They are ridiculous because the reality of the situation is boring. Boring doesn’t drive engagement. So, all the clickbait headlines and ragebait comments imply scandal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get attention.

After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.

This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.

Does china developing ai powered missiles sound ridiculous? It sounds ridiculous to me because the US is surely doing the same, It would be boring if we knew the us was doing the same. It is emotional to think about china destroying the US when it is just the antithesis of American exceptionalism. It reminds me of what Dario said about their stance on open source.

>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?

Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?

>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.

When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.