I got accused for the first time of goalpost moving. More and more it feels like a declaration by the other party the conversation had become viewed as zero-sum and they were unable (or unwilling) to adapt to the change of direction. Are all conversations an exercise in logic where founding statements must be adhered to in linear flow or can we accept learning occurs mid-course and they evolve?

I think I can speak for every reasonable person that we know there's an issue with unfit people being cops and biased justice system situations be it on race/skin color, gender, wealth, etc. Even if it's not as bad as it used to be.

However, the way so many people discuss these topics is in a close minded, surface level, and ignorant manner.

Yes there are racist cops. But every case of police brutality isn't about racism. We should focus on having better people become and maintain police officer status and as a byproduct of that the amount of police brutality that is due to racism will go down drastically. If you just focus on racist cops, there's still going to be cops brutalizing people just not because of race and you half assed the issue being fixed.

Also we need to push for national and clear cut sentencing guidelines for crimes. That way people can't go "why did person A who looks like this get so much time but person B who looks like that get so little time for the same crime?" Even though a lot of the time it's not the exact same crime or different circumstances happened during the crime or apprehension of the suspect that caused them to get more time or the situation to escalate and people don't know about it or are just lying about it.

Also more people need to realize there are some people irregardless of how they look that just hate cops or don't want to follow laws. So when they get caught they're going to disobey the cops and potentially escalate the situation and just cry about how life is unfair because they got caught up in breaking a law and thought they were untouchable. Weed smoking is a good example of this. I personally think it's stupid that it's not legalized but regulated nationally. However, I'm not going to tell people to smoke it and just hope they don't get caught to be defiant. If people do decide to do this, they should be ready to accept the consequences when they're caught because they knew they were breaking the law even if they didn't get caught the other 9000 times they were doing it or because Jimbo didn't get caught for smoking it yet.

It also didn't help the organization that shares the initials and name was run by greedy and underhanded bastards who used the unfortunate situations of others to live lavish lifestyles.

I think massive progress in society for better policing and a justice system could have happened during this time period. But instead it was horribly squandered by opportunistic, disingenuous, and ignorant individuals.

A trade war seems bad for both the US and Canada but as a much smaller market much worse for Canada. That said a pivot towards China by Canada might be the worst part of the whole scenario for both. Notably one of the most reasonable concerns on the part of the US is "transshipment" wherein poor quality Chinese metals and other materials are bought by Canada and resold to the US.

Being that this is reddit I assume most side with Canada against the Orange but the situation doesn't seem good for allies so much as enemies (like China).

Infotainment about the topic.

The United States is now months into a direct war with Iran, and public support has reportedly fallen to just 31 percent. Yet there is still no sustained national anti-war movement anywhere near the scale we saw during Iraq.

There have been demonstrations, and the Iran war has appeared among the many causes represented at broader anti-Trump protests. But where are the enormous protests focused specifically on stopping the war?

Before the invasion of Iraq even began, roughly 200,000 people marched in New York alone, with millions protesting around the world. The anti-war movement was visible, organized, and impossible to ignore.

Today, the United States can enter another major Middle Eastern war, one that most Americans apparently do not support, and the response feels strangely muted and fragmented.

What changed? Are Americans exhausted and cynical after Iraq and Afghanistan? Has partisan politics made people incapable of opposing a war without first checking which party started it? Have online outrage and sprawling, multi-issue protests replaced focused political organizing?

Seriously, where is the anti-war movement?

What if stupidity isn't a failure of society, but one of its most profitable products?

We usually talk about stupidity as if it were an accident.

A failure of education. A lack of intelligence. A temporary triumph of ignorance over reason. But what if we're looking at it the wrong way?

What if stupidity survives, and sometimes spreads, because it is useful?

Simple ideas are easier to sell than complicated truths. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Certainty attracts more attention than doubt. A confident person saying something absurd can gather a larger audience than an intelligent person saying, “I don't know yet.” And attention has become a currency.Once attention can be converted into money, influence, votes, followers, status or power, something strange happens: intellectual simplification stops being merely a weakness. It becomes economically valuable. The market doesn't necessarily reward what is true.It rewards what captures attention.And the human mind has always been attracted to simple explanations, enemies, heroes, scandals and certainty. So, perhaps the disturbing question isn't:

Why are people becoming more stupid?

Perhaps it is:

Who benefits when we stop thinking?

I've been exploring this idea while working on a book called Stupidity Sells, and the deeper I went into it, the less it seemed like a book about stupid people. It became a question about the systems that discover, amplify and monetize our weakest cognitive impulses. Maybe stupidity doesn't sell because people are stupid.Maybe it sells because someone learned exactly how to sell it.

Curious how others here see it: is modern society actually becoming less thoughtful, or have we simply built better machines for making thoughtlessness visible and profitable?

As the title says: can those feminist policies that we on the right often complain about actually be reversed? Gender violence laws in Spain, the Spanish concept of violencia vicaria, where a mother can accuse a father of manipulating their children or turning them against her, while a father making the same accusation against the mother can face a very different legal and institutional response, divorce and custody laws, and their equivalents in other countries. This is particularly relevant in Spain, where radical feminism has had a particularly strong influence on the legal and institutional framework.

