Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts

Monday, March 27, 2023

ChatGPT = Motorbike

This Chipmaking Step Is Crucial to the Future of Computing—and Just Got 40x Faster Thanks to Nvidia

..... it makes an immediate difference in personal productivity. ......... The current situation is truly unprecedented. We are seeing widespread adoption of a technology that has the potential to significantly boost individual productivity, but which is not yet being fully utilized by organizations. .......... Bigger than steam power? ........ A study of programmers found a increase of 55.8% in productivity when using AI (and this is using the Copilot AI tool, which isn’t even state-of-the-art!). ......... asked professionals to write realistic memos, strategy documents and policies. The ones who were given ChatGPT completed tasks 37% faster, and their average writing quality increased as well. All of this is without added training or extensive experience using ChatGPT (which I found makes a huge difference). ........ the productivity gains that can be achieved through the use of general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT seem to be truly large ......... the productivity gains that can be achieved through the use of general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT seem to be truly large ......... they come from the use of a general-purpose tool like ChatGPT, rather than more specialized AI tools ........ the potential for productivity gains is not limited to a select few industries, but rather can be applied across a wide variety of fields. ......... for the average small factory in the US in the 19th century, adding steam power increased productivity by 25%. ......... something very big is happening. ........ it is some of the most highly skilled and highly paid jobs that face the most exposure to AI. ......... AI can increase productivity for workers in fields where automation and economies of scale were previously very rare....... “Ultimately this is not stealing a movie screenplay or a whole song, but it’s spiritually the same kind of thing. It’s just uncool.” ........ Jamie Trufin, who runs a meme account called @DogeCoinDaddy, said he was disappointed when Mr. Musk posted one of his Doge memes in March without credit. ....... Mr. Howdle was puzzled as to why someone with such vast resources would share another person’s work without credit. ....... “Someone in my group chat was like, ‘LOL did everyone see how Elon straight up stole a meme that Miles made?’” ........ Several people who have had their content posted by Mr. Musk have since asked for payment, be it in dollars, Teslas or Bitcoin. (Mr. Monahan said he was willing to accept a “mere $80,000.”) ....... (teachers need to prep lessons, grade, write letters of recommendation, run classes, respond to parents, run after school programs, do administrative work, etc.). With the power to outsource the most annoying and time consuming parts of their jobs, workers in these industries are highly incentivized to adopt AI quickly, either to do less work or to be able to bill out more work themselves. It is a recipe for rapid adoption at the individual level. ........ over half of generative AI users reported using the technology without telling anyone, at least some of the time. Their are secret cyborgs among us. ........... The implications may reshape the way we work in ways that rival the impact of the Industrial Revolution. ........ there are far fewer advantages to organizations in this coming AI boom. With these potential productivity gains, every company should be spending a significant amount of their best employees time - right now! - figuring out how to use AI to improve performance......... And every worker should be spending time figuring out how to use these general-purpose tools to their advantage. They should be thinking about how to automate their job to remove the tedious and uncreative parts, and getting a sense for the disruption to come before the organizations they work for realize the full implications of AI. .......... The key is to learn fast.

धमाधम अल्पमतमा पर्दै प्रदेश सरकार, गण्डकीपछि लुम्बिनीमा एमाले सरकार संकटमा
लुम्बिनीमा ३० दिनभित्र मुख्यमन्त्री बन्लान् डिल्ली चौधरी ?



Elon Musk: Memelord or Meme Lifter? The billionaire has been posting content creators’ work without credit. Some are frustrated; others, simply puzzled........ Elon Musk has referred to memes as “modern art” and shares them regularly on Twitter, where he has more than 52 million followers. ....... Memes rely on reinterpretations of joke formats, and it’s not always clear where they begin. ....... the fact that Elon Musk frequently steals memes has become, essentially, a meme in itself ........ Now, when a brand uses a meme for marketing purposes, it generally asks for permission to share the image, and credits the owner. In many cases, the brand also pays. Mr. Musk, who is both a successful businessman and a freewheeling personal brand, appears to be an exception.





