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vakibs @vakibs
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Technology is not like fire, it is like prescription drugs.

When the best intentions to relieve pain get combined with profit motives of an industry that doesn’t hesitate to trample on anything on its way, we will have an epidemic of addiction and abuse of the drugs.
The effect of technology use are long term, based on how they affect the people’s brains and social behavior. They are not instantaneous like getting burned by fire.

Instantaneous effects are easy to see and reason upon. What we have with technology is far more insidious.
Just as how tobacco companies resisted information about cancer, or how oil companies resist information about climate change, tech companies do have an incentive to resist information about the rot of the human brain and the social relationships between people due to tech usage.
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I think there was a steady and continuous slide from 1970s to now, on recognizing inner talent vs outer bling-bling.

The 70s had rock stars. The 80s had pop stars. The 90s reality TV stars. The 00s had YouTube stars. The 10s had Instagram stars. Next we’ll have bot-stars.
The context of the artistic experience and creative process doesn’t matter much now, as far as popular appraisal is concerned. People’s attention spans got much shorter, and everything can (must?) be cropped and photoshopped in the most presentable manner.
On the other hand, there is a veritable explosion of tiny communities who nourish true creativity even today. But how do they survive and sustain themselves economically? Not possible as the web ecosystem supports only the top performers and aggregate monopolies. Not subcultures.
Read 3 tweets
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It is true that we must develop machine-learning models that can represent causality, but there is no one notion of causality that “represents our intuition about cause and effect”.

All notions of causality are tied up with theology, and specifically, with the theology of time.
When we say the “intuitive notion of cause and effect”, what we typically mean is the Christian theology of time which is the dominant paradigm today, and secularized version of it known as “Deism”, that attributes the fundamental cause to a mover external to the universe.
This theological model of time is implicitly assumed within physics, for example, when we posit the “Big Bang” as the origin of space-time.

Then on, causality is modeled as one directional links from a “past” event to a “future” event.

But this model fails at singularities.
Read 9 tweets
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Well, only the most misinformed of the people would say that AI is about automating “routine work”.

The most drudguous jobs are the last to be automated. It is white collar jobs that get automated first. The proportion of bullshit jobs that humans have is increasing over time.
Even if we accept that routine work is getting automated, and somehow that it is a good thing, what does “humans will achieve more” mean ?

It is ‘newspeak’ to mean “humans will consume more”. And consume till when? Until the ecosystems of the planet get depleted beyond recovery.
The strange western idea of “progress” as a kind of accelerating consumption of resources can only lead to one thing: human extinction.

Other civilizations had other metrics for defining what “achieving more” means. In that perspective, routine work is not at all a bad thing.
Read 6 tweets

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In a speech last week, Pain News Networkreports, AMA President Barbara McAneny described her own experience with the damage caused by anti-opioid zeal. When a patient with metastatic prostate cancer was suffering from bone pain 👇
that was not adequately relieved by his medication, "I increased the dosage of his opioids from two per day to three, and of course he ran out early," McAneny said. "So I called his primary care physician, who agreed to write a prescription for 👇
his very large amount of time-release morphine." When the patient tried to fill the prescription, the pharmacist contacted the insurer, which denied coverage. "The pharmacist suspected my patient was a drug seeker & did not alert me that his prescription 👇
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Best ideas to beat Trump?
- 70% want #MedicareForAll
- 60% want tuition free public colleges
- 58% want $15 minimum wage
- 72% want to expand Social Security
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- 64% want to legalize marijuana
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Let's crush it.
Receipts:
theweek.com/speedreads/803…

reuters.com/investigates/s…

washingtonpost.com/business/2018/…

socialsecurityworks.org/wp-content/upl…

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Let's get it done
Read 6 tweets
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#Pain is a #blessing in disguise!

Just look back at your life. When you were happy about something, did you ever wonder about the meaning of life? Did you look inwards to see who you are, what life is all about? Did you feel the need to deeply know about the ultimate Truth? No!
When things go smoothly you just blindly follow the same routine with barely any awareness or consciousness. There is nothing to jolt you into awareness from your routine so you continue without any awareness. But when #pain happens, it makes you look at life objectively.
It forces you to look deeper into life, to learn why you react the way you react and seek to uncover the real #mystery of life. #Pain is the key that can open the door to the world of #reality; the choice is yours to open the door or not.
Read 6 tweets
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THREAD: Financial Independence:Retire Early (FI:RE) Series Part 1a. Understanding Money: PERCEIVED vs. ACTUAL value. #FIRE #FinancialLiteracy #FinancialIndependence #RetireEarly #TayoOyedeji
Formula 1. FI:RE is not about Money. But you need to understand money to attain FI:RE.
Money is:

1. A means of exchange for PERCEIVED value.
2. A store of ACTUAL value.

Understanding the dichotomy between PERCEIVED and ACTUAL value is the key to FI:RE.
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We are live tweeting for the #Ready4Nuclear US/Canada #Nuclear Energy Leadership Summit!

Great slate of speaker today-- stay tuned.
First Speaker, Marco Presutti of Natural Resources Canada reminds us that $140B in trade and 9 million jobs result from US/Canada Nuclear Partnership.
Next up, Dr. John Barrett, CEO of Canadian Nuclear Association. "After a great advocacy effort at #COP21, nuclear was included in the clean energy efforts of Mission: Innovation."

@TalkNuclear
Read 33 tweets
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Some sauropod dinosaurs had sensory afferent neurons over 50m in length. So if a sauropod accidentally touched a hot stove with its tail, it would take the brain over 25 seconds to realise it was burning itself (assuming C fibre conducting at 2 m/s). app.pan.pl/archive/publis… #pain
Presumably evolution figured out a way of being quicker than this - perhaps by using fast myelinated A fibres or very fat C fibres for nociception instead.
But the point stands that throughout evolution, sensory afferents have had to increase & shrink their length by many orders of magnitude, while still staying quick enough to actually trigger a reflex or pain percept in a useful enough time frame for an organism to get away safely
Read 5 tweets

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