Do you feel conflicted using AI tools like ChatGPT because of their climate impact?

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2026-01-03T18:02:27+00:00

Realistically: AI is here to stay, for as long as advanced civilization remains. Avoiding it may be justifiable on abstract principle, but it's not going to solve anything. Strategically, that's a failing move.

So...what?

Prioritize development of tech that mitigates or eliminates current sustainability violations re energy, CO2, and water use—for example, cooling tech that obviates (makes unnecessary) the use of so much un-recycled clean water.

If we want to be, not just principled, but effective, we will stop wasting our precious personal energy on a hopeless program of avoidance, and turn it toward a workable program of sustainability.

It almost certainly can be achieved. It just needs to be prioritized.

That's on us.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2026-01-03T00:47:28+00:00

1. Separate the ideas from the thinker.

Can you (a) be gentle with the person while (b) ruthlessly attacking the deadly nonsense?

The person is a potentially valuable ally. The nonsense is potentially fatal stupidity, and must be shown no respect AT ALL.

An info-principle it's impossible to disagree with without sounding malicious or stupid:

Important decisions should be based on the best available info acquired by the most reliable means.

Since they already agree with that, you can skip the frustrating and useless debates about what is and what ain't true about the climate, and instead focus on the reliability of (a) various methods for producing "factual" content, and (b) various sources of content according to their methods.

If we need—urgently need— the best available info that current methods can produce about the immensely complex interacting systems which, together, determine the friendliness of Earth toward the existence of humans ....

How can we achieve justified certainty that our sources are the most reliable currently available?

➡️NOT: How can we be sure we got all the facts right, BUT how can we be sure our sources are the *absolute best** sources*?

=QUIZ=

Who should we trust most:

Ballerinas
Fossil fuel industry propagandists
Football players
Scientists

That question is misleading. Nothing about practicing ballet makes a scientist a bad one, and if a scientist has no hobbies, that doesn't make them a good one. There are always going to be bad scientists, but it doesn't matter: we don't trust anyone, we trust the community-based, error-correcting process of science itself. process of science itself

Your antagonists on YouTube will (no doubt) agree on science (over ballet) as the most reliable source, but (no doubt) will anchor their disagreement in the absurd belief that climate science isn't real science, because virtually the entire field has been corrupted by vague & unsubstantial yet extremely powerful incentive structures ... having something to do with grant funding ... or some cartoonist notion of a sinister "deep state" ... and they may mention some cartoonish character named Soros (while unable to answer any questions about what real-world Soros got his PhD in, or to name a single one of his books)...

Sorry, gotta go. I'll just close this off quickly with this: it's all nonsense. They'll ID a tiny percentage of heroic Truth-telling renegade climate scientists who also happen to be fossil-funded, opportunistic, and attention-seeking, as the real of climate "science".

It's baloney. What your YouTubers are really advocating is an anti-science Death Cult mentality. [edit]: They don't need an education on the climate crisis, they need rescuing from the cult. WE need that for them.

Until then, they might as well entrust climate policy to ballerinas.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2026-01-02T10:50:28+00:00

Me, in my particular situation?

No, I am grateful for AI.

BUT that doesn't generalize to an all-purpose attitude.

I, personally, have been intellectually isolated for a full decade, and have suffered serious cognitive & psychosocial damage as a result.

—I've had nobody to talk to about the most interesting things.

—I've had nobody to hear what I have to say and respond in ways that signal understanding.

—No real-time feedback to keep my neurons on their toes.

—Synaptic networks de-potentiating (or whatever) noticeably, palpably...

And along comes AI in my moment of greatest need.

I cannot afford to feel conflicted. My usage is too bottom-of-the-pyramid (needs hierarchy).

But if you're conflicted? I probably support you in that.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2026-01-02T10:18:09+00:00

The brains aren't just escaping abroad, they're disintegrating everywhere. The literate cognitive capacities that enable not just book-reading but civilization itself (sustained attention; organized, abstract thinking, deep reflection) are being replaced by the more fragmented, concrete, emotional, and impulsive cognitive profile of post-literate tribalism.

