AntiImperialis2

>the view seems quite unhinged when read together, but really I would view it as one misstep/lack of step on the way to interesting truth.

Why "unhinged"? I don't know philosophy and English is not my language but I'll try to generalize:

Living organisms take resources that they can, specially if there's a net positive gain from it. This happens because those that gain the most net positive tend to reproduce more and hence these traits (i.e. tendency to take resources which are a net benefit) gets passed on. Does evolutionary theory disagree with this?

Humans are just a special (as opposed to general, I don't believe there's anything "special" special about humans) case of it.

Let's say that there were just two human tribes. If the tribes are not equally powerful, the powerful one will kill most of them and take all the resources and the women.

Let's imagine a case where they are almost equally powerful. Then, conflict would cause mutual destruction and it makes it worth it to have an understanding between them... in which they don't kill each other and not take each others' stuff.

You could argue such cost benefits between families in tribes or individuals in families from the same framework.

None of this needs "morality". You could argue that the very set of rules which make for an optimal balance between individual, family, tribal and inter-tribal interests is in fact "morality"... but when the resources and the power balance changes, whatever "morals" people thought existed will disappear and will be replaced by new set of "morals".

>There is absolutely a solid sense of morality baked into (at the very least) primate brains.

No, there isn't.

>Give this a read. The science is solid:

https://righteousmind.com/

"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion?". Hmm...

So, from your comment, I'm guessing that the answer in the book to the question in the subtitle is that there is some baked in "morality" in us, that evolution gave us? If so, that's extremely misguided.

If there was such a thing, it would be at least somewhat similar across all human tribes and cultures. That's not the case at all. It's vastly different throughout history and across cultures because these things have everything to do with power dynamics and resource distribution.

>https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

And? Monkeys have hierarchies. If they repeated this experiment but swappped the monkeys, it would turn out differently. The experiment is designed and orchestrated to show some sort of "equal pay" nonsense. What is happening is that the monkey on the left is socially higher than the one on the right... and hence it is used to claiming better food for itself first. When it sees the other one gets it, it gets pissed off. When these higher ups get injured, get sick or get old, someone else claims the status. It's all power dynamics and fight over resources. It has nothing to do with "morality".

> What kind of unhinged philosophy are you smoking? Objectivism? Marxism? Freebasing Solipsism?

I don't know what your western intellectuals call it but if I were to translate it to English, it would roughly translate to "reality".

>Emotions are how we humans do morality.

First of all, there is no such thing as "morality". It's just a way for elites to control commoners so that they behave in predictable ways.

Emotions are responses that help us learn and survive.

Anger is one such emotion. It helps us destroy enemies. But it can also make us short-sighted and do things that are not good in the long run, so when it happens, we need to take our time before we do something... but that's a different discussion.

There is no "morality" on stealing or anything. What if the thing you're stealing from me today was something I stole from you yesterday? Would it still be "immoral"? What if my great grandfather stole from your great grandfather many years ago and you steal it back today? What if the transactions aren't that simple? What if the stealing happened in a much more complicated structure thoughout many generations in a network of billions of people?

Nothing belongs to nobody. People take whatever they can get away with. There are rules you have to make up and enforce if you're in the business of benefiting from mass compliance. For everyone else, you follow those rules because otherwise the elites will come for you. There's no reason to complicate this (except of course you are among the elites, in which case you have to, to make sure the masses are predictable).

In everything it does? Most poor people vote liberal but NONE of the leaders are poor. Knowing this, it makes political sense for them to keep the people poor. What will their priorities be when data shows that people who get out of poverty are likely to care about other issues, I don't know, like mass murder of babies... or race baiting or corruption?

No they aren't. More new religions and sects are being created than ever before.

Also, just because you believe your set of looney beliefs is not a religion does not mean that it's any different from any other religion.

I'm sure they've made some contributions but I'm not sure if they've done "wonders". But thats the beauty of the BSD license. Not only do you have freedom to use the software, you also have freedom to not give back your modifications if you choose not to.

