Posted by Curiositry 10 hours ago
The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.
And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!
Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.
So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)
Anyway back to why doctor would be good:
1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another
You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"
2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another
This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).
3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front
4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.
5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well
6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot
7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help
I don't know. I was at my doctor's office a few weeks ago, and the topic of AI came up during our conversation[1]. I expressed the opinion that her profession should be fairly safe because it's so highly regulated and how doctors have the AMA to block new entrants. She said that her and her colleagues had literally just been talking about how they are worried about their jobs, and pointed out that with profit-obsessed private equity firms taking over more and more medical practices, she thought they very much would be trying to replace human doctors with AI. And she alluded to the AMA being a much less effective lobbying body than what I, as an outsider to the field, had perhaps believed.
I dunno. That's just an n=1 anecdote, but if nothing else it shows that (at least some) doctors are not just sitting back and resting easy, assured of a future of high paying career options. And this is a lady with a degree from Yale, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine, and working for a very large and prestigious medical practice. Not some half-educated nitwit at a random back-country medical practice.
[1]: I mentioned that I'd asked ChatGPT about some test results, and told her what it told me. She replied "Yeah, I agree with that." Then chuckled and said something like "God, did I just agree with ChatGPT?" That's what started the whole sidebar about AI.
(there, perhaps insane, but at least a more original take than "AI is a bubble", no?)
In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.
So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.
[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.
[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.
[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).
I just see existing capital holders with new ways to expand their wealth with even less need to share it.
Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
Another thing that would be helpful would be coming from wealth where you could attend an elite prep school like the Pine Crest School, tuition roughly $45,000/yr which is close to the entire median yearly take-home salary for an individual in Florida, which is of course the author's background.
Honestly, I am so tired of reading AI articles from people with very low stakes that basically end with stuff like "Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet". Dude I fucking would love that to be the case, in the meantime I'll be figuring out how to put food on the table and help my kids find a place to live.
Or teach them to marry a rich person. This is the more honest approach. I've been mapping out this strategy with my wife. It's difficult nowadays because of low-trust society and people not marrying so easily. The best path we identified is if the offspring attends an exclusive school in the final few years of high school and seduces and knocks up some rich religious female. Make sure family is against abortion. That's the surest way to achieve marriage with a rich person. It's also financially efficient to only pay for 2 years of private schooling. Only concern is that schools will make those final years more expensive once other people start figuring out this trick. Also, the elegance of this scheme is that schools identify themselves by their religious affiliation and their high fees act as the filter to ensure a high concentration of quality targets; they do most of the hard work for us! Maybe my offspring can get in on a sport scholarship to improve our ROI on the scheme. We'll have to ensure that the school isn't a honeypot for similar-minded people and actually has genuine rich people attending it. The biggest risk is if these elite religious schools become more segregated in terms of all-male vs all-female; this will pose additional hurdles and the playing field for my offspring may shift to an after-school situation... Or this scheme can be delayed until college years. Will need to evaluate and keep a close watch on socio-economic trends. Will rich people still send their kids to college 15 years from now?
For my offspring it's actually highly viable because he is in line to inherit a decent amount of money from grandparents so he wouldn't come empty handed which can aid with seduction/persuasion aspect especially in terms of persuading the opponent's family. Publicly, I will denounce my offspring's behavior (to signal alignment with religious values) but privately, I will congratulate him. Thankfully my 3 siblings were so oppressed by the system that none of them had children except me so my offspring may end up inheriting the share from uncles and aunts as well. Also, we had him late so he will probably inherit at a relatively early age.
Otherwise looksmaxxing is probably a good thing if the offspring is lacking in that department and if the health risks are acceptable.
But TBH I hope we just get some form of UBI/UHI or communism so that it doesn't come to this.