Jayson G

@Leo Gura How do you sort the fact from fiction? For ex. recently trump said he wants to stop all wars, or something like that. Most likely that is one of his bullshit games. But a) how do you know what he says, as president and leader going forward, is true or not? and b) in general is there strategies for sorting truth from fiction? I have been wondering this for a while. Especially in politics, news, even books, it's a mess out there to sort through.

From everyone I talked to that voted for trump, most of them did for some financial-related incentive. It's usually just some petty agenda they have.

"Trump and the Republican party chalked up huge wins this week. Did manipulation of social media by generative AI play any role in this election? While many have worried about AI creating fake or misleading content that influences people, generative AI has probably not been the primary method of manipulation in this election cycle. Instead, I think a bigger impact might have been the “amplification effect” where software bots — which don’t have to rely heavily on generative AI — create fake engagement (such as likes/retweets/reshares), leading social media companies’ recommendation algorithms to amplify certain content to real users, some of whom promote it to their own followers. This is how fake engagement leads to real engagement. This amplification effect is well known to computer security researchers. It is an interesting sign of our global anxiety about AI that people ascribe social media manipulation to AI becoming more powerful. But the problem here is not that AI is too powerful; rather, it is that AI is not powerful enough. Specifically, the issue is not that generative AI is so powerful that hostile foreign powers or unethical political operatives are successfully using it to create fake media that influences us; the problem is that some social media companies’ AI algorithms are not powerful enough to screen out fake engagement by software bots, and mistake it for real engagement by users. These bots (which don’t need to be very smart) fool the recommender algorithms into amplifying certain content. The Washington Post reported that tweets on X/Twitter posted by Republicans were more viral than tweets from Democrats. Did this reflect the audience’s deeper engagement with Republican messages than Democratic ones, or have bots influenced this by boosting messages on either side? It is hard to know without access to Twitter’s internal data. The bottleneck to disinformation is not creating it but disseminating it. It is easy to write text that proposes a certain view, but hard to get many people to read it. Rather than generating a novel message (or using deepfakes to generate a misleading image) and hoping it will go viral, it might be easier to find a message written by a real human that supports a point of view you want to spread, and use bots to amplify that. I don’t know of any easy technical or legislative approach to combating bots. But it would be a good step to require transparency of social media platforms so we can better spot problems, if any. Everyone has a role to play in protecting democracy, and in tech, part of our duty will be to make sure social media platforms are fair and defend them against manipulation by those who seek to undermine democracy. Democracy is one of humanity’s best inventions. Elections are an important mechanism for protecting human rights and supporting human flourishing. Following this election, we must continue to strenuously nourish democracy and make sure this gem of human civilization continues to thrive. Keep learning! Andrew" This is an email (Newsletter) I got from Andrew Ng, founder of Deeplearning.ai. I was wondering this for months, before he sent the email. From my experience, engagement on social media looked inflated, but I'm not sure. Not trying to be that guy who says they messed with the election, but it certainly could be a factor here. I'm still trying to make sense of the different factors that led to Trump winning.

Trump may be publicly distancing himself from Project 2025, but the question is, what's going on behind the scenes? Internally, he may be a pivotal part of Project 2025. I don't know.

One important lesson for me personally is to distinguish more strongly between success advice and development advice and not to mix both. I think I have been loose with these distinctions. Also I still have this notion that success comes without consequence. I'm starting to see the falsehood in that more. Even Russell Brand? Didn't know that. I think you make an important point here. These people do have great qualities in terms of intelligence I believe, but it seems that a few "simple" qualities of corruption can really take over a person for the worse.

That is one thing. But also from another perspective, I think that pursuing of success may possibly be making them more corrupt than a "normie". And there are people on this forum who pursue success, but I see most people here actually recognize Trump as a low conscious leader. It's just weird how people like Joe and Owen, whose perspectives I admire, had their success pursuit take them in a different direction. Maybe they just got really good at getting success, that they wanted more and more power, and they think trump gives them an avenue for more power.

