marchenko

It's not necessarily selfish. One argument I've heard against life extension is that if it is only - or even deferentially - available to the upper stratum, the power of compound interest will allow them to accumulate and hold even greater proportions of social and economic resources (esp. zero-sum resources like status and power). Others caution that social structures will become more resistant to change if those with the most social capital are also the longest-lived. Most people really do care about status relative to their contemporaries-not just absolute status - and how it affects their agency. And then there are environmentalists who have ecological worries, and others with different specific but impersonal concerns.

Death is a great redistributor for all forms of capital - social, economic, and organic.

I can think of counter-arguments to these points, but they do not necessarily stem from selfishness,merely different preferences.

I think it is meant to benefit US mid-tier tech workers, who are expected to experience less competition and downward wage pressure as the attractiveness (and even feasibility) of work in the US is substantially decreased for couples not consisting of at least one 'superstar' (persons earning well over $100k as an individual, or couples in which both members are earners at the top end of the ability distribution). I guess we'll see if that expectation bears out, of if companies respond by offshoring.

I think the title of the essay actually begs the question a bit. The Galileo quote ("Eppur si muove") refers to an incident where the objective facts were on the side of the persecuted speaker. Here the author discusses a clash of opinion: depending on the criteria used to assess its outcomes, or how the technology is developed or implemented, radical life extension work could indeed turn out to be unethical - we don't have access to the relevant priors of the discussants. It's possible that utterances like this give people an impression of unexamined or unearned certainty to which they react negatively.

It sounds like sama just discovered that sacred cows are different in different locations. The experience of discussing whether women are are predisposed to avoid tech careers, or the problems associated with ethnic minorities, as a wealthy American speaking with Chinese startup leaders and other expats is probably different from that of speaking to a US audience. I suspect part of the reason is that the wider US audience is more likely to include ethnic minorities, politically active gay people, and ambitious women in tech[1]. I doubt a discussion of Chinese sacred cows would be as open - in fact, I doubt most westerners without expat experience could even detect the absence of many locally controversial topics from the discussion.

PC stifling of speech often gets laid at the feet of politics and academia, but the hyperbolic increase in thought-policing really seems to be a tech-related phenomenon intersecting with corporate priorities. There are a lot of people outside of tech and SF who are willing to discuss hard topics as long as everyone is willing to have skin in the game.

[1]although I acknowledge that there are a lot of women in Chinese tech and that the social dynamic is different, and suspect that they are more receptive to the idea of sex differences in occupational preferences.

I know it is common practice in psychology to rely heavily on data from student populations, but the tables 2 and 3 in the paper - the data on stereotype accuracy - are almost entirely comprised of college students (except for 1 low-n study that merely included students), predominantly psychology undergraduates. Can we expect that these populations represent average stereotype accuracy, or that their perceptions wouldn't calcify toward exaggeration with time?

Unless those cave walls could be neatly concealed in a pocket or under a desk and served up a stream of rapidly-changing Skinner-optimised content, accompanied by irregular purposefully distracting notification signals, I don't think this is a good analogy. Why is it so hard to believe that we are getting better at hacking our attention spans?

Indeed, the cave wall comparison highlights the difference between stimulation and distraction. Daydreaming while staring at the walls of Lascaux would be a significantly more useful activity than having your attention micro-partitioned by the demands of a Snap streak.

Despite the protists of taxonomists, their colloquial name implies that slime molds would be fungis to have a beer with.

Between slime molds using reinforcement learning [1], and plants using a fungal "internet" to communicate[2], fungi are interesting models for a lot of network concepts.

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-brai...

[2]http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden...

The "-omics" fields and neuroscience have started exploiting graph structures to describe metabolic interactions, gene regulatory networks, and organic neural networks, among other things. fMRI imaging, for example, can be described as representing a temporal network of oxygen levels in the brain.

