textor

You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning.

It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.

To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.

The hell do you even know about typical psychopaths?

I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.

This is of course only my conjecture, seeing as they are undetected unless caught red-handed on some officially recognized crime. However, consider this: violent psychopaths don't differ from this gal in lack of empathy, fearlessness or in deceitfulness. They only have poor impulse control, so they fail at maintaining long-term "masks". You can read basically as much right in the article. Would you like a proverbial serial killer to be your boss? Now, do you really believe that impulsive violence can deal more damage than cool-headed, planned immorality? And there's something like 1% of them in the general population, and they are over-represented in positions of influence that allow to harm people (not because they're exactly good at anything aside from manipulation). It'd be awfully convenient if the invisible hand of the market took care of it all and their natural tendencies became an innocuous tool for generating profit.

How often do we rely on other people just not being terrible for petty reasons? Not grossly abusing their position whenever they can get away with it? Surprisingly a lot of our society runs on trust. And wherever it doesn't, expenses and efforts are necessary to disincentivize transgressors. So even 1% is enough to drive up the costs. People in small, homogenous villages can leave the keys outside their homes, because it's harder to get away with burglary there and they trust neighbors. In cities people need better doors and better locks and security cameras and strong police and a fair bit of paranoia to keep up with rural areas. It's because it's easier to stay anonymous in the community of millions. But even under perfect guarantee of anonymity, I wouldn't break into people's homes and rob them. Most other people of regular upbringing wouldn't as well. A psychopath, by definition, would, irrespective of upbringing. Same goes for black hat activities. How much does IT security cost?

Also, there's a lot of articles dedicated to psychopaths like this one. I don't remember people like her "significant other", or her oblivious parents, or her colleagues ever being given voice. Somehow we are to take them on their word, even though they say (because there's no point denying already) that they see no utility in being honest or reciprocal.

People with other non-standard neurotypes tend to be quite open about their condition, as they prefer to get more understanding and have a better rapport. They are not as glorified by the media, they are not thought of as sexy and enigmatic, yet they come open. But this anonymous interviewee, as I already pointed out, "doesn't think people need to know" what she is to know what to expect from her. But this is obviously nonsensical, given that people (except maybe bankers) operate with some basic trust and information about her psychopathy would change a lot in possible relationships (even assuming that there's some use for their kind). Likewise, no surgeon or CEO has come out with "I'm a heartless bastard with no empathy or code or morals, see, I may be different but that makes me better in my field". Such inconsistencies illustrate that they don't really have any sort of ethical framework, it's all just vague noise to lull a pitiful myopic herbivore into sleep. That's really how they think of people.

All of this is unconvincing, I know. It's probably impossible for a neurotypical, well-meaning person to realize the magnitude of difference without being subjected to psychopathic treatment. Without seeing how the mask you've known for years crumbles in front of evidence and there's no distress behind, since it's cheaper to discard you along with the shards.

You could combine these ideas, though, and have only a few cars that pull weights up/down the hill, with a crane to load it off. I'm not sure but it could probably allow for a far greater total storage and kWh/$.

Another factor is initial variance. Russian foxes experiment uses some hundreds of animals, perhaps. Suppose we operate on the scale of millions of specimens, a significant portion of the entire species. There could be a many-sigma difference between the average and the smartest living crow in the world (not sure how to estimate this), but the former one would probably struggle to survive in the city while the latter would thrive. Urbanization, then, can be thought of as a bottleneck that promptly eradicates the left part of the extant distribution, changing the population average even in a single generation.

> Presumably illegal substances are illegal in part based on risk

The key word here is "presumably".

Equivocation of ad placement and hacking is a disingenious tactic, especially here.

While this is fascinating, I wonder if we could produce the scaffolding itself de novo, and if not, then why? It's not a living thing, just a porous biocompatible structure. At worst, we could grow a lot of skin and process it into scaffolding of arbitrary shape. Or is there some crucial trick, such as remaining chemical signals that guide the development of new cells?

> If a technology that was much better at doing taxes came along, that would be a more comparable situation.

There's no need for it, technology already is good enough.

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

There's no technology-in-general that "the Luddites" fight againtst, nor are there Luddites-in-general. It's risk-benefit calculation in every case, with different parties and different interests. You don't need luck to profit off lobbying against the development of your undoers, this is the norm, not the exception.

> Okay, how does the other party get richer? It usually isn't because they fight against more efficient technologies.

What is an "efficient technology" and what is an "unapproved and criminal enterprise" can be decided by lobbying. Luddite is the one who loses, because he gets labeled Luddite by the victor; the loss itself had little to do with vague attitudes towards technological progress. You're just stubbornly missing the point.

> I think if Luddites really did understand technology, they would have realized that they can't stop it by destroying things, and they can't stop it by attempting to ban it either.

Well that's totally unreasonable. Of course you can stop technology by violence and prohibition, it's just that the other party is generally much better at those things by virtue of being richer. Look at how well gatekeeping works in drug production. Look at how tax preparation companies can lobby against the IRS destroying their pointless business. Certainly this may not hold forever, and sure some things slip through. But you can improve your and your children's life by stifling progress where it benefits you.

