[FRIAM] help me understand

[glen]

My intention was to give Pink (or even Scott Aaronson) the benefit of the doubt and try some empathetic mentalizing. That seems to have failed. And Dave's cynical response is what we're left with. Expressions of "Free Palestine *scares* me" are perversions of the concept of "scared", perverted in the service of soft coercion, Machiavellian rhetoric, etc.

There is one last thing we *could* do to steelman it, though. We could accuse them of not realizing the perversion. In the same sense that a billionaire doesn't really have a choice but to succumb to the reality distortion field that kind of money induces, a continually "online" person has little choice but to succumb to the perversion of *actual* feelings, where "actual" takes on an immediacy and concreteness not carried by other tokens. Attempts to invoke this with phrases like "touch grass", "classic reality" (cf https://youtu.be/wn9pQb4ukBo?si=kUacHVBXmOdnUQk-), "unplug", or "disconnect" don't carry enough traditional meaning IMNSHO.

Is this inevitable perversion what you mean by "enabling unto the mess we are in today"? If so, I agree. But there are so many facets (e.g. Effective Altruism, inference-opoly, newspeak, [il]legitimate postmodernism, etc.) that a gloss like "mess we're in" feels too much like giving up. Similar to the way we tackle scientific or mathematical problems, each persnickety little part of the entire mess may deserve quite a bit of attention. Then as we accumulate results on the little things, larger patterns may submit to systems solutions.

But assembling each small contribution into larger ones requires rigor. A rigor I don't think we have. The AIs might have it. Or, at least, a healthy collaboration with them might. The AI Village <https://theaidigest.org/village> doesn't seem particularly healthy to me. But it's sufficiently different from other such playgrounds to hint at what a healthy one might look like.

On 9/15/26 10:52 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> yes, there is a superficial rhetorical layer (many layers) which provide some social shear-force relief which can be useful as "social lubrication" can but it can also be enabling unto the mess we are in today.
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