This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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Notes -
My positions have changed over the course of my life, certainly. I don't think anything I've ever read on TheMotte specifically has ever changed my mind on anything substantial though. The last time I had anything that could be described as a major shift in views was probably... closing in on a decade ago. I've changed as a person in some ways since then; I've changed my mind on certain personal and idiosyncratic matters. But in terms of anything that other people would recognize as a major political/philosophical issue, it's been a while.
It's hard to expect someone to become an instant convert like Saul of Tarsus or that respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford just because they had a single discussion. Rather, the process of a well-intentioned discussion forces both sides to examine their own chains of reasoning.
And sometimes you both follow your chains backwards, fixing errors along the way, and you see that yours starts with "A is good" and theirs starts with "not-A is good". Okay, fundamental values dissonance, unless either of you have a literal revelation, you'll remain in disagreement. But sometimes it's "A is good" vs "B is good". And this is when you can change. You go, "actually, both A and B are good, I shouldn't disregard B completely. If A and B are in conflict, is there a way to avoid this? If not, what is the mixture of A and B that I find optimal and why?"
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I can distinctly remember two:
One was back in Covid days somebody pointed out that evolutionary pressures would make it almost certain that mutations of a virus would trend towards making it less deadly, which somewhat alleviated my fears of Covid running rampant and becoming more deadly as it spread.
The other was someone arguing that we currently have the capability of tracking any incoming asteroids or other celestial objects that are large enough to pose a danger to earth, and as long as we're actively looking we should notice one in with enough time, in theory, to intervene/deflect it, which led me to slightly downgrade "asteroid strike' on my list of existential risks.
One that the jury is still out on is whether LLMs/AI will end up hurting lawyer employment and salaries by supplanting entry-level attorney jobs, or if it will instead bolster lawyer employment by enabling contracts and other transactional documents to become MUCH more complex.
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