It's hard for me to understand why people choose to walk around in public wearing headphones. I'm aware that it's incredibly common, but you put yourself at risk of theft, accident, and of course the mild hearing loss that accompanies _any_ frequent headphone usage. In the case of both theft and accident, you cannot hear your assailant coming, and miss the queues that would otherwise keep you safe.
"Loud" is a bit subjective, but in my experience most people make their volume far too loud. Even moreso if you're attempting to overcome the background sound around you.
The articles below discuss both volume and duration. It's also worth checking out the OSHA guidelines which pretty cleanly show the relationship between duration and volume. (ie, "safer" volumes still cause damage with enough duration.)
Same reason I listen to music or podcasts in the car.
I am very lucky to live in a city/country where risks of theft from my person is low - when I lived for 20 years in London I never once felt unsafe listening to music.
The closest was two young men got very close to me on the tube, when I was playing on my brand new Hong Kong imported PSP - but I just took my headphones off. I think they were just interested as most people hadn't seem one in the flesh yet.
I can't say I know of anyone personally who suffered theft or accident caused by them listening to music on headphones.
When I cycled a lot, I had a small speaker strapped to my handlebars rather than wearing headphones, as I liked being able to hear cars around me - but when I was younger I regularly cycled in headphones, and was still able to hear enough of the road around me to not feel that I was missing anything.
Remember, we don't make drivers drive around with no music and their windows open, so that they are better able to hear cyclists...
I know a few people that simply wear headphones to help with managing sensory overload, so I wouldn't assume that having headphones on is a guarantee of listening to something (though still likely to be strongly correlated).
As far as assailants, a skilled ninja wouldn't be detected even if their target weren't wearing headphones...
It's a definitive statement that you don't want to talk to people. In London not wearing headphones ironically means you become a target for people who want your attention. And it blocks out the otherwise very loud cityscape.
Where I used to live it was smart not to wear headphones, being it for muggers, drunk drivers, random shootings or crazy dogs. It was not a chill place no.
Here comes the flood of IPv6 evangelists who thinks everyone is confused about NAT and firewalls. I don't know where they get their talking points, but they descend onto these threads with their sanctimony. "Oh, you must be confused about how NAT works, allow me to educate you." It's very tiresome.
Pretending that 0-9A-Z is somehow comparable to 行 or ∮ is quite daring, I will give you that.
And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead.
- In the grand scheme of things, the IP address itself is of very little importance. It was given undue attention because of how IPv4 was inherently limited in address space.
- If you simply needed a way to name your machines, what are you doing not using the (m)DNS? You know, services literally with the word "Name" inside their name?
>And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead.
I spent some good time trying to learn IPv6. I was pretty open to it, but it was just awful. There were parts of it that were bad due to other reasons -- my router, my ISP. But it was unworkable, produced a number of problems and provided me no benefit.
I learn new things all the time. I learn things I like, learn about things I dislike. I find it really rude that people suggest "I just don't want to learn things."
If bad routers etc. makes you think IPv6 is bad... then man, I think for me IPv4 is a mountain of shite.
But my comment was not directed at you, more so towards those people who looked at IPv6 very superficially (i.e. the ipV6 AddRESs iS UgLY!!1! people), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Chinese cars are a cancer, and American cars are obese with heart disease extremely high healthcare premiums?
[edit]
For the record, I would never buy a Chinese car, but I can't fault anyone who is disappointed by domestic offerings: too heavy, too luxurious, too big, too expensive, too over-complicated, too many touchscreens, poor repair-ability, sky-high insurance premiums, terrible visibility, skyrocketing repair costs, too many sensors, etc, etc.
I'd be worried about safety in a crash, safety with regard to battery fires, and then privacy / tracking issues. It's easy to say that these issues are just as bad for non-Chinese cars, but that's not true. As recently as 2024, you could get base model Nissans with no telematics systems whatsoever (this may still be true in 2026, I'm just unaware) and the Ford Maverick's Telematics system has a single fuse that you can easily remove without affecting any other system.
So too did the printing press. Again, this is not a "something similar has happened in the past, therefore this is nothing new" sort of comment.