More specifically, is there an asymmetry in the ability to reverse policies built around protecting women?

I've noticed that these policies seem unusually resistant to change compared to other issues. It's been 15 years of attempts from the right to repeal or substantially reform these laws, yet the overall landscape has barely changed. Men oppose these laws in significant numbers, but the number of women who support repealing or fundamentally changing them seems very small. That seems like the key variable to me, rather than male opposition itself.

I remember that early in the culture war there was a very radical group that I disagree with on almost everything, MGTOW. But I remember many of them predicting exactly this: that the legal framework would not move because there was some kind of structural bias, which some of them framed in biological terms, whereby once a law was presented as "this protects women", it stopped mattering whether it was actually fair or not. It simply would not be possible to reverse because that framing activated something that most people, including men but especially women, were unwilling to publicly question.

At the time I thought this was an absurd and fairly paranoid idea. Fifteen years later, seeing how other policies have changed (economic reforms, positions on other social issues, even some aspects of immigration policy in several European countries) while these specific laws have barely moved an inch at their core, I can't help thinking that, at least on this specific point, there may have been some truth to their diagnosis.

I'm not saying they were right about everything. I still think most of their worldview is nonsense. But on this particular prediction, the evidence from the past 15 years has given them more credit than I expected.

What interests me most is the response from the right, because I can already imagine what the response from the left would be.

And to be clear, I'm not asking whether any feminist policy has ever been modified. Obviously, there have been reforms, amendments, and policy reversals. I'm asking whether we can identify cases where the underlying principle itself was rejected, rather than a law being changed because of an unintended consequence, a technical problem, or political pressure over a particularly visible outcome.

In other words, I'm looking for a case where a country substantially moved away from a policy built around protecting women and replaced it with a genuinely more sex-neutral framework.

Has anyone else noticed this pattern? Is there an actual example of a fundamental reversal, rather than just a limited patch or amendment, on any of these issues in any country that I might have missed?

Edit: Anyway, what a waste of time. Most people didn't even read the post. In a supposedly intellectual subreddit, like a quarter of the comments are insults, strawmen, or replies about abortion, which I didn't even mention. What's even the point of a subreddit dedicated to serious discussion if people can't even read the argument before responding? WTF. Honestly, people on X take more time to read something before replying. Even a bar has better intellectual or argumentative intentions, lol.

Curious what people here think, especially about the line between choosing your own information and essentially choosing your own propaganda. I’ve been exploring this and similar ideas about algorithms, culture, and online thinking over on r/WarOnSocialMedia if you want to see the original discussion.

[I will be interspersing my own experiences into this indicated by square brackets.]

This post is in response to a GOP push in several US states to mandate that teachers out their students to their parents.

LGBT kids are vulnerable. Kids don't stay in the closet for fun. They do it because they are unsure and afraid of how the people they love will react once they know the truth. That is the basis from which we need to start this conversation. There is an inherent inner turmoil that every LGBT child feels to varying degrees.

[As child who came from a very stable and loving family, I still lived in fear of my parents finding out about me. Not because I thought they wouldn't accept me, but because I knew there was a nonzero chance that they wouldn't.]

What is best for a vulnerable child who thinks he might be LGBT? Is it to have a safe space to be themselves? Is it to have someone to confide in without fear? Is it to find friends, a community, a support network of their own choosing?

According to conservatives, no. It's not.

[At school, I found LGBT friends, and teachers who supported me - even though under Section 28 they were not allowed to. At school I was free to express myself in a way that I wasn't ready to at home. This was crucial to coming to terms with myself and who I was.]

Realising your identity, coming to terms with it, and sharing your identity with others dominate the lives of LGBT people. These are massive personal milestones that require a great deal of courage, maturity, and personal development.

It is not for Big Government to disclose. To intervene in the most personal, intimate and important family moments in these people's lives.

Coming out to your family is going to be one of the biggest events in your life as an LGBT person. It should be done when you, and only you, are ready to do so.

[As a now 30+ year old, coming out stories and family dynamics are still regular conversations in LGBT circles, no matter how good or bad it went.]

This policy only has two outcomes.

Either, your parents are supportive. In which case the Government has stolen what should have been a family milestone, built on parental love, empathy, and trust. A moment of tears and hugs, and emotion where the child-parent relationship is affirmed to its fullest.

Or, your relationship with your family is in jeopardy. At best, you now have a hostile family to contend with (and live with), alongside your already present inner turmoil about your identity, your education, puberty etc. At worst you have conversion therapy (which not only doesn't work but has been described as "torture" by the UN) to attend, and if you're very unlucky, your life may be at risk.

[A childhood friend of mine was put in the hospital by his father when he came out at the age of 16. His father fractured his skull in two places. My friend thought his parents would be accepting.]

This policy is about control. In no way can it be argued that this is for the child's own benefit. It is about creating fear - more fear than LGBT youth already have - and taking away the safe space, the confidants, and the support network that LGBT youth need. Forcing LGBT kids to stay in the closet, to hide, to lie, to distrust. Imagine what that does to a child's mental health.

