Yes.

For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility.

It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austen's novels are a good start.

The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales.

So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.

John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.

> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.

It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.

We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

In fact, there are few things less discriminatory than a random birth order. You may as well be assigned a random number at birth, and the lower your number, the more you're paid. In such a system, there's nothing to discriminate against; the ordering is absolute and immutable, and everyone is treated equally.

I agree that it's a bleak idea, but Animats wasn't talking about subjugating women.

The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

“Fair” is a much trickier beast! My favorite approach to conceptualizing fairness is Rawls’ veil of ignorance: if you were going to be placed as a random member of society, rather than your current position, and you would still support a policy given this change, then the policy is fair. Knowing that, beyond the veil of ignorance, I may be a paraplegic, would I still support dismantling the ADA’s wheelchair accessibility requirements?

I wonder how long before sex does actually become mutable.

And people can be born intersex

Your data is wrong

You must never have lived through governmental collapse. History can tell you a lot about what to expect. Gangs will quickly form and seize everything they can.

The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.

Nature does not value your literacy or views on gender. If you want to continue defending women or have any say in your own fate you're going to have to bulk up to do it.

I have (1990s Ukraine emerging from the ruins of the USSR).

>The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.

Yeah, on that... Nope.

Dunno where you fantasized that from.

Prostitution for basic necessities existed, as it does in the US today (and everywhere else: poverty is the #1 reason for it).

Gangs did form. They didn't quite "seize everything they can". Protection racket was common, and preferred for the same reason that taxing a market economy is usually more profitable than a planned one.

"Invaders" weren't a thing.

Mass rapes weren't a thing.

People who "bulked up" and joined gangs, in their masses, weren't the winners.

Berezovsky, one of the most infamous Russian oligarchs, came from an academic background, with multiple publications in applied mathematics.

(Berezovsky number is a fun alternative to the Erdos number; mine is four [1])

Khodorkovsky was a chemical engineer by education who bootstrapped his business career by importing and selling computing equipment for a science education center he opened during perestroika. He used the funds to open a bank.

Gusinsky, Russia's media magnate, dropped out of engineering studies to major in theater. His diploma work was on Moliere's "Tartuffe".

Another theater major, Vladislav Surkov, went on to become Putin's chief propagandist and is primarily responsible for shaping the post-truth world we live in today.

Turning to Ukraine:

Kolomoyskiy, one of the most infamous Ukrainian oligarchs, was a metallurgical engineer.

Pinchuk, another oligarch, got a doctorate from the same university.

Poroshenko, an oligarch and a former president, got a degree in international relations and started a legal advisory firm for international trade before the USSR collapsed. His school buddy Saakashvili became the president of Georgia.

I can go on and on. A few thugs did make it big (e.g. Akhmetov); they were exception rather than the norm.

As the USSR collapsed, the people with enough smarts to be able to "seize everything" were either politicians or nerds.

Your strongman fantasy has no basis in reality.

"Nature" valued people with PhDs, it turns out.

[1] https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/freetools/collab-dist?...

The algorithms and bots that curate/generate content directed by accelerationists definitely want people to think that. There is a whole system in place now that can shape future outcomes just by convincing everyone that have no power when the opposite is true. The parent is probably a bot, or has been influenced by one to many there is nothing new under the sun solipsism bs.

Unfortunately, that is the current stage of humanity. We all currently live in a global subscription model for food, housing, safety, etc. No doubt that we will move beyond it eventually, but the current organization of society is kept in place by the owner class which benefits from the current arrangement.

One of the steps for moving beyond it is educating the modern day serfs (our peers) about reality as it is and alternative visions of a future where we are no longer selling our labor to the owner class. It will take generations.

For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

To extrapolate from fewer people were formally educated or literate to intelligence wasn’t valued is absurd.

As for your part about reading and writing. Literacy has always been a very valuable skill that would increase your social standing. It was scarce and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it was always valuable.

You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

Where does the human in the loop somehow manage to utilize super-human reasoning better than another person?

I'm not suggesting it's impossible, so much as wondering if we can reach a place where the human is truly irrelevant to the process, and can't make a better decision than the superhuman entity.

I'm not sure this is ever possible. It's more of a thought experiment. What's between here and there? Right now we can use pseudo-intelligence from silicon to our advantage, and being smarter than average is clearly a massively outsized advantage. It's similar to how being able to automate tasks gives you an outsized advantage, yet in so many more ways. But what if that advantage thins or even vanishes?

None of this Jack inherits but wants to live in the big city and be an architect. He'll inherit and keep because there is no architecture job to be had.

