nerdspeak

Not especially, but as Leo says, motivation and attraction to novelty rapidly decreases. In my twenties I’d feel impulses to learn or research new things just for the hell of it, even if not related to my work at all. Now, I only learn new stuff directly related to my research or other work projects. Part of that is context and life demands, but some of it is biological for sure.

@Fluran Alex Karp is not a socialist. 3rd generation Frankfurt School is not socialist, it’s to the right of the current SPD in Germany. It’s interesting that a Frankfurt School person ends up head of a US national security state project, given the many ties between the earlier Frankfurt School and the CIA, which promoted Marcuse and Adorno as controlled opposition. Adorno published in CIA-funded journals and Marcuse even had a handler.

I didn’t call the countries social democracies, just that the Swedish Social Democratic Party was in power for a long time. It’s also not really proper to lump them all together, there are a lot of differences.

Swedish model is increasingly more like neoliberal statism. Becuase the social democrats were in power for so long, people expect the state to do stuff for them, but for the past 15 years the elites have drunk the New Public Management kool-aid hard. So, while keeping state provision, they privatized the delivery of the public services either using the market or market-like scoring indicators, and it's created crazy shortages (as well as a lot of rent-seeking). One of the reasons you have so many problems integrating migrants in Sweden is that the waiting lists for schools are several years, so a refugee who comes at 14 from Syria might not start attending school till 17. Of course it's a much better place to live than the US or UK, but the idea that Social Darwinist market survival-of-the-fittest should be our political horizon is pretty silly (although understandable if you live there). Imo, given where they started, the Chinese model is a lot more impressive.

@Ninja_pig They charge high tuition because that's what it costs to provide a US-style university education, and the public funding base has been cut drastically. Even at the most expensive schools, the private liberal arts colleges like Amherst or Williams, the $85k tuition (bear in mind, avg tuition paid is $15k because of financial aid) doesn't fully cover the college's cost per student. They make up the shortfall through income from their endowment investments. There is administrative bloat (with Vice deans of xyz), but the main issue is it's expensive to educate people, which is why there needs to be public funding. Most students don't end up at rich private schools like Williams. We could make it cheaper by reducing quality. E.g., I'm in Belgium right now, and the university's cost per student is more like $10k (each student pays close to $0). Why so cheap? Average class size is ~500 at undergraduate level and over 100 even at master's-level No office hours for direct interaction with professors -- this starts only at PhD level Libraries are open 9 am - 5 pm on weekdays only Athletics faciltiies and university-sponsored student life basically doesn't exist This is in Belgium, one of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. So, if there weren't student loans, public universities in the US would be more like this (lower quality). It didn't use to be this bad in Belgium but the system is different -- university budgets are directly provided by the regional government -- and, guess what? Center-right and far-right parties have been working hard to defund the universities for the past 30 years. As societies get richer, it makes sense to spend more on education. It's better if the rich pay for it directly rather than through bizarre back-door student loan schemes like we have in the US, but it's a creative adaptation andit could be worse.

Half of what it spits out for me is wrong, misleading, or too ambiguous to be useful. I’m better off doing the work myself.

Majed is in Lebanon thus university is likely free or very inexpensive. However, I want to point out that this anti-student debt discourse in the US is quite destructive. 1. Federal student debt (through Dept of Education) has very lenient repayment terms (basically if you're not making a lot of money you pay 0) and it's forgiven after 20-25 years depending on the plan you're on. Yes, private student debt is terrible and predatory, but you can avoid it. 2. Studies show people who try to avoid student debt by working through school get worse grades and are much more likely to drop out. Of course, it would be better if university were free or close to it in the US, but the political situation makes it almost impossible to boost funding back to Cold War levels. Thus the govt and higher ed bureaucrats have figured out this patch solution through the Dept of Education student loans. I know Elon wants to abolish it lol but it's never going to happen. Even if you accept his philistine neoliberal logic, the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem is based on commodifying the basic research done at the University of California and Stanford, and they're both funded heavily by DoE. Why doesn't the US government communicate how lenient the DoE student loans are? Again, it's for political reasons -- they don't want to expose it to attack from the right. It is basically a direct transfer payment program to young people who qualify, and the more libertarian side of the Republican party hates it. You saw how Biden trying to do some moderate reform resulted in these attacks through the courts that threw the whole system in disarray. If you do university, go to the best place possible to learn what you need to learn. Then figure out how to pay for it. I say this as someone who (1) is an academic; (2) who tried to be clever and minimize student debt It would have been easier if I just used the system how it's intended, a bit more US federal debt would not impact my life at all and would have made my path way more straightforward, quicker, and fun.

Even calling it AI is a bit silly. LLMs are not AI. I work in a qualitative field in academia and LLMs are almost useless. Even with sophisticated prompt engineering, their analysis is very generic. Good enough to pass an intro-level course? Maybe. Good enough to write something that could survive peer review? You have to be kidding.

LLMs just makes programmers (and other symbolic analysts) 20% more productive. Did Microsoft Excel eliminate accountants? No, it just meant they could more work faster. If you read history, the same cycle repeats every time there’s a big new invention. “Omgz, all the people will have no jobs.”

I only do things I enjoy. Working only for money is terrible -- almost unbearable -- once you have basic security. Ok, when I was broke, it was somewhat motivating, but once I accumulated a couple years worth of living expenses in savings, it became almost impossible to get myself to keep doing what got me there. One caveat: there is a certain wheeler/dealer type of person for whom making money through trade, sales, and financial schemes is enjoyabe. For those people following the money is its own reward. But, doing something very technical and demanding like programming, with no intrinsic interest just so that you can sell your labor time for money, is a really bad idea. I am not saying you can be a professional rapper, but probably if you try (and most likely fail) there will be something related that emerges that you can make work economically. When you really commit to a thing you enjoy, various opportunities start emerging seemingly from nowhere. When you do things only for money the whole world becomes this very tiring, draining place, and you might as well not be alive.

Most of my Ukrainian friends have gone back

It's flaws are increasingly obvious, so it's becoming more authoritarian.

@RendHeaven In tribes or villages sex is also regulated, in ways that would prohibit the sort of harem you describe. You could only get what you describe in contexts with major power imbalances, eg, warlords who start to control the surplus production in coercive ways. Even now, I can only imagine it with a major power imbalance in place, even if it was fully consensual. I can’t imagine Leonardo DiCaprio keeping a harem of big-name female stars, but I’m sure he could keep a harem of entry-level aspiring models.

When I was younger and dumber coming from Western hookup culture, I lived in a middle-income (not even poor) country and unintentionally had what a previous poster called a “harem.” By that I mean, multiple women who must have known I was seeing others since we met max once every two weeks, but for whom I was their only partner (as I found out later). I actually felt really bad when I later figured this out, since I wasn’t even helping them financially, beyond paying for our dates. I didn’t really know I had an obligation to communicate clearly what the rules were, etc., and it eventually caused some drama. For the women I guess it made a kind of sense, in that they thought by being faithful to me without discussing commitment, they created a kind of resource/emergency assistance debt back from me, since the state and their families couldn’t reliably protect them. These women were otherwise very middle-class in their presentation, with masters degrees, jobs, etc. In poorer countries, where being “independent” in the Western sense is not really possible (to the extent we actually are is a separate convo), people spend a lot of time organizing mutually dependent relationships and ideally becoming dependent on a powerful patron. I dont think we can generalize from poor countries to the West, or from West to poor (or even middle income) countries too much.

This is some rap video fantasy. No, the women will resent the man using their economic leverage to “buy” an asymmetric relationship, and end up dating others anyway. Some financially insecure women would agree to it initially, but it will not last.