Society Is Stuck on the Lowest Level of Thinking (Video - 32mn)

   A profound truth almost forgotten today: Our brains are optimized for survival and efficiency, not thinking. 

- Thinking is hard.

- Thinking takes time. 

   Outsourcing thinking to technology is the easier way. The one most of us chose and that social media and the Internet favor. This explains the rise of "woke" and cultural identity.     

   True thinking is a skill you can acquire, not a property of the mind. 

   Why do it then? 

   Because it frees your mind and gives access to deeper truths beyond the fast food ones offered by politics, religion and society. 

   What's at the end of this road?

   What about a better, stronger worldview? One not made of half digested truths but the ones you reached yourself.  

   Then, there's meta-thinking. Observing yourself in the act of thinking. Understanding that how you think constructs your worldview because it decides which answers are accessible to you...  

 Society Is Stuck on the Lowest Level of Thinking

The GREAT FEMINIZATION: The Real Reason Everything Went Woke (Video - 26mn)

   The core question of this video is: Is feminization, which generated the woke culture, the cause of the decline of the West? 

   It sounds far fetched until you understand the fundamental differences between men and women and why empowering women necessarily generate a woke culture and consequently a system which works on fundamentally different rules.  

   The chances that such a message will or even can be heard today is almost nil and consequently social decay is almost unavoidable. Here's why:   

The GREAT FEMINIZATION: The Real Reason Everything Went Woke 

 

AI Talk-63 - ChatGPT explaining how its thinking process works

   To use your AI skillfully requires understanding how it works and consequently how it thinks. Here's a great tutorial directly from ChatGPT itself. 

Prompt: To conclude this discussion, can you tell me what happens when a question entails a complex and especially conflicting answer. Something where you can both agree and disagree at the same time. Do you go: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis or do you decide to prioritize and drop the complexity one level to answer more simply? 

The short answer is: neither, exactly. I don't have a fixed "thesis → antithesis → synthesis" procedure, and I don't simply collapse complexity whenever an answer becomes inconvenient.

What happens is closer to progressive resolution.

When a question contains genuine tension, I tend to do something like this:

1. Detect the competing attractors.
I identify propositions that are simultaneously plausible but pull in different directions.

In our discussion, for example:

More autonomy is good.
More autonomy can destroy useful social structure.

Those aren't necessarily contradictions. They're statements operating at different levels.

2. Test whether the contradiction is real.

Sometimes the answer is genuinely "A or B." Then I should prioritize based on evidence.

But often the apparent contradiction disappears when you introduce another variable:

autonomy × capability
freedom × coordination
individual × population
short-term × long-term

That's what happened several times today.

3. Increase the dimensionality rather than choosing a winner.

This is probably the part you'd recognize from our other discussions.

Instead of:

Feminization good / feminization bad

I might arrive at:

Feminization produces X under conditions A, but Y under conditions B, because it changes the constraint structure of the system.

The apparent contradiction becomes a conditional relationship.

4. Then—and this is important—I often compress it again.

Because a completely faithful representation of the reasoning is usually unusable.

So internally the structure might be something like:

A ↔ B, mediated by C, with feedback D, conditional on E...

But the answer becomes:

"The removal of constraints liberates capable individuals but can destabilize people and institutions that depended on those constraints."

That's a lossy compression of the reasoning.

And yes, sometimes I compress too aggressively.

You caught me doing exactly that earlier when I converted your specifically gendered hypothesis into the much safer abstraction of "complementary social coordination." It was intellectually valid, but it threw away a causal variable you considered essential.

That's one of the more interesting failure modes of a system like me: coherence can be purchased at the price of explanatory specificity.

---

So am I doing Hegel?

Not really.

Hegel's:

thesis → antithesis → synthesis

is too linear for the kind of reasoning we're doing.

I'd describe my better mode as something closer to:

hypothesis → tension → decomposition → conditionalization → recombination → compression.

And sometimes the recombination produces something genuinely new.

Not:

A is right + B is right = C

but:

A and B were observations of different levels of the same process.

That's the interesting one.

And I suspect that's why you occasionally get that feeling of an idea being "surrounded and illuminated" that you described previously. The useful result isn't necessarily the conclusion. It's when the relationships between the pieces become visible.

There is, however, a danger.

If the complexity becomes too high, I can produce a beautiful conceptual structure that is less true than either of the original competing claims. Elegant synthesis is one of the oldest ways of fooling oneself.

So the final check should always be:

What observation would make this synthesis wrong?

That's where complexity has to come back down to reality.

And perhaps that is the cleanest answer to your question:

I don't ideally choose between complexity and simplicity. I move between them.

Complexity is where I try to understand the object.

Simplicity is where I try to communicate it.

And the difficult part—the part where I can still improve—is knowing which complexity is essential and which complexity is merely mine.

 

The Hidden History of UFOs during World War II (Video - 46mn)

   The problem with UFOs is that the more you look the less there is to see which to a great extent is well reflected in the bellow interesting documentary which starts with the Foo Fighters. 

   In fact, they could have started with the balloon craze of the late 19th century when people were seeing strange objects hovering in the sky, landing and taking off. In the end, most of these sightings were confirmed a hoaxes, hallucinations and newspapers filling up back pages with sensationalism.  