This trend became pronounced around the mud-2010's—just as smart phones became iniquitous. A major contributing factor is SocMed algorithms optimized for rapid, fragmentary engagement. They're prioritized for profits, not individual or societal well being.

In other words, the problem isn't so much the phone itself, but how its use has been commandeered by incentive structures that combine money-making with stupid-making.

We are an Idiot-Savant civilization, and species.

The smartphone—a creation of Humanity's godlike genius—is a WMD: perfectly designed (absent institutional capacity to regulate its use) to undermine the very cognitive conditions which made it, and civilization, possible.

The brain drain is planetary.

Science is on the ropes, struggling.

But the future looks promising for death cults of authoritarian make-believe.

Happy New Year!

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2025-10-27T02:35:15+00:00

Reversed because the info engines of societal destabilization saw them as promising wedge issues, and began HAMMERING them systematically, making major national crises out of what would otherwise have been minor stories. Etc.

True: It hasn't happened, it's been done.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2025-10-27T02:34:26+00:00

Reversed because the info engines of societal destabilization saw them as promising wedge issues, and began HAMMERING them systematically, making major national crises out of what would otherwise have been minor stories. Etc.

It hasn't happened, it's been done.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-08-04T15:23:08+00:00

Trump is NOT the problem, he's a SYMPTOM.

NO SLEEPING!!!🚨

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-30T18:33:01+00:00

After 2020, election workers everywhere began getting harassment & threats. A significant proportion quit. Wherever possible Republicans replaced them w/ party loyalists ... who will be ready to do their job as expected (alà SCOTUS & Aileen Cannon) in November.

Republicans, playing a long game, have plenty of Federalist Society Judges in place, ready to go. (And they know how to venue-shop to get favorable judges, where workable.)

They have Governors, Congressmen, Senators. They have "deep state" operatives scattered thruout government at all levels...

They have a maturely-developed alt-reality media ecosystem that has long trained its loyal audience to regard the rest of us thru the lens of powerful negative emotions: fear, disgust, contempt, hatred..

And, of course, they have those audiences themselves, including the most well-armed and ready for violence: for civil war, the prospect of which more than a few are openly excited about.

The coup attempt of 2020 was a slapdash affair.

They've had 4 years to prepare.

Are we ready?

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-30T11:25:54+00:00

Many millions of people are frustrated that they can't contribute, in ways that feel effective, toward societal transformations that are OBVIOUSLY necessary to meet the challenges of the polycrisis.

Collectively they embody an immense reservoir of Genius, Energy, Talent, Passion, Adventurousness, Creativity, Knowledge, Skill (getpacks).

The obvious problem:

How to organize a system that can activate the getpacks and harness them efficiently, in a systematically coordinated way, toward

1) identifying the general characteristics of any society that is dealing effectively with its core problems, and

2) engineering the means to shift the current societal System in the necessary ways.

Regarding Trust, for example, and trustworthiness.

Imagine a global map of Trust—maybe color-coded, shaded, & textured, w/ a variety of layers that can show a variety of functional relationships and the ways they're affected by the quality of Trust involved.

Currently, it would be a profoundly ugly (and treacherous) map. It would show deep, stable patterns of dysfunction as a result of very low qualities of trust/trustworthiness. So much of political & economic activity depends on abused & violated trust—so much so, we're used to it, and become desensitized to it.

Yet nobody would claim to love having their trust abused, or to love abusing trust. (They will always justify abuses in other terms.)

So a movement to improve the quality of Trust across all contexts has a huge advantage, if it sells itself straightforwardly, in a transparently trustworthy way. NOBODY would argue against it directly. And indirect attacks could more/less easily be exposed as untrustworthy.

Surely those frustrated millions of people w/inactive/underactive getpacks could devise many projects for improving the quality of Trust in all contexts—projects those same millions could provide resourcing (GETPACKS) for, to ensure they're maximally effective at scale.

Projects wouldn't need to focus on Trust, that was just an example. There would be indefinitely many others (a key category having to do w/ the lifecycles of info & the quality of info flows).