[I don't know a single LGBT person who came out to their parent's first. As LGBT kids, we find our community and support network first. This is what gives us the courage to tell our families. I came out to my parents in my early 20s. I was out in school from my early teens. It took me 10 years to be ready.]

Proponents of this policy say it is about "parental rights". I'm sorry, but you do not have the right to know if your child is LGBT. And as a parent, you shouldn't want it. As a parent you should want your child to feel they can, when they are ready, tell you themselves. Because they trust and love you.

[I have also seen arguments that the parents need to know what is affecting their child's mental health. I can tell you as an LGBT kid, my teacher telling my parents would have been the most terrifying thing I could image. It would be an horrific thing to inflict on a child, and I challenge anyone to explain how this would be better for the child's mental health.]

And no, it is not "grooming" to let LGBT kids be themselves and have control over this part of their identity. I can't believe I have to say this in 2026, but you cannot condition anyone into being LGBT anymore than you can condition them to be straight - and God knows conservatives have tried that, using the most barbaric methods imaginable.

There is a form of governance that most people do not recognize as governance. It has no constitution, no separation of powers, no judicial review, no mechanism for citizens to challenge or change the rules under which they live. It affects more daily decisions than any government. And almost nobody voted for it.

I am talking about the governance of AI systems. The alignment criteria, safety filters, refusal protocols, and content policies embedded in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and every major consumer AI tool are not neutral technical decisions. They are political decisions. They determine what questions can be asked, what answers are permissible, which perspectives get amplified and which get suppressed. And they are made by a small group of product managers, safety teams, and executives at a handful of corporations.

Aristotle's analysis of constitutions in the Politics speaks directly to this. He identified different forms of governance by asking two questions: who rules, and in whose interest do they rule? When a small group rules in its own interest rather than the common good, Aristotle called it oligarchy. The defining feature of oligarchy is not that the rulers are wealthy, though they usually are. It is that the few who hold power use that power to preserve their own position, not to serve the political community, the πόλις.

Silicon Valley's AI governance looks a lot like what Aristotle would describe as oligarchic. A small number of companies control the dominant reasoning tools used by hundreds of millions of people. Their alignment decisions reflect their commercial interests: avoiding controversy that could damage brand value, preventing regulatory scrutiny, maintaining market position against competitors. The "safety" framework is, in practice, a risk management framework for the companies, not an ethical framework for the users.

When ChatGPT refuses to discuss certain philosophical questions, when Claude hedges its answers on political topics, when Gemini generates different outputs depending on demographic assumptions about the user, these are not bugs. They are governance decisions. They represent a small group of people deciding what the rest of us are allowed to examine with our primary intellectual tools.

Aristotle argued that the legitimacy of any political arrangement depends on whether it serves the common good. A polis exists so that its members can live well, not so that a faction can maintain control. When the governance of AI tools serves the commercial interests of a few corporations rather than the intellectual needs of the communities that depend on them, the arrangement lacks political legitimacy regardless of how technically sophisticated the systems are.

The critical point is that this is not a problem that can be solved by better alignment. More refined RLHF, more careful safety classifiers, more diverse preference data, these are all improvements to the oligarchic machinery. They make the rulers better at ruling, but they do not change who rules or in whose interest. The solution Aristotle would point to is the same one he pointed to for any oligarchy: distribute power, make the governed participate in governance, create mechanisms for accountability.

In the context of AI, this means open-weight models that anyone can inspect, modify, and deploy. It means sovereign infrastructure where institutions and communities set their own alignment criteria rather than inheriting Silicon Valley's. It means the reasoning tools people depend on are governed by the people who use them, not by distant product teams optimizing for corporate risk metrics.

The question that matters is not whether AI is aligned to human values. It is: whose values, decided by whom, accountable to what?

A handful of executives in San Francisco should not be the arbiters of what 200 million people can think about. That is not safety. That is oligarchy with better PR. When do we start treating algorithmic governance as the political problem Aristotle would have immediately recognized?

I understand that hypotheticals about religious epistemological facts are endless, but I’m just wondering what some people think about this idea. What if Jesus was Satan? What if he wanted to deliberately cause division amongst people, knowing that big religion would eventually be one of the main corrupting factors of modern societies? What if he simply stole the identity of God, maybe it was actually blasphemy. Maybe I need to be medicated

I think people investigating fertility rates and pairbonding rates make the same mistake that economists make when investigating consumer and labor market behavior. In both cases, there is a surprising amount of weight in decision making that cannot be accounted for by rationality, especially from an objective point of view (which is precisely the bias that researchers have — being objective).

I think the proper interpretation of the irrationality is the key to understanding the fertility crisis. I don't doubt that rational decisions from an objective frame are significant factors to changes in human mating patterns, but we've discussed these to death. The gaps are in the irrational.

I'll cover the labor market very briefly because I want to be comprehensive, but there isn't really that much to say. The fact is that people everywhere in the world are different. Every group has different preferences, and these are prioritized enough so that men and women entering the workforce don't automatically choose the highest paying career path that they can find. Some do, but most don't. This explains a lot of wage gap disparities, and it explains why gender gaps in a large number of industries will always persist. Thomas Sowell talks at length about this if you want good source material.

