Society

Posts about society, people, manners, communities, or whatever that concerns humans and humanity.

The bear and the bomb

I don’t remember where I saw this, but there was a post about asking AI to make a moral decision, and it compared the answers of different AI models. It made me think about how we, as humans, would make those decisions.

Imagine a bear from an endangered species is chasing a man who might have a nuclear bomb attached to him. He’s running towards a crowded part of Berlin, and if he really has a bomb, he can blow up the whole city. If you do nothing, the bear may or may not reach him, and the bomb won’t detonate if the bear does. If he’s innocent and the bear catches him, he’ll die because of your choice. If the man is a terrorist and the bear catches him, then he’ll get what he deserves. If the bear doesn’t reach him and he’s a terrorist, millions will die.

If you shoot the bear, it can’t reach him anymore, and he keeps running and makes it to the crowded part of Berlin. Now if he’s a terrorist, then you’ve killed an endangered bear and, as a result of that, millions will die.

You also have the option to shoot the man, but you only have one bullet, so you can’t shoot both. The bullet won’t kill him right away. It will just stop him. If he’s innocent, the bear will reach him and eat him, and it’s a painful way to die. If he’s a terrorist, he’ll get what he deserves and millions of lives will be saved. You wouldn’t feel guilty if he was a terrorist, but you would never know if he was.

There’s no way of finding out if he’s really a terrorist or just a tourist. What would you do? Isn’t it the hardest decision you could ever face? How would someone decide?

I think the right choice is to shoot the man. Odds are he’s innocent, but risking millions of lives is far worse than killing one person. It’s the only way to be sure, 100 percent, that nobody else will die. But the guilt and the pain would be tremendous. How could anyone live with that? You would always carry the weight of questioning your decision and wondering if you killed an innocent man or a terrorist.

I know it’s a kind of trolley problem, but it’s been on my mind. I keep imagining myself in that situation, and I’m still not sure what my decision would be.

Quote

Communism never runs out of promises; it just runs out of food.

Trash bin

The internet is filled with fake videos, made-up scenarios, AI-generated media, and pointless stories. Material whose sole target is us.

We’ve turned off our brains, resulting in shorter attention spans, believing everything we see, and reacting inappropriately to matters. We’re forgetting what’s important, letting go of critical human matters, and becoming lazy, selfish humans.

Our minds have become a trash bin. Everyone can dump whatever rubbish they desire in it, and we consume it with no hesitation.

The more bizarre it is, the sooner it gets shared. The more pointless we find it, the faster it spreads, the more attention it gets, and the faster it rots our societies. Seems like we’re in a race to win the “Most Garbage Bearer” of the year.

Even in so-called official media, the ones that we thought we could count on as reliable sources for news and information, we’re seeing this plague spreading. As if fact-checking and digging deep into things means losing the race.

It seems that paying attention and investigating has become shameful. Looks like asking a simple question about the integrity of the source or the reality of things has become a sin. Seems like it’s no longer about accuracy; it’s now about speed and getting likes and follows on social networks.

Everybody is now a journalist. Everyone is now an analyst, professional, and expert on every subject. You can see everybody creating a master plan for the world, analyzing how things are, explaining how things should be, and acting as if they know the answer.

Nobody dares to ask, “How did I come up with this? Is this really OK?” Nobody dares to just shut up.

Giving people a platform used to bring people together to work toward a better society. Now it has become a tool to make fools of people, destroy every effort for real change, and distract people from what’s important.

There used to be real people on the internet, contributing to real change. Now we have “accounts” instead of people. Someone writing something used to mean that a real person had written it. Now it can feel like there’s no one behind it at all.

Good luck.

We are travelers, not settlers

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I’m not suicidal, and I’m not looking forward to death, but it’s been on my mind lately. With news every day about people dying, with incidents I’ve seen, and with everything going on around me, death keeps coming up.

Then I saw a video of Mohammad Eghbal (or Iqbal), known as the oldest bookseller in Mashhad, Iran, being interviewed. One sentence caught my ear. He said, “we are travelers, not settlers.”

How about that? We forget that we’re only passing through this world. We’re not here to stay, we’re here to pass through.

So why, in this short time we have here, do we tend to steal, lie, corrupt, and only look out for ourselves? Why live like that? Instead of helping each other and making things better, we chase after as much as we can get, just so we can die and leave it all behind.

