accidentallfact

Most people quit, because it doesn't work:

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/aug/14/ozempic-wei...

I hoped it will finally shut up those stuck on the dogma, but it seems the denial is far too strong, and nothing will change.

And yes, it is a dogma, because no kind of evidence no matter how strong makes people like you reconsider.

It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.

There are documented cases where aliens weren't needed for that, either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomio_Kivung

Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances

1. Can obviously be made

2. Can be made very fast

There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.

If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.

The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.

The thing is, you could probably create something FAR more horrific by simply mixing spent nuclear fuel with TNT...

Not that I want to give anyone any ideas.

Not that I want to be necessarily contrarian, but just a few months ago I decided to stop worrying about using my phone, and it honestly feels like the most liberating decision of my life.

There is nothing wrong with it.

I think that many people feel like their lives suck in some way that they can't define or explain, and they want something to blame it on, and their phone is an excellent target. It's relatively new. Of course it's the source of recent problems. It's CONVENIENT. You can do something about it by simply not looking at it.

Your phone is not the source of any of your problems.

I'm talking about all the mid 20th century talk about the "generation gap", "teenage rebellion", and so on. Essentially no stone was left untouched in how the society worked between the "conformist" 50s, and the 70s. Something happened then, or a bit earlier, and it's still doing the damage.

I'm not talking about genetics. There must be something that causes brain damage (and it would probably be a good idea to find it and stop it). The change was too fast for genetics. It was essentially one generstion mostly normal, the next one brain damaged.

It doesn't talk about neurodivergent people, but about non-brain damaged people, whose brains can still do dimensionality reduction, which allows them to deal with problems efficiently.

The so called neurotypical people are people brain damaged from something, who slowly took over the society over the 20th century. Without dimensionality reduction, virtually everything they encounter is an overwhelming, highly dimemsional problem so they can't deal with anything, except for a narrow set of problems they specifically trained to deal with.

I think it isn't a mixing issue, it's an acting issue.

It's the obsession with accents, mixed with the native speakers' conviction that vowels are the most important part.

Older movies tended to use some kind of unplaceable ("mid atlantic") accent, that could be easily understood.

But modern actors try to imitate accents and almost always focus on the vowels. Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English, but I think it isn't true. Sure, English has a huge number of vowels, but they are almost completely redundant. It's hard to find cases where vowels really matter for comprehension, which is why they may vary so much across accents without impeding communication. So what the actors do is that they focus on the vowels, but slur the consonants, and you are pretty much completely lost without the consonants.

It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:

1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".

2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.

3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.

4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.

5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.

The filter is obviously supposed to be there, it's "neurotypical" people who have a problem.

It means you need to use your higher thinking to do sensory processing. It's like if your GPU had burned out. So you had to find a way to do everything on the CPU. It sucks, and you don't have much capacity left for the actual thinking.

Both have the selective attention filter. Autistic people also have another, dimensionality reduction filter.

So in autistic people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [dimensionality reduction] --> (latent space of abstract features) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking)

While for neurotypical people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking).

This is correct, except the last paragraph.

Indeed, corellation equals causation for the schizophrenic.

Which is why you often don't get neurotypical people - when they say A, they often mean to imply B, because they correlate.

You are not too strict when you're autistic, you simply hallucinate less.

It's the other way round - let's say you have a thousand inputs, and those contain 1 bit/s in a way that you can't pick one or a few inputs that allow you to correctly decode that one bit of information.

Or let's say you have a million inputs, or pixels, and you need to determine if there is a cat in the picture. Selective attention won't work for that either. You can't pick six pixels that allow you to reliably answer this question.

You need dimensionality reduction, that will reduce the data into a manageable amount of abstract features, from which you can pick what features matter to you.

Neurotypical people lack (or only have remnants of) this second filter.

No, the core difference is the level of abstraction, and the inability to communicate between people with different levels of abstraction.

The opposite of autism is schizophrenia, where abstract thinking fails completely, and the person is unable to find correct answers to everyday problems.

Neurotypicality is merely a socially acceptable level of schizophrenia.

Autism results when the level of abstraction is significantly higher than the surrounding society:

You can't automatically understand the concrete speech, and you especially can't understand the "implications" that rely on the concrete magical thinking.

People can't understand you, because their level of abstraction isn't sufficient to understand the actual meaning, so they assume you talk about something random.

People overread the gaze of more abstract thinkers, and underread the gaze of less abstract thinkers, due to the difference in the field of view.

Compare Taylor Swift (ultra concrete, easily understood by neurotypical people) vs Rihanna (very abstract)

I don't think there is any specific feature that makes potatoes unique.

Two chromozome copies are typical for animals, but the number of copies in plants varies widely, and and often changes easily, even different variants of the same crop can have different numbers of copies.

Underground storage organs are nothing unique, and those of potatoes are not even particularly large. Many places prohibit fig trees for example, because what you see is basically just the tip, and there can be a giant 100m in diameter underground that ruins every underground structure in its path. But it's full of nasty toxic sap, and harvesting it would be a nightmare.

It's just the particular combination of fast growth, edibility, and ease of cloning and harvest that makes potatoes unique.

You misunderstood. I meant that they thought that they were superintelligent people who should teach others and lead the world, but they had schizophrenia.

They are. Autism is normal, and neurotypicality is simply the socially acceptable/expected level of insanity.

I know I have unconventional beliefs, but the reason is the opposite of what people describe here. There are no patterns and commonly accepted beliefs seem unjustified, and crazy. So I need to find my own answers, but it's difficult. I think that people used to be more like this until recently, and people messed it up because iron is toxic, and heavy metals belong in the brain. I become more and more like this as I keep taking them, and it's better. I admit my IQ has probably dropped, but it's better this way.

Exactly. This well matches my hypothesis about how the brain works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44347211