Listen, I don't know what kind of friends you are seeking, or what social groups you're in, and it's true that there are lots of people seeking power or to put others down. However, your statements fail basic logic and bias checks for in/out group bias, categorical error, inductive reasoning.

To me, it sounds like you are judging humanity based on the interactions on Twitter. I assure you, the vast majority of humanity are nowhere close to the machiavellian narcissists you make them out to be. Then again, I don't spend my time seeking power, or trying to get people to follow my socially extreme views, like veganism.

And yet, lots of people are these subjectively better humans that you describe. I say subjective because good, bad, evil... All labels, they're really just the fundamental attribution error. I recommend that you learn about categorical error and fundamental attribution error, and free yourself from the language that pushes us apart. That causes us to judge and hate.

The penguin gives a stone to his mate. The human buys an F150 to attract social attention and a mate. To a hypothetical alien species, the gap between the intelligence of these two species is not large.

Collectively, we act in accordance with our biology.

But avoiding police is essential for people like me who even have slightly more melanin in their skin than the usual amount. There are certain stores I learn not to use, and I have to learn the locals too avoid in each one I live. The number of times that I'm treated well but that I'm somehow unique in my imagined racial group is unusually high.

And I want to be clear, this isn't just in "white" communities in the Midwest, but other cultures/"races" too. I don't fit in with any because I fall into the mythical "mixed race" category.

This is truly a sad social construct that I wish would die already, but yes, it's often part of the cultural nature of such places. Holding these beliefs often leads to people holding the view that their problems are caused by some external force that they can never overcome, and they end up trapped in places with low economic opportunity.

So yes, racist. And I'm not limiting this to one race or culture. It's sadly a common part of the places where I most want to live and will never fit in.

It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.

Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.

Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.

We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.

IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.

If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.

What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.

Sometimes fear is justified.

Generally they feed narcissism, and they must: in order to believe the anti-climate change rhetoric, you must first believe that you have hidden knowledge that makes you smarter than climate scientists (and more knowledgeable than them in something they have been studying for decades), or have some hidden knowledge that they are all lying, basically mind reading. You have to avoid the empathy and reflection that might make you understand their position, or cause you too question your own. Nowadays you even have to commit "doctrine over person" and deny the warming you see out your own window.

I think that is a bit common in programmer circles, and I have guesses as to why, but I would love to see a study in the space as to why.

Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.

I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.

Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.

Those who want control might suggest otherwise, and they might actually believe it, but that's just lack of creativity (thinking of other possible worldviews) or empathy (realizing that others might see things differently).

Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.

Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.

Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.

Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.

The next step is to take this into account in ethics, but I fear this is a leap that humanity in totality will not make easily.

Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.

My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.

It seems to me that the only good personal knowledge management system is a self-testing tool, like Anki. When going through your daily tests, completed questions can have links to the source of the information. If you find yourself interested in studying the material again, you can follow the link, or retest using decks that you can build on the fly based on the tags of the question that caught your interest.

Personally, I just link to the original material that I found, instead of a personal note system. When I write notes, I write them by hand and regularly throw away binders of material. The handwriting was the important part, fully reinforced by constant self-testing.

The reason that this is so difficult, though, for technology, is the rate of change and how much technological bifurcation exists. Each company that I might go to will have their own stack of similar technologies with the same goals. How many languages do I actually want to know all the details of? Probably one. The ability to think as a programmer (or server administrator, network administrator, container system engineer, etc.) is the important part. Otherwise, I can learn the details of any utility on the fly as needed. It will stick with practice, and doesn't require the same level of personal knowledge management.

Learning a language, or things that don't change much (STEM subjects, for example), can benefit from the use of such a system.

And that's all that we'll actually be without memorization. There is a huge gap between someone with knowledge and expertise ingrained in their head, with a solid knowledge of the gaps in their knowledge, or understanding the layout of a knowledge realm that can only come from dedicated study of a subject, vs a dabbler or whatever level of expertise another individual might have with less stringent studies.

This same problem exists in our education system and cramming. You can cram subjects and pass tests, but research had shown that the knowledge gain from this process to be extremely limited.

Without a well ingrained knowledge of a subject, it is difficult to use that knowledge in creative thought, connecting with other realms of knowledge.

If all of these human mental processes are replaced with computation, and people no longer put in the effort to learn challenging things, then I predict large amounts of mental decline. We may already be seeing this process. Perhaps I should say... "As we offload more mental processing to computers...", Because it's definitely a process that many people are going through.

That isn't too say that computerized information is all bad. My wife would probably leave me if I didn't have a calendar app.

Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.

It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.

If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.