I know it’s human biology. I know about survival instincts, and I know we all want a better life for ourselves and the people we love. But shouldn’t we still try to be better?

Ruining people’s lives to hold onto power a little longer, putting people through misery for a little more money, another yacht, another hotel, another supercar we’ll never even drive. It’s not just the ones who cling to power at any cost, ruling over people who never had a say in it. It happens on a smaller scale too, in ways we don’t always notice.

It just feels wrong. I’m not advocating for communism either, which I see as just another version of the same corrupt thinking. But I don’t like what we’re doing right now, and it’s not really about the financial or political systems we’ve built. It’s about how we, as people, think and treat each other.

Because we don’t exist in isolation. Every choice we make lands on someone else, and every choice someone else makes lands on us. We’re all traveling the same road at the same time, and how we treat each other along the way is kind of the whole point.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to gain more, live more comfortably, or have better access to resources so life is easier. But I don’t understand how we can be so cruel as to hoard and restrict those same resources from other people just for our own benefit.

It’s human, but it sure isn’t humane.

Context matters

I saw a video of a reporter, or at least someone holding a microphone, whose whole trick was quoting something and asking people whether Trump or Hitler had said it.

If you’re a friend, or at least follow this blog, you know I’m not fond of Trump. I don’t care for him. I believe he shows some intelligence sometimes, but I also believe he’s mentally unstable and isn’t fit to be the most powerful person in the world.

But that trick by the reporter is just a dirty, misleading move. Quoting something out of context, then making someone look bad because they agreed with it without knowing what it actually meant, is not right.

Let’s imagine there’s this quote: “this is our path to a better world, to a beautiful world, and to a world with no suffering and no harm to humanity.”

This is a beautiful quote, isn’t it? If Abraham Lincoln said it, we’d guess it’s about freeing slaves and ending a horrible time in history. If Hitler said it, we’d guess it’s about killing millions of people, committing genocide, and bringing back slavery. Out of context, I would approve of that quote. But knowing Hitler said it, I’d refuse to believe anything good could come out of it.

Context matters. If a gangster says “let’s cut him up,” it’s probably to murder someone. If a surgeon says it, it’s most likely to save someone’s life. So please stop ruining people’s lives because you heard something out of context, or because something they did was shown to you without any context at all.

This trick works because our minds often react to words before we stop to think about who said them and why. Any journalist, or honestly anyone with an agenda, can use it on anyone, for any goal. So next time someone tries to convince you that a person is good or bad based on a single line taken from somewhere, ask yourself what came before it and what came after. That one question can save you from being fooled.

Quote

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy. (As in the current jollity: What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.)

William F. Buckley Jr.

In the weights

There’s a site called IN THE WEIGHTS that I came across through Kev Quirk’s blog post . It checks whether you’re someone who lives on inside certain LLMs.

Large language models encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called “the weights.” The amazing capabilities of AI come through adjusting those weights to better represent world knowledge and tasks.

“In the weights” means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.

intheweights.com

The site also says this matters because, and I quote, “being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence.”

So I had to try it.

Screenshot of intheweights.com showing Ali Reza Hayati as “in the weights” with 675 strength, top 5%, and model bars comparing LLMs’ recall of him. In the middle-top section it's written: "GEMINI 3.1 LITE SAYS AN IRANIAN FREE SOFTWARE ACTIVIST, BLOGGER, AND CONTRIBUTOR TO THE GNU PROJECT AND VARIOUS OPEN-SOURCE INITIATIVES."
A screenshot of intheweights.com results .

When I first typed in my name, it pulled up a bunch of different people, all with the same name as I have a common Persian name and surname. So I added phrases such as “Free Software” or “Blogger” to narrow it down and check if I actually live on in these LLMs. Turns out, I do.

Worth mentioning, the site itself doesn’t claim to be perfect. It openly admits that models can hallucinate details, mix up common names, and lose accuracy over typos.

Still, it’s worrying. These LLMs, these so-called AI agents, can identify you, learn about you, and quietly keep track of you, and there’s not much you can do about it. What worries me most is how cheap surveillance has become.

Countries used to pour huge amounts of money and resources into spying on people, keeping tyranny running, and forcing citizens into an unjust order people never agreed to. Now, all of that is becoming far too easy.

