SatanicNotMessianic

Here’s the basis of the finding:

Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla “engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous” and that Musk’s public statements about the technology “had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products”.

Judge Scott also found that the plaintiff, Banner’s wife, should be able to argue to jurors that Tesla’s warnings in its manuals and “clickwrap” were inadequate. He said the accident is “eerily similar” to a 2016 fatal crash involving Joshua Brown in which the Autopilot system failed to detect crossing trucks.

The bot that parses the articles creates a worse summary than you’d get by just reading random sentences.

In any case, we should note that this finding was reached after the recent media disclosures that Musk and Tesla deliberately created a false impression of the reliability of their autopilot capabilities. They were also deceptive in the capabilities of vehicles like the cybertruck and their semi, as well as things like range estimation, which might show a pattern of deliberate deception - demonstrating that it is a Tesla company practice across product lines. The clickthrough defense compared to what the CEO says on stage on massively publicized announcements sounds to me a bit like Trump’s defense that he signed his financial statements but noted that by doing so he wasn’t actually confirming anything and the people who believed him are the ones to blame.

Given his groundless lawsuit against media matters and his threats against the ADL, I think Elon might have started circling the drain.

I haven’t seen the current curriculum but this kind of thing was an area of research for me (the spread of information on social networks).

There was a study done - I want to say that it was about 40 years ago - that used a single lesson to teach young kids the basics of literary criticism and deconstruction so that they could dissect what the Saturday morning cartoon ads were trying to say. They were able to identify that the ads were implying that eating a sugary breakfast cereal would get you more fun friends to play with, and so on. A lot of it had to do with social pressures.

In any case, there was a measurable increase in the kids’ ability to resist being influenced by the ads, once they knew what to look for. I suspect they’ll take a similar approach here.

Nothing is ever going to be 100% successful, but if you pull back the curtain and show them that the Grand Wizard is just a little man pulling their levers, it’ll have a helpful effect on hopefully enough people to matter.

The whole YOLO thing never made any sense to me. If you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, then you have every excuse to risk your life doing whatever you want. There’s usually some kinds of moralistic restrictions, but except in the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies, I suspect wingsuiting on weekends is fair game. If you’re going to live forever no matter what you do, why not?

On the other hand, if you only live once - if you’re one and done - that seems like a demotivation to risk your life before you’re actually done with it.

There’s an old borscht belt joke about insurance - “What if something terrible happens, and you don’t die?”

Evolutionary biologist here.

This is actually a tricky one. Lying (and I’m going to fold the projection of false confidence in with that one because I’m talking about deception, intentional or otherwise, not a moral concept) is only effective if others believe you.

Humans, as the most highly social of the primates and ranking among the most highly social animals on earth, have adapted to believe each other, because this helps with trust, coordination, shared identity, learning, and so on. However, it also creates a vulnerability to manipulation by dishonest actors. Again, I’m not talking about a moral dimension here. There are species in which mating is initiated with the gift of a nuptial present (eg a dead bug) from the male to the female. Sometimes the male will give a fake present (already desiccated insect, eg) to trick the female, and sometimes it works. Deception and detection are an arms race, and it’s believed by many to be one of the drivers that lead to the development of human intelligence, where our information processing capacity developed alongside our increasing social complexity.

The problem is that when lying becomes the default, then the beneficial effects of communication cease. It’s like when you stop playing games with a kid that just cheats every time, or stop buying from a store that just rips people off. It’s a strategy that only works if few enough people play it. There’s tons of caveats and additional variables, but that’s the baseline. So why do we still see so much of it?

The first component of course is confirmation bias. If 90% of our interactions are trustworthy, the ones that stick out will be the deceptions, and the biggest deceptions will get the most notice. The second is that the deceptions as a whole have not been impactful enough, over time, to overcome the advantages of trust, either in biological time or in social evolutionary time. You will notice that more trust is given to in-group rather than out-group members, and a number of researchers think that has to do with larger social adaptations, such as collective punishment of deceivers - sending someone to jail for writing bad checks, say, is easier if they’re part of your community as opposed to a tourist from another country. We can also see cultural differences in levels of trust accorded in-group and out-group persons, but that’s getting into a lot of detail.

