Dave5

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Tag: culture

  • Benevolent AI Is a Bad Idea

    Let’s start looking at this as the speed run for first-contact… our assumptions and values are never going to be universal and here is the perfect practice run. AI safety, originally “friendly AI,” was conceived as the problem of how to create an agent that would be benevolent towards humanity in general, on the assumption…

  • Togs, togs, undies: The story behind NZ’s most iconic summer ad

    If you ever work with me, at some point “togs, togs, undies” will come up… Up there with “ghost chips”, “bugger” and “good on ya mate”, “togs, togs, undies” has become one of the most enduring advertising phrases to enter our cultural lexicon since it was first uttered in a 2006 ad for Trumpet ice…

  • Congress Is Absolutely Wrong to Equate Anti-Zionism With Antisemitism

    The conflation of anti-zionism with antisemitism only serves antisemites (and those who benefit from antisemitism). Conflating the two means that the energy minima here becomes antisemitism. You literally set up a slippery slope of hate. I’ve seen this on the left many times already. I was having coffee with an well known left NZ politician…

  • Anand Giridharadas: The left has to build a ‘bigger, better movement’ to beat Trump

    I’m a big fan of how Giridharadas articulates thoughts around movements. Step away from the Trump specific stuff and listen to what he has to say about building movements and the narratives the need to present: This holds true for the left every where right now.

  • The Battle Between Macroculture and Microculture Is Turning into a War

    A single individual living in Greenville, North Carolina defeats enormous global businesses with tens of thousands of employees and decades of experience—and does it repeatedly every month. But that’s exactly what’s happening. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/in-2024-the-tension-between-macroculture

  • Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions

    Demanding Short, Dumb Answers About Hate Speech Makes You A Useful Idiot For Bigots. … There’s the rhetorical trick. Calling for Intifada is not the same as calling for the genocide of the Jews, and it’s just dishonest to say it is. Not all Jews are Israeli. Arguing that a particular group has a moral…

  • The anti-wokist is a dog

    The basic lesson is that Brooks, like other “anti-wokists” such as Mounck, attack implausibly strong versions of “wokery” in order to avoid having to take seriously the embarassing insights that they wish to deny. The other point to make about them is that, while trumpeting the claims of “universalism” against particular divisive identities, they fail…