I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema
https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...
In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week.
Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally?
It's crazy, isn't it?
You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.
Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.
It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.
That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.
I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.
I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.
Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.
It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"
I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.
Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.
Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.
Yay for Brexit.
If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.
Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)
Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...
This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.
OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.
> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.
You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.
That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.
(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
We're a species that has navigated its way across the world.
Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing.
We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
> I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do
No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard
phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem
every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop)
It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions
it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations
this has the disadvantage of making you even less at home in other devices but hey, my reality is what when this happens I wouldn't have been any better off regardless
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-tw...
That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.