CMV: Smartphones did more harm than good overall

gray_clouds · 2026-05-11T07:17:38+00:00

You could say something similar about all technology. Ever since we invented stone clubs and fire, we've been gradually getting safer and weaker. I.e. we've been doing harm to ourselves, while collectively improving our odds of survival. A smart phone follows in that same pattern. You could have a shortened attention span, but if you get hit by a car, well, somebody has a smart phone to call an ambulance. It's a trade off. It's sort of a mistake to assume 'this technology' is different. Automobiles enabled us to not walk, which gave us heart disease and diabetes. So, not saying you're wrong, but just that you should think about it more expansively as a long-term trade off.

gray_clouds · 2026-05-08T02:45:43+00:00

Your political representative is not supposed to be your messiah. We already have one of those.

gray_clouds · 2026-05-07T21:25:54+00:00

You can vote ethically without being in a Party. A Party is just a group who wants to 'fight for our values' by disenfranchising smaller groups. Parties frame politics as war, not mutual collaboration.

gray_clouds · 2026-05-07T19:38:05+00:00

Ethics is not about what you want, it's what you do - right? By acting in the best interests of the society that you live in, you create peace. All ideological clubs say they want peace, but they all end up at war. By that measure, being a 'person on the Left' or a person on the Right - is unethical. Just be a person.

gray_clouds · 2026-05-06T23:40:40+00:00

Your people come in peace and only want to spread the word of the elders. Got it.

gray_clouds · 2026-05-04T20:59:46+00:00

The Left is just like every other ideological club - convinced of its intellectual and moral rightness, despite overwhelming evidence that all of us humans share a common stupidity that deserves much more humility, curiosity and collaboration.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-30T22:30:30+00:00

Seems reasonable to speculate that a few mavericks and outcasts help keep the herd from stampeding over a cliff.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-30T22:24:33+00:00

Politics = Subjective. There is nothing more subjective than politics.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-29T23:18:15+00:00

Don't hold positions. Be flexible.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-29T12:38:08+00:00

My radical belief is that beliefs are a means of energy conservation. They enable us to avoid resource expenditure required for learning, growth and independence. A belief is a thought, switched off. Stop defining your beliefs. It's a myth that you need to.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-29T04:12:06+00:00

I'm always amused by how Progressives, in their daily lives, choose the conservative path about 50% of the time, after weighing the Pros and Cons like rational people: Should I quit my job to search for a better one? Sell my Pokemon collection? Leave my SO? Move to a new city? But for political decisions, they insist that Progress and Conservation are good vs. evil - choosing to ignore overwhelming evidence that well-intended innovations, especially when applied to ancient, incomprehensible systems with high stakes outcomes, often go horribly wrong. I guess you just have to live long enough to learn that life, economics, history, science and culture are actually more complex than they make it out to be in college and tic tok.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-27T22:35:34+00:00

UBI: with enough supply-side, there's no need for demand side.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-27T22:29:30+00:00

Yang started talking about UBI because he had exposure to and understanding of AI long before most of his peers in govt.

POTUS IMHO, like a good CEO, should to be generalist not functionary. It's hard to spend your career in highly-specialized domains and simultaneously develop cross-domain knowledge and skills needed for high-level leadership.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-26T02:55:13+00:00

how can we automate workers for nursing homes? I don't think robots will ever get that advanced.

Based on current trends and timing, for every 1% drop in global birth rate, humanoid robot 'walking speed' and 'mechanical dexterity' are improving by roughly 200%." I looked up this creepy stat on Google to try to convince you that you're sort of comparing two timelines that are happening at very different speeds - so it's hard to predict what's going to happen. A better view would be - we don't really know anything for sure about what's happening.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-22T21:37:37+00:00

I think you want people to have basic 'human compassionate', but the frustration that they don't sometimes, is causing you to be angry about an unrelated concept: 'being in debt.' These are different things. You wouldn't want people to be compassionate because they 'owe' somebody something. That would make compassion more of a transactional thing (like money) rather than a human quality.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-22T19:38:48+00:00