My meeting with Prime Minister Modi We talked about India’s incredible progress—and how Indian innovation can benefit the world....... At a time when the world has so many challenges, it’s inspiring to visit a dynamic and creative place like India. ....... He was generous with his time, as we talked about how science and innovation can help reduce inequity in India and around the world. ....... India has an amazing ability to manufacture lots of safe, effective, and affordable vaccines, some of them supported by the Gates Foundation. Vaccines produced in India have saved millions of lives during the pandemic and prevented other diseases around the world.......... In addition to producing new lifesaving tools, India also excels at delivering them—its public health system has delivered more than 2.2 billion doses of COVID vaccines. They created an open-source platform called Co-WIN, which allowed people to schedule billions of vaccine appointments and delivered digital certifications for those who were vaccinated. This platform is now being expanded to support India’s universal immunization program. Prime Minister Modi believes that Co-WIN is a model for the world, and I agree. ......... India was also able to transfer emergency digital payments to 300 million people, including 200 million women, during the pandemic. This was only possible because India has made financial inclusion a priority, investing in a digital ID system (called Aadhaar) and creating innovative platforms for digital banking. It’s a reminder that financial inclusion is a fantastic investment. ....... The country’s Gati Shakti program is a great example of how digital technology can help governments work better. It digitally connects 16 ministries, including rail and roads, so they can integrate their plans for infrastructure projects and accelerate the work of Indian scientists and engineers. ........ I commended the Prime Minister on India's efforts to eliminate deadly and debilitating diseases like tuberculosis, visceral leishmaniasis, and lymphatic filariasis. He told me about a fascinating movement taking shape in India: Communities are “adopting” TB patients to make sure they get the nutrition and care they need. India has used a similar approach with HIV, and it’s been shown to produce lasting results........ India is using digital tools to make learning more accessible through several different avenues, including TV....... I’m looking forward to getting together with the MI partners during the COP28 Summit this December to accelerate the development of new sources of affordable, reliable clean energy. ........ visited the India Council of Agricultural Research in Pusa, where I learned about efforts to help farmers adapt to a warmer climate, including by planting new varieties of wheat and chickpeas that can tolerate droughts. Scientists are also working to increase the shelf life of millet-based products. Millets are very nutritious—a super food, as Prime Minister Modi put it—and are also water-efficient and heat tolerant. I even got to taste millet khichdi, a type of porridge, at a “Godh Bharai” ceremony—similar to a baby shower—for two women hosted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. .

My message in India: To fight climate change, improve global health The Age of AI has begun
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Sunday, March 12, 2023

12: News Bulletin

Dendra and its ‘forest-patrolling drones’ close $10m Series A from Airbus, others (2020)
The importance of blue carbon mangroves
The benefits of mangrove restoration from blue carbon to biodiversity
7 important agreements reached at COP15
The Wildfire-Climate Change Cycle and how to Tame it

This Geothermal Startup Showed Its Wells Can Be Used Like a Giant Underground Battery
Detection Stays One Step Ahead of Deepfakes—For Now
GPT-4 Might Just Be a Bloated, Pointless Mess
Microsoft Unveils AI Model That Understands Image Content, Solves Visual Puzzles
Figure Promises First General-Purpose Humanoid Robot

Ethereum Moved to Proof of Stake. Why Can’t Bitcoin?
Face Recognition Software Led to His Arrest. It Was Dead Wrong
As AI Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology
Key Steps in Evolution on Earth Tell Us How Likely Intelligent Life Is Anywhere Else
Stability AI, Hugging Face and Canva Back New AI Research Nonprofit

I Made an AI Clone of Myself
California Company Sets Launch Date for World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket
ChatGPT-Style Search Represents a 10x Cost Increase for Google, Microsoft
Ingenious Technique Could Make Moon Farming Possible
The US Copyright Office Says You Can’t Copyright Midjourney AI-Generated Images

AI Is Dreaming Up Drugs That No One Has Ever Seen. Now We’ve Got to See if They Work.
MIT Team Makes a Case for Direct Carbon Capture From Seawater, Not Air
This Startup Can 3D Print a Battery Into Any Shape You Want
Confusion Spirals in Crypto as the US Cracks Down
For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a US Forest



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Saturday, March 11, 2023

11: News Bulletin

Blue Origin Says It Can Make Solar Panels Out of Moon Dust
This Box Wing eVTOL Will Run on Hydrogen and Have a Range of 620 Miles
This 3D Printed Community Is Printing One House per Week for a Year
Cutting Out Just a Muffin a Day Can Make You Age More Slowly, Study Finds
Robots Could Be Doing Almost Half of Our Household Chores Within a Decade



Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece .... reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously. ......... mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world. ....... Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why? ..... bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax. ........ There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks. ...... Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18? ....... 13 and 17 are prime numbers. ......... cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant. ........ Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all? ......... Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere. ......... mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines, and planets. ........ Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.......... physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms. ....... the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object. ....... reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself. ........ Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance. ........ As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical. ..... The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.