The idea of creating novel purpose-built graphs and embedding ourselves in them, in addition to modeling existing networks using graph structures, is interesting. I think social media and other networking technologies are the most current examples, and the first decade of the internet was probably the best example of an intentionally-constructed dynamic knowledge graph.

Part of the challenge is finding some plausible reason to have the string come up in the context of operating a Unix system.

Maybe Rihanna will come out with a song called "Grep". Heck, maybe the Black-Eyed Peas already did...

I bet it is a reference to the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (a man after midnight)"

Edit: I see that is the explanation given on StackOverflow. This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

These seem like reasonable precautions that don't disproportionately affect womens' access to your time and expertise. They probably help some women feel more comfortable as well.

Fungus Tumblr must support a lot of tags.

Native desktop/mobile apps that support simple formatting like markdown with an import/export function in either .json or (preferably) .md or .txt.

A simple tagging system (also in a simple format like .md or .html) is a nice feature. 1-2 levels of board-style organization/visualization is also useful.

Import/export is key - I just transferred all of my google keep notes to .md via pandoc and it was a pain. This functionality also addresses a lot of the sharing issues at a simple level - you can send or text .md files, for example, or work on them in a shared dropbox file.

Turtl comes very close to this for users interested in secure note-taking. Something like typora or remarkable with google-keep style organization/visualization would take care of a lot of use cases. Basically a simple markdown editor with better display/organization features. Really nailing math, table, code snippet, and image support would cover a lot of use cases.

Unless you really want to go hard in the paint on security, the app itself should probably focus on easy composition and attractive visualization/organization of the files.

The effects of poor health in the otherwise-eligible pool recruit pool has been a concern for a few years. As I recall, the health of WWI recruits, especially from the south (mostly due to poor nutrition and parasites), had similar implications for readiness, and this was the spur for a number of public health interventions.

There are other potentially problematic indicators, such as the fact that grip strength in young men has plummeted over the last few decades (avg 18yo male is not as strong as avg 35yo woman was at his age). Grip strength is a good indicator of overall fitness.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2016/09/11/...

https://www.google.de/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/2938158/youth...

Andy Grove would agree with you [1]. He argued that a lot of valuable innovation occurs during the scaling/manufacturing process. If you offshore that step, all of the proficiency and innovation that occurs 'at the bench' develops - and is capitalized upon - elsewhere.

[1](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grov...)

The lack of paper ballots or hardcopy proof of voter intent in the GA system is unacceptable. Transparency and verifiability - using means comprehensible to the average voter - are more important to free and fair elections than efficiency.

The victim should not be blamed for giving 'tacit approval' for an assailant's behaviour. There is no necessary connection between a victim wishing to avoid the ordeal of a rape/assault prosecution and believing that rape/assault is 'okay'. Rape prosecutions in the US tend to be long, extremely adversarial, and unlikely to result in a conviction. Unfortunately, rape/assault are crimes that still carry bi-directional social stigma on those involved.

Some of these areas have valuable physical assets, and are inter-reticulated with the central city in such a way that their decay is at minimum an aesthetic concern for the city.

I think the author lead with East Cleveland for a reason. According to Wikipedia [1], East Cleveland contains the nation's first industrial park, historical millionaires' homes, and part of one of the main arteries into the city of Cleveland. Poking around on Google Maps shows that it also contains parts of two large and attractive parks (one attached to a historical cemetery where a US President is buried).

It would be hard to write this area off entirely.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Cleveland,_Ohio)

It is clear that homicide rates were higher in the past than they are in modern societies. What is not clear is whether hunter-gatherer homicide rates were higher than those of pre-modern agriculturalists. Here we are primarily comparing band-stage forager societies to other forms of social organisation/dietary lifeway (tribal gardening societies as found in much of Oceania, for example).

Of course relatedness is relative, but the argument is that encounter rates of whatever a group deemed "non-relative" were relatively low and that hostile contact was very costly/relatively unproductive. The "other" was known, cementing feelings of kinship, but distant.

