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Links for 2023-05-03

  • The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn

    As you encounter these ideologies [Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism] in the wild, you might use the TESCREAL lens, and its alignment with Eurasianism and Putin’s agenda, to evaluate them, and ask whether they tend to undermine or enhance the project of liberal democracy. TESCREAL ideologies tend to advance an illiberal agenda and authoritarian tendencies, and it’s worth turning a very critical eye towards them, especially in cases where that’s demonstrably true. Clearly there are countless well-meaning people trying to use technology and reason to improve the world, but that should never come at the expense of democratic, inclusive, fair, patient, and just governance. The biggest risk AI poses right now is that alarmists will use the fears surrounding it as a cudgel to enact sweeping policy reforms. We should resist those efforts. Now more than ever, we should be guided by expertise, facts, and evidence as we seek to use technology in ways that benefit everyone.

    (tags: ideology future tescreal ea longtermism ai politics silicon-valley)

  • heightened risk of autoimmune diseases after Covid

    More evidence of a “substantially increased risk of developing a diverse spectrum of new-onset autoimmune diseases”:

    Previously we knew there were many features of autoimmunity engendered by Covid, but the link to manifesting important autoimmune diseases has not been established. There are still many dots not connected—it’s fuzzy. We need to better understand how the dysregulation of our immune system that can occur from a Covid infection (or even more rarely from a vaccine) can be linked with a serious autoimmune condition. While we’ve fully recognized that people with autoimmune diseases are more vulnerable to Covid and adverse outcomes, the flip of that — that Covid can make some people vulnerable to autoimmune diseases — is what’s new.
    (from the always excellent Eric Topol.)

    (tags: covid-19 long-covid pasc autoimmune diseases health medicine research eric-topol)

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