Except everything is "poison" in a big enough dose if ingested.

Committed experts are basically activists, they are people with grandiose delusions who think that particular thing is so important that they committed their lives to it.

Our bodies are full of "toxins". For example, our bones are made up of calcium and phosphorus. Yet, if you eat a pinch of powdered phosphorus, you die.

YT premium is free of ads that Google serves. But most YouTube shows are funded by other ads embedded in the shows themselves. I wish Ad Blockers could remove them.

How hard would it be to implement an ad blocker browser extention to do it? Query an api endpoint with a video ID to find out start and end times for the ad and automatically skip over it. Allow users to volunteer to submit those ad times to build up the database. It would be limited to browsers, but it would still be something.

I don't remember if I've seen a coke ad in the last year but I'm pretty sure I bought at least 100 litres of it.

That's true.

GPL2 is better for commercialization than GPL3 is. However, BSD, MIT, Apache are much much better than any GPL version, including AGPL.

Have you tried using OLEDs? I can't imagine how eInk would be different from an OLED on grayscale and low brightness settings... other than the fact that OLED will be better in terms of availability, refresh rates, response times, resolution and price.

Those traits persisted in us through all these hundreds of millions of years of evolution because those were the traits that helped us survive.

Because that would be against the site guidelines.

If you're building a hardware and have to ship it with an OS, Linux is the obvious choice for most... but the GPL licensing makes it very difficult for a lot others.

There's a reason a lot of open source in recent years have avoided GPL as a plague and opted for BSD or MIT or Apache licenses.

So, you're discriminating against deaf people? Boy, you're going down big. You have no idea.

You can, if you wait long enough.

>Cooking is useful, rewarding and attractive.

Not so much if you don't enjoy it.

I love cooking occasionally. For example, I will spend a week trying to perfect a dish I just learned. I do it over and over everyday, trying different ways and failing until I make it great.

But for most of the time, I'd rather not have to do it.

>Just be aware that it's rather expensive in the long run.

True. But if your time is valuable, it's much more expensive to have to spend all that time in the kitchen.

The reality that they have created for Foxconn workers is that they have a job that they would die than quit. It's that important to them.

Why do you assume that it has to be Apple's fault that China is fucked up?

Remember folks,

- Eating them: bad

- Mutilating their genetials so that they behave well and you can call them your friend or child: good

Bare-metal refers to running on hardware directly (vs. running on VMs or the cloud). I'm interested to know what you thought it was.

That's true. Younger people seem to lean left. As they grow older, a lot of them start to lean conservative.

My hypothesis is that when they are young and underdeveloped, they have incomplete understanding of the world, are prone to believing in unrealistic utopian ideas, and hence are easy to manipulate. No wonder, the leftists want the voting age to be lowered even further.

As they grow older and wiser, they see it for what it is.

The younger conservatives are explained by the fact that some kids who grow up in conservative households don't fall for the same manipulation and older liberals are explained by the fact that some people are more reluctant to change, mostly because they weave their personalities around their identities in early adulthood. Some is of course explained by influence of peers (i.e. people adopt a political view to fit in) and hence location... but I think this covers it all.

I know I will get downvoted for this which is fine but I'd like to know your hypothesis for the same population leaning conservative as they age is... if it's not too much trouble.

The closing line of the article:

>Use the primitives that are there, when possible. Write what is simple, and natural, and human.

I agree with this very much, but most of this article doesn't support this statement. Let's start with the statement it is based on.

>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Michael Pollan is great but the human way is definitely not what Michael Pollan suggests. No human tribe ate that way prior to agriculture, which happened relatively recently, and has greatly complicated things when it comes to our diet.

