original reddit post (removed).
“I’ll do my work in my own time, but thanks.”
I bet that response to someone offering you advice sounded impressively smart inside your own head. In reality it’s just you letting your personality slip out again - but keep it up, you’re doing our work for us. 👍
geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .
“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.
there’s no way to make that happen.
David Chalmers? Cool, he’s one of my favourite philosophers. 👍
Beth Sarim I think many are now expecting it much sooner than that, like within a few years, perhaps within a decade.
Geoffrey Hinton says he never used to worry about super-intelligent AI because he assumed it was 100 years away or more. That was his view for decades while at the forefront of research. But in the past three years the rapid progress of AI has surprised him and he has completely reconsidered his expectations.
geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .
“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.
there’s no way to make that happen.
I wonder if any who were dismissive of the threat from artificial intelligence are reevaluating the situation yet? More experts now expressing concern publicly.
https://i.redd.it/hd9p1g3ssr2b1.jpg.
1290 jw congregations have been deleted since 4th dec 2022. i have a full map so you can explore active/deleted congs, and also orphaned halls https://analytics.jws-library.one/viewmap.html.
many of the deletions in the usa appear to be foreign language groups.
Thanks Earnest and ComingOutMyCage, looks interesting 👍
https://i.redd.it/hd9p1g3ssr2b1.jpg.
1290 jw congregations have been deleted since 4th dec 2022. i have a full map so you can explore active/deleted congs, and also orphaned halls https://analytics.jws-library.one/viewmap.html.
many of the deletions in the usa appear to be foreign language groups.
They did announce a few years ago that they were scaling back “foreign language” because it wasn’t as productive as they hoped.
Does a foreign language “group” count as a congregation in the figures?
Is the possible to name the 16 congregations that have closed in Britain?
from what i can see no such thing is happening.i became a jw in 1960 and remained for about 30 years and the numbers of active jw`s today in the world are far greater than they were back then.. and here in australia the numbers are much higher than they were back then .. so i don`t see that their in decline or have any worries about losing support .. don`t the numbers speak for themselves ?.
is it just wishful thinking on your part ?.
I’ve been at an assembly where there were no baptisms at all. They gave the baptism talk anyway. Automatons.
from what i can see no such thing is happening.i became a jw in 1960 and remained for about 30 years and the numbers of active jw`s today in the world are far greater than they were back then.. and here in australia the numbers are much higher than they were back then .. so i don`t see that their in decline or have any worries about losing support .. don`t the numbers speak for themselves ?.
is it just wishful thinking on your part ?.
In 20 years it will be gone. I've noticed young couples are not having children
It takes a long, long time for churches to die out completely. The Methodist church in the UK began declining in the 1930s and has been declining steeply ever since. Even so they will likely not die out completely until the 2040s. That’s over a hundred years of steady decline before they will close their doors entirely. JWs on the other hand have not even begun to decline yet.
This is a graph of Methodist growth and decline over a 300 year period.
https://churchmodel.org.uk/2016/11/16/the-rise-and-decline-of-british-methodism/
from what i can see no such thing is happening.i became a jw in 1960 and remained for about 30 years and the numbers of active jw`s today in the world are far greater than they were back then.. and here in australia the numbers are much higher than they were back then .. so i don`t see that their in decline or have any worries about losing support .. don`t the numbers speak for themselves ?.
is it just wishful thinking on your part ?.
In the UK JW numbers have fluctuated around 120,000 to 140,000 for the past 30 years. They are neither growing nor declining to any great extent. But this is in contrast with the vast majority of other churches that are in steep decline. The Church of England, Church of Scotland, and the Methodist church have all declined by well over 50% in that same period.
I thought JWs would decline after the generation teaching was dropped in 1995, and after the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous around 2000, but it never happened. But I don’t think JWs can defy gravity forever: the same trend of secularisation that affects all other churches will eventually come to them also. That’s barring major word events such as world war, deadly plague, technological upheaval, or the like, which could disrupt long term secularisation trends unpredictably.
original reddit post (removed).
What a disgusting little rat. He claims Kim told “many, many lies” about him. The only “lies” he’s ever actually been specific about is his obnoxious quibble about whether visiting prostitutes every couple of months meets the definition of “regular”, and whether it is fair to point to publicly available revenue figures as an indication of income. It is beyond pathetic to claim that these are in any way relevant to the central concerns people, including survivors, have about his behaviour. If he really needs anyone to spell out the connection between using sex workers in Thailand and his so-called advocacy for abuse survivors then he needs his head examined to put it politely. I don’t think he is genuinely asking for an ‘explanation’, he just enjoys demanding an ‘explanation’ out of someone who is a survivor. She doesn’t owe him any kind of explanation at all. And again with all the talk of ‘bullying’ and his ‘mental health’ as if he is some sort of victim. The nerve of this freak is just sickening. When you think the bottom of the barrel has been scraped he scrapes deeper.
https://avoidjw.org/news/jehovahs-witnesses-mysteriously-deleted-shunning-videos/?fbclid=iwar3jjfsa3zx-4kxrdtjwopmzty-5wxhrxm1-gvjtp9j20ovqfpxh.
If her mother phoned upset , begged her to answer , how did she know that it was not a bona fide emergency?
If a relative is crying and pleading for an answer I would argue that is by definition an emergency. I simply can’t understand what is going through the heads of the people producing these videos.
And then you get the Watchtower lawyer in Canada who claimed that family life is not impacted. I just can’t understand how they care barefaced lie like this. Either they should stand by the so-called “principle” of shunning, or they should abandon it. This trying to have it both ways reflects really badly on them.