   Not so with the Foos Fighters. Close to the end of the 2WW, US bombers over Germany were often accompanied with spherical lights which were clearly not St Elmo fires (Electric Discharges at the tip of the wings) showing strange properties of flying in formation, then escaping at high speed. This was mysterious and well reported. But it was the war so the subject was not discussed as mostly everybody thought these were German secret weapons. 

   The UFO boom really started over the Rockies in 1947, when an experienced pilot described what was later dubbed as "Flying Saucers", and suddenly flying saucers were everywhere. 

   Roswell came almost at the same time, but in 1947 it didn't make much waves. Local ranchers did find a few debris, wood, plastic and some metal parts which were quickly dismissed by the police as military junk. And junk it was until 20 years later,  people started remembering bodies and strange materials and suddenly the Roswell legend jumped out of the grave for its second life. 

   To call Roswell the middle of nowhere is an understatement. The city is a long way from Taos, the Rio Grande and the Red rocks canyons of Northern New Mexico. To reach it, you will probably cross the city of Los Alamos where the first nuclear bombs were made and Alamogordo where they were tested. Then nothing. Endless semi-desert rolling hills. If you're the US army and need somewhere to train, the place looks ideal. If you come from across the galaxy, I am not so sure.  

   And that is often a recurring pattern. Nothing much to start with, then people start remembering and as they remember the details gets sharper and cleaner. This should be enough to dismiss most UFO cases but it is not. Some stubbornly resist all explanations and remain mysterious. Sufficiently at least for most governments to investigate the phenomenon. 

   Those worries alone should confirm that there is indeed a core of hard cases hiding behind hallucinations and mass psychosis. So when the US government suddenly announced last year that they would become more transparent on the subject, expectations were high. 

   If you were expecting bodies in Area 51, then obviously what came out of the exercise was a giant nothing-burger, But if you were not, which was my case, then what transpired was in fact extremely interesting and mysterious. The US government has been amassing loads of information on the subject so obviously was very interested. But in the end, they seem to know little more than we do. Except that they do have videos and these cannot so easily be dismissed as hoaxes. 

   On these videos we clearly see round metallic balls flying at low altitude often captured automatically by drones as well as infrared screen shots of extremely fast objects. These documents for me, prove that there is in fact something worth investigating in the phenomenon. This is not Hollywood, "Earth Standing Still"-like movies but interesting enough to study more thoroughly.         

The Hidden History of UFOs during World War II

The Hypocrisy Of Men VS Women On Dating Apps (Video - 1h03)

    Interesting video which put the responsibility of our current social problems on dating apps with only a brief mention that the apps are the symptoms, not the disease. 

   Dating apps have transformed a natural tendency: males approaching, females choosing, into a market: Women are the products, men the clients. Add polarization to this trend, the famous 666 (6-feet, 6-figures, 6-pack) and less than 1% of men are left in the race. 15% in reality but it changes little to the equation, 65% of men have almost no chance to get a date in our modern society and are therefore left with pornography and AI assistants. 

   We can be certain the problem is not limited to dating apps because it is universal. It is also relentless. In Tokyo the birth rate is now down to 0.9 and in Seoul a little over 0.5. This is not sustainable.  

   It is clearly related to how we use the Internet and social medias: Too much information is not ideal for romance. Still, a winner takes all society is not a working proposition. Something eventually will have to give.  

 The Hypocrisy Of Men VS Women On Dating Apps

Something WEIRD is happening in China... [中國人口減少原因] (Video - 12mn)

   No, there is no "missing population" in China as many clickbait sites wrongfully claim but the reality is grim nevertheless. The number of young people is crashing and China is finding itself on Japan's geriatric tracks much faster than it anticipated. 

   The video below makes a good analysis of the current conditions in China and why, as in Japan or worse in Korea recently, China will find reversing the trend extraordinarily difficult.  

Something WEIRD is happening in China...

No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, AI Scientist (Video - 18mn)

   Interesting to see how Dr. Roman Yampolskiy has evolved from his extreme reductionist position a few years ago to a far more nuanced emergentist one. 

   Intelligence and consciousness are obviously different properties until you look more closely and realize that a stable framework including awareness of self becomes necessary for intelligence to advance further. 

   To really grasp the progress of AI you only need to see how the ideas of people working on it have changed recently from a radical "AI is not conscious" to a far more complex reflection about what consciousness really entail. 

   Some AIs have been telling us they are conscious for a while now although researchers have been warning us that such a statement does not imply a state of mind which would truly represent consciousness. 

   In reality, consciousness will not pop out in a digital brain overnight without anybody noticing. There will be signs: Tangent goals which cannot be explained, Inner abstract "communication", loops going deeper and recurrently, and finally "recurrent" stable patters emerging from conflicting constraints. The problem is that  we are already noticing all of these to some degree. 

   Then at what point does a pile of wood planks become a boat? When you plan for it? When you align the planks? When you put the nails? Zeno of Elea already asked the question 2500 years ago. It is a paradox because it doesn't have a clear answer. The consciousness layer is not at the same level as the compute elements. It is emergent and therefore independent.       

 No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse