normalnorm

I much prefer living in a place that errs on the side of too much caution when it comes to privacy. You say "easily manipulated", I say that they have social memory of the horrors of the Stasi. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the Stasi archives were disclosed. The awareness of the amount of information hoarded on so many citizens with the help of friends, family & neighbors was deeply traumatic. Some people even decided they didn't want to know, so that they wouldn't find something about someone close that was hard to forgive.

In my view, this cultural and social memory makes the Germans less insane on the topic of privacy, not more. We can see very well how in most of the modern world how insidious the process is. We make small concessions, little by little, and soon we live under total surveillance. It doesn't seem like that long ago that using your real identity on the internet was considered unwise. Now people are voluntarily giving deeply personal information to shady operations such as FB.

I hope the Germans are not convinced by people like you, and that they remain healthily paranoid about privacy. It's one of the things I appreciate the most about living here. I feel the laws actually protect me against the bad guys on this topic.

> But people want to have it both/all three ways: feel good about recycling, get a discount on a future new gadget and sell/give the functioning old device to somebody. Amazing.

The discount in this case is an incentive against the best possible type of recycling, which is precisely to let someone else reuse it as is. Of course, companies tend to hate the good kind of recycling because it limits their profits. Companies are not entitled to infinite growth, nor should we facilitate that sort of expectation, least we end up destroying our own habitat. Well, we probably will, considering the way things are going...

What is actually amazing is that a company would create such an incentive and then pretend to be the good guys, caring about recycling and so on. Even more amazing is that some people are convinced by such low-effort bullshit.

Sure, and cancer existed before cigarettes. Doesn't mean one should smoke cigarettes.

If there is no way to harass people with notifications for "price alerts", there will also be no incentive to create artificial pricing systems with sudden "promotions", meant to hijack users' attention and cognitive sovereignty.

Don't fall for the tricks. Think about the systems your are engaging with all the way to the end, and consider if you are being manipulated. This is an environment where it pays to be paranoid, because big companies are devoting a huge amount of resources to trick you.

I would say, treat this stuff as one should treat nutrition. Simple is better for your health. If you don't understand how something is made, or what its purpose is, you should probably avoid it.

> If you deny a return within the return period, you're in violation of Amazon policy, and the A-Z team will rightly rule against you.

Amazon makes the laws and acts as a court now? I don't understand why people respect "company policy" so much. The laws of the land take precedence. We are not corporate slaves.

No they aren't.

Because unless the UK and the EU reach a trade agreement by the end of the year, the provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement kick in and Northern Ireland becomes bound to EU regulation.

This is a long and complicated story, but essentially Brexit created the following problem: the UK now desires to have full control over its borders, and this means a hard border between the UK and the EU. But then there is also the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which achieved peace between the unionists (Protestants who want NI to be part of the UK) and the nationalists (Catholics who want NI to be part of Ireland). Simplistically, the GFA guarantees a sort of double affiliation of NI, both to the UK and to Ireland. This means, among other things, no physical borders.

> I would like to point out that when you say that the world does not meet your expectation and that somehow is a problem with the world and not your own self is very arrogant.

Notice that this kind of argument could have been (and probably was) used against the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, universal suffrage, gay marriage or religious freedom. If you have a minority position against the status quo, you can always be accused of arrogance. "Who are you to think you know better?". However, sometimes the arrogant are right.

> These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism.

And capitalism, don't forget. The ideology of infinite growth is destroying our habitat.

Excellent blog post. You mention several things that we are so used to, that we don't even notice the abuse, such as the polluting of culture by association of works of art with commercial brands through relentless advertising. To this day, I associate Carmina Burana with cheap male cologne.

Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET

What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.

Am I the only one getting depressed with all the excuses and rationalizations in this thread? It's the same with "adtech" and the like... "Hey, I'm not killing anyone, what's the harm?"

Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans.

A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market!

Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it. But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something.

Fuck all this.

The position you describe is known as "eliminative materialism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

I find this position absurd for the following reason:

> The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial.

Yes, but who experiences this illusion? This explanation begs the question.

> Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.

That is a very common ideology around these parts (and also in the US), but it is simply not true. We are constrained by our mental health in how we can choose to approach life, and our mental health is partly due to genetic lottery and partly due to environmental circumstances outside of our control. This is not my opinion, scientific studies are massively (as you would say) in agreement with what I claim here.

The American obsession with "winner" and "losers" is just an excuse to be selfish and cruel. Its fruits are extreme economic equality, school shootings and people dying of easily curable diseases because they don't have money for the treatment (or even the ambulance to the hospital).

To me, your offer of "help" reads like a thinly disguised attack / insult. I guess we all know about the "humblebrag", this is "backhanded empathy". Or something.

The author is not saying anything that is not true. Given everything that happened and was disclosed in the past decade, I don't think one has to be paranoid to be deeply suspicious of black box software controlled by big tech.

We have no way to know if the response was reasonable or not, because we were not privy to the conversation and we were not given a list of the claimed health benefits, so we can't judge for ourselves of do our own research.

This was an anecdote that looks reasonable to the casual reader, but amounts to emotional propaganda if you pay close attention.

The reality is that there are many credible medical uses of cannabis, for example in helping people avoid much more dangerous drugs that are legal, frequently prescribed by doctors and frequently lethal, such as certain opiates. I would like to know if ginger also helps with that.

