211–220 of 412 posts
This part is very interesting. "Even now my voice is reaching millions" Chaplin knew this message was for future generations. When he says "even now" it means, hey im long dead but this message is finally being herd around the world. Chaplin & Nikola Tesla were friends. Tesla told Chaplin what was to come down the line like the internet, what he called "the transmission of intelligence" I honestly wouldn't be surpris…
"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's just ad absurdum considering we don't have straight answers when it comes to socio-political issues.
It's absolutely straightforward to uphold Democratic principles over Fascistic enterprises. People who get this wrong are simply wrong, and it's likely emotional and psychological forces that got them there, not rational, historiographic, or empirical ones. The current headwinds are a result of ill-equiped individuals being manipulated by other ill-equiped individuals.
That may be, but it also seems perfectly logical to claim democracy is broken because a voice of an educated person carries same weight than that of a high school dropout. All you need to do is extend this logic a bit. I think it is because of our emotions, empathy or maybe something else that we see that this "flaw" in democracy isn't really a flaw.
> ill-equiped individuals being manipulated by other ill-equiped individuals
Except fascism wasn't only a manipulation. Had fascism succeeded it would've made the participating states extremely rich, powerful and influential throughout the next (maybe) hundreds of years.
I always liked this version with music added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo I remember sharing a jail cell with a 19-year-old Mexican kid once and we were talking about the guards being assholes and he said "they're like machine men"; and I said "with machine minds and machine hearts?" and he was like "YES! You know it?!" -- it was a good moment, we spent the next few days trying to remember the whole s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's so simple. Support for fascism can seem sensible and logical if you let yourself think that between you and greatness stands a minority whose sole purpose is to prevent you from becoming great. You could argue it's not emotion but a calculation coming from struggle and an easy explanation for that struggle. Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion and we have the whole history of science to pr…
> Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion I'm not sure what you mean by that. Every assumption right or wrong comes from emotion. The problem tends to come when people let their emotions are left completely unchecked. "Bankers are taking advantage of me. My banker is an X minority. Therefore, we need to exterminate X minority" indeed has a nonzero degree of logic, but it's not the sort of reasoning 99% of peopl…
I disagree. Wrong assumptions are often just a conclusion of limited or false knowledge.
I always liked this version with music added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo I remember sharing a jail cell with a 19-year-old Mexican kid once and we were talking about the guards being assholes and he said "they're like machine men"; and I said "with machine minds and machine hearts?" and he was like "YES! You know it?!" -- it was a good moment, we spent the next few days trying to remember the whole s…
My partner is very partial to this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzKl0oD6sU :)
"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.
I think the fascist sells the idea that our feelings of weakness can be hardened into solid, rational, scientific, truths. This almost seems like… a horrible promise to a wounded man, that he could be a machine-man, and that’s the best he could ever be, and that will give him strength. Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven. The transparent, meritocratic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people generally, and the Silicon Valley set in particular, have a hard time abstracting from “would I like” to “would the world be a better place if”. Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats. Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around ri…
How many times has your life or someone close to you in your life not died from something they would have died of 100yrs ago? If you're happy medical tech saved their lives then you're arguably for life extension because all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
Specific to:
> all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.
I find it ironic that "We think too much and feel to little" appears to contradict the conclusion at the end "Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness."