corsac

Your opium-smoking analogy is wonderfully apt.

It always piques my interest when I hear of something economically valuable that "cannot be cultivated", as in, I wonder how much "cannot" means "not enough tinkering has been put in to figure out how to cultivate it in a cost-effective manner" as opposed to "impossible". I remember talking to a wasabi farmer in Oregon who claimed to have been one of the first to grow a crop "that can't be cultivated outside Japan" outside Japan.

It seems doubly worthwhile to experiment with in this case since it would both keep a food tradition viable and protect the orchid species from disappearing. When I google Orchis mascula I do find info about cultivation (though cultivation on a commercial scale might be a different matter).

"Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final."

I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.

I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff about "quantum theory rehabilitating the basic premise of moral philosophy" etc. etc.). I also took a glance at a few of the cited studies. Schwartz's main point has nothing to do with the brain "naturally resisting change"; the book argues rather that our brains remain malleable and are continually shaped by our behavior, and the studies he highlights are in support of those points. In his own words, he is arguing for "the brain’s astonishing power to learn and unlearn, to adapt and change"--so it looks like the article-writer drew a very different conclusion from the same undiscussed studies.

The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.

What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".

How disingenuous.

You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry.

"Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise?

Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms.

Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No.

By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.

notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time

"Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory

To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.

eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.

Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.

Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not? And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?

More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?

And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?

Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.

Population density != human flourishing.

> hence why they won the fight.

More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "silk road" to the oceans.

> those are the only societies with formal, documented anything

You can't be serious.

"Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".

> settlement

Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.

"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).

The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.

Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.

Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.

The more I think about this, the more it rings true. Implicit in the phrase "I have nothing to hide" is an assumption that everything is open to inspection by default, and concealment is deviance. In most situations, nobody assumes anything close to that. When they do, they're taking a supine position, like an animal submissively exposing its belly.

For a careless user, or one who does not bother to learn about the risks, having one's account stolen is more of a danger. On the other hand, for a reasonably cautious user with a basic understanding of the risks involved, and whose life varies at all from predictable (affluent) norms, losing account access due to Google's protective measures is a bigger danger – and more of a hassle to guard against – because these protections are so easily triggered

What are the limitations?

Inability to procedurally generate highly stochastic forms or textures (for instance what a haboku painter, or any kindergartner, can get by splattering paint); reliance on a finite bank of source or "training" images; no way for the artist to turn an artistic vision into a meaningful input for an I/O program; no demonstrated ability or proposed algorithm for producing on its own (without human inputs) anything resembling any component of art aside from formulaic patterns.

AI us nothing but a human given no constraints.

I think you have a key insight that productive constraints lie at the living core of the arts, and I agree that if some hypothetical entity that was a human with no constraints produced imaginative works, Kipling's devil[0] would finally get to make a point. I had a similar objection to the hype when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol – Lee was playing under the constraints of human cognition, which the "AI" with its brute computing power did not even pretend to approximate, yet still overall held his own. That's where the beautiful or "living" quality of the game emerges.

But no existing or proposed AI is anything like "a human without constraints."

There are productive constraints, and their are counterproductive constraints. The 5-7-5 haiku form is a productive constraint; complete exclusion of the letter "e" from an novel[1] turned out to be an unproductive one. Having to include anything generated by Midjourney in an extremely unproductive constraint.

[0] https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_conundrum.htm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

How are there no constraints with AI? I'm not arguing that this piece is good art, but rather that "AI" is merely a tool, with limitations like any other tool. In fact, considering how aesthetically uniform (centerless, fragmented, "dead") works using Midjourney and similar programs are, these programs strike me as extremely limited, little more than artistic crutches for producing novelties that will almost immediately become dated.

I'm saving this comment so that next time someone uses "begging the question" incorrectly, I can show them what it really means.

Video games are more mentally stimulating than non-screen-based activities (building a fort, catching animals, reading a book)? People with better cognitive performance prefer more external mental stimulation? I didn't know any of that.

Your classic comment certainly stands, though. It could easily be that e.g. the large gender difference between the gamer and non-gamer groups alone can account for the difference. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study at all.

But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).

And language itself.

can (often) be refuted by zooming out and regaining a little perspective.

I think this is exactly why it is so maddeningly hard to engage critically with those who espouse these theories – they keep an 'authoritative' death-grip on the frame.

It takes a bunch of ‘facts’ – some of which are accurate but entirely explicable, some of which are just plain wrong – and knits them together into an ostensibly compelling narrative.