Pythagoras’ revenge: humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of
Mathematical Explanation: A Pythagorean Proposal
Who are Jehovah’s Witnesses? A religion scholar explains the history of the often misunderstood group 8 million members across 240 countries. ........ understood “Jehovah,” a version of the Hebrew “Yahweh,” to be the name of God the Father himself. ........ looked forward to Jesus Christ establishing a “millennium” or a thousand-year period of peace on Earth. This “Golden Age” would see the Earth transformed to its original purity, with a “righteous” social system that would not have poverty or inequality. ....... look forward to the Golden Age that Russell and his Bible students expected. ........ the group’s belief in a literal thousand-year earthly reign of Christ ....... they do not vote in elections, serve in the military or salute the flag. Such acts, they believe, compromise their primary loyalty to God...... Jehovah’s Witnesses have no political affiliations, and they renounce violence. However, they make an easy target for governments looking for internal enemies, as they refuse to bow down to government symbols. Many nationalists call them “enemies of the state.” ......... Jehovah’s Witnesses were jailed as draft evaders in the U.S. during both world wars. In a Supreme Court ruling in 1940, school districts were allowed to expel Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to salute the American flag. Through subsequent legal battles in the 1940s and 1950s, Jehovah’s Witnesses helped expand safeguards for religious liberty and freedom of conscience both in the United States and Europe. ......... In Nazi Germany, Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed in concentration camps; a purple triangle was used by the Nazis to mark them.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER ENZYME THAT CAN TURN AIR INTO ELECTRICITY
ECONOMISTS COMPARE CRYPTO TO "COCAINE" IN SCATHING TAKEDOWN
Company Raises $100M After Announcing Shift to AI, But Has No Discernible Product We're in the middle of an AI gold rush — but is there any gold?
CONGRESSMAN CLAIMS THE US GOVERNMENT HAS "REVERSE-ENGINEERED" ALIEN TECH FROM UFOS IT'S A PRETTY OUTLANDISH THEORY.
NOAM CHOMSKY: AI ISN'T COMING FOR US ALL, YOU IDIOTS "THAT DAY MAY COME, BUT ITS DAWN IS NOT YET BREAKING."
MICROSOFT SAYS OPENAI'S LATEST BLOCKBUSTER AI IS DROPPING "NEXT WEEK" WE HAVE QUESTIONS.
WE'RE TOTALLY OK WITH THIS 48,500 YEAR OLD "ZOMBIE" VIRUS BEING RESURRECTED WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
SCIENTISTS PLAY TINIEST GAME OF BASEBALL BY THROWING AND CATCHING INDIVIDUAL ATOMS EAT YOUR HEART OUT, ANTMAN.
Report: Elon Musk is Building His Own Town in Texas Musk wants his own company town where people live and work for him. ........ a "Texas Utopia" along the Colorado River where SpaceX, Boring Company, and Tesla employees can live, work, and play, and never have to leave. .



Iran-Saudi ties: China-brokered ‘win-win’ deal could bring Yemen war to a close, analysts say Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to restore diplomatic relations following the Beijing-led talks that experts dubbed as ‘a major development in the Middle Eastern diplomacy’....... Analysts say the easing of tensions between the rivals could also prompt Saudi and Iran to end hostilities in Yemen by agreeing to a ‘face-saving’ resolution .......... The Chinese-mediated agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations after a seven-year hiatus is widely expected to de-escalate conflicts across the Middle East. Although details of the deal reached during five days of talks in Beijing have not been made public, many analysts believe they include an understanding on bringing the eight-year war in Yemen to a negotiated close. .