So, I'm in the "Eat a lot. Not too frequently. Mostly animals." camp because I believe that's what we'd have done as scavengers and later hunter-gatherers... and since we lost most of our digestive system because of the change in diet, we can no longer digest plants well and most importantly, we are no longer immune to plants toxins, which they use to protect themselves, and a lot of processing is required to get rid of the toxins (which is seen in various indigenous diets)... and still, it is never as good as animals when it comes to toxins and nutritional value. There are other considerations which may make eating more plants sound better but I have noticed that they're not well thought-through. Also, if I'm going to be conservative about one thing, it will definitely be food. We haven't evolved for 22 million years as hominids without certain adaptations to our diets. We can't arbitarily decide to change them without side effects.

Similarly, when it comes to programming, I'm in the "Write code. However much is needed. Whatever works for you." camp, the one that I made up just now and I invite others to join it.

Objects and classes are good analogies and work well for many use cases. Humans think object oriented programming makes a lot of sense because we already think in object oriented terms. A lot of software we use day-to-day are written like that and it has worked fine for a very long time. Same is true for patterns and frameworks built on top of them. They caught on because they resonate with human way of reasoning about things. They have their limitations though.

Similarly, functional programming has a simplicity to it which works great in many applications. When complexity grows, you have to get used to various other patterns and concepts to write real-world applications. Functional programming originates in mathematics, which is also very human... but as complexity grows, it's not as human as you'd like it to be. A lot of humans struggle with complicated functional programming code, which is why it is not as popular.

When it comes to programming, there are various useful theories and tricks you can learn and knowledge you can acquire... but ultimately you are responsible for collaborating with your peers and getting the work done. So, you should choose whatever programming paradigm, patterns, frameworks, abstractions make it easy to do so. There is no "one true way" to do things.

If you really enjoy the "one true way" idea and want to take it to the extremes for fun, feel free to do so. But otherwise, there's no reason to beat yourself for not using some "superior" design pattern or programming language or paradigm. A lot of these things are context-dependent. While understanding all the intricacies and benefits and tradeoffs can be very interesting, and it is in fact explored in academia, it has little real-world value, apart of entertainment, if you just care about getting things done.

>Why would vaccination increase the likelihood of new mutations, or mutations surviving better?

Our immune systems are general enough to face a wide variety of viruses, infections and strains.

When one is vaccinated, it gets prepared for that particular strain of a particular virus. The cost is that it could become more vulnerable to other infections... it's the cost/benefit of specialization vs generalization. Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14970928/

The reason is that the immune system is highly optimized and it is optimized to be flexible enough to save enough individuals for the next generation. It is not optimized to save each and every individual against all possible infections. That is unnecessary, as far as evolution is concerned.

Having said that, vaccines generally don't weaken individuals to a slightly different variant of the same virus. It should rather strengthen it. The immune system expects the virus to mutate so it prepares for the mutations to an extent. In fact, a category of vaccines called live-attenuated vaccines are basically weakened strains of the same virus (these can sometimes mutate into dangerous strains, eg. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/polio-vaccination..., but that's a different discussion).

The strains being transmitted the most are likely to keep the host the most healthy for the longest time.

However, this is only true in the LONG RUN, when different variants have played out for a while.

In the short term, there could be a highly transimissible strain with a much higher mortality. It will eventually come to a point when the most common strains in a population are milder strains... but one of the reasons that happens is that hosts with immune systems unable to handle the strain die off... and those who survive do so because they can handle it better. So, at a later stage, it looks like the virus got milder, but:

- it doesn't generally apply to all strains

- the strains look mild later because only those for whom it was mild survive

I suggest reading (or listening to) How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It's about psychedelics. I've gotten back the experience you're talking about when microdosing psilocybin... and it's not just limited to programming.

Remember when you went to a new place or met someone interesting or got to play with a new gadget? You probably remember it as a vague memory but can't recall how it actually felt. It's possible to get it back, to a certain extent anyway.

I love how you're being downvoted here, for having a different opinion.

My primary account got auto-shadow banned because I got so many downvotes that my karma went a lot below zero.

With the risk of this account going the same way, I want to add that even the ad part of Facebook is a net positive to everyone involved.

