In this country we get to choose our leadership. That means that we deserve the leadership that we get.
You can take JD Vance out of the hills but you can't take the hillbilly out of JD Vance.
I personally doubt that The Donald read Mein Kampf. I personally doubt that The Donald has ever read anything more demanding than the Peanuts comic strip and probably didn't actually understand even that.
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I have been thinking a lot about humanity, intelligence, AI. I am left with the impression that we actually aren't all that and a bag of chips. We (in the largest sense of we) remain puppets of our selfish genes, slaves to evolutionary responses that served us well enough when mysterious gods unleashed volcanic eruptions and capriciously ordained bumper crops or desperate famines and survival hinged on competition for scarce resources. Those responses serve us much less well today when our long term survival depends more on cooperation than competition. Technology moves fast. Evolution moves slowly. lt is that time scale mismatch that likely pens the score to our future. Homo habilis gone wild has turned the tables on the vicissitudes of the environment. We can increasingly manage the abundance of food that we eat, the temperature of the structures in which we live, the speeds at which we travel. But the better part of a million years in we are little better at managing ourselves than we were in 1939 or 27BCE or whenever it was that Thum smacked Legog with the femur of an antelope.
Amen, Bob. A few observations:
In this country we get to choose our leadership. That means that we deserve the leadership that we get.
You can take JD Vance out of the hills but you can't take the hillbilly out of JD Vance.
I personally doubt that The Donald read Mein Kampf. I personally doubt that The Donald has ever read anything more demanding than the Peanuts comic strip and probably didn't actually understand even that.
---
I have been thinking a lot about humanity, intelligence, AI. I am left with the impression that we actually aren't all that and a bag of chips. We (in the largest sense of we) remain puppets of our selfish genes, slaves to evolutionary responses that served us well enough when mysterious gods unleashed volcanic eruptions and capriciously ordained bumper crops or desperate famines and survival hinged on competition for scarce resources. Those responses serve us much less well today when our long term survival depends more on cooperation than competition. Technology moves fast. Evolution moves slowly. lt is that time scale mismatch that likely pens the score to our future. Homo habilis gone wild has turned the tables on the vicissitudes of the environment. We can increasingly manage the abundance of food that we eat, the temperature of the structures in which we live, the speeds at which we travel. But the better part of a million years in we are little better at managing ourselves than we were in 1939 or 27BCE or whenever it was that Thum smacked Legog with the femur of an antelope.