I feel a need to add that conspiracy theorists deserve no grudging credit for "ingeniously" pulling this off, any more than sociopaths deserve credit for "ingeniously" manipulating people. With little enough intellectual integrity, any dope can do it.

As an off-topic aside, did you know that the Wuchang Uprising (a key 1911 anti-Qing rebellion in Wuhan) had a coronavirus on its flag?[0] It's worth asking why the media never reported on it, and what shadowy Tongmenghui revolutionaries are behind the events of the past few years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#/media/File:C...

No doubt it's directly mentioned in that blasted library too, along with any number of perfect refutations.

I love this response. Deflates the enchantment right out of Borges' library (and Nietzsche's eternal return, and fantasies about mystical significance of pi), which always bothered me somehow anyway.

Dairy isn't nutritionally necessary for anyone. Perhaps it was in the past, but not now.

Assuming alternative sources of the same essential nutrients, I agree – no single food is nutritionally necessary or ever was. In the real world, meanwhile, dairy products are a key source of protein etc. for people in at least some regions where sufficient alternative sources are not widely affordable or available. Certainly, milk was crucial to the survival of many populations as recently as a century ago (not "aeons ago during some ancient famine").

Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods

Evolution is an open-ended history of accidents, with much to say about what works for us (as opposed to what cannot).

but it does not control us.

Indeed. Not only does it not control us, we cannot even conclude based on it that a novel environment or resource will not be advantageous. In the case of ungulate milk consumption, it turns out it was.

Not sure what you mean about telos.

Evolutionary adaptations are in the nature of accidents, not guided by any purpose or implying any optimal "natural" state. Populations taking advantage of accidental fitness for new niches is a defining pattern in the evolution of life on earth, and consumption of milk by some human populations fits that pattern. Drawing conclusions about the suitability of drinking milk because "we didn't evolve to drink it" is fallacious (in contrast to, say, explaining most people's lack of lactase persistence by their ancestors' non-consumption of milk, which is sound, non-teleological reasoning).

several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption.

Are you claiming that most people who consume milk as a major part of their diet suffer health problems from it? Or that grain-based diets do not cause health issues?

That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material.

Evolution has no telos. Evolutionary leaps into new niches are the norm, and hunting had formative impacts on the evolution of modern humans. We've also evolved for orders of magnitude longer walking on all fours (and walking erect causes health issues, such as stressing the back), but that has no bearing on what is healthy or suitable.

It's not a good argument to take a small exceptional population and apply that reasoning to the general case.

I don't believe I did so. Northern European-origin populations are not small or insignificant, but I agree that for lactose-intolerant populations who have no tradition of using milk-based foods they are generally nutritionally unnecessary.

milk is to grow baby cows into large animals

Whence this transcendent purpose that limits suitability? Likewise, quinoa grains are to grow into full-sized plants, and not for consumption by humans, etc. etc.

Most people may be "lactose intolerant", but some of them find ways to survive and thrive on milk-based foods; meanwhile, some populations have developed tolerance to lactose, presumably because milk-based foods are important.

Koreans don't get a third of their calories from dairy products, though. Whereas if Mongolians get ~30% of their calories from dairy on average (which is credible), that would mean they are getting far more than that in summer, since dairy consumption is largely seasonal. We're talking prodigious amounts by the standards of any culture, not a dash. That consumption includes both significant unfermented dairy (milk, milk tea, clotted cream) and dairy products fermented in a wide variety of ways.

Are lactose intolerance symptoms widespread among Mongolians? If not, and if Mongolians are really genetically lactose intolerant, then it is worth asking whether the fermented dairy foods (as opposed to kimchi) they consume are mitigating that intolerance.

And if they do, they will never get past the throbber.

Why do you think human children play with dolls?

Do children "play" with dolls? I don't think that is a slam-dunk. As far as we know, children may be mindless automata and what we call "doll-play" may be unfeeling mirroring of adult anthropomorphizing behavior absorbed through something like blindsight.

You're kind of making my point for me here.

Not at all. My point was that calling a puddle "melted ice" has nothing to do with mistaking it for any kind of ice or ascribing characteristics of ice to it. Likewise with "dead people".

A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood

That's simply untrue, even in neonates (not to mention babies several months older). Look into the abundant research applying the Facial Action Coding System and derived systems to infants and their pain vs. other distress responses.

You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone.

This is a denkverbot, not productive skepticism. We can draw robust, valuable conclusions about subjective states without enjoying deductive certainty.