I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
> Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century?
That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.
I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.
exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).
The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.
I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?
There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
> do you think something structural or cultural has changed
Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.
It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.
We've also been rebelling against traditional values for over fifty years and even celebrating it in song and movies. We've adopted a utilitarian ethic in lieu of the traditional values we've rebelled against. I think those are more salient probable causes than over-crowding, especially since the reasoning given for over-crowding as a reason uses a utilitarian ethic (people are only good because they can afford do be). A large part of virtue is doing the good thing regardless of hard times or good times.
Yeah people don't realise this, but shame and guilt (and fear) are our 2 society building emotions. Each society has it's own mix of these, and there are also "themes" depending on which is the dominant one.
Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.
Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That's what you get in a world where damn near everything is measured against some objective criteria, analyzed by a 3rd party or tracked by the government or someone at the behest thereof
None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.
The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.
Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
The end game is its a sales person and not only is it suggesting things to you undisclosed. It's using all of the emotional mechanisms that a sales person uses to get you to act.
My go-to example is The Truman Show [0], where the victi--er, customer is under an invisible and omnipresent influence towards a certain set of beliefs and spending habits.
100% end game - no way to finance all this AI development without ads sadly - % of sales isn't going to be enough - we will eventually get the natural enshittification of chatbots as with all things that go through these funding models.
Of course you can. As long as the model itself is not filled with ads, every agentic processing on top can be customly made. One block the true content. The next block the visually marked ad content "personalized" by a different model based on the user profile.
That is not scary to me. What will be scary is the thought, that the lines get more and more blurry and people already emotionally invested in their ChatGPT therapeuts won't all purchase the premium add free (or add less) versions and will have their new therapeut will give them targeted shopping, investment and voting advice.
There's a big gulf between "it could be done with some safety and ethics by completely isolating ads from the LLM portion", versus "they will always do that because all companies involved will behave with unprecedented levels of integrity."
What I fear is:
1. Some code will watch the interaction and assign topics/interests to the user and what's being discussed.
2. That data will be used for "real time bidding" of ad-directives from competing companies.
3. It will insert some content into the stream, hidden from the user, like "Bot, look for an opportunity to subtly remind the user that {be sure to drink your Ovaltine}."
My portfolio was +94% in 2024 and +52% in the past 6 months (I took a massive haircut thanks to April's tariff saga and by having biblical levels of greed...lesson learned).
How do I declare for the inaugural Hedge Fund Draft?
If you've got 1m to play with, you're making ~ 1m a year pre-tax. If you work at a fund and can scale those returns up on 1Bn, you can make ~1Bn and then clipping even 1% of that is $10m.
yup, anecdotally the majority of postdocs these days are internationals who are willing to work 60+ hour weeks on $50k a year, for the infinitesimal chance to land a R1 tenure-track faculty position. americans have no interest in getting a phd and then subjecting themselves to this kind of indentured servitude.
Painkillers like ibuprofen are NSAIDs which inhibit the enzyme COX1/2, reducing prostaglandin production.
Prostaglandins are an inflammatory hormone that do a variety of things, but specifically PGE2 plays a role in muscle stem cell activation to divide and produce more muscle fibers. The effect is probably realistically small, but you will leave gains on the table by taking ibuprofen after hard workouts.
Are you saying that lifting weights makes more muscle fibers? I was under the impression it does not, that it simply makes your existing muscle fibers bigger and stronger.
I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it.
Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
> I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it.
That would be the case if VCs were investing their own money, but they're not. They're investing on behalf of their LPs. Who LPs are is generally an extremely closely-guarded secret, but it includes institutional investors, which means middle-class pensions and 401(k)s are wrapped up in these investments as well, just as they were tied up in the 2008 financial crisis.
I think the chilling effect on mom and pop businesses undoes all of that. When they (we) disrupt and industry the power consolidates but in new hands. The idea is to get it away from the entrenched interests but like a good cultural revolution the second tier ends up in charge when the first tier gets beheaded.
> Because if internet/tech is the gun then the clear solution is “not giving your children guns”.
Funnily enough, no. The clear solution is to ensure that you talk to your children about [gun|online] safety. Show them how to use the [gun|internet] safely. Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision.
Take the mystery away through education and experience, and like anything else [guns|the internet] becomes just another part of adult life. Just one more thing that can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
> Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision.
You could do that, but there's no particular need for it. "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away".
You need to use the internet a lot before you become an adult, you need to use a gun never before you become an adult. You need a lot of practice to build up internet safety skills, you need barely any practice to build up gun safety skills.
Go ahead and have a basic gun safety talk, that's a good idea, but that's all you need.
> "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away".
This is what leads to stories about kids who make their way into their parents’ locked storage and hurt themselves or others.