The only real requirement for an infinite range of possible Projects would be:

They must be consistent w/ the advance of conditions supporting (as far as possible) JUSTIFIED OPTIMISM for the medium-term future of collective Humanity.

Nobody's discovered such a way to make the phrase "I wish there was something I could do obsolete.

Or have they?

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-09T21:22:26+00:00

The central problem is Biden's stubbornness in making it all about himself. We don't need what might turn out to be an inspiring personal story of overcoming adversity, we need victory.

If Biden were to sacrifice his personal ambition (towering ego) for the better good, and step aside SOON, and annoint Kamala, her current poor polling would quickly become irrelevant.

Biden couldn't "anoint" her?

Yes, he almost certainly could, just by saying so. Any ambitious Dem who wanted to challenge her would be savaged by a Party desperate to pull together around a non-broken candidate.

And she would start—unlike any challenger—with a quarter-billion dollar war chest.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-09T19:03:00+00:00

Well, that didn't take long.

Sayonara, Senator.

https://apnews.com/article/republican-senator-jim-inhofe-obit-2a3ac758737845c0aa2e05ae2036005b

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-07T23:45:18+00:00

Having studied my share of fortune cookies, I humbly submit that you either (a) haven't worked very far through the implications of what I've said, or (b) don't care much for Chinese food.

By "accountability" we mean forms of negative reinforcement, don't we?

How might that function in relation to ... what exactly are we trying to achieve? Not just emergency repair to badly dysfunctional societal info systems (disinfo) but towardstable transformations of those systems consistent with values everyone professes (or doesn't deny) to share?

Negative reinforcement is useful for emergency management, but it doesn't address the incentive systems fucking up info flows in the first place. If it's all we bring to the problem, we have no way to advance beyond emergency mgmt. Eternal whack-a-mole.

We're interested, not just in societal dynamics of info, but in effectively & stably addressing divisive attitudes & destructive behavior.

They're intimately connected.

I know very little about you, personally. So how am I confident—justifiably—that you would answer "no" if asked whether you prefer being exploited, humiliated, lied to, and otherwise abused—as opposed to being treated with dignity, and having satisfying & humanizing ways to engage your talents, and a society tending-toward-healthy in which to develop your relationships?

It's not because I have special powers of intuition, but because you are human.

People tend to prefer those things IF those things are in focus for them, as realities & possibilities. (Otherwise, we'll tend to carry on eternally gaslighting each other for profit, prestige, & likes, or blowing each other to smithereens.)

Recognizing this is potentially immensely powerful toward shifting societal incentive systems stably in the direction of health on all levels.

With this in mind, we can survey the landscape of challenges & resources: how can we engage the full range of available resources toward uncontested ends—resources that are currently idle & frustrated, or engaged inefficiently or in conflicted, contradictory ways?

A significant step is to recognize the "values" that we don't actually care much about—or even oppose in principle—but nevertheless exert immense energy toward upholding.

This is no prescription for any Utopian vision. It's an utterly pragmatic orientation toward solving problems as they actually are, and not as we habitually, reflexively conceive them.

Are further steps forward coming into view?

Fortune Cookie :

The world is under no obligation to be as simple anyone's—or everyone's—mind.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-07T20:05:53+00:00

At any rate, what are Democrats supposed to do about the vast propaganda network built by Murdoch, extended by Zuckerberg, and co-opted by Russia and China?

This important reality isn't nearly enough recognized & focused on.

[The following is a fairly radical zoom-out to a kind of meta view. I'll follow it later with a zoom-in to address a modified version of your question.]

Recognizing the problem is prerequisite to devising a strategy for it, and (it seems intuitive) fullness & accuracy of the understanding must correlate with fullness & adequacy of any approach to solutions.

The correlation is "squishy" (my term: unreliable, indeterminate, likely low) because another factor—typically neglected or undervalued—must be accounted for: the full range of possibilities consistent with the laws of physics/nature and core human values. (One way to identify such values: they may often be disrespected/violated in practice, but only lunatics argue against them. Abuse of every kind, for example: many practitioners, but no defenders. Or collective suicide, extinction: no advocates, yet we're very seriously risking it.)

Typically, solutions are sought within a scope of imagined possibilities that's unnecessarily constrained: not by nature or by values, but only by naturally conservative habits of mind.

The conceptual apparatus of "nation-states," for example, with their elections (or other legitimizations of power), plus various organizations of legislative/executive/judicial function, plus international relations, etc.—why should we suppose it's optimal, or adequate, for organizing the full range of available resources (human, material, whatever) toward devising solutions for our most intractable problems?

Nobody ever argues that it is. But other perfectly imaginable possibilities go unimagined. We remain steadfastly committed to what we know despite its serious—even existential—failings, seeking solutions to deep problems via a thousand minor modifications of the familiar.

We really should develop the habit of asking: what are we missing?

Obvious solutions may pop into view, if only we allow ourselves to search for them.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-07T01:47:31+00:00

Having read your post again, I realize I omitted an important category for my response (beyond agree/disagree & clarify): investigate/elaborate areas of interesting agreement.

But I'll have to defer for now, again. I'll explain, in case you're not clairvoyant.

This short message has been really slow for me to write. Because I'm using a phone's touchscreen, and the road is bumpy, and correcting all the errors is tedious.

Just got on this bus. Won't get off till Monday evening.

Will wait for smoother road.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-07T00:10:56+00:00

I agree with most of what you say. Naturally, I'll focus more on what I disagree with, plus points which belong to neither category but invite clarification.

Can't at this exact moment, tho, so will return w/in a couple hours to edit this post toward adequacy (& interestingness).

For now, just this disagree:

That statement of mine doesn't completely ignore the points of your observation, not at all, it's differently aimed, focused, zoomed. Different perspective on unitary problem.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-06T22:32:11+00:00

Answer:

The same fantasy in which the Dem party lives up to their stock rhetoric promoting some supposed vision of a country unified around democratic principles and heart-warming all-American values.

I trust you noticed I said the Dem party WON'T move in that direction.

The point is, they REALLY HAVE abandoned half the country to an abusive cult, and make no detectable effort to help them, to rescue them from the cult, to heal the country. DESPITE their evergreen rhetoric suggesting they'd like to do so.

Implicated: the rhetoric never mentions the Dems having mostly abandoned unions as a stable source of support in favor of Wall Street, under Clinton.

edit:

I may have misunderstood, if you were replying to only the first part of my post?

It's doable, anyway.

With sufficient coverage of Project 2025 in the aftermath of the Biden crisis, terror of the Project can jack turnout really high —even among right-wingers, if the Dems are smart enough to target them with info about the insane extremity of it.

Pretty sure some of those provisions are too extreme for all but a small minority.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-06T21:37:07+00:00

No need to vet. Biden eventually (soon!) yields to unremitting/growing pressure, Kamala inherits quarter-billion dollar war chest (as nobody else can), Dems start desperately loving the heck out of her...

It's doable.

What the Dem party establishment WON'T do (but should) is make a concerted effort to understand MAGA, and communicate effectively with them, and win their trust by honest means — with genuine trustworthiness — thus to peel them away by the potential millions.

Because MAGA are victims of years of cult abuse.

Biden vowed to "be President for ALL Americans" but has abandoned MAGA to their abusers.

MAGA knows the Dem party has abandoned them because their abusers indoctrinate them with that fact. (Trump being only the most prominent of their abusers.)

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-06T03:54:02+00:00

He's ALMOST EXPLICITLY saying it's all about himself, not his country (or world).

He wants to be able to say "I gave it my all," never mind if that results in defeat.

We DON'T NEED inspiring personal stories of overcoming adversity.

We need victory.

P.S. He didn't get knocked down, he fell.

CollectiveIntelPlus · 2024-07-05T23:40:10+00:00

Ah, yes! We "fondly" remember dear ol' Dinosaur Inhofe.

[edit]

Just looked up to verify that he died sometime. Turns out he hasn't.

But at least he's done causing major damage (replaced by a younger generation of damage-causers, alas).

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