As with all substances, there are counter-indications to using cannabis. However, massive empirical data shows that it is overall safer than abusing many other legal substances, for example refined sugar. It receives an undue amount of scrutiny, which is not scientific but of a political nature. And make no mistake, the prohibition started for very concrete political reasons that had nothing to do with public health preoccupations. If the US government was truly concerned with public health, it would provide nationalized healthcare in the same fashion Europe does. And again, there is a massive amount of empirical data supporting this assertion. Let's separate politics and religion from science.

> Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality.

Yes he does. You touch anything and state is erased. Don't know exactly which one of the search results you want to go to? Tough shit, the interface works against you.

And still, getting directions used to be simpler. Now you have to decipher unlabeled hieroglyphs, and the interface keeps changing. You can't even get used to it. You are constantly being nudged to do shit that is not what you really want to do, such as "exploring your neighborhood".

> And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out.

Luck you, I guess. I have this problem all the time. A better trade off: if I searched for "Market Street", show that label! That would be a start. And frequently labels aren't shown even when there is plenty of space.

Oh, and why not show the scale of the map by default? Is this also a "power user" feature? I thought it was a crucial piece of information when reading a map...

> Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would you improve in this particular area?

Easy. Revert to the interface circa 2010. It had none of the above problems.

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless.

So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"?

Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map before. Now it prioritizes ad revenue at the expense of what users actually want to do.

There are no "power users" in this new world.

This comment is a master piece, in that it crystallizes everything that is dismaying about the present.

We live in a boring dystopia.

We all know exactly what they do. I don't care what the OP does specifically, they are collaborating in building something that makes the world worse for all of us.

> there is ABSOLUTELY a place in this world for advertising on the internet

I have no idea what this means. What I do know is that adtech turns everything it touches into shit.

I had this problem in the beginning (specifically and only with hotmail), but it solved itself at some point. No idea if it was something that fastmail did or that hotmail did.

I have been using fastmail for one year and had zero other problems. If we don't move away from gmail, we will lose email, which is one of the only true decentralized and free protocols still left.

I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity.

The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.

> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).

Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.

So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.

It's really just a personal intuition. I don't have any good argument or explanation to offer...

For what it's worth, I do feel that panpsychism was my "natural" belief when I was a kid, until the adults told me it was crazy to believe in that. I still don't think it's crazy, and there are some people who I respect a lot who believe in panpsychism.

Hehe :)

There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience.

You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight).

So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.

You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering.

There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.

Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.

An important difference is that angles are imaginary entities, while I doubt people with give up on explaining the most direct thing they can experience, which is their own consciousness.

Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms.

With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces).

Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.

Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.

> mentees

Sounds like something you would use for bad breath.

I an European and I have worked and lived in 4 different EU member states, some rich, some more poor. I know almost nobody who gets private insurance.

Currently I am in Germany, and I had a serious health issue. The sort of thing that makes you go bankrupt in the US. I had surgery and months of treatment for free. I stayed on my own private room in the hospital, and it looked like a hotel room, with a private bathroom. I payed zero euros, this was all on public healthcare. They even offered me a few days in a SPA to recover after surgery. They even funded the metro tickets to go from my house to the place where I received the treatment.

Some other EU member states do not have the resources for such niceties, but you will absolutely get the treatment you need.

I feel sorry for people in the U.S. I read about all sorts of situations that are heartbreaking, and it confuses me that most people there still vote against universal healthcare. This serves nobody except the very rich people exploiting the situation.

I listen to North American podcasts and such, and I am still surprised to hear educated people repeating lies about the situation in Europe, as if we were some almost-communist repressive society about to collapse. The most common assertion is that, after all, the US is the only country with "real freedom". To my European ears, this sounds exactly like the sort of propaganda you get from any authoritarian regime. As if "freedom" is some simple one-dimensional things that can be measured like this.

I think it would be good if U.S. citizens had a more realistic picture of how the rest of the western world lives.

Philosophy encompasses science. Testable hypothesis are a philosophical idea, justified on philosophical grounds. You can't justify the very idea of "testable hypothesis and experiments" by using testable hypothesis and experiments. There is a branch of philosophy devoted to this type of question, called "philosophy of science".

One very famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, gave us the idea that for something to be considered a scientific theory, it must be possible to devise and experiment that could, in principle, falsify the theory. Still, the issue is not settled and there are alternative positions. These are deep questions.

One interesting thing to retain here is that science provides empirical knowledge, but there are other forms of knowledge. You alluded to "testable hypothesis", and so you in fact deployed non-empirical knowledge.

The scientific method gave birth to a branch of philosophy, first known as "natural philosophy", and modernly known as "science".

> There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.

There are philosophy departments in almost every reputable University I know...

Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. This has nothing to do with academia itself, but with the managerial society we live in, where MBA-types decide on the value of everything with simplistic, dumb and short-sighted economic metrics.

Science absolutely needs philosophy. Science is philosophy. There is not a lot of encouragement to do real science/philosophy these days, because this requires deep thinking and following all sorts of unknown paths. Everything must be justified in terms of what gadgets can be built with the discoveries.

We are going through a profoundly anti-intellectual stage in western culture.