suoduandao3

My understanding is they've demonstrated a correlation. I don't think they've made any claims about causation.

A factor I think gets left out of this conversation is that the 50's housewife was an aberration, a home-based adult in an age of washing machines, electric ovens and small gardens at most. There used to be so much housework you basically needed a dedicated person to do it all[1].

'50s housewives didn't need to do most of that BUT they were also the primary mental health caregivers for a generation of men who had just come back from something like the second-most brutal war in human history. Typically with support from a member of the clergy but they were on the front lines. It was an enormous but unacknowledged responsibility. And given that we didn't have a repeat of what happened after WW1, on average it must have been pretty well handled.

Today we have memetic warfare [2] instead, and given the social media nature of it, I would expect more women on the frontlines of it than men. Maybe we'll have a lot of 'tradmen' who spend a lot of time fishing, writing poetry, and providing mental health care for their partners working in social media.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p10G1m3ZfU

Far from all Incels are antisocial. An incel is just a (typically young and male) nonbreeding human of breeding age. Most species have them. Human societies in the past got around the problem a little by discouraging polygamy and shifting enough risk of death onto men only that men were a minority and likely to breed by default if they made it into adulthood. Modern society doesn't like fifteen year olds dying in farming accidents or warfare, so there are a lot of men involuntarily celibate instead. But that category covers a huge range of situations and behaviors. It's just become associated with the antisocial subset because it's an effective insult - by definition, no one wants to be incel.

I thought this was more of a 'designer babies' suggestion than a 'mess with the source code after it's finished compiling' one.

I rather enjoy talking to smart 15 year olds. They're curious about the world and more likely to have fresh takes. What's not to like?

isn't it? I think it might be. It's definitely artificial so it depends on your definition of intelligence. And that's a rather confused subject.

I favor a model of intelligence where one measures problem-solving capability along multiple axes and defines an N-dimensional shape that describes a hypervolume of 'general' intelligence. One could certainly argue that because this program solves problems that can only meaningfully be measured along one axis that it has too few dimensions to be called intelligence. The trouble with that is software generally works best when specialized for problems with a single axis, so by that definition 'general intelligence' is either unlikely to happen in that space at all or won't be energy efficient if it does.

What would likely have a higher intelligence is a 'cyborg' - which could just be a human accessing this program via conventional means - who adds this program's problem solving capability along one axis to their existing hypervolume of intelligence. So maybe not artificial intelligence, but definitely an artificial intelligence expander.

Maybe it's a function of my work, but that sounds like a lot of Pa.

The line in the sand is generally when someone's recent enough to have living people object, the more loudly they'd object the deeper the line.

Funnily enough, a lot of contemporary spiritual groups do claim some memetic ancestry from Egypt, though I don't think that extends to the bodies of people from that era in most instances.

fun coincidence - I've been playing with the ideas from pattern language as ai art prompts for a while now - the project's the primary focus of my twitter feed for anyone who'd like to have a look.

https://twitter.com/Eucyclos1

I recently encountered the term 'Tempoflavanoids' - the flavour of a particular moment in time. I love the concept, it speaks to the artist in me.

Though I thought David Hasslehoff's 'True Survivor' music video for the Kung Fury kickstarter was a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY

I believe this is the origin of the '90s kids' meme. Not too long ago there was one culture. Then the internet came along and there was a gathering place for fans of every obscure anime and political system.

I don't miss the restrictiveness of a single culture and the expectation to fit into it, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't say it was a terrible culture, given all it had to do.

Yeah, I recently got a response to a cold email to Dr. Karl Friston. Definitely a fanboy moment!

Regarding the risk of a minor doing this kind of outreach, 90% of all child abuse happens with someone known to the child and/or their guardian, and I doubt many of the remaining 10% are just waiting around for a child to contact them first. I'd say reaching out to people you admire is a useful enough skill that it's definitely worth honing as soon as there's an interest, though of course involving one's parents in the process is a good idea.

Well... whether he's responding to a market need versus creating a market need versus responding to a moral obligation is very hard to untangle. That's part of why nobody's found a better system than capitalism yet - the most self-serving actions are often also the most public serving. I will say from the perspective of someone who specialized in renewable energy all through undergrad, renewable energy is cheap but requires storage. Expensive storage is the reason wind and solar have trouble competing with coal and gas on a dollers per watt basis. Subsidizing the creation of a lot of batteries by bundling them with cars people would buy anyway is the kind of brilliant but dirty growth hacking only a Silicon Valley Techbro would have the audacity to try. I can't comment on his motives, but I don't have a better idea for how to accelerate renewable energy adoption than the path he's pursued. Affordable storage is the keystone that supports that entire structure, in 2009-2014 it was the big unanswered question among my professors.