Targeting allows small businesses to advertise their niche products or services... and helps the user be aware of the product or services. Before Facebook, the same thing existed but in a different form. You as a small business owner would have to buy placement in niche TV shows or radio programs or a local niche magazine... but for some small businesses, it could be a no go because they'd have to consider a much bigger than required marketing budget. Targeting solves this problem, for small businesses and for users who get suggested the things they're likely to buy and use. In fact, it's not just good for users being targeted, it's even better for those who are not being targeted because they don't have to be bombarded with products they'd never be interested in.

The reason Apple is deciding the default for the users when it comes to Facebook learning about the user is to deliberately hurt small businesses and give their users fake sense of "privacy"... and to not let other platforms flourish.

Apple needs to be legally challanged for monopolistic practices i.e. disallowing users to choose what software they get to run on devices they purchase. Users should be able to download and install Microsoft App Store, Samsung App Store, Epic Games Store... and install any software they want. Why is Apple allowed to restrict what software users can run? Apple is big and too much of a monopoly. Its hardware and software divisions need to be separated and other companies should be allowed to license and sell their hardware with whatever software they want. Users should be able to choose what software comes with their devices.

You're looking at it from a very individualist perspective. In reality, genes don't belong to the individual, or a tribe or species for that matter. Genes belong to the ecosystem i.e. genes favor behavior which is good for the fitness of the ecosystem (you could say it's because of the other way around, but you get the idea), even at the expense of the individual itself or other lower level organisms or super-organisms. It will be clear if you look at it from a different perspective. White blood cells kill bodies own cells all the time. If you think the reason might be to protect the larger organism, it makes more sense. But there's more.

Think of the "freeze" response that, say, deer have when they get caught by a leopard. It would be best for the deer (and its family i.e. those with similar genes) if it didn't have a freeze response. It would be much better for them if they had a "fight till death" response. That way, every time a leopard caught a deer, it would get most likely get injured and leopards would be able to hunt fewer deer.

The deer has a freeze response because it has nothing to do with what's good for the deer and everything to do with what is good for the ecosystem. It's best if it outruns the leopard... but if it gets caught, it's best if it freezes while the leopard kills it.

P.S. The mainstream explanation of the freeze response is that "it helps the deer deal with the pain". However, they fail to explain what the evolutionary benefit to not feeling pain as one is being eaten is.

>How does this not apply to other vaccines, which have clearly saved an astonishing number of lives, and have, almost without exception, not produced the kind of long-term existential threats to humanity you seem to be hinting at.

It does apply to all vaccines. Vaccines bias the immune system, which has evolved to be general enough to deal with problems that generally come our way. This bias caused by vaccines results in better performance against those specific viruses but comparatively worse performance against most of anything else. This can also result in auto immune disorders down the line:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607155/

Generally, this bias also happens naturally when viruses infects populations. But the tradeoff is mostly worth it when the virus is still at large... and the natural population is optimized for wide variety of attacks because the immune systems are biased in many different ways in the first place, so even after a pandemic, the resulting population will still have a varied enough immune systems.

Large scale vaccinations bias the population in a very few particular ways. When vaccines for multiple viruses are given to everyone, the immune systems become more and more similar than it would ever happen naturally. So, mass vaccinations make us more fragile as a species against future pandemics, not to mention the autoimmune disorders that also happen as a result.

Given that vaccines have unintended consequences, you probably agree that targetted vaccinations are effective i.e. what if we could vaccinate exactly those who will get infected right before they get infected? That way, we could help them fight the infections better while not affecting anyone else. Right? That is how the immune system already works. It starts the fight right after it detects the infection.

Sometimes, the immune response is not appropriate and can cause more problems than it solves. The same can happen with vaccines.

Sometimes, the immune response may be appropriate but is not sufficent to save the host. The same can happen to vaccinated individuals. It can be argued that the headstart that one gets because of early vaccination might make it worth it... but you also have to consider how many will be vaccinated even though they never really get infected and how many will be missed anyway... and there is also a cost to determining these things. So, overall, it is highly unlikely to be worth it.