Paying attention. We cannot keep paying attention to content that outrages us and offers nothing in regards to solutions. It feels like most apps are full of carnival barkers that continue to get more and more extreme with time. I have been on Meta since 2011 and deleted my accounts. The fact that so many people feel trapped by these apps and dependent on them to conduct business or stay connected to their communities is a big problem to solve. I am thinking about creating a zine.  What are some other solutions people see for decentralizing and being more mindful of the content they create? 

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

Helping my mom ease into AI. I'm thinking about helping my elderly mom get set up with Claude or ChatGPT. (Free ChatGPT allows more usage even after the limit has been reached. This could be a bonus for her.) 

She has suggested interest in it a couple months ago and has not mentioned it again since. AI can be so helpful if used well! I am at her home this week. If I set her up now, I can help her navigate it for the next days before I go home. 

I'm concerned she might use AI to medically self-diagnose or lose skepticism and take answers as facts. Claude has a "personal preferences" area where I could write some instructions on how to engage. With Chat you can enter that into a thread but I've noticed it can forget instructions from other threads. 

She doesn't work so won't use AI for projects. She'll likely use it to ask about health concerns, which supplements to buy, getting help with emails or letters, help with doing things around the house (like how to clean her air purifier, or create recipes). She might ask questions about politics. 

Can any of you with AI expertise give me suggestions?

1. Go wtih Claude or ChatGPT? 
2. Any instructions I can enter as preferences so she is less likely to act on misinformation? There's the thing about limiting the compliments too. 
3. Any other suggestions I am not considering? 

I'm grateful for any help you can offer!

"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.

He asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”

The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

AI, cameras, drones, and an attempt at a construct-aware take on “crime”. Companies like Flock claim their traffic cameras, drones, and AI can reduce crime to nothing. 

There are Minority Report concerns but they try to say they that 10% of reported crime is solved by Flock. 

here's my issue: all the claims and statistics assume an agreed upon definition of crime. But clearly we don't agree: is abortion a crime? What about immigration? Gun ownership? Pollution?

crime never existed / doesn't / will always depending on the frame we take. We have to take a frame—not trying to go all postmodern here—but I'd like to be more honest and self-aware of it. I'd like to claim our direction, and where we're coming from: fear or love? I think we'd build different systems with more evolutionary processes and back doors, for example. We'd ask questions like "how does crime fit with forgiveness, accountability with love, safety with the illusion of ego and control? Idk, just trying to put some provocative questions out to point to deeper (as in more causative) structures at play here.

i love police and want to transcend and include traditional definitions of safety, in the same way uptrust transcends and includes algorithms.

What do you think?

Why you should post more: Everything is a mirror of everything.

We’re all censoring most of our awareness.

Uptrust is a currently curated community where we can actually practice thinking.

The more I post the more direct I’m being with everyone in my life. (I have an embedded belief that if I do anything anywhere then I should that anything in more everywheres…but I still curate).

Post about why you’re not posting.

Post about questions you’re asking yourself.

Post about your anxiety.

Post to express art.

This shit won’t last, this fun safe newborn ward. Use this time now to try something. Create a fake name or another account so you can try it from anonymity.

Huge opportunity to bust out of our norms.

Racism through a developmental lens. unfinished draft…
note: I’m totally uninformed here…

• Red: Does this benefit me?

• Amber: My race is simply better (or worse) than yours. We perpetuate it because that’s good.

• Orange: Racism is a thing we transcend by being worldcentric and meritocratic; we perpetuate it by constantly looking at everything through the racism lens.

• Green: Systemic racism is everywhere (and at the root of many of our social problems); we transcend it by balancing the scales with education and programs to help the victims and stop the perpetrators; we perpetuate it by taking advantage of our privileges, ignoring it, and doing nothing.

• Teal: Systemic racism is real, but it’s mostly an unconscious self-organizing system that’s perpetuated because of the incentives that keep things how they are. We transcend by owning our projection, and by setting up systems that reward non-racism for each level of development in the currency that level values.

• Turquoise: We never transcend racism, it’s a construct we enact through conscious embracing and boundarying/channeling or we enact through ignorance.

All these are frames that enact world-experiences that overlap, and they’re all us; these frames keep us from being in awareness and seeing awareness as the stuff the frames are made of-which is the way out of the self-referential self refuting trap of this frame into unity of experience…

note: This doesnt mean everyone who’s using the surface language of systemic racism or whatever is actually at that level—for example there’s a red green alliance that uses Green language because it benefits them directly; there’s an amber-green alliance that uses green language to make their in-group good/better and make others wrong/bad.

What's good about Trump? I don't follow (American national) politics a ton, but I know Trump is an incredibly divisive figure who just got convicted of 34 felony counts, while still being favored as the Republican candidate for the next presidential race.

 What's good about him, what he's done, and his policies? For example, less death in foreign wars—even the biased ChatGPT admits:

Trump's foreign policy led to fewer foreign deaths due to a reduction in large-scale military engagements, and his administration did not initiate new large-scale wars or military interventions—a significant departure from previous administrations that engaged in extensive military campaigns, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.