As for enriching himself by helping... I don't think there's a perfect solution there. The Rockefeller-Gates system of making money in one industry and funding purely philanthropic ventures in another comes with its own moral hazards. For profit work in a field of public interest comes with different ones. Both are preferable to taking no interest in the public good IMHO. Personally, if I was a billionaire I'd try to fund ventures that are in the public interest and also have paying customers, it promotes a certain kind of honesty that would be important to me, but I think any oligarch that claims to be trying to help should be given the benefit of the doubt, societal incentives are just so much more aligned that way.

Since we're criticizing reading comprehension, you seem to be shoehorning whiggist interpretations of history into every story that needs a villain, so do be careful not to stare into that abyss too long. My question was about a surface skim literary analysis, 'Golden Age' scifi have many utopias, modern scifi prefer distopias, why is? Since Asimov wrote plenty of utopian scifi, and that's not the portion of his work getting film adaptations today, I don't think your whiggist bogeyman theory really works for the question I was actually asking. And I'm well aware of my whiggist beliefs, though I despise the term. If you want to be polite, you can call me an evolutionary humanist.

I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.

It will keep growing until it doesn't - why people don't factor in that the sun will shine a lot longer than the wells will pump when discussing these plans I don't understand. Is technology so turbulent that no one wants to make predictions beyond the next ten years any more or what?

I visited China over the Christmas Holidays last year. Reliable and cheap sums up what I saw from electric vehicles at the time. The taxi I took also did a battery swap in the middle of our trip, which took maybe five minutes and was heartening to watch.

I think Tesla is still the luxury brand even in China, and that can sustain a company for a long time, but I predict it'll lose more market share for a while.

with the gigafactories out and market pressure to build EVs, I feel like Elon has achieved what he set out to do. If he borrows too much and builds too many factories, those factories will still be producing cars after Tesla is liquidated. I can see why he'd be so cavalier with Tesla's survival given what else is happening, the momentum is achieved even if he loses a lot of money.

That he'd turn that leverage to X though, I didn't like to see. Even as a Musk fan, it looks like a functional alcoholic buying a bar. Twitter probably does have a lot of military value as a propaganda vector, but it's hard to see how he could be an improvement over Jack Dorsey without ending up in conflict with the military industrial complex that pays for that propaganda.

>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.

What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.

Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.

I think it makes a fair amount of sense - the Ferengi have elevated capitalism to a functional religion, and although the only thing that's scarce is latinum (which is useless and unexceptional except for the fact that it can't be replicated) their religion still works when that's the only target of acquisition.

Kind of a neat example of a religion outgrowing the pressures that created it but still being a source of meaning to the believers.

While I find communists the most annoying ideologues I've ever met, I'm fine with communist propaganda if it assumes postscarcity as a necessary precursor for communism. It's people's tendency to handwave the getting to postscarcity that makes my eyelid twitch.

Question: are you drawing on oral accounts of the 'meme magic wars' of 2016? I find it a fascinating piece of history and very relevant to the subject you're writing about.

right, but I'm wondering specifically about the part that is propaganda.

I'd ask what you disagree with, but you're calling an open-ended question an argument so I doubt it would be a productive discussion. I doubt you'd have had the same initial response if I'd said 'decision makers in the security and intelligence branches of the civil service'.

Incidentally, I think a lot of insights can be gotten into psychological warfare if one likens it to cellular biology and the games viruses and engineers play to get a cell to accept foreign code. What we're seeing here is an excellent example of an immune response that looks for 'tells' of hostile activity causing an allergic reaction.

By that line of analysis, we'd expect a Whiggist regime to have optimistic propaganda with contemporary scifi being pessimistic because the Whiggist faction is ineffectual?

If American propaganda owes so much to Scifi, I wonder why optimistic visions of the future have gone out of vogue to such a great degree. Endemic conservatism in the military arm of the deep state?

I guess you missed it when everyone was leaving joke reviews on this product? https://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-Ore/product-reviews...

That's very anti-enlightenment values of you. Do you think everything is better handled by committee or just capital allocation?

Why?

Anathem has a great example of that idea. It's absolutely hilarious that the mystical wizard priest's day job is repairing the thatch rooves for the building the nuclear waste is actually in.

interesting. Brings to mind this study:

https://sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/An-experimental-test...

Memory and DNA are both weird. As an appreciator of weirdness it's fun to see that there's some kind of connection between the two. Anyone know if there a theory of weirdness where it would compound?

I've been working on a project where I take DNA sequences and convert them into sound - the result is always a kind of jazzy melody, but I don't have any of the rest of what makes a piece of music.

Would it be possible to feed the synthesized 'beep-boop' throughline my program outputs to the 'prompting with audio' portion of your pack and get the rest of what makes a musical composition? Or modify my program to output notes that feed into a text prompt?