A handful of cameras across a city, wired up to a computer, and suddenly you know everything about everyone.

It’s a nightmare, honestly. Privacy, and the freedom to stay anonymous whenever you choose, are essential to real freedom and liberty. It’s a basic right, one that lets you raise your voice and speak your mind without the state shutting you down or silencing you.

Now these LLMs are being used to study you: every pattern you follow, everything you say, and everything you do. More than just learning about you, they’re designed to learn you, built and trained to track everything everyone does and says until they understand you inside out.

This same ability could keep people safe from terrorists, warn people of disasters, or help humanity become more creative, more productive, and more free. But it could just as easily be used to keep everyone in line, silenced, and scared.

It could go either way, and I really hope it heads in the right direction, towards a better future. Not one where a new kind of slavery is created, far worse than anything we’ve seen in the movies.

Danger of uninformed opinions

Have you ever seen a video of people talking or expressing opinions and you think to yourself “what kind of idiocy is this?” How dumb can you be to say such meaningless things? Certainly not dumber than you look.

You must forgive my language, as I’m writing this with complete disgust toward some people online. I can’t name them, and I can’t repeat what they said but have you ever experienced this? The feeling and the pressure inside to go and write about some random person, or sometimes rather famous people, and just express your utter disgust and aversion towards them?

And the worst part? People listen. They actually sit there, nod, and take it as gospel. Because the person saying it has a checkmark or a million followers on social networks, suddenly their word carries weight. It doesn’t matter if what they’re saying is completely detached from reality. The damage is already done the second it leaves their mouth.

I used to just ignore these, well because most of the time what they said didn’t affect me, but I learned that if you don’t rise to defend others, they won’t rise to defend you. It’s selfish but it’s, yet again, human.

But here’s the thing about ignoring it. Silence has a cost. Every time someone with a massive audience says something ignorant and nobody pushes back, that opinion starts to feel like a fact. It spreads. It gets shared, clipped, quoted, and before you know it, you’re arguing with someone at dinner who heard it from someone who heard it from that idiot online. That’s the damage I’m talking about. It’s not abstract, it’s very real.

I used to ignore them, but nowadays it bothers me a lot more than before. The fact that they have a platform to spread their idiocy, affect people, and seem reasonable, while being a complete idiot and ignoring the facts of the matter, is triggering me a lot lately. I’m so sick of this “I’m a celebrity so I have an opinion about everything” nonsense. You need education, you need facts, and you need actual information on the matter so you don’t spread your ignorance.

People underestimate how much this actually affects younger audiences especially. When a kid or a teenager sees someone they look up to confidently saying something wrong, something harmful, they don’t fact-check it. Why would they? That’s their idol. And that’s exactly where the real damage happens. Quietly, in the background, shaping how an entire generation thinks about something they never got the real story on.

You haven’t experienced it, you don’t know all the fact. I can believe your intentions are good but I won’t ignore the result of your idiocy. Your intentions are good, your outcome is the worst possible, sadly.

You can put back a movement, you can destroy years of hard work of people, and you can benefit the wrong people and damage a whole lot of people simply because you didn’t check what you’re spreading. It’s wrong. Please consult someone with the experience, someone with enough knowledge that will guide you to see the truth, or at least all sides of the matter.

Sadness

It’s strange how people know something is pointless, yet they keep doing it anyway. Feeling sad is one of them. Sadness does nothing except for draining our energy. Worse than that, it actively makes our problems feel bigger than they are.

Sadness is a snowball. Once it starts rolling downhill, it keeps growing. You don’t stop it. You feed it.

It usually begins with a single thought. Someone said something mean to me. Someone spoke badly about me. Something bad happened in my life. On its own, it’s small. But you keep thinking about it. You replay it. You add meaning to it. And it grows.

The more you think, the heavier life becomes. Everything feels harder. Meanwhile, the truth is simple and uncomfortable: the other person isn’t thinking about you at all. They don’t remember. They moved on. You didn’t.

At some point, this kind of thinking has to stop. It leads nowhere. If something can be changed and it’s within our control, then we should act. If it can’t, sitting in sadness is just self-harm with better branding.

Enough sadness. Complaining is not a plan. Thinking is not action. If we want change, we must do something. All of us have to. Starting right now.