Mars Cheung

Oops. I thought her account had nothing to do with the mayor's views.

“Same shit just coming from a different religion”. One of the reasons I’m not a fan of religion/ideology. Beliefs influence actions. Whatever virtues you practice or preach will be directed by those beliefs and it’s not always pointed to something in reality that does good.

When Chuck Norris does a push up, he’s not pushing himself up. He’s pushing the Earth down.

Thank you to @billmaher and Sam Harris for cutting through the noise on the @ClubRandom_ podcast. Living inside a bag - erased as a human being in every possible way - is a waking nightmare. And the fact that expressing concern for women trapped in these domestic prisons is labeled “bigotry” by Western “progressives” is the ultimate betrayal. Knowingly or not, they only enable totalitarian control of women. It’s tragic.

Antizionism is for losers. (My succinct summary of two decades of historical research).

From the recent @TheFP God debate between me and Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): Question from attendee: Doesn't the history of 20th century Marxism show us where rational materialism leads? And shouldn't you, as a student of history, have seen where this worship of rationality would lead? Me: Well, you're assuming that Marxism was rational. Attendee: It was the worship of rationality, putting human presuppositions about right and wrong before the teachings of God. Me: If we judge an ideology by its effects, there are reasons to think that the precepts of Marxism were the opposite of rational. Namely, they led to disasters, but people held them anyway, so it was the opposite of the ideal of falsifiability. And they led to both economic and humanitarian disasters, so on rational grounds, we can see that Marxism was mistaken. So the failure of Marxism does not cast doubt on the value of rationality. It is precisely because we can evaluate it on rational grounds that we can identify what was wrong with it. Likewise, the horrors of the 20th century due to Nazism were not because Nazism was rational, quite the opposite. It had a number of obviously mistaken and monstrous beliefs, and it is by the lights of rationality combined with concern with human well-being that we can judge it as having been a disaster. I don't think that our problem now is that we have too much empathy. I think that the allegation that we're suffering from toxic empathy is mistaken. That too much empathy is the least of our problems. If I were to single out some of the things in Christian tradition that I think are worth keeping, then empathy, compassion, forgiveness, forswearing revenge, all of those are good things because they can also be defended on rational grounds.

From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: The more religious the society, the worse the problems are. And if you don't believe it, consider some of the world's most irreligious societies, like Norway, Netherlands, and New Zealand. They're pretty nice places to live. Now consider some of the world's most religious countries, like Afghanistan and Congo. Those are places that people want to get out of. This is also true in a comparison across American states. The more religious, the more dysfunctional. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What we should wish as Americans is to be neither Afghanistan nor Scandinavia, but to be the United States of America, which as a culture has always done an incredible job of balancing some of the absolute, definite benefits of modernity, including religious toleration, a respect for pluralism, a refusal to simply sort of impose the totality of one religion's theological doctrines on society with an abundant faith in a cosmic purpose for the human race. And obviously there are downsides to religious intensity. Those downsides are often manifested in zealous intolerance. There are also serious downsides to religious indifference, which are often manifested in anomie, drift, and despair. And it is simply the case that if you look across the developed world today, there is a strong correlation between secularization and a kind of loss of faith in human purpose and the human future, manifested most starkly in the declining birth rates that make it extremely unlikely that Dr. Pinker's predictions about the inevitable triumph of secularism and humanism over religion will come to pass, because the secularists and humanists don't seem to be making the basic choices that would enable the continuation of the human race.

@mysteriouskat Doesn’t a ratio already serve the same purpose? I would imagine this button would just amplify how toxic social media can be.

Dislike button is coming to X. Do you like this?

Astonishing that it takes an entire book to explain what everyone has known for many millennia, but that's where we are in history today. So @SteveStuWill forthcoming book is a must read:

@concretemilk @EFischberger He’s a walking Dunning-Kruger. Has been for a long time.

@EFischberger Just the most intolerable egomaniac I've ever witnessed up close. The man is absolutely fascinating for all the wrong reasons.

My contacts in Mossad have informed me that they’re looking into Bret Weinstein. They say it may even take precedence over finishing up the operation in Iran. That’s how serious a threat they think Bret is.

You’re quite obviously a moron. If that’s my “job” why do I write so little about Muslims? Why have I literally never written anything that could be read by a non-moron as “hate Muslims”? Who is paying me to do this job? If you want to be taken seriously, you should probably stop speaking in public.

Until we have an objective test for consciousness (good luck!) or an understanding of how "understanding" works in our brains, or what it actually 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 to "experience" something, the only issue I see is the sheer confidence people seem to have that AI doesn't (or cannot) have any of these things. Saying AI is doing nothing more than data processing or computation assumes that humans are doing something more than that. Are we, really? How do we know? If experience or consciousness just emerge from certain types of information processing (which is what it increasingly seems like), why do we carbon-based life forms get some kind of monopoly on it? Is AI really becoming more human-like, or have humans essentially been computers all along? Historically as a species, we haven't done well coping with challenges to our anthropocentric delusions. We didn't take it well when Galileo showed that we're not the center of the universe (or even the solar system). We didn't take it well when Darwin demonstrated that we're not exactly created in God's image. And now that we're experiencing a digital species that seems increasingly indistinguishable from humans in intelligence, creativity, and at least the appearance of consciousness, the cope is off the charts. We don't have these answers yet either way. These definitive proclamations about it being impossible for AI to be conscious are a defensive mechanism from a place of existential anxiety, not empirical evidence. We 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 AI to be "just a machine" so we don't have to face the (very plausible) idea that if consciousness can just emerge from information processing, maybe that's all we are too.

This is not only demonstrably false, it is blatantly anti-American.

DEBATE: Are We Better Off With God? - I say: "We’d be better off with a greater sense of a common purpose: with more trust and less polarization. We’d be better off with more knowledge: of how to solve big problems like scarcity, disease, violence, and energy. And we’d be better off with moral clarity: with defensible convictions about right and wrong and where to invest our moral energy. God gives us none of these." NYT columnist Ross Douthat, author of Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious disagrees. The Free Press thefp.com/p/debate-do-we…

@StrangelEdweird @NicoPerrino A Chinese saying: may you live in interesting times meaning living through times of turbulence and uncertainty.

@NicoPerrino We live in interesting times!

And he speaks in Fox News, of all places. Interesting!

@clairlemon Maybe not immediately but, assuming AI doesn't hasn't advanced too sharply by then, I'm anticipating that junior people will be needed to replace seniors at some point in the game. Speaking as a programmer myself. That said, the technology does seem to be advancing quickly...

Using Claude CoWork for a couple of days and can see how it will give already skilled senior people extraordinary leverage. But how on earth is a graduate who works with symbols/abstractions ever going to get hired ever again?

Well said sir. Dr. Pinker has been one of the giants in my intellectual life.

.@DefendingEd is proud to join more than 120 organizations calling on the University of California regents to address the rising antisemitism on campus. Every student deserves a safe learning environment free from harassment and discrimination.

This applies to the right as much as the left. A whole lot of feeling being passed off as thinking...

Incredible