ericdykstra

I think people tend either see the world primarily through existence or experience.

For those who see the world through the experience frame, they will be more worried about the negative impacts toward an individual octopus, seeing it as an intelligent creature that shouldn’t need to endure our fishing practices.

For those that see the world through the existence frame, the potential genocidal and even eco-system crashing impact of overfishing or various fishing practices is more vital than what happens to any individual creature.

Maybe this would be better as two articles, one that appeals to each type.

I’m more worried about the genocide of species via chemical and plastic contamination. There are apparently rivers so flooded with estrogenics that fish can’t reproduce at a replacement rate, and need to be re-stocked by fish farms. This is not sustainable.

This seems a little overblown when put into context...

Commercial fishing kills 300k cetaceans annually. [1] For contrast, at the peak of Japanese whaling, less than 40k were killed per annum[2]

China alone, in 2010, had 8.8 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste came from China with an estimated 3.53 million metric tons of it ending up in the ocean. [3] What happens when cetaceans lose their only environment to pollution?

I'm a conservationist, myself, but I feel so much energy of conservationists is misdirected at things of little consequence (banning plastic straws is an international debate among first world countries), whereas many of the big issues (unsustainable fossil fuel use and farming techniques) is ignored.

1. http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?281850/Bycatch-is-the-biggest...

2. https://www.organicauthority.com/energetic-health/commercial...

3. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

This reminds me of the Limits to Growth graph, popularized by #GraphTwitter

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7LCSEDWwAE5_Ar.jpg

The common conception is, like the person I responded to originally, that news outlets optimize for clicks and eyeballs in order to sell the most advertising. Many will cite "if it bleeds, it leads" as a mantra for news corporations that will do anything to get viewers.

That's just not how it works now, though. The narratives of the stories are what they're selling to you, and the advertising is secondary. It's something you can't unsee when you start noticing.

I get the sentiment, but advertising is just a small part of how public perception is manipulated. Edward Bernays laid this out in his 1928 book, Propaganda, which is a how-to guide to indoctrination and manipulation of the public.

I take a little bit of issue with Truth is less important than shock value, which implies that news media is selling out their content for profit. The vast majority of news outlets don't make enough in ad revenue to stay afloat, and rely on outside funding. The news itself is the propaganda. Carlos Slim didn't put $250 million into the New York Times out of charity, he did it to buy influence.

We already see this problem with other streaming media services; just because something is available today doesn’t mean it will be available tomorrow.

I don’t want to give that much control over to someone else. I don’t need all-you-can-eat content. Just let me pay for the music/movie/book/game that I want and enjoy it for what it is, and know I always can just use my copy without needing to be plugged into the internet.

I guess this view probably makes me look like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I’ve managed to find a way to survive without signing up for Netflix, and I hope I can still play games in the future without needing to sign up for a streaming service.

I’ve been an Audible subscriber for a fairly long time (2011), and really enjoy the format. I really wish it wasn’t tied to Amazon, though. The recent increase of their “digital book burning” is pretty egregious, and it’s weird to own books on Kindle and Audible that are no longer even available for purchase.

There are, fortunately, some authors that publish their audiobooks direct, and others that put their work free on archive.org. However, the vast majority are Audible-exclusive, and it keeps me locked in.

I see this as just another way to replace some of the natural food in your diet with a garbage mix of highly processed plants and oils. No thanks, I’ll stick to the food that has created and sustained human life for 1000s of years over a science experiment. If you want to subject yourself to this, go ahead, but it’s not for me.

I can get a chunk of wasabi for about $6 at my local greengrocer in Tokyo. Unless you plan on eating a lot of sashimi at home within the next few days, though, it’s not practical since it goes bad much faster than the tube stuff.

The taste is substantially better than the fake stuff, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re eating at a cheap place that doesn’t properly prepare the nigiri rice.

> If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.

I couldn't find London's murder rate further back than 1990 for some reason, but for England, the murder rate is higher now than it's been since at least 1900.

We don't know if CCTV surveillance, gun bans, and silverware purchasing restrictions have had an effect reducing violent crime, but at the very least it hasn't been enough to counter the increase.

> Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

I'm pretty skeptical that this would decrease violent crime and/or murders. Do you have any evidence for this?

Fair Use is not a right; it's an affirmative defense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense) that needs to be used in court.

Here's a recent (long) video on fair use that I enjoyed, and might be interesting for some of you here who are interested in this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyucXC6pWug

> What specifically do you think is the reason black people should not be expected to achieve demographic parity in academic math?

I don't expect demographic parity in anything.

> And how does that relate to “blank slate-ism”?

You only expect demographic parity in everything if you think genetics doesn't play a role in what type of careers people choose.

> You seem to be implying that there is some inherent characteristic of black people that prevents them from attaining equal representation in math academia.

Well, for one, it looks like Black students choose Math as a major significantly less often than Asian students do. Blacks having some genetic predisposition to prefer other subjects seems like a pretty decent hypothesis.