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Friday, November 18, 2022

18: Twitter



How Nepal Grew Back Its Forests An effort decades in the making is showing results in Nepal, a rare success story in a world of cascading climate disasters and despair. ............ This transformation is visible across Nepal, thanks to a radical policy adopted by the government more than 40 years ago. Large swaths of national forest land were handed to local communities, and millions of volunteers like Mr. Karki were recruited to protect and renew their local forests, an effort that has earned praise from environmentalists around the world. But the success has been accompanied by new challenges — among them addressing the increase in potentially dangerous confrontations between people and wildlife. ........ Community-managed forests now account for more than a third of Nepal’s forest cover, which has grown by about 22 percent since 1988, according to government data. Independent studies also confirm that greenery in Nepal has sprung back, with forests now covering 45 percent of the country’s land. ....... a NASA-funded study that found Nepal’s tree cover had doubled between 1992 and 2016. “Now, you’ve got the community saying, ‘No, you don’t go there!’ So, the trees are coming back.” ......... Back in the early 1980s, the government couldn’t persuade people to stop cutting trees for farmland and for firewood. ........ What followed was an enormous replantation effort that was bolstered by foreign aid. Villagers like Mr. Karki planted seedlings of rosewood and sal on barren hills. ......... For the community foresters, that involves guarding their forests from the timber mafia, poachers and from nature itself. ........ One morning early this year, Chijamaya Sarki, 61, was cutting grass for cattle feed in a forest when she was attacked and killed by a tiger, her family said. “We only received her half-eaten body,” said Shyam Bahadur Majakoti, her son, still visibly in shock and dressed according to a traditional mourning ritual. ......... Hundreds of thousands of Nepali youth migrate each year to other countries in Asia or to the Persian Gulf in search of stable, well-paying jobs, leaving fewer workers at home. Foreign remittances now represent almost a quarter of the country’s economic output, and brought in about $7.35 billion in 2020. ....... The rejuvenated forests have transformed life for the locals here. Floods are less frequent. Rainfall, once intermittent, is now normal. ...... Many people have moved on from subsistence farming, taking up alternatives like beekeeping and growing profitable crops like dragon fruit and strawberries. .......... Keshav Raj Basnet runs a thriving beekeeping business, earning $5,000 a year from 12 hives. ........ Nepal is expecting a $7.4 billion package from a group led by the British government to “build back greener from Covid-19” and about $300 million from Norway, the United States and Britain, among others, for helping reduce global emissions. ......... Sergeant Gurung, 36, who is armed with an M-16 rifle, said that on a recent patrol he was chased by a tiger. “I was so scared that I climbed a tree,” he said. “We are allowed to use our gun to protect ourselves, but I am here to protect the animals,” not shoot them. ........ More than 100 of Mr. Gurung’s peers have died on duty in wildlife attacks since 1974, the Army has said. The army has also had a fraught relationship with some locals, who accuse it of heavy-handedness against ethnic minorities. ......... In July 2020, troops found Raj Kumar Chepang, 24, fishing in the restricted area of the national park. His punishment, a beating from sticks, was so severe that he died a few days later .

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Thursday, November 17, 2022

Some Suggestions For Twitter

Twitter And Voice
Free Speech And Just Society
Should Elon Musk Be Owning All Of Twitter?
The Masses, Not Mars
Musk's 44 Billion Dollar Give To Foolish Fascism

My Twitter experience has not changed. Is that a problem? The guy from Mars took over. But my Twitter experience has not changed.

He is being criticized for having bought a 10 billion dollar company for 40 billion. I don't want to go into that. It is certainly a dip. But if it is a startup, it has nowhere to go but up. Although there are plenty of people saying this is his Waterloo. That is the New York Times hyperbola. It is a dramatic statement to make, but people like Paul Graham do not seem to be buying.

Since the early 2010s, I have looked at Twitter and thought, what a waste! So much potential, so little of it realized.

Could Musk be the break Twitter has needed? Or is this Musk's Truth Social?

I just had to say that. I don't believe it. I think Musk might be able to pull it off.

I quite like Twitter. I have an experience on Twitter that I do not have on any other social media platform. And so you are left wanting more.

What is it about Twitter? The brevity? The text? That 1% feel?

How about letting people verify for free? And instead of using government isued IDs letting people use biometric IDs provided by Twitter itself? A selfie? An iris scan? Fingerprint? And you get a checkmark? If not blue, then green. The bots don't have that.

If you can verify your name also with some sort of official ID, you get an additional checkmark. For free.

You could use an assumed name, but it would say so.

The ability to read 10 or 100 or 1,000 tweets at once. How do you read the sentiment?

Real time search engine. Twitter could be tops.

The Twitter archives are a wasteland. So unnecessary.