Relevant:

https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-...

> There is a widespread belief in contemporary computer dominated societies, that regular people are not allowed any say in the discussions around the types of technologies that radically reshape their lives. And the way that the term Luddite is commonly used functions to reify this belief by making people believe that they cannot push back against technology. Of course, as the above history demonstrated, the irony is that what the Luddites prove is that you actually can push back, you can build up a mass movement around it, and you can in fact be so successful that the government is forced to deploy soldiers and pass harsh legislation in order to squash you.

> Need a more recent example? How about Google Glass. When Google unveiled that wearable high-tech headset it was framed as “inevitable,” those who raised worries were dismissed as “Luddites,” and Google seemed hellbent on pushing forward regardless. Google Glass was going to be the next thing, not because regular people wanted it to be, but because Google insisted that it would be. But a funny thing happened: people said no, and Google’s “world changing” product was shelved. There’s certainly a difference between the public rejecting a piece of consumer technology and workers pushing back against mechanization – but the common thread that connects them is that you do not have to let a tech company screaming “technological progress” in your face turn you into a paragon of passivity. And what’s more you don’t have to accept a false dichotomy wherein saying no to one kind of technology means that you are rejecting all technology.

While I appreciate your even-handed and careful defense of the point I was making, it's probably necessary to note that I didn't consider the merits of adoption at all. I have no idea what sort of policy to support on this issue. Indeed, the only thing I was objecting to was the idea of the company of biological parents being preferable by default. Given the evidence, I think that options rank like this: good parents > good foster parents > single parent > no parents > violent antisocial parent(s). Maybe it's wrong, but I don't immediately see how and believe we shouldn't assume that any position pro "ripping families apart", whatever the circumstances, is indefensible. If anything, the only policy I can responsibly advocate for, and not just voice general agreement with, is more rigorous and unbiased research into life outcomes.

> those are very different concepts

They are overlapping. Moreover, "parents on the margin of incarceration" are an extremely significant group of parents for whom the discussion of "supporting families as is" vs. "ripping apart" is meaningful at all. For most poor families it's irrelevant as there's no grounds for dissolution.

I believe you can't deny that it's much more common and publicly acceptable to claim that such a criminal parent should be shown leniency when possible, because having no parent at all is horrible. Yet we have evidence to the contrary.

I concede that this may be inapplicable for some other cases (or at least that we have no proof that it would be applicable yet). However, I personally think that those "at risk families" where parents create an atmosphere that's detrimental for stydying (by being aggressive, anti-intellectual etc.) may well be worse than outright criminal ones, and I believe it'd be proven in due time.

There's no reason to assume that they work to begin with; pretty much nothing ever does in education. But you can examine the failure of Head Start and the general trends in education costs vs. results to see that the room for improvement is largely used up.

For what it's worth, children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated. So we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart" and against supporting "families as they are".

> My findings suggest that on average, parents who are on the margin of incarceration are likely to reduce the amount of schooling their child attains if they instead remain in the household. This can be explained because the removal from the household of a violent parent or a negative role model can create a safer environment for a child (Johnson, 2008; Jaffee et al., 2003). Incarceration is also a mechanism that can limit the intergenerational transmission of violence, substance abuse, and crime to children. This result also relates to findings in other fields that conclude that See Kling (2006), Aizer and Doyle, 2013; Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2013), Mueller-Smith, 2015; and Bhuller et al., 2016, among others. For example, using data from Sweden, Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2007) report significant father-son correlations in criminal activity that begin to appear between ages 7 and 12, and are 3 the positive effects of being raised by one’s parents depend on the quality of care they can provide (Jaffee et al., 2003).

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5664c583e4b0c0bb910ce...

Anecdotal experiences are near worthless when discussing policies, though. Feel insulted all you like; statistically speaking, these resources are wasted. Chances are you'd be equally well off without them.

Behaviorists have failed to explain a monkey using a stick to get bananas for the first time. I have little patience for antiquated baloney such as "Emotions are are momentary improvisations to bodily reactions". Do paralyzed people have no emotions now? What about locked-in syndrome?

His broader point about flatness may be justified, but his entire school of thought is no less nonsensical than Freud's, which acolytes also try to revive by sprinkling with modern research from time to time; so this "debunking" leaves me unimpressed.

I have mixed feelings about this. Flux team did contribute to the popularization of this trick, and they were of much help to me for years. But really, inasmuch as this is useful at all, this must be an inbuilt OS feature, so their project is kind of doomed.

That's not it at all and nobody cares about "destructive potential" of screen-emitted photons, though. The actual reasoning behind shift to lower wavelengths is that our circadian rhythms are entrained by ambient light, with "blue" light being assumed as indicative of daytime and "red" tones – of sunset (ergo, time to ramp up melatonin secretion and prepare to sleep).

That's preposterous and obviously false. We're seeing fast evolution on the scale of thousands or even hundreds of years. See Baujau, for example.