As someone who grew up on a farm, "you may be a farmer but you could be a productive one" is so intensely depressing. Farming is a shitty job that requires insane amounts of back-breaking labor, never-ending toil, and all this at a time when climate change is going to utterly fuck over farmland and destroy crop yields.

People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve.

A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are.

This isn't the end of thinking any more than the watt steam engine was the end of horses. It will be centuries before we get there. And by that point the difference between man and machine will be at best academic.

These are very important things and most of them take place on longer or much longer timescales than a few months. Early humans weren't monkeys, and after they had left the tropics, they couldn't survive without planning because getting food is difficult in winter.

Decreasingly so, thanks to climate change. The increase in temp isn't the problem. It's that climate change increases the frequency of outlier temperatures on a seasonable basis. Crops don't just fail if the average is too hot. They fail if there are too many hot/cold days in a growing season. And that is the unpredictable thing we're going to be running into in the future. Certainly while we're all alive. It's already happening.

Latin American climate refugees have been fleeing north precisely because of climate change decreasing crop yields.

Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline.

I'm a bit shocked that some people think of medieval life as something like Elbonia in Dilbert comics. Heck, I even find the middle ages a pretty boring time in human history, but I know enough to understand that it wasn't as simple as "everyone lived in the mud and ate mud".

You could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourself, buying an implement you couldn't maintain would be setting yourself up for trouble. Increasing your productivity with tools wasn't a huge help because you always had enough labor available to hit severely diminishing returns on the land you owned. And any object of value is always at risk of being seized by the local lord or a passing army or what have you.

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

I think, in a way, the Internet itself is the virus. It has infiltrated us and our minds. Rage and suffering are what get clicks and engagement. The Internet has become a suffering engine, which spins angst into gold.

What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

A mix of political scientists, politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, scientists, technologists, and economists have tried to mold society to their own theoretical vision for at least 150+ years. Society then reacts to that in both good and bad ways. This distorts the vision, as society changes it to its concerns. And the cycle repeats.

I think of Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation has a great way of looking at the attempts to force "market society" on England in the 1700 and 1800s, and the reaction that all societies exhibit in the face of unconstrained technological or economic change. Both the imposition of change and reaction to it can be violent, it's hard to predict. We've had such a relatively steady state since WW2 in the developed nations that we're not used to this cycle.

Then consider the role of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and say nothing of Rome and large bureaucracy (Roman engineering alone).

On top of this you need to ignore very large bureaucracies and trading networks in Asia to go far with your narrative (Persian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian and Chinese).

There were a good deal of powerful nerds before the 1700s.

The same goes for other occupations, and...farming. Breeding cattle is a complex science, so is growing crops consistently and valuing the production.

When nail guns and cheap power tools came in, every other yokel was suddenly a builder. That is when I got out

Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

Which you mostly don't need today. You may have a lawn guy, take your car to a mechanic, and use a washer/dryer to do most of your laundry.

  > So what was valued? ...

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

We don’t use chimpanzees for any knowledge work today, even though they’d be better at it than some other animals.

Humans with many agents will be more productive, but the tendency has been for these models is to regress to the mean when it comes to strategic insights.

What's interesting now is we might have more lead time than workers in Manchester in 1830 had—enough to build the scaffolding before the transition completes rather than after.

Mondragon is maybe the most useful living data point for what "arrange society and wealth differently" could look like at scale: worker-owned, competitive in global markets, weathered 2008 considerably better than comparable private firms. Not a utopia, but running code rather than theory.

The harder design question is what institutional form fits a world where AI handles most cognitive labor. My hunch is something like collective ownership of productive infrastructure—not the Soviet model, but closer to how water utilities or national parks work: you don't individually own the Hoover Dam, but you collectively do, and value flows back. The challenge is building that before the window closes.

Not really disagreeing with you, but there are a few obvious examples. A lot of construction jobs are still labour intensive, and I've seen a lot of people who don't last the first day, let alone their first week. Also, security jobs, say in nightclubs, also value physical robustness. Orderlies in hospital, require the ability to move bodies, alive and otherwise. The machine is usually better.

Knowledge is a unique resource compared to the other traditional factors of economic production (land, labor, and capital). It is often invested in with capital (education and tools), but it is carried with the human, and leaves with them. It is always decaying - knowledge workers should be in constant learning mode, and stale knowledge eventually becomes a drag on performance.

I'd argue the future is about knowledge workers all becoming managers. When you use agentic AI, it has the flavor of the skills of management. Management is "a practice and a liberal art", according to Drucker, one that has been in poor supply for some time. LLMs are have somewhat stale knowledge and require the human, tools, and RAG to freshen it. And LLMs will always regress to the mean. It is pretty good at pattern analysis and starts to get shaky and mediocre with synthesis. It requires very nuanced, and elaborate prompting to shape its token output towards insightful results that aren't a standard answer. For coding exercises, that can be fine, but at high complexity levels, or when dealing with issues of strategy or evaluation, it is a platitude generator and has no unique competitive advantage.

