elv's Shortform

It's really puzzling that evolution decided to manifest taste receptor signals as qualia. You can absolutely imagine a counterfactual human whose whole decision process about whether/what to eat is subconscious, and the human just gets a reward signal when it's eating a good thing. Food selection seems like a very simple ML problem, simpler than e.g. metabolic regulation, that could have just been done by the unconscious brain.

"<Democrats/Republicans> want to destroy the country" is ridiculously unlikely just from first principles.

Take a mental step out from your own country and look at people from other democracies, where the divisive issues are different, and you'll find in all of them people who believe that the rival big tent party is malevolent.

Partisan ideoculture is a waste product of democracy - parties are incentivized to encourage in people a vague  hatred of the opposite party instead of having them focus on concrete policies or issues. Getting ensnared by it is shameful.