An ideology that told you you were protected by some big brother type being, that your dead relatives would once live again and that the bad people you knew would get theirs eventually would absolutely be comforting. Thats a lot of why religions spread so readily in the past when things were arguably bleak by default. i.e most of your kids died young, diseases, storms, droughts, floods, locust swarms, famine, war, very little of the world would be understood. The only thing people really had to cling to was religion. It gave them (false) explanations for the unexplainable and (false) hope and comfort that they could pull through if only they believed a specific set of things and followed a specific set of rules. It was arguably advantageous during a time when there was really no alternative. But today it is dangerous. Comforting when shit hits the fan but often directly or indirectly the cause of shit hitting the fan in the first place.
Those for whom religion makes “some or a great difference” in their lives experienced around half the increase in unhappiness seen in those for whom religion makes little or no difference
Religious/spiritual beliefs give context to tragedies and instill a greater sense of purpose overall. It’s no surprise that someone who truly believes in a spiritual force greater than themselves, that is active in people’s lives, is better able to handle the stresses of crises. A sincere belief in a deeper meaning to events and the existence of a higher purpose to life, even though its nature is unknown and possibly unknowable, i.e. faith, gives a person’s mind a firm foundation that can help through hard times.
Weird how that works, I would have coped with the pandemic better if the religious people in my area actually took it seriously rather than just stick their heads in the sand and ignore everything around them.
As my old english teacher used to say, “Ignorance is bliss.”
Yeah, I'd be curious to see the same study measuring how many of them died vs the regular population. Being calm in the face of danger ceases to be a good thing when it stems from straight-up ignoring the danger until it kills you.
Yeah if you interview after the fact there’s inherent survivorship bias.
Almost like “not wearing helmets decreases nonfatal head injuries” as the upside down finding of steel helmets leading to more head injuries (instead of death) in WWI.
Right cause policing belief ever worked and/or is ethical at all.
I’m an atheist but fuck that shit, waste of resources while simultaneously accomplishing nothing AND you get to invalidate your claims of goodwill by forcing people into your system of thought.
I’m one of these patients. I was successfully treated for an autoimmune brain condition of some sort. To this day, none of our clinical testing has ever showed any abnormality. I was treated based on detailed medical history and my insistence that my self-reported symptoms be taken seriously.
It took months to find a physician willing to treat me, and I still to this day don’t understand what they were so afraid of. My self-reports of symptoms, patterns of exacerbations, and positive response to corticosteroids were consistent and unequivocal.
I was in nursing school at the time, and I don’t know if that helped or hindered me. But I finally figured out how to speak the language that my physicians could understand, even though I was the patient. That shouldn’t be necessary.
I don’t think LLM’s will lead to AGI, but at some point a system is going to be implemented that does lead to AGI but it will be unexpected.
This seems to be the worse case scenario as the AGI will likely be clever enough to ensure humans don’t realise it’s AGI. There are network effects and complexity that we are not 100% knowledgeable about. The net result is the same: we lose the control problem. Badly.
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