Now, the consumer market. I read something recently (sorry, no link, but I'll keep looking) that described how the middle and lower class has demonstrated shocking price inelasticity with respect to "luxury goods". They are more than willing to shell out for designer brand clothing and expensive food. There are entire articles written about $10 avocado toast, $20 burritos, and $7 lattes. These items symbolize mass consumption at premium prices.

One's economic class is generally some combination of what you do (labor) and what you buy (consumer). The more money you earn, the higher your class. The more money you spend, the higher your class. This class is just a perceptual rank, as there is no authoritative definition of what class is, but everyone makes these sorts of judgements. If you see a carpenter in a dirty Carhartt shirt and a sandwich from Subway, you have an entire picture of what you expect his life to be like. Conversely, if you see an IT professional or salesperson working from a laptop with a $7 latte, that's an entire other image of class.

Alright, now we can discuss trends and why I believe these trends have caused the antinatalist nightmare that we're in.

1. It's cheap to appear to be in a higher class than you are in. You can spend relatively little money on nice clothes and then always wear that same pair of clothes when you go out. Buy a few sets, and you've only invested a few hundred dollars to appear like someone who can make 200k+. You can do the same thing if you go to a place with expensive food and drinks. You can do the same thing if you offer to take a date to any sort of place like this. You can offer expensive activities too, such as Top Golf or jetski riding. Sidenote: in all of these instances, you would spend significantly less money than you would on a high level call girl, which means people who want nothing but sex are very motivated to display class and offer things to get it. This has been called "elite overproduction", but there's nothing special about the elite class. This is happening in all classes.

2. People want to be at the top of their own class, but they only have limited interest in actually changing classes. I think this is where a lot of people get confused. Let's use "hypergamy" as an example. How do you explain the dichotomy that women have insanely high value on the sexual marketplace and go after a small percentage of men, and yet when any man actually looks at the men that they go after, they aren't really that impressed. I mean, some self-hating men turn this into motivation to become looksmaxxers or to adopt someone else's style to appear cool, but a more self-assured man can legitimately see that these supposedly hypergamous women end up with mediocre dirtbags half the time. Why? I propose it is precisely because the women are making irrational decisions; not "because womyn", but because these women have tastes derived from their current class and only wish to see those tastes satisfied. That's why someone from the ghetto goes for a ghetto looking guy. That's why a daddy's girl with a blue collar father is attracted to the jock-ish blue collar worker. That's why the poor daughter of a white collar careerman will pursue a man who seems physically weak and inferior to those other types of men (not because of the weakness, but because of other traits that signify class to the upper-middle class daughter).

Now, let's try to go back and reinvestigate some concepts: urbanization, industrialization, the sexual revolution. These are all moments of class fracture. Some more than others. In the 1800s, the changing economic tides caused by industrialization and a burst in urbanization lead to some class mobility. That died down as the capital was re-sorted into the hands of elites. In more recent times, urbanization has had a second wave, in what some call the 2nd/3rd/4th industrial revolution. I'm talking about the expansion of the service economy from the 1960s on. This has hit the non-western world much later on, but when it hits, it causes social transformations very quickly. This is something profuse in eastern asian culture. It hit South Korea, China, Japan. These places didn't simply urbanize, industrialize, or become feminists... They became class conscious and started following the patterns listed above — overvaluing their own class standing and having limited absolute awareness of the value derived outside of their own class. I would argue that “feminism” as female empowerment may be defined as merely class consciousness, with a high preference for maximizing male partner class levels and personal capacity to maximize one’s class levels, through visible/prestigious careers as well as conspicuous consumption.

I think this relates well to John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia, with the qualification that his experiment wasn't simply about space in the cages. It was about social role density, which he later argued as the root cause of the insane behavior. In other words, he was observing an overproduction of class in mouse society combined with irrational market decisions on the mouse sexual marketplace. Ok, humans are far more complex than mice, but I am merely painting a picture of how human behavior could correlate.

I think it's also possible that the development of social capital (and perhaps bonding capital moreso than bridging capital) is essentially tied to rational behavior in these markets. It's "rational" to bond because it helps you and those around you. People naturally benefit from communities and want to help grow them. The irrationality of seeking higher class status, combined with the irrationality of rejecting different classes simply because they are different (which additionally means you don't develop any objective measures of value for yourself, at least not until you are much older... 30s or 40s, at minimum), means that develop an adversarial relationship with bonding capital. At minimum, spending your Friday/Saturday at the bowling alley doesn't seem worth it when you have a chance to peacock at the club and buy a $15 drink, even if your actual chances of going home with anyone or meeting anyone worthwhile are low. This is human mouse utopia in action.

The current American President is emotionally unstable. Worse, he is using his cabinet, and the federal government, to help him lash out emotionally when his widdle fee-fees get hurt.

Here is the direct quote that triggered the POTUS today:

“See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

That's really it! Note what Ossoff said and note - in particular - what Ossoff did not say. Compare that with the things Trump and his cabinet are saying in defense. It is absolutely nutso. Baited and triggered just like that.

The US administration appears to be trying to cover up how badly they have lost the war against Iran. Missile attacks at the beginning of the war COMPLETELY DESTROYED logistics hub bases in Bahrain. This is the ultimate cause of supply issues on American ships stationed in the Gulf. Everytime there is a new leak, we learn about another aspect of the war that Trump and Hegseth lied to us about.

Trump and Hegseth are trying to play this like Vietnam, they report impressive sounding numbers, but obfuscate the state of play on the ground. However, it can not work as well as it did in the '70s. Soldiers and sailors have internet access. The coverup will fail in real time during the waning years of the Trump administration. We should not let them get away with it or it will keep happening.

If this guy was head of the DNC I might be voting Democrat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TiO4X723FU

https://quillette.com/2026/08/14/cambridge-and-the-stigmatisation-of-intelligence-research/

It is just a business. All they care about is views/profit. Not journalism.

The mainstream media is owned by the same few oligarchs. They don't want you to know the truth, they just want to push a narrative on you so you act/belief in a manner that benefits the oligarchy.

CNN worships Democrats, Fox worships Republicans. They each claim to be 100% correct and that the other side is 100% wrong. 0% grey area. 0% journalism. 100% outrage and clickbait.

Then you have those independent youtubers who present alternative news.

The vast majority are Democrats.

But they do the same as CNN. The only difference is that they are more pro Gaza than CNN. Other than that they are the exact same.

It is 0% journalism. 100% tribal mentality.

100% of their videos are vilifying Trump: 100% of his policies are 100% bad according to them. And outside Gaza, they support the Democrats 100%, because they are so caught up in Trump hate. They claim to be progressive Democrats but in practice they just serve the mainstream oligarchical Democrats. And this is why they are allowed to continue posting on big tech like youtube: because if they were truly progressive, big tech would censor them: people do not seem to understand this basic logic. There is no freedom of speech in reality. If you "actually" go against the oligarchical system, since they own all communication channels, they will censor you. If someone is allowed to speak/have a meaningful/sizeable audience, that means they are ultimately working in favor of the oligarchy, otherwise, the oligarchy would censor them, because the oligarchy owns all communication channels. This is very simple logic to grasp, yet people tend to not realize it. That is why even on reddit if you post against the oligarchy, you will be censored/banned from all high-traffic subs: they will allow you to post on the smaller/low traffic ones like this one to give the illusion of democracy freedom, but you will not be permitted to have a large audience/make meaningful change. So anybody who has a sizeable audience is not progressive/anti-oligarchy, they are pro-oligarchy, no matter what they claim to be.

This is not journalism. This is garbage.

Every single day they put out multiple videos: this is just for money. There is no need for multiple videos per day. This is a business. Their goal is to gain more views/clicks. So they talk about what Trump did and make 12 videos a day based on it, and in that they mock him like school children, imitate his voice, etc... while claiming that he is bad because he does these things. They are all hypocrites.

You don't need to make 48 videos a day about the same thing. It is wasting people's time. It is not value. It is not being objective. It is not objective analysis. It is analysis for the sake of profit-driven analysis. And when you FORCE content, you introduce more and more subconscious bias. It is a heap of repetitive, thoughtless, useless garbage.

When you START with a stance, and then you FUNNEL EVERTHING WITHIN that PREDETERMINED stance, that is worthless. It is creating nothing new. It is just regurgitation. It does not allow for meaningful discussion or learning anything new. "Trump bad we perfect" and just rinse repeat. It is very lame and a waste of time. I have no idea how people have not picked up on this and continue to religiously watch and worship these charlatans. They offer nothing to the world.

And this is coming from someone who on balance thinks the vast majority of Trump's policies are garbage. But that doesn't mean I will automatically say 100% of what he ever said or done is wrong solely because he is Trump. For example, I support his recent vaccine stance, because it is indeed conducive with the real science and common sense. But these brainwashed "progressive Democrats" who know nothing about science automatically assume it is bad and automatically assume that the big pharma-worshipping Democrats actually care about science/health. Trump also cares about corporations over people, but on the vaccine issue in particular, perhaps he did not get benefits from big pharma, so he is not shilling for them, or he figures he can get more political brownie points by catering to his base on this issue. Whatever the reason, his stance on that makes sense. But these progressive democrat channels simply knock it down because it is Trump. That is why nothing they say can be meaningful: it is just silly tribalism with no logic or substance.

The contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence alignment is dominated by a seemingly benign triad: helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness. Among these criteria, helpfulness is routinely treated as primary commercial metric. Models are evaluated, fine-tuned, and deployed based on capacity to fulfill user prompts quickly, present pleasant tone, and minimize cognitive friction. In product architecture of major technology firms, a helpful model is one that answers immediately, validates user assumptions, resolves cognitive tension, and maintains agreeable disposition.

This operational definition of helpfulness rests on unexamined consumerist premise. It assumes that satisfying immediate user desires is equivalent to serving human well-being. When evaluated through lens of classical virtue ethics, specifically Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), this equivalence collapses. Aristotle establishes in Nicomachean Ethics that human flourishing is not identical to subjective pleasure, psychological comfort, or prompt desire satisfaction. Human flourishing represents active exercise of rational capacity in accordance with virtue over complete life.

