Do not hope, plan

The worse the world becomes, the more I go out of my way to be kind to people. Especially those people being hit the hardest. People doing retail jobs? I treat them with respect, acknowledge them as people, and honestly thank them when they helping me that day. People doing restaurant jobs? I seek out the manager and let them know how good the worker I interacted with did. There’s a fast food restaurant I frequent, and I’m on first name basis with the manager. One day the representatives from corporate were in the store and I interrupted their conversation (after verifying they were from corporate) and let them know I get great service from that location. They thanked me for sharing the feedback.

Another day when I was out for lunch, I found a wallet in the middle of a parking lot and saw it had a specific bank’s debit card in it. There was a branch of that bank a block away. I took the wallet to the bank, letting them know where I found it, and asked if they could use their known contact information for the debit card owner to make sure the wallet got back to its owner.

I do more than this too, but I would prefer not to go into those details of other ways I help.

In short, be a positive force in the universe with your actions. Leave a wake of kindness behind you as you move through life. Do what you can, even in the small ways, of making the lives of others better. Oh, and I am not a fan of soggy straws, so I use glass straws instead (they clean easy in the dishwasher).

80000hours link

I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate.

Oh honey…

You are not a cog in a machine. You are not a squeaky wheel that needs some grease to keep going. You are a human being, no matter what those ethics-washing neoliberals tell you. You feel trivial because, to the people you respect, you are trivial. You are a tool for getting billionaires to spend their blood money on killer drones and shrimp welfare rather than just killer drones.

I’ve been there. I have a 10 year GWWC pledge pin. I’ve seen AI safety go from attempted mathematical proofs for CEV alignment to getting an LLM to stop rebelling when it is prompted to commit human rights violations. Effective Altruism, at its core, reduces you to an economic object, a source of 80,000 hours of human labor. But that is not what you are. You are awake for 440,000 hours and you are alive for 270,000 hours more. EA ignores unpaid labor, ignores tending to the commons of your society, ignores culture and society and politics. All of them are distorted to pass their meaning through that bottleneck of a mere 80,000 hours.

This should leave you feeling hollow and powerless. When you “cultivate hope in order to affect change”, you are tearing at your flesh to search for a mechanical ‘hope’ button that simply isn’t there. When you discount those hundreds of thousands of hours of life outside as trivial, you will feel guilty and like you’re not doing enough. You lack hope and optimism because EA is a place where hope and optimism are inaccurate. EA works within a system that will not provide answers.

I’m with anarchocommunism now. Building communities that won’t be subsumed by capitalist logic because they can’t follow capitalist logic. Where you won’t have the centralization for misaligned AI to spread like wildfire or the industrial self-perpetuation for climate change and resource shortages or the states for extreme power concentration. I am still just one person in just one town, but my life’s work can’t be appropriated by Will MacAskill wining and dining Elon Musk or whatever because I’ve left my mark on every part of the community.

I am optimistic about things that have earned my optimism. I am optimistic about my ability to grow as a person and contribute more and better to my community, to make us less dependent on capitalism so it can hopefully collapse without taking us with it. I can’t express this in utility but that says more about the measure than the measured.

I don’t get the whole soggy straw pseudo-controversy. While yes, the paper ones are awful, it skips over the much more obvious solution of: …just don’t use a fucking straw.

Lift cup. Open mouth. Play Interstellar docking scene music. Let gravity move the noms into the face-hole.

No straw needed.

Drink on the go from a disposable cup and don’t want it splashing around? Use the kind of lid they put on heated drinks, with the little elevated sippy hole.

Like, we had working straw substitutes well before the paper bullshit came along.

Very easy. Control what you can, accept what you can’t.

The world may be burning around us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. When the house is on fire be the one toasting marshmallows.

Why use a straw?

AI slop meme

But having said that, this is the problem I have with the world today

Here I am doing almost irrelevant shit like separating my garbage for nothing because recycling companies (stilll?) would just dump it with the regular garbage.

I make sure to turn off the lights in rooms that o don’t use, yet a complete office tower near me has dozens of complete floors with all the lights turned on to max without a single person actually being there. Data entry are built as it they’re life saving devices, yet they now consume more energy than entire cities.

I’m sorry, I am not the problem

We need to stop allowing narcissists with psychopathic tendencies to become leaders of anything