That humans are just machines and there's no such thing as free will. I already knew that to some degree before reading the book, but it frames it in a particularly bleak way.
Not really, no. While logically inconsistent the form of rhetoric used appeals to humans which are behaviorally dominated by group association. Pointing out its logical inconsistency appeals to a very small subset of the population who probably already agree with you.
What a cynical, defeatist attitude. The Internet is full of people, and you don't know who reads what. Everyone has to learn somewhere, to start from something.
Your logic essentially is, "No one can learn anything; their opinions are fixed," but that's obviously false, as we have all learned or else we would be unable to read and write and do everything else we do.
In fact, your posting your own comment contradicts your logic, as according to it, there's no point to saying what you said, since it can't change anyone's mind.
It is not defeatist to suggest energies would be better spent elsewhere. Defeatism would be if I said we could never convince people of the need for privacy.
> Universal basic income, free university education and free state-run healthcare are leftist... no Democrat puts those things in their platform so I wouldn't call any democrat leftist.
That's not a logical conclusion. Even if they did support those things, they wouldn't put them in their platform now because it wouldn't fly now. You're defining "leftist" as "actively supports X, Y, and Z," which is arbitrary. And the part about Europe is a red herring; this isn't Europe.
Well here's an interesting observation: the "right" subreddit cites some sources that the "left" subreddit cites, but not vice versa. For example, NYT and Politico appear near the tail of the "right" sub's sources and near the head of the "left" sub's sources, but none of the "right" sub's sources appear anywhere in the "left" sub's sources.
So, assuming that NYT and Politico are left-leaning, it would appear that the "right" sub links to its opponents' views, while the "left" sub does not.
The conservative subreddit links to archive.us (notice it is 2nd on the list) instead of the NYT, WaPo, etc. because they do not want those news orgs to capitalize from traffic it would be sending there; instead they send their massive conservative user base to archive. (i suppose this behavior might be another interesting observation?)
This is not just because of traffic, but to get the original story. There have been plenty of times where the story was changed and edited after the initial post.
Left and right are degrees of authoritarianism, e.g. libertarian is far right, and nazism and communism are far left. Nazism and communism would be flavors of authoritarianism.
Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser.
> We're on a mission to drive them out of business
But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?
Ad security is very weak by design because it allows any fourth-party to serve html/javascript on any website. As long as this is the norm, we'll be around to protect publishers and their audience. Beyond ads, everything we built applies to the web in general so if we ever run out of bad ads, we'll expand in different directions.
>Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser.
I find it incredibly interesting that the evolutionary-arms-race of ads and viruses versus blockers is mimicking the development of actual genetic evolution.
There's that XKCD comic that mentions if you want to look at 20 years of code evolution, look the source for the google homepage. Now imagine what your genetic code looks like after 800 million years.
I don't have any insight or education to back me up here, but I believe that even if we were to re-engineer the internet from the ground up we'd still get an evolutionary arms race, simply because a space with potential to exploit a system will always exist.
So, just to be clear, you want to impose your will on the planet, as a whole. You don't care about any form of democracy. You don't care what anyone else thinks. You think you're right, and anyone who opposes you is wrong. And since you're right, you're justified in doing whatever you think is necessary.
Vast tragedies throughout history were perpetrated by people who thought they knew better than everyone else, that their ends justified imposing their means on the rest of the human race.
Your attitude is dangerous, because you can use it to justify anything (e.g. you think you're about saving lives). It is evil, because it places you above everyone else and leads to death (e.g. you think you're saving civilization, which requires destroying the bad parts of it).
You either have not learned from history, or have learned the wrong lessons from it and are following in the footsteps of millennia of anti-heroes.
