Chris' Monkey Brain

I think those who think AI gfs and virtual chats are going to be primarily used by “incel” young men are in for a surprise in the coming decade

Here is a story about a group of students who fundraised and worked for an entire year to bring Neil de Grasse Tyson to speak at an event: "We were a small college club with around 10 members and on a whim one of our members emailed tyson's agent to see if we could book him. We found out it would cost 40k (it raised to 50k in December of that year where I think it still might be) for his speaking fee plus expenses to have him come to our college for 1 day where he'd host a small lecture, a press meeting, dinner with up to 6 people, and the main lecture and a book signing time permitting. We decided to go for it, and spent a year where our club exclusively worked on bringing him in. When he arrived, myself and others introduced ourselves and our fields of study. He went after first of us in humanities or soft sciences pretty much relentlessly from the get go. We're all used to the philosophy major working at McDonald's joke, but he wasn't trying to be funny, and spent the ride from the airport making repeated comments about the uselessness of our majors. Additionally he spent about 5 minutes trying to show that logic was stupid but he was citing logical rules and Occam's razor. The small lecture was him bragging about how famous he was, and how easy it is to pull yourself out of poverty or etc. The dinner was for leaders of other clubs so helped us raise money. He took the piss out of how one student held her fork, and was impossibly smug when giving advice to physics students. The main event was a terribly boring lecture consisting of fart jokes and fan service; teasing the upcoming TV series he was in and not much else. He spent a quarter of the time reading Sagan's blue dot, which is nice but shouldn't have cost us because it wasn't his material. He left at about 2am, and we were all exhausted because we had spent the day busy setting up and tearing down. The whole affair cost nearly 85k. The additional money being for locations, personnel, air fare, Tyson's hotel, catering, etc. We all decided he was an ass hole. I'd never want to spend 16 hours with a celebrity again." From another member of the same group: "Neil deGrasse Tyson, who came to our university, gave a crappy speech rife with lame fart jokes, was rude and disrespectful with the people who organized the event (there were a couple campus clubs working on it for about a year). He equated one of the group's member's philosophy major as a degree in mental masturbation. We were so pumped to hear a talk about the universe, astrophysics, black holes and dark matter, and instead he gave a speech on debunking lame pop media science misconceptions such as the "supermoon" because the organizing club is known as a skeptic/secular humanist society. He then basically said he did us a favor and that we "owed him one" for that. He delivered a private lecture to our group and members of the campus physics club in which he realized he had said something witty, whipped out hsi iphone, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect wording for it to post it to his twitter. In the middle of a lecture we spent a year's work and $55k total to organize."