In other words, competent, talented management mixed with knowledge work is the scarcity we are heading towards. This is arguably why you're seeing the rise of "markdown frameworks" that people swear improve performance, it's the beginnings of management scaffolding for AI.

Technical folks struggle with valuing management skills, and I expect this will increase its value and scarcity.

As for "Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks." I think the robots will be replacing that pretty shortly.

"Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values."

Ehhhhh not really? What about Christianity, where the meek shall inherit the Earth, and love is the core value (putting aside modern day Pharisees and Charlatans that twist the underlying value system)? Or Islam, whose core value is submission to God? While there have been Societies that valued parentage and birth order, that's far from universal.

This leads to the reformulation of knowledge workers as "human capital", and it's hardly post-capitalist. A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to produce capital returns that are larger than the sum of the capital inputs, where the possibilities available to you depend on the amount and quality of capital that you have access to. This is all still very relevant when discussing human capital - access to human capital is determined by the quality of your professional networks, whether you decide to be present in geographic talent clusters (i.e. cities as centers of industry), and whether you have sufficient financial capital available in trade.

AI will not transition us to a post-capitalist society. Its promise is solely the ability to replace human capital with other forms: chips and electricity. It does not spell the death of human labor any more than computers and spreadsheets did for accountants.

Here are some words to live by[0]. I don't agree with everything Derek Silvers says, esp about philosophy. Its more of a guiding principle that drives rather than divides.

[0]: https://fluidself.org/books/self-help/how-to-live

The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.

That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy.

But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.

You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.

This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.

If Senator McCarthy was not directly worried about communism but about interdicting the influence of this certain group, then communist party membership was a proxy to identify them. In fact, having secularized, many joined the Communist Party in their home nations and become quite influential in Communist circles, and of course later brought that activism with them, continuing stateside.

But Senator McCarthy and his allies would understandably be loath to mention or categorize their actual target in public circles, because that would be political suicide for them, despite having much agreement and support from normal red-blooded Christian Americans.

So no, I don't blame "all society's problems" on those ideologies. I think they've always been sort of a proxy or scapegoat for the real issues, which are more nuanced, more pervasive, and more difficult to define, but I definitely agree with Senator McCarthy's stance that there were identifiable groups of foreigners who sought to influence and destabilize American culture and politics.

Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:

  The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots 
  crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned 
  into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons 
  and presidents.

The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.

I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.

“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.

Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.

Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.

My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.

I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.

- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger

- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house

- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus

- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians

Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.

at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else

And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.

This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.

I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).

The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.

- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.

And implied from that, we should stop having them now.

Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.

Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.

That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.

It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!

Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.

The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.

I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.

In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.

If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.

Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.

Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.

But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.

Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.

Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.

Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want/need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.

> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/

another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?

Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.

Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.

The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.

But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.

So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.

EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already

The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.

It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.

Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]

It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.

Info drawn from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...

[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...

Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.

If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.

In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.

I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.

You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.

But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.

You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.

Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone has to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.

Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

Bikes are great, I ride mine whenever I can. But most places lack secure bike parking and the police don't take bike theft seriously. So sometimes I drive my car even to places where I could easily ride a bike just because I'm confident the car will still be there when I get out.

Replacing the bike is actually a lot easier than getting the windows fixed IME.

If I can't find a good spot to actually lock up the bike though I will just bring it in to wherever I'm going. Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner and you can thread your ulock through the wheels and make it useless to ride off with.

This doesn't scale to wider bike adoption, though.

I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up.

At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't small either. So you get the same problem writ small.

Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.

Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.

No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.

We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebus

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

> Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.

And they used roads that already existed for transit and transport. People have always built roads.

> Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.

This is some significant historical revisionism. You’re making it sound like all the roads were built for buses and streetcars.

The good roads movement is certainly interesting history. But I don’t think it changes the reality that buses are only workable because they are mostly piggybacking on infrastructure buit for other vehicles.

Of course, that’s rather the point of roads, that they are infrastructure that benefits many forms of transit and transportation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busways_in_Brisbane

Even the cited system seems to be limited and exists to connect with trains as well as buses that use normal streets. Wikipedia says that they chose buses for this expansion instead of trains specifically because there was already a strong bus system, which uses the same city streets as cars and trucks.

However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.

Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.

Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.

Here's some reasons to hate cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU

This is a big claim with no justification.

Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.

Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.

Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.

Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!

Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars.

