Underrated reasons to be thankful V
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
This is pretty understated. We live in a strangely beautiful world such that our experience of time is shaped like so due to the interplay of energy on the surface of the earth
Would be great if the stressors didn’t affect sleep though.
Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
Some of the things the post mentions are possible to do and good and some are not. There's much to be grateful for yet there are still many problems to solve if we could focus as a society...
> we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.
Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again.
[0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad
> your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have
This is a nearly word-for-word explanation of mutation-selection balance, e.g. check out the Wikipedia explanation:
> an equilibrium in the number of deleterious alleles in a population that occurs when the rate at which deleterious alleles are created by mutation equals the rate at which deleterious alleles are eliminated by selection
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon about, well, measurements that regress to the mean. In the given quote, the average baby isn't regressing to the mean, the average baby is carrying a higher number of deleterious alleles and is less fit across the board. TFA then describes fitter babies having more babies themselves, which is irrelevant to regression to the mean but an integral part of mutation-selection balance.
- Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!
In an ideal world. But in our current world I find that economical stance in the world influences amount of children more than if you’re “fit”. E.g. the poor(er) people of the world and the ultra wealthy of the world are having more kids while the middle class is having less, sure they have to meet some kind of ‘fit’ threshold but not the kind implied IMO.
according to V-Dem Institute [0], 72% of population live in autocracies.. does it include the US nowadays?
> 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs.
Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?
Point 22 seems to imply that the other finds it notable that that isn't happening.
[...]
#20. That not every symbolic expression recursively built from integrable elementary functions has an integral that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions ...
Lisp programmers disagree from the first lesson at learning Lisp.
E.g. look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_rule
Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors!
For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.
And having found: https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ #18
Can't agree more. Thank you
He lived around the year 400, so pretty progressive for his time.
But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way to let food pass through, and then reconnect.
As history shows, Rome did win, so I wonder just how you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was possible) Was there another universe where the first apes that would later become Carthagians found more bananas, thus had higher population and resources and won this way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this counterfactual history :D
But, in another timeline, a mosquito stung the Cunctator shortly after war broke out, giving him malaria, which was then endemic in Italy. He would have recovered if not for another piece of bad luck: clumsy from the fever, he stumbled on the way to the latrine and cracked his skull on a rock, dying instantly. The Cunctator's friend and rival Gaius Flaminius was given command of the Roman forces, who attempted direct confrontation with Hannibal's forces, suffering a series of increasingly disastrous defeats until finally Hannibal marched his elephants into Rome and put the Roman Senate to the sword.
The same mosquito hatched in our timeline, but mosquitoes are not strong fliers, and the air currents were slightly different in our timeline, so it instead stung the Cunctator's slave, who got malaria but survived. Air currents are of course chaotic¹, and the divergence between the timelines has been traced to the thermal emission of a single photon from a warm rock thirteen years earlier in Karnataka, resulting in the rock being slightly cooler and producing an almost undetectably smaller thermal updraft that night.
How our universe could have ended up two-dimensional is a much more difficult question.
______
¹ https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/25/387/2018/npg-25-387-2... estimates the maximum Lyapunov exponents of well-regarded atmospheric models such as PUMA in the neighborhood of 0.02, i.e., a Lyapunov time of a few months. As I understand it, that means that the 10⁻²⁰ joules of an infrared photon emission creates atmospheric disturbances of about a joule in about six years and about 10²⁰ joules in about 13 years, which is a couple of milliseconds of solar irradiance.
So why were the air currents slightly different? Oh I guess because the surrounding weather must have been slightly different. And how did that happen? Because the surrounding climate was different. And how that? Because earths development facilitated that different climate. Maybe the moon was bigger? Earths mass smaller? Well that's a big ask for a historical event we know happened on our known earth surrounded by our known moon.
The findings of chaos theory are counterintuitive, but they are absolutely fundamental to how our universe works.
Okay, but is space having 3 dimensions instead of 2 also an accident of history, or part of the fundamental structure of the universe?
For that matter, it's not obvious to me that history as it actually unfolded is not also part of the fundamental structure of the universe.
I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.
I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.
De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
> That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit ...
You're right that it's a relatively weak effect-- which is a good part of why the effects of variance and selection (incl sexual selection) win out and fitness doesn't decline with each generation.
The worst thing out there are those arrogant folks who think they know better than everybody else and go and try to create some sort of (self-centered) utopia, based on flawed expectations who we humans are, ignoring basic human traits we all share like selfishness. The more anybody tries to stick out of grand design and forge their own way (or even god forbid criticize), the harsher they are put down to not spoil the paradise.
I'd take democracy and freedom with corresponding risks and rewards any day over that.
Ancient Greek-style democracy -- where every citizen votes on every important issue -- can now be implemented in the US and any European country, with ease. It's not like we don't have the technology. Why do we need corrupt intermediaries? To simplify things a bit, it is because we're going to get oligarchy or ochlocracy, and the oligarchs want to make sure they're on the winning team, whereas direct democracy is a path to ochlocracy within a mere handful of years.
The Ancients knew all of this, of course.
All that said, a state's form of government has very little (in some cases nothing) to do with that state's ability to benefit from material progress.
It's a real laugh to suggest that our ancestors were "suffering enormously" on account of the fact that they were ruled by a feudal lord who descended from his mountain fortress once a year to collect taxes in the form of a handful or two of grain. Our ancestors had a place, a duty, a strong faith, and a connection to their superiors and inferiors. Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music. On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.
laughing in Marx
> Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music.
You may want to visit an open museum about a peasant life. It was all but a festival with homes "full of music".
As for the suffering - I grew up in communism, or socialism, or whatever you want to label it, behind iron curtain. There was some child-like naivety in population, you can personally call it something positive but I do not. The rest - oppression from all angles, erasure of individualism, sometimes outright murder by system. This is reality of alternatives I talk about.
The medieval fairy tale you are getting from maybe some children's book wasn't true anywhere in Europe, that's pretty much guaranteed. Half of kids died before reaching 5, child births were often fatal for mothers so men had often multiple wives out of practicality. Tooth infections, appendix or flu were killing those older left and right, everybody smelled horribly due to simply not washing at all, had fleas and other parasites and infections. Those folks suffered in ways we can't even imagine, lived short lives full of hard work and often died of causes we simply don't experience anymore. Marriage around 14-15 with first child on the way right after was the norm.
> On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.
You don't know that, nobody knows and its not even comparable. Its true that if you are semi-constantly in survival situations and one bad crop will kill everybody you don't have energy to ponder on larger topics. You can easily create it on your own today if you want, nobody is stopping you.
Direct democracy has been working out pretty darn well for us, for a pretty long time now. The system may seem slow and tedious sometimes, but it's probably mainly responsible for why it seems much less susceptible to the polarisation, demagoguery and authoritarianism we see rising all around us. It's not perfect and a constant work in progress, but I don't know of any other system that has a better track record of ensuring long-term social cohesion and stability.
As for medieval life, I keep remembering an interview with a medical historian. They said that you could imagine it a bit as the reverse of today's mode where most people are usually fine, but occasionally get sick. Back in those days, having some sort of ailment was pretty much the default, and people felt exceedingly lucky to be genuinely healthy for a few weeks.