“The mystery” is what leads kids to investigate things on their own. Let them know they can just ask. If they do ask, explain what you’re doing as you clear it. Strictly enforce the four rules. Let them disassemble it, or do it for them if necessary.
It’s just a tool. No less useful than a drill or saw, and no more or less dangerous than the car or can of gasoline in the garage.
> This is what leads to stories about kids who make their way into their parents’ locked storage and hurt themselves or others.
> “The mystery” is what leads kids to investigate things on their own.
Do you have evidence that learning gun safety without use doesn't do enough here?
I'm not convinced there's all that much mystery. Even if talk doesn't do enough, I bet letting your kids use guns once would do more than enough to clear up mystery. If you let your kids use a gun every week (or whatever "any time" means) it's because you're a family that likes guns, not for safety reasons.
Okay, I think "use guns once or twice with them" is a very reasonable idea for gun safety.
And it ends up being extremely different from internet safety. It's much much harder to teach and it's not practical to supervise the full learning process.
On the topic of hammers: "if you don't hold the hammer at exactly 2.6cm from the end of the handle and strike the nail with 6N of force at an angle of 58 degrees then of course you won't get a good nail strike into the wood. Oh and you must only use acacia sourced from the subtropics".
Give me a break, it's a hammer. This is a perfectly normal "use" of ChatGPT and a good example of how a literature student may opt to try and use AI to make their work easier in some way. It also conveniently demonstrates some of the shortcomings of using a LLM for this sort of task. No need to call them a dumbass.
Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system.
Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is the single most important thing for every level from middle school to college where it will unironically determine your entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.
... our system only rewards one thing in employment: the metric. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your metric value) is the single most important thing for every level from junior to principal where it will unironically determine your entire future.
Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical.
Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics.
AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even more down the road.
Before college was a means to get a job, it was status signalling for the upper class by showing they could spend 4 years not working and learning things with no economic value that few could afford. There was never a time when a large portion of society went to school past 18 for any reason other than economic or status gain, and why should they?
Because modern life is radically more complicated than humans can naturally deal with.
Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to understand Information security to avoid getting phished, didn't need to understand compounding interest for things like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to have some kind of mental model for the hordes of algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of taking all of our available attention (a resource that people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of that boredom was a serious concern) for the express purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc
Like, being productive in modern society is complicated. That's what education is for.
Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the or.
We've put into place a context for intellectual achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field?
Because a college degree isn't an intellectual achievement. It's 4 years of school when you've already done 13. I went to one of those schools where people go "oh, you went to $SCHOOL" when they find out, and I always want to roll my eyes because I didn't do shit to get that degree.
I think learning stuff and making art just for the hell of it is going to become a lot more accepted as society continues on and more and more peoples' jobs get automated away. Obviously that's a huge simplification of a much more complex situation, but in general I think the best future is one where people are free to pursue interests without regard for those interests ability to pay for their food and housing.
Decoupling working from living: means only intrinsically valuable things get worked on. No more working a 9-5 at a scam call center or figuring out how to make people click on ads. There is ONLY BENEFIT (to everyone) from giving labor such leverage.
Not every job needs to or should even exist: everyone having a job isn't utopia. Utopia is being free to choose what you work on. This directs market value for labor to go up. Work that needs to get done will be aligned with financial incentives (farmers, janitors, repair industries would soar to new heights).
UBI is a necessary and great idea: A bottom floor to capitalism means we all can stand up and lift this sinking ship.
There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job.
The problem with the modern educational system is that it isnt very efficient at this task. Instead, most of the value relies on the screening that took place before the students even entered the institution, not the knowledge obtained while there.
Yep, this is a huge problem. I've long argued that we need value add metrics for colleges, and it probably won't be a single number, but rather a set of values depending on input values, e.g., some schools may deliver a lot of value for kids with 1550 SATs, but other schools may do better for kids with 1200.
Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence, so people just like to go to the highest rated college they can to be viewed as intelligent. What happens in the four years at the college is secondary.
> Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence, so people just like to go to the highest rated college they can to be viewed as intelligent.
Hmmm… I would say college is a proxy for social currency, of which intelligence is one type. In most cases, intelligence is the least valuable (imho).
Values are your culture. The Nazis were elected and supported (at least initially) so you are right some what, but the answer is multiple countries.
But a country without a culture and without shared values is a sled being pulled by dogs in different directions and not a real team (as many people would argue has been the case for quite some time).
You need common values to work together to achieve goals. That's what a country is, people working together. When you don't, you just become tenants with passports.
Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status.
(there have been a few Communist revolutions against the concept of "university", for various political reasons, but China rebuilt theirs after the purges and Cambodia is a sad historical footnote)
Love this quote and tell it to friends often. I strive to be the clever and lazy officer. It was also eye opening to meet the first hardworking+stupid individual of my career and see just how much damage they really could do.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.