This is quite new, however this outcome was totally unavoidable -- once methods of communication become widespread and centralized it is impossible for them not to impact language and thought.
On the contrary, the printing press enabled people to quickly spread new ideas. Protestantism was enabled by it. That was quite the schism in thinking.
I also agree with your follow-up around the normalization of language. It's a good point, but it seems like an improvement to standardize effective communication, and at the time it was outweighed by the ability to spread challenging heterogeneous ideas. LLMs threaten to engulf us in a uniform grey goo that lulls us away from critical consideration of what we're interacting with and, even more dangerously, creating.
I wasn't going for pro or anti-eugenics, just expressing that the Flynn effect has been reversing. At least from what I've read the trend is true _within_ families, which downplays potential pro-eugenics arguments.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
One other thing that's interesting -- at least in my personal observations, climate deniers don't usually actually argue the science. They might do this when publishing or speaking publicly. But, at least when you're talking with them and they're at ease and speaking freely, they seem to offer a different argument.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
A lot of beliefs are cultural and not directly related to intelligence. From an outsider's perspective, it can be difficult to tell which beliefs are merely fact-based and which are rooted in culture.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
I don't think that's what the GP was going for... rather, implying that flat-eartherness is uncorrelated to IQ and, thus, the average IQ of flat-earthers is the same as that of the general population.
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people.
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.
Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done. Those actions involve contested subjects like economical aspects (both national and global), fairness among population demographics, historical fairness (such as indigenous populations), border politics and wars, as well as what methods and technology is scientifically proven to be effective measures. Denialism in this aspect is very broad concept, and if we define it that anyone who disagree with the politician actions are idiots, and everyone who agree with them are intelligent, then a large portion of people will be idiots even if a large number of them are very intelligent in other areas.
> Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
> How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
In Germany, for many years we had been told that climate change is the most important thing ever, that we need to change our habits or else the world will go down, that if we don't act now, we will all be doomed. Then the Ukraine war happened, and suddenly nobody was talking about climate change anymore.
I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
Plenty of people in Germany (on all social/political levels) still talk about climate change, and have done so without pause before, during and since Ukraine.
If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
Unless you are a scientist directly engaging with the literature, you and your relative are both doing the same thing: trusting the opinion of peers and high-status people in your political clan about what is happening in the world. It just happens that people in your clan are telling the truth while the other one is lying.
Neither side’s behavior can be considered “more intelligent” when you consider the vast majority of people on both sides are “opinion-takers” simply conforming to received social norms about what to believe about the world. The “opinion-makers” on both sides are undoubtedly intelligent, although you might prefer to call one side “cunning” instead.
I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
I really love the way you communicated this and wish HN posters could more routinely invite curious conversations like this. Which isn't to say I'm perfect at it either
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
Because where you draw the lines for "race" is down to your own culture, not a constant dividing line that all cultures agree upon.
To an American, race may be e.g.: {White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Arabic, Asian}.
To most Europeans, everyone who an an American would call Hispanic, we'd probably either call "Caucasian" (i.e. white) if their heritage is more from the Spanish side or Native American if their heritage is more from the pre-Columbian (Aztec?) side.
If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.
Rwanda, infamously, would get you a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; if you show me a picture of two people and ask me which was which, I wouldn't be able to answer, or even know if I was being pranked with any of the other ethnic groups in Africa.
But more broadly, while skin colour is easy to spot from the outside, it's about as useful as hair or eye colour when it comes to correspondence with the huge range of invisible genetic variation.
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
No I think that our tools to measure and our definition of intelligence are lacking and are causing more problems than actually helping with anything.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
I think it’s an essential question.
I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round.
Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it.
For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Could you please elaborate on why measuring the same group somehow eliminates social effects?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
Just downloaded Wesnoth due to this post. I'll try it out this weekend maybe. I was wrong in my other post -- I believe I played it around 20 years ago.
Something I have always appreciated. I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Working with unintelligent people, you need to spend more time building up a reputation. They cannot tell if you're intelligent based on what you say, or how you explain things -- only if you get results. This is nerve wracking for multiple reasons, but chiefly because intelligent people can be wrong, or unlucky, etc, and so only judging someone based on results is partially to judge based on luck.
