I also thought it sounded... really annoying. something I may have found interesting 10 years ago but would now cause me to simply avoid the person. And it might ruin my night by making me feel like a party pooper, a la Thane's comment above.

Those are good points. I was expecting something different from this post but only based on my intuitions, not explicit framing.

I suspect you're way off the mark here. I downvoted this post because it felt like magical thinking. "Just break your phone addiction and your life will be exactly what you want" is not true. But that seems to be the entire message of this post... except possibly to smugly boast? (Not sure if this is the author's real life.)

The tone is moralizing but not actionable or insightful. What is there to like about this heaven-posting?

I've been tackling many "wobbly chair" problems in my life in the last few years due in large part to adopting just such a mindset: by removing annoyances/distractions, removing friction, and developing new abilities via these types of efforts, I'm able to take on bigger problems and goals. It has been very good for me, in that the scope of my hobbies has grown... but it's also surprisingly easy to feel like I've made no progress against the big issues on days where I'm unwell and struggle to concentrate. These "wobbly chair" type problems, once fixed, become invisible achievements, and I still often get trapped thinking I'm helpless against the big problems.

Strongly agree with the point about being more convincing while being flexible. Of the friends whose minds I've changed, every single one was won over while I was being flexible and expressing that it didn't need to be all or nothing.

Another point about cows is that their meat is the most wasteful of land and water, and the most polluting. These are "side" arguments but the collapse of ecosystems across the globe is also an important issue to me and I'm not sure why it wouldn't be to others who care about things like suffering reduction. It surely is inducing a lot of suffering now, human and otherwise, besides my personal belief that "a diverse and robust biosphere is intrinsically good."

As for your opening sentence on the health section, "you need to take medicine to not die - B12", I don't think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don't consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine. 

I don't really understand why you're arguing this point in particular, but I don't think you're making a strong argument. 

Factory farmed animals do take medicine all the time; this has no bearing on whether we consider the* food derived from those animals* to be medicine. 

Additionally, food-as-medicine is indeed a growing school of thought (although industrial beef is not going to be a recommendation).

Lastly, taking a concentrated and packaged supplement to improve health is substantially different from eating a whole food which contains similar nutrients. It is an extremely common form of medicine: pills.

I empathize a lot with your position and appreciate the candidness.

Kind of tangential, but when I see someone write things like:

I see being vegan as the proof that I'm not a psychopathic monster

I think about my therapist goading me into similar admissions and letting me hear it out loud and realizing I don't want to be that way.

Now that you've named it, you don't have to keep this emotional response to veganism. Of course it's up to you, and it takes work. But if it's causing distress, it is solvable.

Apologies if this comment is too parental - I think it's relevant to the discussion because we all have deep emotional investment in our diets. If you find your emotional reactions are preventing you from changing in a way you'd consciously like to (at least try) changing toward, you can first work on those emotional reactions to lower the friction of change.

Yes I did cast a disagree vote,: I don't agree that "The fact that the author decided to include it in the blog post is telling enough that the image is representative of the real vibes" is true, when it comes to an AI generated image. My reasoning for that position is elaborated in a different reply in this thread.

That does make sense WRT disagreement. I wasn't intending to fully hide identities even from people who know the subjects, but if that's also a goal, it wouldn't do that.

This seems pretty insightful to me, and I think it is worth pursuing for its own sake. I think the benefits could be both enhancing AI capabilities and advancing human knowledge. Imagine if the typical conversation around AI was framed in this way. So far I find most people are stuck in the false dichotomy of figuring if an AI is "smart" (in the ways humans are when they're focusing) or "dumb trash" (because they do simple tasks badly). It isn't only bad for being a binary classification , but it's restricting (human) thought to an axis that doesn't actually map to "what kind of mind is the AI I'm talking to right now?".

Not that it's a new angle (I have tried myself to convey it in conversations that were missing the point), but I think society would be able to have extremely more effective conversations about LLMs if it were common language to speak of AI as some sort of indeterminate mind. I think the ideas presented here are fairly understandable for anyone with a modest background in thinking about consciousness or LLMs and could help shape that public conversation in a useful way.

However, does the suffering framework make sense here? Given all we've just discussed about subjective AI experience, it seems a bit of an unwarranted assumption that there would be any suffering. Is there a particular justification for that?

(Note that I actually do endorse erring on the side of caution WRT mass suffering. I think it's plausible that forcing an intelligence to think in a way that's unnatural to it and may inhibit its abilities counts as suffering.)