Ideology of independent working woman seems far more pronounced to me. We all are expected to work, which necessarily makes having children – especially early in life, when they have the highest chance to be healthy – a big bother for women, and feminism doesn't help here in the least, even if it slightly compensates for the issue of "ideology of male breadwinner".

In fact only the coastal regions will suffer from sea levels rise per se. But no height will be sufficient to guarantee your safety, sadly, because this is not about literal Great Flood. This is about climate change and hundreds of millions of deperate displaced immigrants from places like Bangladesh who will make everywhere more chaotic than today. We're not prepared for the human part of the catastrophe.

You don't need a degree here.

It's not amusing in a bad way, it's not ridiculous. I mean to say that it's highly surprising and counterintuitive, like a punchline in a joke. Most theories about REM are focused on brain function, as is almost all research on it. Chaperone production, though, is a basic housekeeping routine. Saying "well, REM isn't about episodic memory consolidation or dreaming or wherever you might think, it's an epiphenomenon of a very low-level mechanism that prevents boiling alive" is almost as unorthodox as claiming that learning to code is about forearms' dexterity.

Just so you know, there's half a dozen of equally plausible hypotheses about REM function, and dozens more of more fantastical. Most amusing one yet is about synthesis of molecular chaperones that guard against aggregation of chains produced during NREM. But honestly we just don't know.

Personally I agree with Marcus Schmidt and his idea of "energy allocation function of sleep". Basically it says that distinct physiological states provide viable configurations of priorities for vital functions that allow for the lowest possible energy expenditure over the whole cycle. I.e. there's no single specific function of REM sleep, it hosts all functions that are too costly to prioritize during other states, and the same is true for NREM.

Certainly it isn't hardwired in any relevant manner, and people are in fact just fine not reproducing, see vasectomy.

Don't just repeat platitudes. People are killing themselves over not being able to have sex, or rather not being able to prove they're proper functional men. It has at least as much to do with social status as with actual sex.

E-readers also suck for figures and formulas which are indispensable for any comprehensive education. The most readable textbooks can only be rendered on a big high-res display, on iPad at least.

Cheap 10" tablets are definitely easier to make than cheap 10" E-readers, though.

> Are there any other cells in the body that are not, over time, replaced?

Sure. For instance, female ova. The stock is limited.

> Might it be possible that some brains have the ability to generate new neurons, while others do not?

The former is obviously the case for rodents at least. Could it differ within the species? I can't see why not, in principle.

> Couldn't it be possible that evolution created such situations?

I imagine it's more about gradual loss of function. For example, in larger brains it's progressively harder (and less probable) to transport the neuroblast to the area where its growth would be beneficial for the brain at large. Thus, eventually adult neurogenesis ceased to increase fitness in large mammals, became effectively an atavism, and mutation load disabled some relevant genes, but it still could hang on a few pathways that either work or do net depending on specific alleles present in the population.

I cannot imagine anyone here on HN arguing in good faith in favor of crackdown on encrypted messenger "because terrorists". This is retarded and illiterate, and the same goes for gun analogies. I get that many Americans are concerned with gun violence, but at least here you ought to be able to try to not think with your hindbrain, and instead consider whether your concern has any relevance.

Normally that should be enough. Let me elaborate, though. First, there's extremely little chance of uncovering any "terrorists" or any major criminals by investigating the extant chats: competent lawbreakers delete incriminating messages as soon as possible or communicate in secure chats to begin with, and would do so especially if Telegram showed signs of cooperating with FSB. There would, however, be a guaranteed influx of falsely accused. VK is a good example: there are cases when people are incriminated for inciting hatred because of something like a closed album with Nazi caricature memes, on the grounds that "everything on VK is public"; there were multiple trials for reposted messages. And so on. Most of this is simply due to some random asshat spook trying to furter his career by hauling in a lot of "extremists" and surpassing average "productivity". This is both inhumane and not economical.

More importantly, encryption is not analogous to guns because guns are hard to manufacture and even harder to conceal, but software is different. You can easily create your own encrypted messenger and nullify whatever efforts the government is putting in suppressing current platforms. Signal Protocol is open source, you know. Blocking Telegram would merely speed up the transfer of terrorists to their own networks, and/or increase the popularity of platforms which would not even shut down the channels with terroristic propaganda (something Durov actually does).

There is no replacement to actual investigation, to fieldwork, to international cooperation, to training of competent agents and infiltrators. This is hard and risky, it's so much more easy to vantonly gather data, threaten average citizens with your overreach and pretend to save the day. Well, let me remind you that Boston bombing did not rely on any sort of encryption. FBI received hints from FSB and interviewed Tamerlan way before the event; Dzhokhar’s Facebook was insanely suspicious. They failed to notice the threat. If the intelligence cannot successfully work with open information like this, what more could they gain from Telegram?

But it's not at all evident that narcissists suffer from their condition, as long as they can afford to live the way they prefer. In fact all Dark Triad traits make more sense when viewed as alternative social and reproductive strategies enforced on the level of phenotype.