Machado @machado@refactorcamp.org

@akk Obligatory annoying reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AckvdGbk4w

I just found out that theology courses have a 0% unemployment rate in Portugal. It's a pity I'm not into bumming little kids...

@nindokag @riga Addendum: arguably, rural places with a taboo on conversation topics that aren't sports and fishing are a form of hillbilly safe space.

@nindokag @riga Millenial hate is almost cute in it's stupidity. It's kinda like the people who came up with drapetomania.

I'm gonna refine my stance about safe spaces as being an issue of execution. It's a tool that can be used well, or misused.

@BruceJia Although the sensible thing is to distinguish single and collective personhood, and be clear about what rights apply to each category.

@BruceJia At the sci-fi insanity level: Weird takes on human rights. Adoption as a form of indentured servitude. Corporations running for office.

@riga You don't have to answer if you don't want t have this conversation, but here are my specific beefs with safe spaces:

1- can easily be turned into a tool of censorship.

2- can be used to create abusive environments.

3- when taken too far, turns avoidant behaviour into a subcultural norm.

@msweet I'd say we're better at analysis, but we tend towards crappy synthesis.

We have a hardware bias towards treating things as human-like agents, despite also having excellent spatial reasoning modules for dealing with material reality.

I blame resource constraints.

Free analogy fodder from a slow day in the office: Ripping up six sheets of paper is easier than doing it to three sheets folded in half.

@nindokag @vgr Well, we can always hope one of the megalomaniacs-in-chief saves us from that miserable future by making things a lot worse all at once.

@riga I'm still thinking about your question from the other day. Thanks, I needed that.

@moltensteel Sure, technology could fix some of the issues, but we've already seen that human psychology is not good at dealing with technologically mediated interactions.

Basically, you'd need humanity to become a lot different from what it actually is.

@moltensteel I'd say that way leads totalitarianism.

1- since the competition exists, you can't just act like it doesn't, or you get outcompeted. You'd need a top-down mandate to abolish the competition.

2- without status anxiety, you lose the bottom-up tools of enforcing cooperation. So now you need more top-down mandate to stop people from defecting against the group.

@moltensteel In that sense, the fuzziness and anxiety of status is a vital feature.

If you had a strict hierarchy where a lot of people had absolute certainty of being on the bottom and never going up, it would be rational for them to revert to lethal competition.

@moltensteel Addendum: zero sum social games have a very important purpose: non-lethal competition.

(Non-lethal in the same sense as rubber bullets. Shit happens.)

To have a non-competitive humanity would require a lot of work, and a lot of trade-offs that might not be acceptable to everyone.

@BruceJia Human hardware takes way too long to change. We're talking evolutionary timescales. The societies we build now have to account for humans as they exist now.

@moltensteel We are kinda hardwired to treat status as a positional good of vital importance.

@moltensteel I think we'll only have made dancing useless for social purposes.

@Elmkast I don't have actual numbers, so I can only talk confidently about the most visible anomalous patterns. Also, a lot of rural property exists under illegal ownership for historical reasons.

Seniors are mostly owners for historical reasons.

In Lisbon, it's very skewed towards renters.

Adults under 40 are mostly renting or living in extended family homes.

Increasing amounts of foreign owners of luxury properties, mostly french, brazilian, and chinese.

@BruceJia @vgr Well, non-elite humans always have a job available that's very hard for a machine to replace: entertainment for sadists. I'm expecting the future to look a bit like Altered Carbon.