The third major operator is the concept of the self. This is a subject where we are just being able to start making scientific headway - understanding where the concept of a self comes from in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary dynamics - but this is still very much a new science layered on top of ancient philosophy. In the concept of the self there is a component of what I’m going to calll the physical integrity of the structure. People find being wrong painful - there are social situations that activate the same parts of the physical brain as physical pain and distress do. This is especially true of those ideas are seen as being held by other group members, because you now have the group structural integrity on top of the one in idea-space. That’s where you get people willing to literally die on the hill of Trump winning in 2020. For the evolutionary construction and nature of the self I’d recommend Sapolsky and Metzinger - it’s too new and too complex to get into here. If you want to just summarize it in your mind, call this component ego defense.

I think that’s most of what’s going on, at least as we understand it so far.

It means they lied, either directly or by omission, but seriously and materially enough for the board to make this move.

Or at least that’s the claim.

Evolutionary biologist here.

As the importance of killing wolves and foxes died down due to the rise of cities, territorial competition, and so on, dogs adapted to fit into new niches - thus hunting dogs, herding dogs, guard dogs, and so on. Obviously, this was largely human driven selection, but as a theoretical biologist I consider all selection to be essentially the same.

We eventually reached a point where dogs became more companions than utilities, although there was pair and family bonding all along the way. What I mean is that they frequently had fewer pragmatic jobs to do.

Combine that with the biological phenomenon of neoteny. That’s when an animal continues to express childlike characteristics into adulthood. Most domesticated dogs express neoteny, some to a greater degree than others. It’s not completely inaccurate to think of them as wolf puppies, but permanently. Interestingly, neoteny seems to be a side effect of breeding for human family compatibility (ie friendliness towards people).

Humans (and other mammals) also have a hardwired response to juvenile features, and it often triggers a caring response, so that became a second level but intense reinforcement of the toy breeds, for example.

I actually felt like the PT Cruiser and the Pontiac Aztek fell well within the “so bad it’s good” category. To be transparent, I’ll also disclose I also like the Volkswagen Thing and I love dune buggies.

Not really, no. From what I read the first shipments are kind of a stunt because they still haven’t worked out their production issues. They are having to do a lot of work on each vehicle by hand. Which means each unit is going to have costs like a Bentley but be expected to sell for the price of a Ford.

I really think this is a Potemkin delivery.

From what I read, Musk’s insistence on the stainless steel design as well as his overriding his design engineers on multiple aspects of the program are forcing the first set of trucks to ship to have a significant amount of hand assembly, pushing the unit cost towards $200k.

I’m going off of memory here, but the low end version of the truck was supposed to be in the $40-50k range. While they can bump those prices (I assume - I’m guessing the reservations people got let Tesla change the price), they’re going to see a lot of people dropping it.

I can’t look at it without remembering the Simpson’s episode where Homer says “In the 80s, this is what the future looked like!”

I realized my omission and put it in my edit. The term generally used is “spiritual but not religious.”

It can include everything from atheistic humanism alongside the Gaia hypothesis to Wicca.

I think this is a very fast growing segment of the US population now. It might have been in a recent Pew survey.

I’m a strong atheist, which means I have a positive belief that no gods exist, just for the record. The way I would put it is that I have never heard of nor have been able to come up with a god concept that I believe is an actual being.

I prefer to use the term “god concept” rather than god to make it clear that we’re talking about a specific idea of a god rather than an actual being. So Odin is a god concept, as is Minerva. Multiple god concepts exist in the bible, including the original regional father-deity El, El’s wife Ashera, their children including Yahweh, and so on. When the Israelites started to move from polytheism to henotheism (many gods exist but you should only worship one), and then to “monotheism” (in scare quotes because there are enough different god concepts as well as divine beings who would be counted as gods in any other pantheon).

In any case, I don’t think having a god concept which you believe refers to an actual being in itself is an indication of anything, good or bad. In my opinion, there’s a feedback loop between the disposition of people and their religions. The problems come in when the religions around the god concepts become extreme. The Amish have a fairly strong god concept, and while I’m not Amish (thank god), I don’t think they do harm unless you think of their actions within their community. 90% of UUs are great people. Sponoza’s Watchmaker would suggest we have to study ourselves to discover what constitutes good. And so on.

So I’d say that your belief is absolutely fine, but you also might be interested in the neurophysiological, social, and anthropological bases of humans so often having god concepts.