u/FederalGovernmentUS

Think about the applicability of climate science to interplanetary exploration. You need to understand the climate to think about habitability, how to terraform, how to keep people alive and weather systems predictable.

In funding climate science today, it’s not just about saving the world. It’s about creating the next one too. And what we learn here, we can apply there.

If we put all our money into rockets and the engineering element, we’re going to really struggle with the people/survival element, which ultimately is the whole point of going out there anyway.

I know some of you billionaire technobros use Reddit. Seriously consider what I’m saying!

I’m diagnosed ADHD, and for 9 years I’ve been on venlafaxine and varying doses of Vyvanse/ritalin/concerta/dexamp. But while it for sure would stimulate me, I’d just lay there and not really be able to channel that energy into anything. I‘d routinely avoid responsibilities and just be super avoidant of discomfort in general.

I figured I’ll try out of the box and went for a non-stimulant option. I’d heard bad things about atomoxetine, so instead I asked for Guanfacine. 4 milligrams. Holy crap, whatever its doing is working. Within months of going on it, alongside my other medications, I’ve gone into a masters program, am more active on average compared to last year, am sleeping on time, and there is way less task initiation issues than before taking it.

The task initiation issue was my worst symptom, and it’s pretty much completely gone. My desk still tends to become a mess, but I clean that mess after two days rather than letting it sit out of avoiding how overwhelmed it’d make me feel. Big ups to Guanfacine, game changer if you’ve got underlying anxiety that you’re not cognizant of.

testing

Just coming in to do a graduate certificate in National security policy, thinking of which master I’d want to continue on into. Both are passion fields, but would the master of Strategic Studies be helpful to get into the sector with some breadth? Don’t want to be silo’d into NatSecPol. Anyone here with experience?

Since 2016, maybe earlier, we’ve seen the rise of big data and monied interests fuelling manipulative, targeted propaganda, pinpoint behaviour profiling, swung elections, and the tearing of the social fabric in democracies across the globe. We’ve given it a name - disinformation. While MISinformation is simply incorrect or ignorance, DISinformation is deliberately misleading, to confuse or distort your perception of reality.

It was recognised at scale when RU interfered in the 2016 presidential election. You’d see Reddit threads exploding with blatant denials of hard truths, dropping off soon after the election cycle is over. It even has a name now, the “firehose of falsehoods”. It effectively destabilised the United States, causing the capitol riot on January 6th, multiple assassination attempts, allowing monied interests to seize power independently of Russia, and now escalating into the situation of today, where the world is on the brink of war.

The US is not alone. France had Le Pen. The UK had Brexit and now has Reform. Germany has the AfD. Netherlands, historically one of the most progressive governments in Europe, elected Wilders. We’ve seen terror attacks and bombings, and attempts on parliamentarian lives. Some successful. Some staged! We’ve seen the homes of judges burned to the ground, we’ve seen assassinations in broad daylight. The frequency and intensity of the world’s woes today, particularly in the western world, have jumped severely from just ten years ago. The correlation is clear.

The power in being able to speak directly to the mind of the people is not being fully recognised. we treat it as a social or cultural unrest, rather than a serious national security concern. And yet ten years later, democratic governments have not made any meaningful progress towards neutering this vector of attack. Rather, now that the strategy is widely known, we’ve seen other states, and even non-state actors, even corporations just trying to sell a product - it is now omnipresent. And it is adjacent to a form of psychological abuse to the populace. And the trend is clear, as the ship chugs along, we slowly get enveloped into whatever narrative is convenient, with leaders who are friendly to those who would harm us, and who willingly tear the country down for personal benefit. See Orban’s complete betrayal of Hungary and now his recent defeat, leaving the country with billions of embezzled public funds. See Trump’s dismantling of US soft power. See Farage’s hand in Brexit. See Australia’s One Nation, who frame themselves as a blue collar party, while funded by billionaire mining moguls. See Germany’s AfD rejecting the memory of the holocaust, threatening to set the country down an old familiar path. And their success is in no small part due to the artificial amplification of social misgivings, in an effort to divide and steer the populace to desired political outcomes.

It would be easy to neuter this ability. But in today’s digital era, and especially now with the advent of artificial intelligence and mass data predictive modelling, the very infrastructure of our livelihoods is the private property of a select few. And in their being wealthy, they share the same interests as those who benefit from a divided society where money speaks louder than words.

All in all, I believe the core issues are real, but how loud they become, how divisive they get - it does not match the reality 9/10 times, and is 100% amplified to manipulate and enforce the psychology of groupthink.