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Monday, August 01, 2022

Better Tokyo Than Twitter: Rocket Travel On Earth

SPACEX STARSHIP: THOSE 30-MINUTE, CROSS-PLANET FLIGHTS WILL BE PUNISHING But on the other hand, it will also be very fast.
The space-faring firm is currently developing the Starship, a stainless steel behemoth designed to send the first humans on a mission to Mars. Another use for the vehicle, aimed at improving its feasibility as a profit-making machine, is point-to-point trips around the Earth. ......... The sheer power of the rocket is enough to enable a trip from New York to Paris, which takes around seven hours 20 minutes by plane, to take just 30 minutes. ......... “Probably needs a restraint mechanism like Disney’s Space Mountain roller coaster,” Musk warned on Twitter Thursday. “Would feel similar to Space Mountain in a lot of ways, but you’d exit on another continent.” ....... Musk has instead suggested that each flight would take around 1,000 people. Every seat would be “coach” basic travel. There would be no toilets, or food area, or pilot area. ........ SpaceX is essentially asking people to sign up for packing themselves like sardines into a giant tin hurdling as fast as a ballistic missile. ........ it would cost over $1 million to transport 853 passengers, working out to $1,200 per person. ......... Musk has also suggested that it could link up with the hyperloop, his design for a vacuum, sealed pod transit system moving up to 700 mph. That would mean trips from the spaceport to the city center in under 10 minutes.


https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

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Thursday, May 26, 2022

News: May 26



The death of globalisation has been greatly exaggerated So far, slowdown in cross-border activity reflects slowdown in growth ........ The global elite gathered at Davos this week for what by all accounts has been a gloomy affair. The head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, set the tone by warning against “geoeconomic fragmentation”. Among business leaders the talk is all about globalisation going into reverse. So here, in the spirit of constructive contrarianism, are some ideas to sprinkle a little nuance over the debate. ........ Start with trade, which has grown strongly from the short-term collapse in the early months of the pandemic. As the chart below shows, until the first quarter of this year merchandise trade gave little indication of deglobalisation for rich countries, China, or the 20 biggest economies (advanced and emerging) taken together......... the IMF’s own research shows that the world now trades more than it had projected three years ago. ........ Russia is being cut off from global economic activity, as it should be, and more comprehensively than has happened to date. The World Trade Monitor estimates that Russia’s imports collapsed by 40 per cent from February to March. And Ukraine is having much of its trade shackled by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s assault, which beyond the sheer violence of his warfare ranges from

blocking the country’s ports to stealing and destroying grain in a macabre echo of the famines engineered by Stalin in the 1930s.

.......... If the worry is being held economically hostage by hostile governments, this can be addressed not by trying to “reshore” all your supply chains but by reorganising them around the economies of allied countries — what US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen calls “friend-shoring”.......... the EU’s plan to reconfigure its energy system. It aims to end energy imports from Russia, but it does so in part by intensifying other regional and global trade in energy, in particular finding new suppliers for imports of natural gas today and hydrogen in the future. ......... the efforts among democracies to agree rules of the road for the digital economy and the handling of sensitive data, which may lead to fewer digital transfers between democracies and non-democracies while deepening data connectivity within these blocs. ........ the global economy may be reorganised along big regional blocs defined not just by geography but by common values and governance. That would be “deglobalisation” in the literal sense. But it would involve more globalisation in the economically meaningful sense — that of deepening cross-border economic integration. “Regionalised globalisation” would be a better term......... The question, then, would be whether further globalisation within such regional, politically delineated blocs could be as efficient and productive as a literally global integrated economy. My hunch is that

for the advanced economies centred on the transatlantic west, the answer is yes — and that there is much more doubt for less advanced economies.

But that is, to be sure, an uncertain gamble. If regionalised globalisation is the way we are headed, we shall find out whether China needs the west more than the west needs China.

Building your Digital Identity in Web3 Digital identity in DeFi and crypto looks different from the way people express their identities in other online communities. ........ Web2 platforms, personal branding is about putting forward a polished look of your everyday life, offering your followers a curated glimpse into how you spend your time and what your interests are. ......... On Crypto Twitter (CT), Discord, NFT marketplaces, and other platforms favoured by the crypto community, who you are and what your everyday life looks like does not matter as much as your engagement with the ideas circulating in the space and how you demonstrate that engagement through the construction of your digital identity. .......... Web3 will be decentralized, open source, resistant to censorship, and users will own their own data. Since social platforms built on Web3 will adopt the principles of decentralization and privacy enabled by blockchain, people who are involved in this space have found creative ways to build a digital identity that demonstrates an alignment with those principles. .......... Since all blockchain transactions are verifiable on a public ledger, sharing a public key with a long history of making educated and savvy investments, participating in crypto events, and holding culturally significant NFTs is becoming the Web3 equivalent of a resume. ........... some Web3 companies are accepting this type of record for job applications along with or even instead of a traditional resume.

