Yes, managing relationships needs time, but there is another problem I see nowadays. When I was young (I'm in my sixties), it was normal to have friends who could be very different from you. They might have had qualities you didn't like at all, but you could still be very good friends. If I look my students (highschool and college level) now, they are extremely intolerant for differences compared to what I remember from my youth. One "I don't like it" problem is enough to dump any relationship. Why? I guess it's because of a lack of practice – you don't really need to interact with so many different people nowadays and interacting with people who are very different from you is just plain terrifying for many.
It may be terrifying, but it's also terribly important. If the friendship can't survive differences, you're going to silently censor any points of differences (real or imagined) and soon you're just pretending to be the people you think the other expects you to be. No depth of connection, no growth.
You want someone to be friends with you, as you actually are. And that means you need to be friends with them, as they actually are, even if you worship different brands or vote for different movies.
>Why? I guess it's because of a lack of practice – you don't really need to interact with so many different people nowadays and interacting with people who are very different from you is just plain terrifying for many.
It’s not any more or less terrifying than in previous times, but as you wrote “you don’t really need to interact with so many different people”.
I would shorten that to “you don’t need so many people anymore”. Another factor is you can easily find more agree-able people (or bots) to spend time with, such as on this website rather than a neighbor.
I’m curious if you think viewpoints have also gotten more extreme in this period. It feels like the gap in political ideologies has widened a lot since I was younger.
The gaps in views are certainly widening in societies in general, but my point wasn't exactly that. It was more about differences which always existed. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable. It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting.
I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.
Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.
I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this
In my twenties my friend group had a gay jewish law student and an actual nazi, and everything in between. We all had the same sense of humour and didnt take ourselves seriously. The two guys specified would have deep and long conversations (not debates, not arguments) intonthe early hours while the rest of us fell asleep or left due to next day obligations. The only controversy I recall was when I said Conan the Barbarian is better than Lord of the Rings.
I see this exact thing right now to me and some (former?) friends, we’re all in our early to mid-40s. And, yes, it does involve politics, and more generally how one sees the world, but I personally find it quite baffling nonetheless. It’s like people really do feel the need to continue living in their intellectual bubble-balls, no dialectics involved, no contradiction, and hence no real (intellectual and not only) move forward.
I can’t and don’t see an easy solution for it, to be honest.
Depends? Are those more narrow one’s better and people have a better idea of what ideal looks like?
I’m kind of horrified at people saying they had/have to work at their best friendships as with my best friends, everything is seamless.
There are no misunderstandings. We never have to forgive each other. We never even need to clarify things for each other much, as we are that well aligned.
Granted it may not be possible, but ideally go find a better match in a friend.
The axes are independent. You can have seamless friendships with people who are very different from you, and contentious relationships with folks who are just like you (but doing it wrong!)
There's nothing wrong with having to work at friendship. For years I had a friend that I looked up to (and, as it turned out looked up to me). We were both constantly striving to justify the other's faith and respect. It was a lot of work but incredibly valuable for both of us.
You're absolutely right! Nobody in the 60s or 70s thought that the police should terrorise minorities or that women were beneath them. These are entirely new problems that have only arisen since 2020 or so.
They knew not to say the quiet part out loud back then. That decorum is gone now.
Or in many cases (not mine since I don't use them), there wasn't the world's largest bathroom wall to go sound off on... Except you sign every message off with your name. The kind of stuff people post in their real name that I would take to my grave is insane.
WARC is mentioned with very specific reason not being good enough: "WARCs/WACZs achieve static and efficient, but not single (because while the WARC is a single file, it relies on a complex software installation like WebRecorder/Replay Webpage to display)."
Musima Lead Star is a musical instrument, Ural "guitars" were not. I played and owned several ones during eighties. The moment I could finally afford Musima Lead Star and finally get a sound I had in my head, was one of happiest moments of my life.
Musima means Musik marktneukirchen, a place with a long tradition of instrument manufacture. The Martin family emigrated from there to America and the rest is history..
> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output?
The local statistics office here recently presented salary statistics claiming that teachers' salaries had unexpectedly increased by 50%. All the press releases went out, and it was only questions raised by the public that forced the statistics office to review and correct the data.
That's not THE problem. The problem is that they can't encode/decode text. They lack experience, vocabulary, knowledge and all these little small things needed to communicate via (not necessarily written) text. It's not dyslexia.
There is no fight actually and noone is complaining "kids these days" at the moment. KIds are not the ones to blame in current situation. It's 100% work left undone by previous generations.
Most of comments seem to assume that education system have been functioning up to this point, LLM-s appear and there are somewhere solutions ready to adapt. That's just not the case. For many reasons – parental problems, early development, phones, social media, decline of responsibility, changes in educational principles in general etc etc etc – education is already in free fall almost all over the world.
Average student even in universities is functionally illiterate now, it's not an exaggeration. Even if we assume that there is LLM which would help to learn, how these students should use it?
It's not just about parents, it's about our (western) society as a whole. While Germany has a bigger problems because of massive immigration, all this sound familiar for all teachers from Eastern-Europe to the US. We stopped treating people as being accountable for their own actions. This is true for parents, children etc. It's OK to have every possible excuse – "I'm immigrant, single mother, immature, don't have an education etc" not to take any responsibility and people take advantage of it. This is the idea that you just have to treat people well and it fixes all sorts issues in society failing.
I somewhat agree, with the caveat being when your citizens do it, you're stuck with the poor behavior because they have rights to be on the soil. You get another chance to do better when their kids become adults (and either choose to be childfree [1], or become parents, but hopefully engaged and active in the effort). When immigrants do it, you have options, because depending on your residency model, you can ask them to leave if they are not adhering to your systems designed to lead to desired outcomes. You can treat people well and they still don't perform to expectations. Broadly speaking, you don't want an endless obligation of having to provide material amounts of support and services (which comes out of the pocket of taxpayer citizens) to people who don't give AF, but we should be accepting of inevitable drag when people did try and still fail (such is life). It's a poor outcome for everyone involved imho, but accountability is very important in the context of child rearing.
That's what I'm really afraid of – we will be drowning in the AI slop as a society and we'll loose the most important thing that made free and democratic society possible - a trust. People just don't tust anyone and/or anything any more. And the lack of trust, especially in scale, is very expensive.
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