Contract requires "meeting of minds", i.e. intentional assent from both sides. I am not sure text generated by fully automated bot can be treated as intentional assent.
All this non-lawyer programmer legal analysis is always fun because no one really knows. When I send email aren't I just telling my email "robot" to do something? This is one layer beyond that, my 'llm robot' is sending text messages on my behalf.
Now witness how people suddenly realize what is the problem iwth this argument when it happens to them. It's free private action when we do it, but fascism when the other guys do it. Always so.
I have a blog still, which I've maintained since 2001. But I have no interest in having "personal brand", whatever it is, I just enjoy it. I also read a number of technical blogs. Most of them I found by word of mouth - somebody referenced it somewhere, the content was good, I got interested, browsed the other entries and decided this is something I want to be reading on the ongoing basis.
Policing the language to avoid harming oppressed people. This is not a real virtue though as there's no actual harming and the only thing it does is creating animosity, annoyance and pointless arguments and causing people to hate each other needlessly, without helping any oppressed people in any way.
> It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no
Of course, absent communication, that would be the only way. Fortunately, communication - such as written text - allows us to let others to witness certain aspects of our mental state, this is one of the points of communication. So, present the communication, we can make certain conclusions about the mental state of the communicator.
> It's not like he's going on Twitter/X and hectoring people.
He personally may not. We do know though there are a lot of people very eager to wage such campaigns, and we know speech-policing campaigns have very real and very far reaching consequences sometimes. So the sensitivity to such things is heightened right now. And I am sure that if the "rambling on his personal blog" contained some things that are considered culturally unacceptable (something like Damore memo, for example), there would be a lot of people who would call not only for widespread discussion but for suppression and deplatforming of the person expressing it. I think this is extremely wrong approach, regardless of the content, but I think also this may be the reason why discussing this seriously is an appropriate reaction. To be clear, I do not call (and I am extremely opposed to) attacking the person writing it in any way. But I think it deserves the pushback - in the form of discussion and critique - that it is getting. Language policing and censorship is very real, very dangerous and should be discussed and pushed back against.
> he gives a good obscure-history lesson as to why the phrase "cargo cult" doesn't actually mean what most of us think it does.
I am not sure that's actually true. Most of us probably thinks cargo cult is a religions practice somewhere in the Pacific that mimics external looks of the logistical operations performed by Westerners on their islands to expect the results of coming of goods that the Westerners brought in (cargo), without understanding what caused the actual logistic processes to happen and how they work, just by magic means. Most of us would probably have the specific details wrong, but that's true for almost every area. The article provided very good plenty of details, very interesting - but with all the "akshually"-ing there, I don't think it has proven the main premise wrong. The information itself is very much appreciated, but I don't think the conclusion - which seems to be "you are all wrong and should stop using this term" - is warranted.
There's a difference between your proclaiming "I am so much better than you!" and me actually feeling worse. If you baselessly proclaim that, I would not feel morally worse, I will feel annoyed. And behavior that annoys people around you is anti-social and must be publicly shamed so that there would be less of it and people would have better qualify of life.
> But to accuse someone of "virtue signaling" is a political attack that requires evidence.
What kind of "evidence" beyond the content of the signalling itself it would require? I mean, sure one could make a detailed critique of the article to show why exactly it fits the term very well (TLDR version would be it tries to police the well-understood usage of the term that describes real phenomenon and is useful to prevent imaginary offenses) but it wouldn't be "evidence" - it does not introduce any new facts, only one's opinion. The only factual "evidence" necessary is the content of the article, which is already here.
> Is that not enough for you?
Not even beginning to be close to being enough. Winning would be going back to the times where you can discuss political topic without fear of your life being ruined and your livelihood being taken away from you. Winning would be where there aren't thousands of people actively searching to hurt other people for disagreeing with them. Winning would be not having dozens of people in a lot of corporations specifically paid obscene money for pushing idpol. Winning would be forgetting the meaning of the word "cancelled" that we learned in the last decade. Winning would be for the culture to change so that trying to hurt people for disagreeing would be shameful, not praised. We may have hope for it to happen one day, but we're not even close to being true now. It may take years or decades - just it it took decades for "woke nonsense" to take root in the culture - and may very well not happen at all, any election results nonwithstanding.
> What kind of "evidence" beyond the content of the signalling itself it would require?
"Virtue signaling" means someone is acting only to signal their own virtue, and not because they actually believe in the thing they are doing or expressing.
> "Virtue signaling" means someone is acting only to signal their own virtue, and not because they actually believe in the thing they are doing or expressing.
[Emphasis altered -- CRC.]
Really? I never knew it had to be a necessary part of it, that they don't believe in [whatever]. Are you sure that's part of the general definition, and not just something you made up?
Even if you do believe in something, if you keep preening yourself in sanctimony about how virtuous you are for believing in it -- what is that, then, if not virtue signaling?
You can't have food that is at the same time cheap, healthy and at your doorstep. You can have two of them. Walmart gets you cheap and nearby. If you want healthy and nearby, go to Whole Foods and be prepared to stretch your wallet. Not everyone can afford it though.
I don't think the stores that used to exist had the same or superior choice of goods and the same prices as Walmart did. I mean there might be some that did, but they persist even in the presence of Walmart - I have several Walmarts within 15 min drive of me, and still know a bunch of local grocery stores and specialized shops that still do fine. But I am not sure why "local store" is inherently superior to Walmart unless it does something better, or how it will be able to deliver on the all three.
I wouldn't expect better. Everybody sends these kinds of emails. Banks, shops, social media sites, hospitals, government... everybody. It's just easier this way for each particular site, and since data theft and unauthorized access has been successfully reframed as the victim's fault, there is no incentive not to do it.
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