The Answer to Stopping the Coronavirus May Be Up Your Nose
Anne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism The writer discusses what Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” reveals about the fragility of liberal democracy. ......... So much of what we imagine to be new is old. So many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. ........... Arendt was the master theorist of liberalism’s most fundamental blind spot, its inability to account for or even understand the appeal of its shadow, of illiberalism. And look around today, it’s still happening — look at Putin, look at Trump, look at Xi. Look at how deeply liberals underestimated all of them, and the appeal they would have and continue having, even when they failed the very movements they promised to help. ............. our diagnosis is fundamentally about the weaknesses of liberal societies, the way liberal, political and economic systems can paradoxically open the door to the figures they fear most, to the passions and yearnings they refuse to understand ............ moments of technicolor prescience ........ she was observing liberal societies of the 1940s, which we now are nostalgic about, and we imagined to be so much more solid and deep and rich than our own. ........ she talks about Stalin actually using the purges, using these periodic assaults on society as a way of creating fear between people and creating distance between people. ........ there are other sources of this kind of radical loneliness, and loneliness meeting people who are not connected to institutions. They’re not part of groups. They’re not part of churches. They’re not part of civic organizations. .......... people who aren’t connected to other people in society, she believes, are much more liable to be persuaded by forms of totalitarian or autocratic propaganda ......... what prepared men for totalitarian domination in the non totalitarian world is the act of loneliness, once a borderline experience — so once, something that only elderly people experienced — and now, it has become an everyday experience. ............ Almost every form of modern technology, almost every economic change and every technological change, often has the impact of separating people even more from one another — even new forms of entertainment, where we watch movies by ourselves on Netflix, rather than in movie theaters. .........

her description and discussion of loneliness is really quite important

........ what makes a society vulnerable to takeover is loneliness. ......... “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” ......... of belonging to a shared sense of meaning. Belonging to a story, feeling a place for yourself, whether that place is literal as in a church, or just conceptual, as in part of the narrative of your own country and the time in which you live. ........... in the modern world, we now see that people are capable of being part of communities that exist only online .......... QAnon is an excellent example of a community of belief. ......... Once you accept the basic premises of QAnon, you know, that there is a conspiracy, that American elites are involved in massive pedophilia scandals and complicated relationships with one another that involve abusing children, when you believe that there is a prophet out there named Q who’s going to tell you what happens in the future, and is going to shape reality for you — once you’re inside that world, you are constantly reinforced. So you join it. When you post things about it inside that community, people write back with enthusiastic acceptance and admiration. You read other people who believe the same kinds of things. You form a group that feels very strongly that all of this is true, and that you have — even more importantly, that you have access to special and secret information that most Americans don’t have. So you’re a community that has special knowledge. You’ve been gifted with this special access to a different reality. ............. And once you’re inside it, it’s extremely powerful. And it turns out that it’s more powerful than the real reality. ........ why propaganda is effective, because many people do not believe in anything visible in the reality of their own experience. They do not trust their eyes and ears, but only their imaginations. ............ it’s much easier to create these kinds of communities, and to give them that reinforcing power, because when people are surrounded all the time by the same images, the same messages, when they see them on their phones and their laptops and so on, it has the effect of seeming more real than what they can see out the window. ............ on the other side, it can be a very sharp accelerant of loneliness. ......... “loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone, whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.” ......... “the lonely man finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact, or to whose hostility he is exposed.” ......... a description of loneliness as being surrounded by others with whom you cannot establish contact, or whose hostility you are exposed, actually strikes me as a very good description of what being online and being in social media often feels like for people. To the extent you establish contact, it’s not the kind of generative, nourishing contact you really want. And you’re constantly either exposed to hostility or on the knife’s edge of being exposed to it. And so what superficially looks like a way of coming out of loneliness, at least you’re there on Twitter with everybody, in fact is a more intense experience of it. .......... And sometimes, you’ll read these passages of just startling insight, where you feel they’ve got into something that studies and empirics can’t get you to. .........