The most violent societies according to your charts are post-band but pre-state with relatively high population density. That is not in contradiction with the "foragers nonviolent compared to other pre-state and comparable to earlier state societies" model.

The interesting question is whether there may have been two optima for human organisation - one at very low population density mobile foraging, the other at the point of the modern state. The modern state may be preferable to the first optimum, but the idea that it takes 10,000 of evolutionary search time to find the second hill is fascinating.

I think the overall tone today is much more sympathetic than that surrounding the crack panic of the 90s, especially when the legal and political environments are compared (3 strike laws v complaints about Narcan expense seem to constitute the political extremes). However, I agree that the disturbing undercurrent of contempt for certain demographics is certainly quite prominent in the public discussion.

The Repugnant Conclusion may be of interest:

“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

aDNA is a complement, not a replacement for ancient history and anthropology.

This is not a settled question. The references in your link are mostly new-world non-state (nonstate != hunter-gatherer), whereas Africa, where most of human foraging history occurred is under-represented. There are significant differences in environmental constraints and physical and social ecology between these regions.

The link also mischaracterises the argument that anthropologists make: they do not believe that foragers had a fundamentally different ("noble savage in a Marxist feminist garden") character than moderns, but that their incentives and constraints differed. It is hard to find people to war with if you are living at extremely low population density, or to carry out ambush raids along long sightlines in the savannah. You are probably less likely to murder your neighbours' children if they are your nieces, or fail to share food with your brother's wife. Hunter-gatherer social technology exploiting human biases (e.g. toward kin) is often ignored in favour of wishful retrocasting of our own political viewpoints.

Globally, foragers may not have enjoyed the low levels of violence we do in modern society, but they may have been competitive with gardening/agricultural/tribal/state societies for millennia.

When you consider that hunting has been an elite pastime for the entirety of recorded civilisation, I suspect that many people would indeed opt to "run around [in environmentally-appropriate clothing] looking for an animal to kill"

I was a precocious reader (<3yo), and I have a strong suspicion that kids who learn to read early read differently than those who learn "on schedule". I think early readers do something much more like code breaking, and I wonder if this affects second language acquisition or other skills. I don't necessarily think one style is preferable to the other, but I do think there is a potentially interesting difference.

I was very happy to read early, and I think it was advantageous for me, but I have not seen evidence that early reading in itself provides any lasting advantages on average. There may be a good deal of heterogeneity in the early-reading population.

Sub-Saharan Africa is almost entirely free of Neanderthal DNA except for some groups who acquired a bit through introgression from Eurasian modern humans.

Various sources of Archaic admixture have been observed or postulated for different modern human groups; determinations about their similarity to modern humans are made in broader grounds. As a practical matter, taxonomic distinctions between different hominid species/subspecies are generally retained until sufficient evidence accumulates to justify dissolving the boundaries. The idea that archaic groups like Neanderthals were very cognitively sophisticated has been around for a long time; the question is whether it is more informative to maintain them as different taxa.

If this is 'sabotage', it's got a thumpin' Beastie Boys beat.

I'm curious to see what develops from Apple's stated intention to keep more user data on-device and the company's attempts at 'differential privacy', and if these stances disadvantage Apple against its competitors.

The BGI project referenced above was hindered by certain suboptimal methodological assumptions. It does not appear that the Chinese are any further than the West in the field, and the most notable replicable advances have occurred in the supposedly-stymied labs of the West.

It is worth remembering that China is a highly ideological society with blinders and "PC" of its own, and is not entirely uninfluenced by Western priorities.

I'm really enjoying Mastodon. It feels like it's geared more toward conversation than counting coup. I have asked several tech and programming questions, and gotten fast and comprehensive responses. For those interested in science, tech, privacy, history and philosophy of software development, and econ, and willing to tolerate t h e a e s t h e t i c and Tuxedo Mask memes, it's a cool spot.