the world seems to actively hate the idea of kids having something that remotely looks like choice.

Replace that with “power seems to actively hate the idea of anyone having anything that remotely looks like choice”. Mostly because everything is determined. And they know this. They understand that nothing is up to chance. We’re perfect little bots who respond deterministically (albeit chaotically) to sex, advertisement, gambling, propaganda, drugs, and so on. Basically all aspects of modern life are designed to chip away at your degrees of freedom. Consider a mortgage, for instance. It locks you into a job so that you can’t afford to quit anymore, or you end up destitute. Then consider marriage: it exists so that you buy a house and so that you have children in it. Every choice we think we’re making clicks like a ratchet and locks us into a lower energy state that’s easy to control.

Or… and I’m prepared to receive flak for this. But consider transitioning in the US specifically. On one side you have Dems coddling you, and on the other side you have Republicans threatening to murder you. So once you transition you’re a Dem voter for life even if you don’t agree on their other policies. Both parties are playing the same game behind your back.

But when an LLM adds more to the conversation than the average poster, you have to start wondering what the fuck we are even doing here.

Because it’s a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn’t wholesome 100. Also because it’s decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it’s basically feudalism.

Doing or thinking anything over 1 standard deviation from what the middle of the bell curve endorses, I guess.