>> I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology...
Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked.
William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked.
Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example...
Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...
The paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging other's intelligence. Nobody is claiming that intelligent people are completely infallible, nobody is claiming that they're incapable of ever believing in incorrect things.
My experience is that smart people more often refrain from judgement of intelligence in others. Those that judge quickly, especially after a single statement that may have been stupendous or trivially illogical, almost certainly aren't the brightest stars in the night sky. That includes excentric people, perhaps not those that state something like that in an overly emotional state. But otherwise it is quite a good giveaway in my opinion.
Especially if you ask them to elaborate their disagreement, the argument is often trite and one-dimensional.
"I don't have enough information to render a judgement" is itself a judgement, and often a wise one. Some of the scariest folks think they really know a lot about a candidate after a job interview with some canned questions.
You say “the paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging others intelligence.” Lets talk about what the paper actually shows...since you all and the rest of this HN thread :-) are confidently defending a claim you apparently... have not even scrutinized...It says so much, that from the hundreds of comments mine is the only downvoted.
The study is about 198 German psychology students watching 1-minute video clips...
That is your entire evidentiary base for a sweeping claim about intelligence and judgment. The “valid cues” that drove accuracy were speech clarity and vocabulary...meaning the finding is essentially “people who are good at verbal processing noticed verbal cues.”. That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
But here is the part you really missed. The original commenter I replied to was not making the paper narrow claim. They said intelligent people “can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.”
That is a much broader claim about intelligent people general judgment quality and exactly the kind of overreach my examples were dismantling. I was not arguing against the paper. I was arguing against the commenter extrapolation, which you are now also making by hiding behind the paper :-) as if it supports what was actually said.
Now...even if we stay strictly within the paper own claims: Correlational design, no causal inference possible, tiny unrepresentative sample, restricted intelligence range, zero validity (a 1-min clip vs. actual human interaction), multiple predictors tested with no correction for multiple comparisons, and half the authors own hypotheses failed.
The effect size could be trivially small for all the headline tells you. You are defending a study you probably read only as a headline, against criticisms you did not understand and were aimed at something else entirely.
The irony of confidently misjudging what argument you are even responding to, in a thread about people ability to judge accurately, is not lost on me.
The methodology is about as sound as a sociology study ever gets - respectable n and in a domain where "only college students" is probably OK.
The conclusion is pretty clear: intelligent people are better at discerning intelligence in others. The effect is weak but statistically significant.
This result lines up with mine (and others) experience, which is that it is significantly harder to bullshit a smart person than a stupid person about your own intelligence. It's fair game to discuss anecdotes in the context of a study like this because human beings don't understand the world in CIs and z-scores, they understand it in narratives.
> That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
So is my statement above. It would have been a profound discovery if the study found out that intelligent people were no more accurate at judging others' intelligence than anyone else.
> William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
This seems different than the astrology or AIDS or cancer ideas mentioned above it as it's scientifically sound, just widely considered unethical.
This is honestly a tell about you. “Smart people” doesn’t imply that everything that comes from them is smart like they’re a branch of life with left-handed proteins. It’s much more complex.
Unintelligent people can also be right, or lucky, etc, and someone judging on those criteria can end up getting swept up in making some very bad decisions based on dubious advice.
One the most important lessons I ever learned in my career was not to mindlessly disregard a known bullshitter. He'll be right enough that you'll look foolish even if he hasn't earned his reputation.
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
For large swaths of music I'm not sure that matters all that much, not anymore. At least the copy-paste bands had some level of uniqueness, there always seemed to be a distinct sound or gimmick.
I don't really like much of the "mainstream" music right now. It's basically whining, high pitched young men. They all sound exactly the same to me, you can't hear or make outall the words, they play the guitar, sort of and all bass sounds have been scrubbed from the track.
Even if they write their own songs, which I honestly think many do, I don't see the point, when it's basically a stream of high pitched tones which you can't hear. Even if you read the lyrics, they are super generic. Might as well be AI, and I think that's really the point. Most people don't give a fuck, AI or not, who cares, it's noise coming out the speaker or headphones. It's not there because it's music, it's there to be noise and isolate you from the world.
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
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