what makes a society vulnerable to takeover is loneliness

......... some of the older people in my life who have drifted right, or when I go and report with right wing thinkers who have become much more radicalized in recent years — something I hear again and again is that sense of non belonging, this feeling the world has changed too much for them to find a place in it, or that its mores have changed in a way where they feel like people are hostile to them and what they think. ............. if you are in a white supremacist movement, you have actual meetings. You do military training together. You have projects that you do on the weekends. You plan things together. ............. what Jobbik started out with — what it started as, rather — was as a paramilitary organization. It literally just organized marching events for men on the weekends. And it was very, very successful in rural parts of Hungary where there wasn’t anything else to do. .......... they attack and undermine existing morality. So they mock and make fun of not just the current political setup, but you know, the morals of normal people. They set themselves up as something outside of normal morality. ............. that means they admire different things. So they admire violence, or they admire power in an old fashioned form, or they admire old fashioned kinds of hierarchies, male-female hierarchies or racial hierarchies that are now taboo ........... This is a community that breaks the rules, exists outside of institutions, and offers you a full experience of entertainment, connection, comradeship, that almost nothing else can. .......... how a lot of people I know on the right, who believed totally different things about how you should comport yourself in public a couple of years before, ended up responding to Trump — that yes, he is cruel and bullying and vulgar and unkind. But you know what? It just shows. It just goes to show how sick our society has become that we needed someone like that. And they began to take an almost delight in it. He’s our fighter. .............. the more corrupt the society, or the more people sense it to be corrupt, the more you get this phenomenon. ........... I mean, modern Washington, with its lobbyists, with its really ridiculous rules about money — I have European friends who come to America. And when they learn how the American political system works, and how important money is for congressional campaigns or senatorial campaigns, they’re often really shocked by it. And once people understand how corrupt, how dark money works, how lobbyists work, once they understand that, they can often feel so much disgust for the system that they think, well, you know, anybody who wants to smash that is right. And that was why Trump’s language about destroying the swamp was so successful ................. And never mind that Trump was the swampiest creature in America. I mean, he ran the White House as if it were an adjunct to his private business, which is something that has never been done before in American history, at least not at that scale. But that didn’t bother his followers, because they thought, well, he’s simply doing in public and openly things that were done privately in the past. ............... that’s very powerful, a powerful human phenomenon that we have now, and we also had in the 1930s. ............ “The bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions, and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues, which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt.” .............. that they’re out there telling you, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re bigoted, you’re backwards, you’re deplorable. .............. And there they are, taking millions of dollars from Goldman Sachs and jet setting all around the world, and telling you how bad climate change is while they fly in their private jets and have their big mansions. ............ If you’re cynical, you can’t be gullible. If you’re gullible, you’re definitely not cynical. But her argument is that they play off of each other. They coexist in a way that’s really important to these movements. ............ it is the policy of Putin’s Kremlin, of his propaganda, to make Russians apathetic. ............ That’s done by offering them contradictory and sometimes ridiculous pieces of information that don’t make sense. ............. the fact checker’s fallacy, that if you can prove, or think you can prove, that somebody who claims to tell the truth is lying, that you will deeply damage their relationship with those who trust them. ............. Tony Blair used to say have this thing, if I could just get two people in the room at the same time and get them talking to one another, they would agree. I could come up with a compromise. Bill Clinton had that as well, this belief that you could solve problems through rational conversation and discussion. .......... the founders of the United States of America ..... they were actively worried about a Caesar coming to power. And there’s the famous Alexander Hamilton quote about, you know, someday a demagogue will come to power and people will fall in behind him. And they’ll gullibly believe whatever it is that he says. ............ So we became a society that was the richest, the most prosperous, the most powerful, the most culturally attractive society in the world. And we simply were that way for many decades. And that gave us the assumption that we’ve found the solution, we found the best of all possible worlds. Within this system, everything can be resolved reasonably, and there aren’t any challenges to it that are serious. ............ there are other impulses in human natures. There’s an attraction to the irrational. There is a desire to smash whatever the existing system is ............. self-interest is much weaker than people think, and people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of material gain to be part of these larger movements. ........... And he’s offering people something completely different. And the expression he uses is

