SnazzyJeff

Well, the part that was claimed. "The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut." The person seems to mistake the term "speech" for the phrase "language comprehension"—the field moved past that decades ago.

if only this site could manage something more complicated than the dialectic of "not retarded enough for y-combinator" and "too retarded for y-ycombinator"

one day, y-combinator will give a shit about disability. There is not enough money in the game for the powers to be to care yet.

> Power drives consensus.

Power is able to manipulate consensus, but ultimately it exists despite consensus. Its existence is relative by definition.

> Capitalism has uses other than consensus as well.

False

> Ah. I think I was talking past you by hyper focusing on just the "capitalist" and "consensus" parts of what you wrote. I was taking it to mean that there was a special connection between capitalism and consensus, and not just that capitalism is one means by which consensus is created

There are of course other means of consensus. For whatever reason these means are not available to us now, allegedly.

> But no matter how well the gene therapy works, the researchers recognize that Aissam may never be able to understand or speak a language, Dr. Germiller said. The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.

This is trivially false. How are you acting like this person can be taken seriously? At best, they're wildly hyperbolic in their statements. At worst, they're funded to push a polemic.

> It's fascinating how our brains are wired in such a way to enable read-only mode at an certain age in development.

You're responding to a quote that is trivially false with a quick google. Ok.

> Worth keeping in mind that Helen Keller didn't loose her hearing (and sight) until an illness at 19 months old.

While this is in fact an important sample, this doesn't imply much about how humans develop after 19 months, much less how they develop before 19 months.

> At this age, a child's brain has already locked in the sounds for their native language and lost the ability to learn non-native sounds (hell, research suggests that unborn infants can recognise the difference between their mothers native language and foreign languages before they even leave the womb).

We have nearly zero clue how the child's brain recognizes their "native language". We know they react differently at different stages of their development to the same stimulus, which is occasionally linguistic. We have nearly zero clue what the mechanism is that corresponds input to measurable output. This is a very disingenuous characterization of the data.

It's also worth mentioning that the root of this question is trivially false—people obviously learn language after the age of five. Such haphazard presentation (at best) should not be taken seriously.

Hellen Keller never developed the skill to listen to spoken language.

I agree with you fwiw, but your argument needs to acknowledge the above statement.

> Gives me hope that one day my tinnitus may have a cure.

We are all chained to reality. We must all accept reality or kill ourselves trying to.

> Consensus would exist due to the power of the state regardless of the economic system.

What does this mean? Genuinely confused what you think a state is in the modern age if not the infrastructure necessary to support a market.

I mean, I'd also like to find elves. I don't see any reason to suspect either exists. There's an assumption that intelligence is a natural progression for evolution of life, which seems irrational. Why is intelligence so special compared to other mechanisms of self-organization?

Do you have a point? Humans are self-evidently self-interested. You don't need to justify it.

> Prisoner's dilemma

This falls apart pretty rapidly when you move beyond one person—groups of people don't tend to act collectively rationally. Hell, the entire reason "capitalism" is a thing at all is it provides some consensus in the face of byzantine faults even if it fails to represent our collective needs with any accuracy.

I can't be the only person who absolutely doesn't care about intelligent life. Either it makes its relevance clear or it doesn't. I see no particular reason why "intelligence" is noteworthy enough to look for in the first place.... maybe that's just a quirk of self-organization rather than a common route to it.

> By now, everyone knows that serverless doesn't actually mean without servers; it just means using someone else's servers.

What? Is this some kind of confusing reference to lambda and competing providers? As far as I know most of computing is serverless.

Knowing what exploits are like in the private/state sector that seems like a no-brainer if your threat model includes a well-funded attacker.

LLMs are not capable of passing the chinese room test, fairly trivially.

IMO a chatbot is sufficient to demonstrate AGI. I think the chinese room problem is as good as anything.

Of course, there isn't much money in teaching a bot that only knows english chinese.

EDIT, Wikipedia page for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

> Placing a skull on a bookshelf is not conducive to this public veneration.

Veneration is enormously culturally subjective. There are many, many, many cultures that would have seen placing the skull of an ancestor in a prominent place as a very, very, very obvious sign of respect and power.

But, my people don't engage in ancestor worship. I come from sad stock and I'd rather be forgotten after I die.

That may be true, but I'm guessing you're not going to improve the situation without better wages. People likely don't get into this field in order to pursue a passion for tissue theft.

> All of these arguments seem totally compatible with anarchism, especially the type of modernism-questioning anarchism that would stem from anthropology.

Given that virtually all political theories stem from the structuralist assumptions being questioned, I'm not sure where that leaves us with respect to political labels.

Personally I read Graeber because he's persuasive and argues well. He represents his own political views far more genuinely and forthrightly than the vast majority of people who put a lot of weight in labeling per se.

> But it turns out that it's illegal to remove parts from a human body in the US.

This is not true, it's just a highly regulated market. Look up tissue banks.

I imagine a lot of things tested at the USAF base aren't the "most advanced in the world"—and frankly the assumption that they would be is somewhat odd. There's only so much throwing wads of cash at contractors can solve.

> Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download a program.

They are if the first six results are SEO bullshit. Which is the de-facto state of affairs for Google today: advertising traipsing around as search.