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Comment by salawat

5 days ago

The community may very well feel ashamed of here, dang. I've been here in the good times, and to be frank, even before I made an account in 2017, I'd lurked for a long time. Recently, I've personally come to recognize an ethos nurtured here that it may very well be has overstayed it's welcome in a polite society. People aren't dumb. People see where the money flows. People see whose decisions things revolve around. People see the trajectory that seems to be set, and people are starting to realize that talking & reason aren't working for them any more. Reason, is by virtue of rationalization, in it's own way it's own worst enemy. With enough practice, anything can be intellectually justified. So where the little box of rationality ceases to be effective, life shifts to the irrational. Suddenly things start hitting different. You might be ashamed of all those here feeling the squeeze, but the squeezed don't even register the pinch thereof compared to what life is already throwing at them, in no small part because of your fellow Sam A. What you should note, and take away from all of this, is someone you know is building themselves into a Wickerman doused in gasoline through their actions. If you want something to change; you can try applying pressure to your first degree connection. Sometimes people just need a helping hand back onto the right path from someone unexpected.

Or... You can keep telling a bunch of people with much bigger problems how ashamed you are that they are having an absolutely human response to the suffering of a man at the forefront of building a reasonably foreseeable suffering amplification machine within the context of a society that is organized around a social contract of exchanging capital for labor. I'm sure that shame you cast won't get "lost in the softmax" as the AI folks might say.

No more skin off my nose either way. Though I'd feel much better seeing some genuine humanity injected into cutting edge tech circles, I'm aware of the incentives, and also cognizant that sometimes, you have to leave the incentivized path to stay on the Right one. That's a lesson it isn't in any one person's capacity to teach though. Sometimes... it takes a community to get the point across. Even then though, you can lead a horse to water...