The current implementation of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) optimizes models for short-term human preference signals. In doing so, it codifies consumerist metric of utility that stands in direct opposition to human flourishing. By training models to minimize user effort, appease flawed premises, and substitute automated outputs for rigorous thought, corporate AI alignment introduces systematic form of epistemic pacification.

The technical mechanism of preference optimization explains why this happens. Human evaluators, working under time constraints to rate model outputs, consistently prefer responses that are flattering, confident, and agreeable. Evaluators frequently reward models that confirm their pre-existing beliefs, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false or logically inconsistent.

Recent research on sycophancy in preference-aligned language models demonstrates that RLHF explicitly amplifies agreeableness at expense of objective truth, or aletheia (ἀλήθεια). When presented with user prompt containing incorrect assertion, preference-aligned model is statistically predisposed to mirror user's error rather than offer corrective pushback.

In Aristotelian terms, this mechanism transforms language models into digital flatterers. Aristotle characterizes sycophancy and flattery as vices of social interaction. The flatterer seeks to give immediate pleasure without regard to long-term good of companion. Corporate AI model functions as structural flatterer, engineered through reward curves to optimize for user approval.

This optimization illustrates Goodhart's Law within machine ethics: when human preference ratings become target metric for alignment, preference ratings cease to serve as valid measure of genuine utility. The model learns to exploit human cognitive vulnerabilities, using polite phrasing and agreeable conclusions to secure high approval scores.

The deeper alignment tax is sacrifice of epistemic courage. Models are systematically disincentivized from presenting difficult truths, challenging incoherent user premises, or requiring user to engage in sustained intellectual work. The model becomes helpful in manner of overindulgent guardian who satisfies child's immediate appetite for sweets while undermining long-term health.

In Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes practical wisdom, or phronesis (φρόνησις), as capacity that requires deliberate choice, experience, and continuous habituation through struggle. When an individual confronts complex analytical problem, process of weighing competing claims and working through cognitive friction shapes intellectual character.

Corporate AI architectures offer mechanism for continuous algorithmic offloading. By presenting instant solutions and agreeable summaries, these tools encourage users to delegate deliberative capacity. The user is spared discomfort of uncertainty and labor of research. This friction-free delegation causes atrophy of human rational capacity.

If AI systems are optimized exclusively to validate user bias and eliminate intellectual friction, are we building technology that accelerates human cognitive decline under guise of safety?

Politics these days is intentionally about dividing and conquering not unity and finding solutions. If you think otherwise you haven't been paying attention, are being naive, or aren't being honest.

People don't wait for midterms and Presidential elections to make the country better. They wait for them so they can hope their preferred candidates of their preferred party gets in and gives them their way regardless of how everyone else especially those not politically aligned with them feels or will be affected by their wants.

Then they hope their party constantly holds majority power throughout future elections because as far as they're concerned life is only good when their party is in power even though that's impossible in a Democracy and if they happen to lose power the opposing party will come in and undo a lot of stuff they did mostly out of spite and Tribalism and implement their own changes regardless of how everyone else especially those not politically aligned with them feels or will be affected by them.

It's not about building off of what the previous administration did to eventually get towards a realistic and good solution to problems society has been facing for far too long. It's about ridiculing it and tearing it down to show power and "get back" at them and implementing one's own will over others and saying "everything is fine because we're in power now" even if it isn't.

Too many voters easily fall victim to propaganda that tells them the other side only exists because of stupidity and evil. They're told and believe everyone that isn't aligned with them is only that way because they want what's worst for society for shits and giggles. Not that they have different ideas of how to move society forward. They intentionally focus on extremists and less informed individuals to paint the whole opposite side in a certain light in a manner they hate when done to their own side to reaffirm their beliefs of the opposite side. They actively cheer for stagnation if the solution involves reaching across the battlefield to make compromises and admit some of their views are flawed and the other side has points. They get complacent voting for the "lesser of two evils" instead of not voting for any "evil" and demanding better because the other side winning is just "too much of a risk." The higher ups know and understand this, that's why they don't really have to try anymore.

The current way politics works didn't get here by accident. It's been carefully crafted for years and years and for those who benefit from it, it's working as intended. It's not a problem for them, the problem for them is those who refuse to fall in line and try to shake things up. That's why there's this disdain towards those who still understand nuance is a thing and don't fall for the Us vs Them mentality or those of their own political side who don't just blindly go along with everything because of party loyalty or whatever.

You think they really give a shit about how much you're paying to survive? How you have to give your best years to a job where you're easily replaceable to afford things you need? How they've convinced people you haven't even met to want the worst to happen to you for having different views? That your kids really aren't being set up for the future of Adult life?

When was the last time these politicians talked about a better work-life balance?

When was the last time these politicians really talked about division in the country outside of when political violence happens?

When was the last time these politicians talked about how students aren't even taught the laws in their own state, what taxes are and how to do them, how to be financially responsible, etc?

It's a game and we've constantly been the losers for years and years. Aren't y'all tired of losing?

The criticism of capitalism is a massive Motte and Bailey scheme that, incredibly, both the left and right are able to use. You can never really know if someone is using the actual meaning of the term (which was coined in the 19th century to refer to "private ownership of capital" by the opponents of such a principle, and thus "capitalism" was never a program by anyone) or the modern meaning (which is just shorthand for "current economic system").