This has been making me question the field of personal development lately: Joe Rogan, Owen Cook, etc. people who have been in personal development for a while, understanding life from many perspectives, etc. .. You would think after all that work they would at least care about voting for a conscious leader.

I used to do something similar. Journal + ChatGPT (deep exploration for hours) + get fine distinctions from other art (video content in your case) + ask yourself questions that you are curious about + free write. You will have tons of ideas this way.

@The Renaissance Man These are pretty good examples. I'm actually curious about a lot of what you mentioned as well. I think Leo would cover the dynamics of theft in his video, but also curious about AI and marketing as for a lot of us this will be a part of our future as business owners going on our life purpose. And I also think Leo is not suggesting to not be a thief as well. Theft does appear to be a natural consequence of survival. By nature of survival, if I'm surviving, I am consuming all kinds of resources from my environment, resources from other living beings, the environment, resources not even mine.

@Leo Gura Thanks for addressing the recurring subscriptions. It is connected to my life purpose and I want to make sure that I am as conscious and as ethical as possible. I too dislike when companies like ClickFunnels make me go through 7 tricky hoops to cancel their absurdly expensive software. I will make my software easy to cancel and find other ways to make it conscious. My purpose for recurring subscriptions is just continuous cash flow for continuous expenses like employees, recurring development tech stacks, etc. Also looking forward to the videos on corruption and theft a lot. Corruption in particular would be a very useful video. One theme about corruption that keeps coming up for me as I keep noticing and letting go of corrupting behaviors in my life this past week is my connection to life, my authentic self, and honoring that as motivation to let go of corruption in my life.

@The Renaissance Man I'm actually referring to his latest blog post lol he gave a ton of examples there. But I felt that those examples are the pretty obvious ones. He referred to more subtle forms of theft, but I think Leo could have expanded on the more subtle forms of theft. I have also been very interested in examples for corruption lately as well. Past some days I have really been observing corruption and contemplation in my own life and realized just how important this topic is.

@Leo Gura Regarding Theft .. I have actually been thinking about theft, since you made some forum comments a few weeks ago. I'm starting to think that it's not just the AI companies stealing data. If one even generates an AI image with MidJourney or Dall-e and uses that for some purpose of any kind, that is a form of theft. My thinking is that it took stolen data to create that image. It's like that image was made with that data in a sense. Along those lines, it is possible that ordinary human creativity, which is most of the creativity within most of the products and services we see is a form of theft. James Cameron said Titanic was Romeo and Juliet on a boat. Aside from the obvious Titanic copy, he copied ideas from Romeo and Juliet. Now of course this form of theft is not bad in my opinion. I actually think this is a good form of theft. But it is theft. But then the question is, how does one even define theft. If theft is stealing what shouldn't be stolen, then that's a narrow form of theft. If theft is defined as taking an element outside of yourself that is not yours, that can be theft. But also interestingly, at one point you mentioned that nothing is yours. Everything is god's. We take credit for a product we built, even if it is completely original, when really it is god doing it. Maybe everything in our life is theft considering we like to say to a lot of things that "This is mine." "This is my mother." "This is my desk." I don't know about that last part lol I might be getting too ahead of myself. By the way, are all recurring subscriptions theft? If I decide to offer an app with a 10 dollar per month recurring subscription, but that app provides tremendous value to society, and I need to set that recurring subscription for continuous cash flow for the sustainability of the app's long-term development, I don't think that would be theft, would it?

@Leo Gura "At this point I will be happy if America still has a democracy in 4 years. I doubt it." .. what does that mean exactly though? dictatorship? a highly flawed democracy? collapse of government?

@Leo Gura It's not like I'm only on social media all day. But social media, from my understanding plays a big role in the election votes right and societal thinking? It's currently the most powerful form of media distribution and the influence on society's mind. I'm not talking about my own mind. I primarily get my information from books and high quality videos. I'm talking about the minds of mainstream society.

@Leo Gura I try not to let it affect my inner reality, but don't they represent a good portion of societal thinking and societal reality, sort of?