Facts, by definition, are true

There are no alternative facts. Only additional facts.
Alternatively there are lies.

You don’t need to trust facts.
That’s what makes them facts.

Additionally, facts don’t tell you anything about anything, outside the fact itself. The sun rose yesterday. It rose today. It doesn’t automatically follow the sun will rise again tomorrow. That’s speculation, based on interpretative pattern recognition. Or to put it another way: “That’s just, like, your opinion man.”

On what?
Different people have different bodies of knowledge and experience. Their expertise on one question doesn’t transfer to another.

Haven’t been to a meeting in years.
I know, they’re “mandatory”. But it’s not like anyone takes a head count. And nobody’s even noticed I wasn’t going anymore.

Becides, they’re always the same bullshit. Anything actually important will be in the newsletter. It’s fine.

It’s a kind of nostalgic survivorship bias.
You remember the dozen or so old ones that were good, and forget the hundreds that were not.

Who are you?
How do we know each other?

I don’t have a problem with you.
As I said, you’re doing the only thing you can. I can’t fault you for that. Nothing I wrote was in anger, or meant to be combative. I expect that offline you’re a perfectly kind and decent person. I wish you all the best. Truly.

You are right. There is no debating the meaning behind things built by people who are long dead. Because as I said, what they mean to us today is whatever we want. It perfectly represents one thing to you, and another entirely different thing to me, and something neither of us imagined to someone else. There is no debate there.

I just want people to understand what the thing they’re liking actually represents,

It doesn’t actually represent anything. It’s a public pool.
You just imagine it represents something. Something specific to you.
Just as anyone else could imagine it represents anything else.

And what you really want, is to convince others your imagining is real. Because you believe it is. And since you can’t choose what you believe or don’t, all you can do is try to convince others to believe what you do.

I think that slavers don’t deserve monuments […]
Lincoln himself did not personally own slaves, but [yada, yada, yada]

You’re just making a different shift here.
Shifting the definition of slaver, from one commonly understood usage, to your own personal version.

But that doesn’t even matter, as you admit that’s not the reason you don’t like it.
The reason you don’t like it, isn’t any rational practical reason. It’s an ideological dogmatism. A decree. Because you don’t like it, other’s shouldn’t be allowed to. Which is kind of funny coming from “an outspoken anarchist”.

That’s called Shifting the Goalpost.

“I don’t like it for this reason!”

Shown that reason doesn’t apply.

“Doesn’t matter, I’m still right because I have a whole other reason!”

I’m sure that’s also not the reason you don’t like it. But it doesn’t matter because, whatever anyone says you’ll have another excuse reason right behind that. Not worth playing that game.

The reflecting pool is part of the Lincoln Memorial.
Yes, that Lincoln. The one who freed the slaves.

Well that’s just geopolitics and economic upheval. That stuff happens all the time. I thought it might be something important.

My momma’s dead
Your momma sat on her head

I’d say Friends is worse. But it’s a thin margin.
Neither are good by any means. But my sister loves Friends, and she has terrible taste in television, so I’ll accept her judgement.

Collapse of what?

GoneMAD playing a local music library I keep on my phone.

They’re only on stage for an hour at most. They can drink all they want before or after, so dehydration isn’t a real concern. With all that talking, dry mouth can be. The drink is just something to wet the pallet palate, to aid in speaking comfortably and clearly. For that, it doesn’t mater much what it is, so long as it’s wet. So it’s just whatever they feel like drinking.

Evil doesn’t exist
It’s a Thought Stopper people use to excuse shunning and even killing those they don’t like, instead of understanding and correcting.

You’re right in a way. People are born narcissists. Our brains aren’t fully formed. It takes years of training an neural development for them to change.

But that’s a ton of work. It’s easier to label someone Evil and be done with them.

I think it’s inevitable.
I also think it won’t be possible on our current kind of computing hardware.

The software of the human mind, seems a byproduct of the structure of the human brain. I think a major revolution in processor design and manufacturing tech will be needed. It’ll need some fundamentally new form. Closer to an ASIC or FPGA processor to run with any kind of reasonable efficiency. But it’ll have to be truly 3 dimensional, not just layers of 2d chips. It’ll also need to be extremely low power.

LLMs are as close as we have right now, and they have miles to go. But they need hundreds of times more power than the brain does. No it won’t be soon and it won’t be with this kind of silicon processors.