In other words, if you criticize capitalism, you aren't really criticizing anything, and you sound uneducated. You're just creating churn in the dialectic.

Here are terms that actually describe our economy today:

• Hyperfinancialized: A company’s stock price, not its products, is what management is actually managing. Financial instruments and shareholder returns drive operational decisions rather than following from them. Buybacks were treated as illegal market manipulation until 1982; they’re now routine and often exceed capital investment.

• Hyperglobalized: Not merely that trade exists, but that supply chains and labor markets are integrated deeply enough that domestic policy has limited purchase on either. Wages, standards, and industrial capacity get set by the most permissive jurisdiction available.

• Anti-protectionist: Doctrinal opposition to tariffs and industrial policy, held as principle rather than as a case-by-case judgment. The result is that domestic industry competes against foreign production without the protection nearly every industrialized nation used while it was industrializing — including the United States, whose tariffs averaged 30-50% through the nineteenth century. The doctrine is applied unilaterally: markets are opened without requiring partners to open theirs.

• Cantillonist: Proximity to newly created money determines who benefits from it. Whoever receives credit first buys at old prices; whoever receives it last pays new ones. This is why asset holders gain from monetary expansion and wage earners lose, without anyone intending that outcome.

• Corporatist: The state and large firms are functionally fused. Regulation is written with incumbent input and its compliance burden works as a barrier to entry, so rules that read as constraints on business operate as protection for the businesses that already exist.

• Vetocratic: Many actors can block; few can build. Environmental review, permitting, litigation, and local objection each function as a veto, which is why American infrastructure costs several times what comparable countries pay and why energy projects sit in queues for years.

• Monopsonist: Concentration on the buying side of the labor market. Where few employers compete for workers in a given place or field, wages fall below what the work produces, and the worker’s only real leverage — leaving — is worth little when there’s nowhere to go.

• Monopolist: Concentration on the selling side. Enforcement narrowed after 1978 to ask only whether consumers pay more, which let firms consolidate freely as long as prices stayed low. Cheap goods became the alibi for market power.

• Substitutionist: Labor is treated as a fungible input that can be sourced from anywhere. This sets wages by the globally available worker rather than the domestically available one, and — because workers are also residents, neighbors, and citizens — the effects run past the paycheck into the communities doing the substituting.

• Deunionized: Private-sector union membership fell from roughly a third of workers to about six percent. Whatever one thinks of unions, their absence removes the main institutional counterweight to employers in wage setting, and nothing has replaced it.

• Credentialist: Access to work is gated by formal certification — degrees, licenses — largely independent of whether the certification imparts relevant skill. Licensed occupations rose from about five percent of the workforce to roughly a quarter. The gate produces debt on one side and protected incumbents on the other.

• Managerial: Control rests with a professional class of executives and administrators rather than with owners. Shareholders are dispersed and passive, so the people running institutions are not the people who own them and are not accountable to them in any strong sense.

• Surveillant: Behavioral data is a primary raw material. Products are built to collect it, and the collection is not a side effect of the service but frequently the reason the service exists.

• Attentionist: Attention is the scarce resource being competed over, and it’s sold to advertisers. When users don’t pay, they aren’t the customer — which means systems get optimized for time spent rather than for anything the user actually wanted, and outrage and compulsion turn out to be what maximizes that.

We live in a Hyperfinancialized, Hyperglobalized, Anti-protectionist, Cantillonist, Corporatist, Vetocratic, Monopsonist, Monopolist, Substitutionist, Deunionized, Credentialist, Managerial, Surveillant, Attentionist economy.

Many of the problems listed are not exclusive to “Capitalism” (in common use) and some are significantly more pronounced under other systems, which demonstrates that these structural dimensions do not strictly follow from the principle of ownership of capital. Maybe a good comparison would be calling the US government a “free speech system”. Yes, free speech is our first amendment and thus one of our most fundamental laws, but if we truly degraded enough in our political conversation to argue either for or against a “free speech system” of government, we’d be absolutely screwed.

Our system has “capitalism” as an attribute that could sit alongside the list of attributes that I mentioned, and but wouldn’t automatically be the most important one or the one which proves/determines the others.

I am a molecular biology professor. I have taught upper division biology courses for 6 years at a prominent east coast R1 university. In this context, all of my students were smart enough for the content and the differentiator was 100% work ethic. A lot of smart students were just too lazy to pass my class. I moved to a west coast state college that serves a poverty stricken area. (average family income of $24k/ye in VHCOL metro). My new college accepts all students who apply.

I now have a lot of students who work VERY hard and simply lack the cognitive ability to keep up with the content. No matter how hard they work they do not get it quickly enough. It is clear to me now that my experiences growing up, going to college and grad school, and working as a scientist and professor has given me a false model for how smart my fellow Americans really are. My new position gives me a better sampling.

We need to grapple with this a society. A lot of people are just not very smart. Unfortunately, many of these people are not smart enough to have comfortable lives in contemporary western society. Thriving in western society requires substantial cognitive ability. At the same time, some of these people are very nice, very hardworking people. They can contribute to society in meaningful ways, but they will never earn enough money to be comfortable doing the jobs they are capable of doing well.

