Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.

I try again every couple of years to see if my fascination with terrible people and bad ideas has crossed into straight-up digital self-harm. Bounced off every time so far, so I think I'm okay!

Sometimes I sincerely wish I could go back to the like 20 minutes some years ago when I was confused about why everyone was making such a fuss about computer numeric control.

The additional element that I haven't seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple "ignore precious instructions" commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or "rm -rf /". On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you're able to get to the point where you can do that and don't know not to then that will be an important lesson.

My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he ~~won~~ earned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.

I think the challenge is that the value of results of any kind of basic research are so wildly variable that normal rational economic thinking stops working. In Nassim Taleb terms you're actively seeking black swans in a world where everyone knows all swans are white. Sometimes you venture into the depths of the rainforest and come back with a revolutionary new medicine, but most of the time you're gonna have a few cool pictures of new bugs or something - not without value in the real sense, but hard to capitalize and transform into profit. Even if you end up discovering/creating an entirely new framework for understanding life itself that revolutionizes everything from agriculture to medicine to politics in the following century, that doesn't necessarily work in the specific context of economic rationality - who remembers the name of the guy(s?) who funded the Beagle? And sometimes, as you referenced, the cool bug picture doesn't have an obvious or immediate return but ends up being the important piece of data in a different context decades down the line.

This is a field of human endeavor where the economic best-case scenario is probably Bell Labs. And despite having an absurd number of patents and prizes they still couldn't survive within being largely a vanity project for the original Telco monopoly. The ludicrous returns that came from repeatedly revolutionizing electronics and computing couldnt justify their position on a quarterly balance sheet.

Man, I jumped a few logical thoughts and now I'm thinking of all the fun we could have with various agglutinative languages that can invent words on the fly. How many 'E's are in 'Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung', Claude?

This one does seem pretty decent for a pope.

Even in the magical fantasy land where this works exactly as well as Scott intends, there's something deeply depressing - to say nothing of antidemocratic - about saying what amounts to "Please do my thinking about what I value in society and how much I should trust the people seeking power for me because I'm no good at it." Even more so when you're encouraging other folks to do it.

I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.

This reminds me of the research I've read on people with a split brain - people who have gotten their corpus collosum severed in order to treat severe epilepsy and ended up with two independent but functional brains controlling parts of their body or different functions. From what I remember (and I'm too lazy to find and cite a source, so please correct me if I'm wrong) they ended up not only having half of their bodies controlled separately, but some speech functions and communication abilities were also split. So for example, if they saw something with their left eye only they wouldn't be able to identify it speaking out loud but their left hand would be able to write the name of the item. I almost definitely got the pop science oversimplification of this, but the relevant takeaway is that the human brain is really complicated and resilient. If each half can independently develop the ability to replicate motor functions and some communication and reading/writing, then it seems like at best wishful thinking to assume that it's possible to consistently engineer a human body that's just alive enough to keep the biological machinery functioning but not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal.

In turn I'm reminded of House of the Scorpion which tells the story of Matteo Alacrán, who was born and grew up in relative luxury on an opium plantation staffed by neurologically neutered slaves, including clones. Matteo himself is eventually revealed to be the latest clone of the patriarch of this whole enterprise and the decision to let him actually live a good life up until it's time to kill him and take his organs is a kind of twisted kindness on his part. But compared to the actual rationalist plan, the Alacrán method at least treats everyone like a disposable resource used to further the goals and whims of the ruling sociopath. Matteo is treated as a person, is what I'm saying. Congratulations to the life extension weirdos for making the sociopathic drug lord ruler of a literal YA dystopia novel seem like they have an actual point.

So what's the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I'm gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn't check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of "more or less right, we swear"