It's made me come to the conclusion that our identity hugely depends on social constructs and our relationships with others.

I have thoughts but they're definitely not conversational. It's like, "me hungry, want lasagna" or thinking about mathematical/programming concepts, or "I should read more about this" or "I'm sad/happy this happened."

Somebody help me out here... please give me an example of how you talk to yourself when you are alone? What is that like? You have an actual dialogue with another entity that is also you? It's very hard for me to wrap my head around.

edit: Nevermind found an answer... It's from "psychology today" which I know is not the best, but it seems to cite an actual study and be by an actual psychologist.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/pristine-inner-exper...

Seems the experience of inner monologues/dialogues has a huge amount of variation and isn't well understood. Neat!

I guess we can include Seneca was an inner-monologue-er. So you guys think to yourselves but whenever you change your mind you experience it as some sort of conversation with yourself happening. Cool.

Like moral imperatives are essential to understanding Kantian Deontology, but the wikipedia article on it goes on a weird tangent about a "Global Economic Moral Imperative," which I have never head of before and is absolutely not something somebody trying to wrap their head around Kantian moral philosophy should be distracted with. I'm kind of annoyed it's even on there, it's absolutely not something Kant ever talked about.

If you want a better highly detailed resource I would recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu

But if that's too much (it is VERY detailed)... I can highly recommend chatGPT. For whatever reason it genuinely excels at philosophy. I've used it to discuss different absurdist philosophers before and it did an excellent job, which surprised me because I find it to be otherwise unreliable for a lot of subjects.

You can ask it to compare and contrast philosophies like Utilitarianism, social contractionism, deontology, etc, and tell it to simplify or summarize things, it is impressive how good it is.

Another approach is, also surprisingly, Youtube!

The channel PBS Crash Course Philosophy is at the level of an introductory philosophy course at a University and has good episodes on concepts like Kant's Categorical Imperatives (a favorite of mine):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bIys6JoEDw

Also the channel the School of Life has fun little overviews of different philosophers that I can vouch for like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxrmOHJQRSs

And for longer format documentaries the BBC has great documentaries like this one on Nietzche that are similarly entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9f1F5jUzaM

So I would recommend trying these different resources and seeing what combination you like.

edit: there are also just SO many ways moral philosophies start to diverge at that point. Like we're talking about what is "necessary" animal experimentation. It's an important question, and one that really does boil down to a personal exercise.

Like... Personally I have no idea how to answer it. If you remove animal experimentation, well there goes a bunch of carcinogen studies which could result in a lot of human suffering. I also would need to do a ton of research to figure out if BCI research is at a level where primate brains are necessary instead of simpler organisms.

I also need to examine my own lifestyle, since hypocrisy severely undermines moral positions and having integrity/cogent beliefs and actions is essential if we are to engage with these subjects honestly.

For example, personally I have sometimes consumed meat in the last year (although I generally avoid it). Supporting factory farming absolutely violates my deontological moral imperative that "it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to others", in a ton of different ways. So who am I to espouse views on how people should behave with regards to animal research, when my own behaviour is in such a state of disarray?

Anyways... Getting pretty long again lol. Hope that response is helpful I know it's a bit rambling.

IMO Utilitarianism is a particularly dangerous ethical framework when wielded by narcissists who have a difficult time imagining that they might catastrophically fail (looking at you Sam Bankman-Fried), or might not be delivering salvation to the world (looking at you Elon, lol).

If you tell yourself it's for "the good of humanity", or the alternative is destruction / widespread death, you can justify any action.

Here's one deontological perspective you could take:

It is always wrong to cause unecessary suffering to others.

Now, the subjective traits to be considered here are "unecessary" and "suffering."

It used to be a common belief that animals lacked the capacity to suffer as humans do. They could feel pain, nocioception sure, but whether it caused complex psychological suffering (torment) used to be contenious.

Today, this is certainly not contentious for our closest relatives. All primates possess a theory of mind, long memory, emotional states, complex social behavior like lasting bonds and altruism, and other traits necessary to suffer in significant ways.

So the focus (as long as we are considering primates, obviously nobody cares about model species like drosophilia as they have a greatly dimished capacity to suffer (edit: although I should mention that ranking things based on capacity to suffer leads to pretty awful territories too. Eg, if a human is severely mentally disabled, is more permissible to experiment on them? I think most of us would say no, which raises the question why it's okay to do so for other species)) shifts to whether causing them immense physical pain and torture is necessary.

And this is where I think things get pretty murky, and I will leave the rest up to you! I wish more people were curious about moral philosophy and creating their own consistent ethical framework for the world... I think it's especially important in science and engineering.

Of course, you could use a different model like utilitarianism, but utilitarianism still requires some level of deontological principles or you end up with a pretty extremist moral philosophy (same goes for just having Kantian deontology with no room for utilitarianism, IMO).

edit 2: come to think of it, Jainists would certainly have an issue with experimentation even on drosophilia, so I take that back that "nobody" cares. IIRC they even have a mouth covering to prevent swallowing and killing any insects that might accidentally fly into their mouths, as well as a specialized stick to gently move things like spiders and other insects out of the way. I know most people would scoff at that, but I think their deep respect for all forms of life is beautiful.

You can easily have the worst of both worlds, where somebody disables the autonomy to engage in some road rage, then re-enables it, but without driver awareness features (lots of videos of people doing this) so they can have a nap and not take over when the autonomy disengages.

So you can easily have all the disadvantages of autonomous cars and idiot reckless driving.

Only time we'll be free is if there's ever L4/L5 autonomous driving, which seems a long way off.

edit: even "full self-driving" in Tesla's are L3, since you need to be available to take over, driver awareness is enforced, etc.