No, again, this is blank-slateism. People are born with genetic predispositions that influence things such as height, eye color, mathematical ability, and career preference. You would only expect population-proportionate outcomes if genetics played no role. Even if they only play a 10% role, you get vastly different outcomes.

This is baseless, unscientific blank-slateism, and isn't true anywhere in the world among any demographic segment in any measure.

If 10% of Singaporean men are gay would you expect 10% of male plumbers in Singapore to be gay? If women are 30% of the workforce in Canada, would you expect Canadian dental assistants to be 70% male?

Disparate outcomes doesn't imply unfair treatment.

Maybe it's because it's taboo to say so, but I haven't even seen it speculated that the rise of these diseases be partly, or even mainly attributed to illegal immigration.

How many anti-vaxxers are there compared to those illegally crossing the border? There's a battery of vaccine requirements for any immigrant[1], but if tens of millions of those living in America skipped that part, it seems like a huge potential source of the problem.

1. https://www.uscis.gov/news/questions-and-answers/vaccination...

> Fun fact 1: since most people are raised by their parents, religion and political party affiliation are also highly heritable, but no one is suggesting that there's a genetic basis for religion or political views.

Religious and political views being influenced by genetics is not only a completely valid hypothesis, but the most likely. Cultural environment is downstream of genetics, and although cultural memes look like they evolve, they're trickster replicators: subservient to genes.

The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky

Studying and playing poker in high school changed how I thought about problems of incomplete information and how to gather the most information possible to make a decision. This book, in particular, for introducing The Fundamental Theorem of Poker and its use and application, gave me tools of reasoning and analysis of complex problems that I have built on and still use to this day.

We're currently well on our way to the first alternative, and I don't know if we can find a way out of it without the second

"Climate change" is a red herring; we can "fix" the increasing temperature problem and yet deforestation, pollution, and overpopulation will still destroy every natural ecosystem on the planet.

I used "eco-fascism" just because it's really the only somewhat mainstream movement that argues for ecological diversity preservation at all.

There are potential forms of alternative or third position government structures that allow for just as much or more personal freedom than current democracies, and yet can preserve our natural ecology. It just requires an accounting of destruction of commons, where untouched biodiversity is valued by the people of the state.

If we have the power to absolutely destroy the natural environment, we also have the power to protect its beauty for future generations rather than selfishly destroy the earth.

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

I agree with you. Governments subsidize and pay for things with a lot less ROI than sports stadiums that can foster a sense of local community.

Seattle spent $5 million making public shelters for drug deals and prostitution[1], and I bet most residents would have preferred that money go toward a new basketball/hockey arena.

1. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattles-5-million...

The forecast still fluctuated way too much to be correct, as can be seen in Taleb's paper, which cites the "forecast" and not the "now cast."

Do you find humanity worthwhile? If you do, then you should be concerned about starting a process that will lead to the end of humanity.

Just because we are able to split an atom doesn't mean we should end the world through nuclear weapons. Just because we can genetically modify humans doesn't mean we should end DNA-based life on earth through a phenotypic revolution.

It wouldn't be as immediate (likely thousands of years at the shortest), but genetic modifying of humans could start us down the irreversible path within the next 10-50 years. I encourage you to read the book, since it gives the entire overview of the updated hypothesis. It's not a sci-fi novel, just a Biology book with a warning.

You’re ignoring the inevitability of a Phenotypic Revolution if we go down that path. Please read the book so you can get an understanding of what’s at stake.

It was just released a couple of days ago, but it’s an update to our understanding on the origins and evolution of life forms. If you read it now you can be on the leading edge of these conversations before it hits the mainstream.

It's at least a little bit promising that the reaction to the CRISPR baby has been resoundingly negative. From the technical errors pointed out by scientists in this case, to the visceral reaction to the idea of "designer babies" to most regular citizens.

Of course, we have some short-sighted scientists who only care about their own work and not the long-term implications, like He himself and Church, but the actions and words of these two were roundly condemned.

Hopefully this buys us enough time to see the real long-term implications of starting a Phenotypic Revolution[1], and we can get some world-wide consensus to stop gene-editing in humans.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1729861563/

Indeed. There's not a history book that is without some critique or alternative theories, anyway. Solzhenitsyn spent a long time compiling the information he presents in Two Hundred Years Together (1120 pages in the original Russian)[1], and I would like to read a professional translation of the entire work more than the small excerpt that's in The Solzhenitsyn Reader.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Together-Complete-Volumes-Dve...

Great profile of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; one of the most important writers of the last century who was prolific up until his death. It's a shame that his last non-fiction work has yet to get a proper English translation even after all these years.

While we're on the subject of young musical prodigies, I'd like to shine a light on the influential metal band Windir. At age 16, Terje Bakken wrote, arranged, and performed everything on the first album (with the exception of drums): Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Keyboards, and Accordion.

His second album, Arntor, also a solo work, was released 2 years later, and is considered one of the best albums ever of the genre. At age 18.