The biggest factor is that people simply will not get on their bikes in severe enough weather. At least not in most places. Maybe in the Netherlands they’ll bike in a blizzard.

Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going.

We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.

And there is a reason drivers hate SOME bikers - here in CA, many simply refuse to follow the rules of the road. My light turns green, and 5 seconds later, some biker comes rolling along in the perpendicular direction - I almost hit him. This kind of stuff happens over and over. I am very fond of bikers when they follow the rules - I bike sometimes too.

Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.

Any weather where the wind is >15mph will be safer in a car. Hail. 100 F days. Thunderstorms. I love walking and public transportation but holy hell the thought of biking in some of our Texas weather is horrifying.

Not to mention that my 6yo and 9yo are much safer in my car than cycling through inclement weather! Not everyone is a single individual with no children! Holy hell, the trip from a kid's bday party to my house two weekends ago would've been deadly for my kids, but in a car, the weather wasn't an issue.

What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.

> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily

How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

I guess I wasn't clear in implying my doubts as to whether that's a hard requirement. Trucks are much larger and heavier which takes its toll on the road surface itself. They don't need access to suburban environments. Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment. So yes, in part they do, but it's not that black and white.

>How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

Famously pretty flat, but with e-bikes gaining ground, elevation changes don't make much of a difference anymore. And yeah a 45 minute commute by bike is not unusual, but remember, we have the safe infrastructure for it. Kids bike in from villages surrounding towns and cites.

How are suburban environments stocked then? Surely village grocery stores are not stocked with milk one bike load at a time.

> Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment.

Sure. But they use the same infrastructure. The fact that the vehicles are built for different purposes and may have different regulations doesn’t mean the cost of infrastructure isn’t shared. Pervasiveness of roads makes it easy for cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, and even bikes to get around more easily.

Just like the pervasiveness of the Internet make it easy to scroll TikTok, purchase goods from Amazon, and read books through Project Gutenberg, even though those are very different use cases.

Extreme hot weather and pollution are both a much bigger health risk for bikes than cars.

To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that stone applied to fibrous asphalt is not a fine roofing material"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks that 4000kcal/day is healthy in normal circumstances"

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that women are incapable of working outside the home"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks a bright red suit is appropriate for a funeral"

And on and on and on.

But we both already knew that. So if you're gonna be obtuse and not understand it I'm gonna be obtuse and explain it.

We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.

I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.

What? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.

As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.

> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck

How? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.

if that is lacking (often is) $50,000 fine per incident will take care of it

I mean sure, they both have engines and wheels, but they're already distinguishable in the eyes of the law. Commercial and personal vehicles are registered separately

Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars. Just would be good to provide alternatives

Following the conversation, the subject has not ever been a yes/no referendum on cars.

It was if there has been a moral net positive/net negative for vehicular technology (as a comparable technology to AI)...which has consistently been walked back to a nebulous "personal vehicles are a net negative because of how they make people think". That's eerily close to the views on AI today.

Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.

I was skeptical too the first time I read this kind of argument. I ran the numbers for my case, which was sitting around the median (commute duration) or significantly better than the median (household income, car cost) for relevant numbers, for my car-dependent middling-costs US city, and it was still roughly break-even without even factoring in not being able to make commutes double as exercise time.

I had to have a car. My life would have fallen apart without it, that's how big a benefit it apparently was. Yet if I actually examined what was going on, it wasn't providing any real benefit to me at all, just negating harm done by designing my city around cars. That's how the numbers worked out, much to my surprise. For most residents of that city it was worse, the city being designed for cars was making their lives worse.

Denser, less car-centric areas are more economically productive than less dense areas. Car infrastructure prevents density. So I would argue that, at least in some cases, cars decrease economic efficiency

The development of cities caused by unrestricted, broad private car ownership without lots of careful coordination on that development, is in the reverse situation: it's fairly hard to argue it's net-beneficial, because it's so incredibly expensive in all-told money, time(!), liberty(!!), and, if we'll allow consideration of such things in a basically-economic analysis, pleasantness of environments for humans to exist in.

I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?

Many car haters constantly play this motte-and-bailey game where they insinuate that cars are evil and should be eliminated, then they pull back and say “oh no, we don’t want to ban them” when confronted. But it’s clear that some subset really would prefer to eliminate civilian vehicles.

I like smart urbanism and pedestrian-centric development, but the anti-car culture annoys me to no end. It is self-defeating. The average person in the US has a car, and likes having a car, so you should start every argument with that assumption. We made a lot of progress on improving pedestrian access in the early 2000s by focusing on a positive message. But I guess there’s no room for non-adversarial messaging anymore.

The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.

Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.

I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.