guns, flags and loyalty parades

. So he’s offering people a way of being part of a spectacle. And the rest of us are over here arguing about things that can often seem trivial. ......... the height of this was really the era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. They were both excellent leaders. They were both excellent speakers. And they were both policy wonks who absolutely believed that if they could just get people in the same room and have them talk to one another, they would soon see the light, and rational conversation would solve all problems, and what people really wanted was better policies to deliver better things. ............... people also sometimes want something more. They want to be part of a movement. They want to be part of a big change. They want to be on the cutting edge. They want to be marching in the parade. And when liberalism shrinks to being only about economics, that’s what can happen. .......... Donald Trump’s contempt, very, very often stated, for the other politicians, whose rallies are not very well attended, or who don’t do that many rallies ................ he’s right that he has something important that they don’t. ........ And they especially want it in periods when politics has become very technocratic, and very boring, and very focused on policy. And then, people begin to feel the need for something bigger. .............. people communicate on many levels aside from the literal. .......... people need myths and spirit and stories and communion and narrative to thrive, not just for politics to work, but for them to thrive. ........ identifying this as something that liberalism, when it is in its governing mode, begins to lose. ........... there’s a tendency to miss the importance of myth in politics. ............. A really interesting example of this is with us right now. And we see it in the popularity, the incredible popularity, actually, of the Ukrainian president in the rest of the world, and especially in the democratic world. ............... Why is Zelensky so popular — because he’s seen as somebody who is speaking for and defending a liberal society, one which is profoundly tolerant, in which people can speak more than one language, and they can have different religions, and they believe in freedom and the rule of law. And yet, he’s doing it with a military campaign, and in this vigorous and extremely brave way. .................... and the fact that everybody wants Ukrainian flags hanging from their flag poles, or stuck onto their Twitter accounts. ............ And then Russia actually invades, and Zelensky becomes this world historic figure. ........... and one reason that totalitarians so often, and authoritarians so often actually do launch wars, which is that it is hard to sustain the inspiration that comes from life or death stakes without life or death stakes. ............. totalitarians often create the world they tell people is inevitable. .......... war is a force that gives us meaning. .......... the Nazis, actually — she talks about them in the 1930s, artificially creating civil war conditions. In other words, they sought to increase the feeling of violence so that people would feel more safe inside their movement than outside it, but also to create exactly what you said, which is this life or death stakes. .......... He needs to create the sense that an outsider is threatening Russia in order to justify his rule, so he’s somebody who is profoundly corrupt, and is known to be corrupt, and who runs a very unfair and unequal society, and one that has actually been getting poorer in recent years, which he also knows. .......... He sought to create an enemy, and the enemy is a combination of Europe, which is degenerate and threatening our values, and America, which is violent and is prepared to attack us. And then Ukraine, which is a kind of proxy for both of those things — you know, Ukraine, he describes Ukraine as a fake state, and we need to attack this state, because Ukraine is the symbol of this degeneracy and this violence that are coming from outside. ........... He’s trying to create a rally around the flag sentiment and a feeling of unity in the face of this war. ......... He has created something much closer to the world he has told Russians they are living in, and the world he has told them he is the only answer to. ..........

Putin has not told the Russians yet that they’re at war.

............ The Soviet Union had this very consistent and actually inspiring narrative, one that was much more inspiring than what Putin offers people, about international brotherhood and peace, and so on. And of course, it was hypocritical. And of course, it wasn’t true. And for a lot of people who lived inside that system, it still had a deep appeal. .......... communism essentially fell because the narrative no longer worked. .......... when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union could have invaded and protected East Berlin. And they talked about doing that, but nobody had the conviction anymore that would work, or that it was a good idea. I mean, it’s as if the idea failed, and from the failure of the idea, all these other consequences followed. ............... reality can contradict a propaganda narrative ......... she underestimated the creativity of Western societies, of Western democracies, and American democracy.......... Western economies and societies simply became so much more sophisticated than totalitarian dictatorships, and they became able to solve problems that the dictatorships themselves barely could even know existed .............. social media, as we discussed at the beginning of this conversation, has created new divisions between people that are much harder to surmount .......... people don’t disagree anymore just about their opinions, but they disagree about what happened yesterday. And we can’t agree on our problem. And if we can’t define the problem, then we can’t solve it. ........ this is the problem that the Soviet Union had. I mean, there was so much lying and so much dishonesty that they couldn’t analyze what was wrong with their society. ......... something that was tried in other post-civil war, post-conflict zones, where they try to get people to talk about practical solutions that don’t have existential answers. ......... Americans, especially in the area of national politics, are so caught up in the culture wars ......... a time when people aren’t even focused on the outer world? They’re just focused on online, or theoretical conflicts between narratives. ........... people are caught up in online conflicts that they care more about. ......... Cuba was a slave state past the time when America was, and so it became a place that was where former secessionist Jefferson Davis went on holiday.



‘Elon Musk’s Crash Course’ “I have lots of ideas, more ideas than I can act upon” ....... “I tend to bite off more than I can chew and then just sit there with chipmunk cheeks.” ......... “Elon Musk had a very specific way of motivating people,” JT Stukes, a former Tesla project engineer, said. “He would say really cool things, science fiction things, and he would make you believe that you could do it.” ......... he has spoken publicly of a future in which a driver gets in a car, falls asleep and wakes up at their destination. ......... a disconnect between the vision being espoused by the chief executive and the technological reality
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