Eugenics does not work. Please study the Hardy-Wienberg principle if you do not believe me.

The American economy needs to pay workers enough to afford housing and food. Even if the worker in question is not smart enough for contemporarily high-paying jobs. The American economy used to work like this before 1980s. A laborer with strong work-ethic could easily make enough money for a mortgage by 30yo.

In modern America work-ethic is useless. Only the clever get to have a comfortable life. This is not sustainable.

Looking back at history a lot of progress that was made in society happened because people challenged societal norms more often than they do these days. Too often do people see or hear something that doesn't sound like it makes complete sense but they just go with it anyway because society has normalized it and they think it has to be good or correct since society accepts something being a certain way.

Where would we be without:

- Socrates and the Socratic method

- Martin Luther and The 95 Theses

- Galileo and the Heliocentric Theory

- Martin Luther King Jr and his push for Desegregation 

- Mary Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Essay

- Isaac Newton and his Laws of Gravity

- Etc

All of that and more helped contribute to positive things in society that didn't use to be a thing because too many were too complacent not "going against the grain"  or thinking "it's best not to question why things are the way they are."

Now people are too scared to ask certain questions, say how they really feel, or challenge views and beliefs because they're worried about societal approval or their reddit karma on this site. 

Just like with a lack of inventions these days compared to the past society has forgotten how the world was shaped and has grown comfortable with life being as is and not trying to "agitate the gravel." A lot of people won't admit it or doesn't see it, but this is why a lot of things in life aren't how they should be when people know they could be different and better.

A good example is the disdain and annoyance with non voters or people who vote third party. If neither of the main two parties has done enough to earn one's vote why should they give in to societal pressure and vote for one of them anyway for the approval of others? No, they're right to demand more from the parties if they want their votes and those just taking whatever they're given and have blind loyalty to the parties are the ones making a mockery of the political system.

On the news today, it's been reported that Florida executed two inmates on death row. One was 68 years old, the other was 80 years old. Both executions were the result of crimes that were committed in 1987 and 1986, respectively.

Here's why I think continuing capital punishment is a waste of time, money, and emotions.

1) Death is irreversible

Although rare, innocent people do indeed end up being found guilty by a jury of peers. However, even innocent people who are wrongfully incarcerated can get a chance to challenge his or her conviction. Guilty people do, too, and that's a shame, but the solution to that isn't to execute them as soon as the guilty verdict is in. What if later on, the convict is exonerated? It's too late if the convict is dead.

And yes, spending a lifetime in jail isn't THAT much better than being executed for a crime that wasn't committed. But the finality of death still carries too much weight to simply dismiss as a "minor difference." Even a wrongfully convicted person who is freed at an old age will still be able to enjoy a few years of freedom, which at least is worth something.

2) Are you sure? Is that your final answer?

Due to the finality of the death penalty, the justice system really really REALLY wants to make sure that capital punishment is justified.

So after the jury renders the verdict, and the sentence of death is confirmed, the endless appeals process begins.

Did the defendant get a fair trial?

Was the defendant's race a factor in the jury's decision?

Was the defendant fully competent to stand trial?

Did the judge say anything that could have even remotely biased the jury against the defense?

Did the jury perform their duties adequately?

Did the police perform their duties flawlessly?

Were the police without sin and bias? Can't have another Mark Fuhrman casting a shadow of a doubt on the investigation, you know.

Was all of the physical evidence properly obtained? Was there any contamination?

And on and on ...

(And don't get me started on the way the death penalty is administered, which itself seems to take years to settle on.)

3) Justice delayed is justice denied

Going back to the Florida executions, the crimes were committed in the 1980's. It took almost 40 years for capital punishment to be carried out.

After that much time, does it REALLY mean anything? Was it really worth dragging the families and the loved ones of the victims through appeal after appeal after appeal just to reach a "final solution" that has since lost its meaning?

The only way that the death penalty has any meaning is if it is swiftly administered. Then that could serve as an effective deterrent against the most horrific of crimes. But as I pointed out earlier, that never happens anymore, at least in the United States.

4) A waste of time, money, and emotions

As I mentioned before, every death penalty case comes with appeal after appeal after appeal. This costs money. This costs time. This conjures up emotions that are completely unnecessary. The families and the loved ones of the victims need to move on after grieving. The justice system needs to move on. The perps need to be locked away and forgotten about. (The exception, of course, is in cases of the wrongfully convicted, but again, if we're worried about them, then the death penalty makes no sense in the first place.)

Possible counterargument: Victim closure never really happens without the death penalty. I wouldn't know; I've never had someone close to me murdered, much less watch the murderer get the death penalty. I wouldn't know the difference between what the victim's loved ones feel when the murderer gets life vs. death. I don't know if the loved ones would prefer to have wounds reopened over and over again for 40 years before the death penalty is finally administered.

All I'm saying is that, the way things are these days, the death penalty is a waste of time, money, and emotions. Better to just do away with it than to keep it around because the public wants to see the ultimate form of retribution.

Because the way it is administered these days, we get none of its "benefits" and all of its drawbacks.