Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 48
I love exploring concepts for alien life. I discovered the YT channel Curious Archive devoted just to this niche. If you like exploring alien lifeforms, this channel is for you. Here's a sample:
I think one of the coolest careers in the universe would be xenozoology: to fly around to various planets in the galaxy, document all the strange alien lifeforms, and look for traits that could be used in genetic engineering.
I love the world-building of this game, so unique and atmospheric. Just don't bother playing it because unfortunately the gameplay is brutal and not fun. Sometimes a piece of media is best appreciated at a distance.
If you're a fan of dark chocolate like I am, watch out! New research shows that a high percentage of dark chocolate bars are filled with crazy amounts of lead & cadmium. Yes, even the best organic brands are very toxic.
Check the list for yourself:
Consumer Reports - Dark Chocolate Lead & Cadmium
Remember, just because a brand seems extra fancy, "natural", "healthy", fair trade, or organic does not say anything about heavy metal toxicity. Many organic, "all natural", and premium brands are more toxic than basic ones. Don't be fooled by the premium facades these brands create. In the end they use the cheapest ingredients they can find and they don't care at all about your health.
I am no fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson's materialistic notions of science, but he does a great job trying to reason with PBD in the following conversation. What's disturbing is that in the comment section, most of the audience thought PBD wiped the floor with Tyson when the opposite is the case. That comment section is seriously disturbing and shows you the power of fandom, group-think, and online echochambers.
I gotta say, PBD has some good takes sometimes, but he also has some really huge stage Orange business/libertarian biases.
The government wasn't wrong about Covid. The government saved millions of lives, but people are too brainwashed with anti-mainstreamism to understand this. As much as I criticize science, my criticisms of science are from above, and what you see on display in this video is criticism of science from below. Anti-vax is criticism of science from below, and it is dangerously wrong. If guys like PBD were in charge of public health, millions of people would be dead. Which is why, yes, we talk down to the masses, because the masses are too ignorant to do proper risk analysis for themselves. Talking down to the masses is not a mistake, it is not "elitism", it is a natural consequence of mass ignorance. Your average business/YouTube bro is incapable of doing public health risk analysis. We live in an era were average people on social media — especially if they have a million subs — think they are smarter than experts with PhD's. Don't kid yourself. Your typical social media influencer is an idiot, and the more subscribers he has the bigger idiot he is. I will take a materialist scientist over a social media influencer or businessman any day.
Science > social media
Whatever biases materialist science has, social media is way worse. No contest.
Does it surprise you that I defend science? It shouldn't. Most humans have a lot of growing to do just to reach the point of appreciating basic science, never mind transcending it. All the crazy spiritual shit I say does not for one minute undermine the relative validity of basic scientific research. God exists and medical science is good. There is nothing contradictory about that statement. Of course medical science is still missing many things, but that doesn't invalidate the whole field. And as imaginary as death is, you still don't want to end up with Covid in a hospital that's all out of beds and ventilators because millions just like you thought they were too cool for school.
Covid is not a serious political issue in America. Overall the American government's response was good, excluding Trump's early denial efforts, the lack of funding for basic pandemic preparedness, and the reaction of the ignorant masses with their conspiracy theories. There was no government failure with the Covid response, there was failure with the masses of people and the non-mainstream media who fed into their deluded skepticism. The people who cry that Covid is politicized are actually the ones politicizing it! This is gaslighting 101. The science on the vaccines was clear and accurate. Those who claim otherwise are the ones politicizing it because they need to justify their twisted anti-mainstream worldview. I swear, this anti-mainstreamism has become a disease in its own right. Railing against the mainstream does not make you intelligent. That's fool's gold.
When you live in a society you have a responsibility to get vaccinated for potentially serious diseases in the same way that you have a responsibility to fight in war if you are invaded by Nazis. If you cannot understand this, you fundamentally do not understand what society is, and your politics are trash. Covid killed more Americans than Nazis killed Americans in WW2. And yet, people like PBD and Joe Rogan are crying about not being able to eat at his fave restaurant for a few months. Where is the manliness in this? Imagine if in WW2 I had a radio show and I said that fighting the Nazis was an infringement on my right to dine at The Cheesecake Factory. That's effectively what anti-vaxxers did with Covid, and it is deeply unpatriotic, irresponsible, and cowardly. Anti-vax isn't just unscientific, it is cowardice unbefitting of a man. What kind of man are you that you cannot deal with a few months of lock down and mask-wearing? People whined less when there was a draft.
Side-effects from a vaccine are NOT a valid excuse not to take it, just like side-effects from war are not a valid excuse not to defend your country when it is under attack. When I took antibiotics 2 years ago for an infection, I had a really negative reaction with bad side-effects. But I did not blame my doctor or Big Pharma, I knew there were risks. You rarely get a cure to a health problem risk-free. Yes, of course there are costs to handling a pandemic. Some people will die in that battle, never mind inconvenienced. The federal government has a responsibility to pass policy that protects 350 million people, many of whom are sick, old, fat, poor, and dumb as doorknobs.
