The shift from "you need to optimize your thinking/rationality" to "yeah, LLM use breaks your cognitive abilities but what can you do" that so many middle aged men went through is literally brainmelting.
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@tante most of the 'what can you do types' I've encountered are much younger, 30-40. The going on 60s I know are more like, 'thank gog I'm out'.
@tante nah, it's all serving the same goal. it's just a pivot.
@tante Ageism is a complicated problem, and I think one of the social problems we have is that the minority of older people in positions of power won't admit that they have less energy and learn more slowly than younger people. They prefer to stifle younger people so they can hold on to power.
I think they’re specifically irresistible to people whose advantage, when young, was being fast. Almost everyone loses that with age. If you haven’t replaced it with depth or breadth or taste, how terrifying.
@tante I think to understand this, you have to understand their motivations. They were rarely actually obsessed with **being smarter** or more mentally *capable.*
They were obsessed with what it would **get them.**
"Optimize your thinking", "build a second brain", etc have one purpose: to be **productive** and more capable of **grinding**, not *necessarily* improve yourself for the sake of it.
From that perspective, "machine that does things for you" is quite appealing to them by default.
People used to take weird supplements to optimize their brain and now just fuck up their abilities without a second thought.
You know what?
I suspect micro dosing drugs was never about performance.
I fear, it was just a rationalisation to take drugs.
Shocking, I know.
So the real timeline is that delusional people went from messing with their brain via chemicals to messing with their brain via... behaviorism?
@tante this is what I wanted to say... some of them use drugs anyway, so what's the difference?
