Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.

They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a “good” thing. The situation here is not that the “rich” run the economy - it’s that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.

The alternate headline here is “wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending”

Or

“1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck”

People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They’re not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.

Instead we need to acknowledge that the people “earning” 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.

It’s not clear to me who or what is directly responsible for this, but do you really think the American Agency for Making Sure Planes Don’t Crash isn’t involved when an American Plane Crashes… just because it happened somewhere else?

Reveddit seems to be a useful workaround but of course you’ll see all the removed content as well

A lot of great answers here, but one issue stands out as the most important: time. There isn’t enough time for anyone else to pick up the slack for the promises the US has already made. People across the world are depending on those supplies, and many of them won’t survive long enough for another country to step in and provide them.

Even the ones that will survive will face long-term consequences. Malnutrition and lapses in medical care aren’t just short-term or isolated problems. Suddenly pausing treatments for tuberculosis patients doesn’t just mean the patient can suffer and die - it also means TB can repopulate in their bodies, develop resistance like any bacteria exposed to but not cured by antibiotics, and that patient can spread more drug-resistant strains of TB to others. (Credit to John Green). More drug-resistant TB anywhere in the world is going to be a problem for people everywhere.

Not enough attention is given to the literal arms race we find ourselves in. Most big tech buzz is all “yay innovation!” Or “oh no, jobs!”

Don’t get me wrong, the impact AI will have on pretty much every industry shouldn’t be underestimated, and people are and will lose their jobs.

But information is power. Sun Tzu knew this a long time ago. The AI arms race won’t just change job markets - it will change global markets, public opinion, warfare, everything.

The ability to mass produce seemingly reliable information in moments - and the consequent inability to trust or source information in a world flooded by it…

I can’t find the words to express how dangerous it is. The long-term consequences are going to be on par with - and terribly codependent with - the consequences of the industrial revolution.

Thank you!

But, the beautiful thing about hitting rock bottom is that the only way to go from there is up. All of that to say that maybe (yes, I’m being optimistic) Trump is what this country needs to hit rock bottom, do some self reflection, and pull ourselves back up to a better place. The biggest takeaway I learned way back when is that no matter how bad things get, the world keeps spinning

These are unfortunately contradictory ideas. It sounds like you had a positive journey in the end, but there are many individuals - especially people struggling with addiction - who will tell you that there is no rock bottom. The world does keep on spinning. And as long as you are alive, you can go lower. There is no point where you go so low that you hit bedrock and the world stops spinning.

Plenty of people think they hit rock bottom and later discover that what they thought of as their lowest point eventually became a time they now think of as “the good days”.

There is nothing inevitable or guaranteed about hitting rock bottom and climbing your way back up. It is hard work, and it sounds like you know that personally. Whatever comes next will be a terrible struggle for all of us, and there is no guarantee of success. But we do have to try anyway.

That’s very interesting. Do you know where I could learn more about that decision? I tried searching but its 2025 and any phrases I could think of just returned websites offering nearly identical collections of flag emojis…

As much as theists would claim that their morals were handed down from divinity, ultimately an athiest would understand those morals to be originally handed down from humans, and therefore humanistic.

Doesn’t mean they’re good morals of course, especially when corrupted by motives of power, but bad morals can be handed down by secular sources as well. The point being that theistic origins do not necessarily mean the morals themselves are flawed.

In any case, fundamentally the ethics of AA’s 12 steps are technically theistic in origin and nomenclature but humanistic in nature, in that they appear to really dig down into the psychology of humans in a way that deviates significantly from their christian roots.

According to Mercadante, however, the AA concept of powerlessness over alcohol departs significantly from Oxford Group belief. In AA, the bondage of an addictive disease cannot be cured, and the Oxford Group stressed the possibility of complete victory over sin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Alcoholics_Anonymous

The original christian prayer group believed that through God, addiction could be cured. AA has maintained from the beginning that addiction cannot be cured - a recovering alcoholic is and always will be a recovering alcoholic. Faith in God alone will not deliver salvation because addiction is not sin, it is illness, and should be treated by more than just prayer.

I never said that, nor did I ever think that. But you have made clear that this discussion is unwanted, and I will respect that and say no more on it. Farewell.

Did you? To me? Where?

I already told you what I didn’t agree with and why I didn’t agree with it several times

I didn’t and still don’t see any explanations for why you disagree, other than “being athiest” which I do not believe is sufficient explanation in and of itself. There are plenty of athiests who find reasons to agree or disagree on this topic beyond that single belief.

I apologize if my approach seems insistent that you need to agree with me. I only wanted to explore the topic further, and am happy to discontinue that if the desire is not reciprocated. Farewell.

I have no idea how to interpret “improve our conscious contact with God” any other way.

… All they’re really doing is using their imagination to simulate a being greater than themselves and then asking “what would that being want for my life?”

This is a secular interpretation of “improve our conscious contact with God” that doesn’t actually involve “communicating with a God”

Is there something about this interpretation that you don’t understand or disagree with?

I have no idea how to interpret “improve our conscious contact with God” any other way.

Then you’re not experiencing any empathy for them. You’re not actively putting yourself in their perspective, their world. You’re accepting what they say, not extrapolating from that to understand what they think.

Religious people generally don’t hear voices in their head. We know God doesn’t talk to them. They know God doesn’t talk to them. They might believe in signs or whatever, but they don’t hear a voice when they pray, and they certainly don’t expect to.

From the outside perspective of an athiest, you should be able to see that all they’re really doing is using their imagination to simulate a being greater than themselves and then asking “what would that being want for my life?”

This is not very functionally different from asking ourselves “if I was a better person, what would I want for my life?”

The theistic process could be corrupted by malformed ideas about the things a deity would want, sure. But the athiestic process could also be corrupted by malformed ideas about the things a good person would want.

If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS.

It sounds like they don’t want to take responsibility for that user choice or be connected to anything that happens because of that choice.

It would still be an insecure choice, even with obvious UX distinctions. It would only be a matter of time before headlines muddy the waters with “intercepted Signal messages reveal…” or “Judge rules in favor of subpeona for unencrypted Signal messages…”

I am describing its original purpose in the sense of prayer’s original purpose in psychology and sociology.

One can learn lessons from religious practices without becoming religious in the process.

Besides prayer in general, take another look at the step:

… improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Do you know what that is? Look at it as an athiest, and imagine what purpose that step serves.

Seeking to understood God and his will? That’s not - as many would put it - a human trying to communicate with a Sky Dad.

That’s a human trying to understand his own Coherent Extrapolated Volition: “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence

When a human makes a gesture and a sound on cue, they’re usually engaging in in-group signalling. But when a human prays and meditates on finding God’s Will for them, they are trying to imagine their own desires and needs from the standpoint of a superior being. One with more information, a greater mind, a greater moral compass. They are trying to make themselves better by imagining the ways they could be better.

Athiests do this too, they just call it cognitive behavioral therapy and moral philosophy.

But you don’t see how it’s easy to rewrite something without losing its original purpose and value? How the step can serve the exact same psychological niche for an athiest as it does for a thiest, without actually changing the cognitive and emotional processes they need to undergo for sobriety or self-improvement?