the “hopelessly lost” aspect of the matrix bears here. You are disinclined to doubt the reality of a game that you are successful in. Without that doubt you won’t escape it. So success becomes failure because it directly increases your lostness.

Video games lack that “hopelessly lost” aspect. I mean, nobody mistakes them for reality and never comes back. (Right?). So I’m excluding them.

That’s a big if. And “real world” is shakey too. Yr running with a stretchy hypothetical here.

Except for poetry. When you wake up from your dreamcoffin you’ll still have your poetry skills and a few memorized poems.

First : the algorithm predicts thar our behavior today will be like our behavior yesterday. Which makes sense.

Second : what you eat determines how you poop. And they do control what we eat. So that makes sense too.

So both work together.

What’s a “commercial break”? Arrrrrrr!

Yeah I hate those. This medium is difficult enough without such antics. Best to speak plainly and succinctly.

Teacher : draw a triangle with sides of length 1 inch, 2 inches and 3 inches

Kid : but you can’t do that. You get a 3 inch line. Other students proceed to draw skinny triangles.

Teacher : you’re wrong Kid. Everybody else can do it, what’s your problem?

True story.

You have met your sq quota

Because it would remove the offending information from being viewed by his sensitive eyes.

Thank you captain obvious.

You framed your statement as a question. And it’s unnecessarily verbose.

You could filter it on your end

Handle it on the client side

This is why open source, total transparency, radical free speech and democracy is the one and only way. Because if there’s even one little shadow there will be a scorpion hiding in it.

It might be voice to text. It sometimes gets carried away.

Just put little silver skulls on the front of your hats already.

I’ll do my own pandering thank you. With a collection of clear virtue signals, a rigorous purity filter and a crew of fanatical moderators.

It could be inherently flawed. We look at a picture or a symbol and pretend it’s real. That’s insane. I mean, I know that’s kinda how it works, but still. Insane.

Or maybe it’s imprecise to call it a flaw. Maybe call it a trap, to be careful of. But nobody’s careful. (So that’s maybe an “out of control” situation)

(I know I’m not. I mean case in point. I’m watching this movie “don’t look up” right now and I’m getting all teary-eyed and stuff. It’s a fucking movie. An illusion of flickering images and bullshit. I know with great certainty that it’s just a fantasy but I’m still having this reaction. So that’s insane)

Is it inherently bad? Out of control? Something else?

We could order understanding by quality.

First there is perception. That’s the closest. Then there is thought about that. Then there is the secondhand form of that, gotten from a friend. Then gotten from a mere associate. Then a stranger. Thirdhand and fourthhand. And so on.

Close to far. That close kind you don’t even have to think or talk about it.

Perceptions like rightness, beauty, gut make a good guide. Art and invention are proof of that. Call it a good source of truth.

Not too good for building objective consensuses tho.