AI is developing backwards. The simplest organisms eat and find food. More complex ones can smell and sense tremors. After several steps in evolution comes vision and complex thought.

AIs that can't smell, can't feel hunger, can't desire -- I do not think it can understand the world the way organic life does.

> Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”

Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.

Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.

I had never noticed this before. Can you point at any examples?

I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.

I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck

Agree, it makes it seem like the individual is "one of us" and that what they're saying is a little more raw/genuine.

"They're being mean to me." vs "theyre being mean to me".

Uh, no, it makes you look careless and unprofessional.

How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".

I always cut them into slices, then leave them in an airtight plastic container for an hour or two, so the juice can seep out a little.

Do you do that with your apples too?

This analysis totally ignores the power of snappiness. Of being laconic. It's the sort of stuff that works in the walled garden of academia but completely ignores the state of reality, where the average person is so bogged down by information overload that the gist is all they ever desire. I think a pie chart or an infographic is infinitely more powerful than a "Stage 4 argument".

That’s because the author, Peter Suber, doesn’t go beyond Nietzsche in his work (you can read his self summary elsewhere on the website). I’d suggest you read The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin[0], if you want an exposition on the power of the visual, and of shocks of experience, in the social and political world.

[0]https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

> This analysis totally ignores the power of snappiness. Of being laconic.

You can convince somebody with an unsound argument if you say it in a certain way, but it seems unethical to do so.

It's also may not work for somebody who has a habit of coming back to the arguments in his thoughts and finding questions - if he can't answer them well enough.