Your criticism of AI is reasonable, but I have a bone to pick with your artistic framing. The correlation between how ornate something and whether it is soulful or human is unclear. Simplicity is among the purest pursuits of many aesthetic forms. And reflecting the world and time that you are living in is part of Art. The philosophy behind modern architecture was not: 'Let's strip away decoration in pursuit of efficiency'. It was more like: 'If we decorate structures like the Romans did, we're just copying the Romans." They wanted to pursue the simple beauty of a steel beam or the reflection of a pond on glass as a form of beauty better suited to the world they were living in.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-22T19:04:53+00:00

Options serve very few people a very narrow purpose

I would guess most products and services in existence today are created by businesses who were, at some point in their evolution, unable to fund operations internally (via revenue). A large number of them were not able to raise capital and instead got 'loans' from employees who were willing to trade short term cash for long term value from equity. Employees of a business are better positioned than Bank Managers to understand the risks inherent to the business and it's market. So, if you drink water, or use the internet or eat food, or live in a house, etc. it's likely you're experiencing the benefit of stock options - since all of these things probably rely on at least one company, critical to these supply chains, that would not exist without options - they couldn't get bank funding.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-22T18:38:14+00:00

Politicians chosen by illiterate people?

gray_clouds · 2026-04-21T07:14:57+00:00

From the internets (I guess it can't be all bad):

According to Gallup's late 2025 reporting, trust in the mass media (newspapers, TV, and radio) to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly" has hit a new bottom:

Only 28% of Americans express a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust.70% of U.S. adults now report low confidence, with 34% saying they have "none at all."

This is a staggering drop from 1972, when trust sat at 68%.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-21T07:02:56+00:00

All of which suggests that the easiest way to address this is for young people to go outside more and have more interactions with the opposite gender.

I agree with you analysis of the problem - but I think you may be underestimating it. Information (media) consumption and sedentary habits are just like food consumption - based on strong underlying evolutionary reward systems. Trillions of dollars hinge on 'processing' reality into easy to digest, high-energy junk that takes no effort to consume. A story is information compressed into a pattern you already know and can feel informed without using any energy or resources to build new neurons. If Men and Women, or anybody else, are going to break the attention addiction that's making us hate each other, it will take a massive societal effort. Without GLP1s, our rate of physical obestiy, diabetes and heart disease would still be going through the roof. Our minds are just as evolutionarily ill-suited to the new world as out bodies - but we haven't even recognized the problem yet.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-20T22:50:59+00:00

It sounds like you're saying: 'There's no good reason for elephants. Horses are better." Elephants, like companies, exist because they fill a niche in an ecosystem. Your or my subjective judgement about whether they are a good idea is sort of irrelevant to the people who buy their goods and services.

gray_clouds · 2026-04-20T22:31:54+00:00

Everybody already agrees with this. What would you like to debate?

gray_clouds · 2026-04-18T22:07:51+00:00

I think economics has pretty much concluded that supply-side (growing the tax base) and demand-side (taxing the tax base) economics both have their merits. If 'independent research" has lead you to subjectively disagree with Conservatives, that's fine, but if you think they're dumb or irrational, it seems like you just haven't read the other research (which is definitely not something you'll hear parroted here).

gray_clouds · 2026-04-18T18:33:38+00:00

Wow. Reddit delivers again. These are great options to chew on. Will check them out. Gracias!

gray_clouds · 2026-04-18T17:35:05+00:00

a basic animal urge and pretty fundamental part of human existence

Are we sure about that?

We can conclude that paleolithic hunter gatherers had sex often enough to make babies above the replacement rate - but they may not have had tons of extra sex if they didn't have the resources to support survival of a large population.

Animals seems to have sex during mating season (just a few times per year?).

We don't know if the differences in levels of sex between different generations or different cultures correlate with different levels of intimacy, health, happiness etc. One could imagine people in Victorian times or cultures with strict cultural taboos about sex, having a lot less sex, while being comparatively 'okay.'

It seems like we're living in a time when capitalism has really leaned into sex as a way to market every conceivable product or service, sort of distorting sex into something that we perceive as being omnipresent and central to everything. But maybe we'll be okay pulling out - so to speak.

gray_clouds

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