Americans have become spoiled, selfish children. It is the height of ignorance for PBD to suggest that freedom of choice is somehow "American" while vaccine mandates are not. George Washington mandated everyone in the US Army to get vaccinated. That's a historical fact. So vaccine mandates are as American as apple pie. So any right-winger trying to claim the mantle of patriotism or "Americanism" on this point is full of shit. If you really wanna stick it to a right-winger, show him how his politics are anti-American — in many cases it is. It's not so easy to be truly American. Wearing a red hat isn't it. Just like with religion, there is genuine spirituality and then there is religious fakery and virtue-signaling. So it is with patriotism. The genuine thing is rare and those who cry the loudest about being "American" are not. If you want to be truly American, do that which will save a million American lives at very little risk to yourself. If you got vaccinated, congrats! You are a true patriot. Thank you for your service. Thank you for saving a hospital bed for someone else who really needed it. Thank you for not politicizing a global emergency by acting like a spoiled crybaby. Thank you for wearing your mask quietly like a mature adult. These are the natural sacrifices of living in a community which allow us to have nice things.
It is time for the left-wing to recapture the language and ethos of patriotism. The right-wing has bastardized it long enough. If you don't care about paying your taxes to ensure that people don't go hungry, homeless, uneducated, and sick, you are not a true patriot, and no size arsenal of firearms will make you one. Buying a gun is easy, sacrificing some of your personal comfort to assist people who are less fortunate than you is hard.
What the right-wing got wrong on Covid is very simple: A pandemic is not about you. But you took it as such. Sorry to break the news, but your petty freedoms — like the freedom to walk your dog wherever you please — are not our highest priority. This is not a bug, it's a feature. A virus is fundamentally different from all other personal risks in that it rapidly spreads and destroys the whole community. Therefore it requires a collective lens to address, not an individualistic one. In this respect a virus is most similar to war and requires a war-like collective mobilization. If this virus was something more serious than a flu, the loss of life from our lack of a cohesive, collective response would have been staggering, worse than the Holocaust. Not because the government failed, but because the people failed to listen to the government. When you fail to mount a cohesive response in war, the result is conquest by your enemy. Which is why in the military you don't get to eat at The Cheesecake Factory. And if you whine about it, they will mock and beat you.
Imagine you grew up here. This is how most people in the world live. They don't have the luxury of your socialist, progressive fantasies:
Socrates was so conservative that he rejected the idea of writing, on the grounds that it would result in a weaker memory. And so, he never wrote anything.
Just think about how stunning that is!
Imagine refusing WRITING because you find it too liberal, fearing that it will lead to the moral decay of man's mind. But then again, when writing was first invented, how could you know that it was not the tool of the devil? Don't assume this is obvious. After all, how much evil has writing created? Think about it.
This is why we have no writings from Socrates. Everything we know about Socrates is only know because his more liberal student, Plato, took a wild gamble on this tool of the devil and started writing things down.
2500 years ago it was not obvious that writing would not destroy a man's mind. Today we take all this for granted. Then again, maybe writing does destroy a man's mind. Maybe writing was the beginning of the end of true philosophy. But what then would Socrates have thought of YouTube or TikTok?
Some 2500 years ago, writing was as revolutionary and transgressive as gay marriage or human cloning is today. And you should recognize that these fears are not entirely unfounded. The invention of the printing press lead to the splintering of Christianity. The invention of one machine can splinter an entire religion! That's how powerful and dangerous technology can be. So don't take the social, political, and spiritual effects of technology for granted. Many technologies come with moral dilemmas, complications, and responsibilities which are difficult to foresee. Technology, culture, and morality are deeply entangled.
If you're not yet aware, huge things are happening in the field of AI which will transform the entire way humans do life and business. AI will be as transformative and disruptive as the last 30 years of the internet. So make sure you prepare yourself strategically for the new world that is rapidly approaching. People are not taking AI seriously enough. They are treating AI as a toy but AI will disrupt every industry. Humans must start preparing now for living and working alongside AI in a hybrid, human-AI world. If you are not adapting your workflow to leverage AI, you will be out of a job soon. The future is hybrid.
The next trillion dollar company will be in AI. One of the reasons that I invested in Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple recently — even though these companies already seem to have maxed out their growth potential — is because I believe that they will be the leaders in AI. Only these companies have the funding and infrastructure necessary to make AI work at a global scale. So either Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple will buy up all the best AI start-ups, or if they are foolish enough not to buy them up, one of those startups will reach a trillion dollar market cap in the next 10 years. That's my prediction. I also see that Tesla, Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and similar companies might do good really well from AI. The trillion dollar question is: Who will corner the AI market first? This market will be bigger than the entire mobile market. It's just unclear right now who will dominate it. There is a lot of opportunity here but also a lot of uncertainty about who the top dogs will be.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Think for yourself.