By default in the dominant culture, most systems come down to individual incentives for individual drive and shame dynamics for collective drive, and that covers a decent chunk of how people are motivated, but leaves out people who are motivated differently and actively harms people for whom these are paralyzing.

Crude form: winning is metaphysically guaranteed because it probably happened or probably will

Refined: It's metaphysically impossible to tell whether or not it has or will have happened, so the distinction is meaningless, it has happened.

So... I guess Weir's Egg falls out of that particular line of thought?

LLMs can only produce things by and for people who prefer not to do the work the LLMs are doing for them. Most of the time I do not prefer this.

Like, there was a 2-panel comic that went around the RPG community a bit back where it was something like "Game Master using LLM to generate 10 pages of backstory for his campaign setting from a paragraph" in the first panel and "Player using LLM to summarize the 10 page backstory into a paragraph" in the second. Neither of these people care for the filler (because they didn't produce or consume it) so it's turned the two-LLM system into a game of telephone.

Generally, if I come across an opportunity to produce ideas or output, I want to capitalize on it for growing my skills and produce an individual and authentic artistic expression where I want to have very fine control over the output in a way that prompt-tweak-verify simply cannot provide.

I don't value the parts it fills in which weren't intentional on the part of the prompter, just send me your prompt instead. I'd rather have a crude sketch and a description than a high fidelity image that obscures them.

But I'm also the kind of person that never enjoyed manufactured pop music or blockbusters unless there's a high concept or technical novelty in addition to the high budget, generally prefer experimental indie stuff, so maybe there's something I just can't see.

One of the things we need to accept as social animals is that there are a lot of different flavors of "true" and "correct".

A lot of times I'll get someone to concede with my opinion of stuff in a way where they say something like "well, sure, but good luck convincing anyone of this" and that's them just giving into the social-consensus truth rather than the empirical (what the evidence shows, what follows from that and our choices of axiomatic principles) or practical (produces the best outcomes in the situation) truth.

If we want to be a species worthy of surviving our impending climate extinction we need to have a population of leaders and actors who are willing to act on and create institutions according to the practical truth as informed by the empirical truth, and become villains in the eye of the social-consensus truth.

The job of a state is to create social good for its citizens by solving tragedies of commons which promote opportunities, solving common problems in a way that takes advantage of scale, and holding other organizations (other states, corporations, whatever) or individuals accountable not to be creating harm. By reducing them to cultural divide-and-conquer games this process has been crippled. A certain economic class is responsible for this, is not even subtle about it, and propagandizes the other classes into believing that it benefits them, that the worn down veneer of democratic processes involved could somehow legitimizes it despite the obviously poor outcomes.

When I see people say left/right or "whole spectrum" of political ideas I know they've bought into this reductive vision of what politics could ever even possibly be, and it's as disappointing as it is common.

I particularly love when I get involved in a demographic survey and I get asked to rank myself on a "very liberal" to "very conservative" spectrum as if those are the only possibilities. I am incredibly critical of both of these ideologies and positions of "compromise" between them are even worse: ahistorical, amoral and unethical.

People who live their whole lives within the Overton Window and can't imagine anyone lives outside of it are incredibly bizarre to me.

This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.

I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).

If there are jobs are legitimately not worth doing or paying someone to thrive while doing, why do those jobs exist? If these people aren't capable (or even willing) to do these jobs (or better jobs), why? How can we motivate or train people. (Lots of education, healthcare and especially psychotherapy are missing, I can tell you that.)

We can't solve poverty by thinking "well, some individuals might be able to solve theirs". It's a whole population, we have to solve for the whole population.

The worst will basically laugh me out of their office for daring to belong to a marginalized identity or failing to already have the health knowledge I'm there trying to gain from them.

Maybe I have awful luck... but I have very little faith at this point. The most effective relationship I had was with a hack who was willing to just prescribe whatever I asked him for and order whatever tests I asked him for (I think most of his patient base were college students seeking amphetamine salts).