notabot

They do, but it usually means they have trapped wind, and, if it isn’t resolved soon, that’s going to become everyone’s problem.

That doesn’t mention the lawsuit, or any significant manual recount, so I’m guessing it didn’t go anywhere.

That’s from Oct 30, has there been any update on the lawsuit?

It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife.

It’s been a long time since I read that one, but it’s stuck in my head.

We clearly have very different ideas of what hope is. What you’re describing seems thin and rather tenuous to me, and would do nothing to motivate me. You would not look at a broken arm and just hope it got better, you’d bind the wound, splint the break, maybe get help from someone who knows what to do, and you’d expect that to help. In the same way, when facing a broken or corrupted system, just hoping it gets better, maybe even believing it can be made better, achieves nothing, and encourages exactly the sort of meme post activism we so often see. Only deciding what you can actually do to make the situation better, and then doing it, makes a difference, and if you’ce planned well, you can do it with the reasonable expectation that the situation wil improve as you expect it to. Seeing how your actions move you towards a better situation is what drives more action, and what buffers you against setbacks. At least, I find it vastly better than just sitting and hoping.

Perhaps you and I mean something different by “hope”, but a revolution doesn’t succeed on hope, it succeeds on determined action towards the desired goal. By all means keep that goal in mind, but, unless you are actively working towards it, you are just relying on others to achieve it for you, and if you are working towards it, then it’s not hope, it’s expectation, and that’s a very differentn and far more positive, thing.

Hope is the motivation killer. Hope is what encourages people to post memes rather than take action. Hope is relying on others to achieve your goals for you. Replace it with expectation based on deliberate action.

The dose makes the poison.

Do you have the count of total votes cast in each of those contests to hand? I’d look, but I’m in the middle of things (yes, yes, lmgtfy and so on ;) I’m interested in if there was a significant difference there too.

So, I get where you’re coming from, but Scrooge McDuck seems to have two key differences from your average flesh-and-blood billionaire, one, his fortune seemed to be in actual, tangible, assets (mostly gold coins and other currency), rather than imaginary share valuations, and two, he was unwilling to spend a cent of it if it could be avoided, including on things like buying politicians. The net result was that the gold and currency was removed from circulation, which would increase the value, and thus buying power, of what was left, without exerting any influence itself.

Another key difference is that he liked to dive face first into his fortune, and if other billionaires did that, the problem would largely solve itself.

I am lucky with my friends and family, and I’m always grateful for that. As I said before, when I say something is simple, that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting it’s easy. The trouble is, no one but the addict themselves can break addiction. Of course algorithmic media, social or otherwise, should be much more stringently controlled, but if it disappeared overnight people who just move to the next source of quick dopamine hits.

Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean you have to let your phone become a “nightmare rectangle”. You already know things are bad, you don’t need to constantly immerse yourself in every detail of the badness. Keep an overview, of course, but save your energy, and your sanity, for doing something positive instead.

sore bought

Sore what bought???

Sure, when I say these things are simple, I don’t necessarily mean they’re easy. None-the-less, it is down to each individual to control their behaviour. Having supportive people around you undoubtedly helps, but no algorithm can actually control your behaviour unless you permit it to.

Where I can, I tend to distance myself from those who can’t control themselves, and my family are all pretty disciplined, so the total is around about “everyone I care about or spend time with”.

That’s what drives me nuts about these sorts of memes, they’re just learned helplessness. You control what you’re viewing. No-one is forcing you to read or watch anything. Some platforms try to mould and filter what you see on them, so simply stop using them, or limit your use if you must dip in. Others have biases that you should be aware of and take in to account.

Curate your own intake, and know when to stop. Put the phone down, and do something else. Uninstall the apps and delete the bookmarks if you must, but take control and stop blaming things you have control over.

They’re not doing to Uranus what they did to Pluto, those heartless scoundrels! Uranus is a treasure of the solar system.

The biases I’m talking about here are things like their generally preferred approach to solving problems, or how optimistic or pessimistic their outlook on certain classes of problems are. These are things you tend to know about the people you’re likely to brainstorm with, plus you can also be fairly sure that you’re all working towards the same goal. When you’re using an LLM like a partner to do this you can’t know those biases, as they’re externally controlled, you can’t know how they’ve changed since the last time you interacted with it, because the training data may have been updated, and it’s definitely not working towards the same goal as you because it’s not working towards anything, it’s just following statistical patterns in its training data.

A handful of employees in a conference room are more likely to just agree.

I see you’ve never met my coworkers before! The politest way to describe that sort of gathering would be “a free and frank exchange of opinions”. I quite like them for that. The point is that I know their biases already, so I can adjust for them, and I can be confident that they’re actually trying to achieve the same thing I am, rather than regurgitating a probabilistically derived sequence of tokens that strongly resemble, but aren’t, actual thought.

The biases I’m talking about here are usually more along the lines of preferred approaches to problems, general pessimism or optimism in outlook, and any “oneupmanship” that is known to occur, rather than anything people tend to hide.

The assertion was the brainstorming with an LLM was like brainstorming with a rubber duck. It is not, as I’ve outlined in another comment.

Brainstorming with another person can also lead to biases, you’re correct, but your partner is less likely to just agree with your ideas, or to have built in biases that you’re not aware of.