keiru

Firstly, getting this out of my chest: It felt like a really good note, except for the graphs. The author acknowledges that he is pulling the Bell curve out of his ass, but somehow serves to illustrate his point. But for some reason the extra amount of information that would implicitly come from the internet seems uniformly distributed across qualities. I would have expected a taller (or wider) Bell curve if anything. Why even bother with graphs if there is no semblance of meaning to it? Was he aiming for the target audience's math fetish? I do appreciate silly illustrations, but I felt it distractingly pointless.

Having said that, it's nice to see that people acknowledge the ways that information was available, seeding the need to re-evaluate information dynamics.

It's amazing how the whole world can be in turmoil about a presence we barely bothered to actually look at because there's simply no point in doing so.

This is the only reason I chose not to delete some old accounts from different sites, and check on them yearly-ish. I used to think the internet as ephemeral, but I don't have that luxury as long as anyone else doesn't. From relatives to banks the authentication crisis is real. My soul is forever bound to some shitty teenage usernames and some poorly secured hashes distributed around the world.

Y2038 is in your walls

Fuck me, as this is true

Related: Samo Burja is a sociologist with a pretty tidy and poignant YouTube channel. He has a lot of stuff on human institutions (from corporations to civilizations), their underlying social mechanics and what makes or breaks them. He emphasizes the importance of patronage and apprenticeship viewed as a "social technology" that allow for the correct passing of knowledge that is essential to maintaining institutional life-cycles.

Short introductory videos:

Why We Still Need Masters & Apprentices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribdRDO75Rk

Dynasties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNIYEhjI2xE

Functional Institutions are the Exception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fanjkT3pi0

Intellectual Dark Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KPAD1UjpsE

Longer and very worthwhile talks:

Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge, and the Future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdYmuFyjWM

Institutions And Intellectual Dark Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA-YeBb5V4

I found this so baffling that the best I can say is I don't know, and I've found no explanation satisfactory. "Denial" doesn't cut it, it's mass delusion. The first Chinese quarantine was a giant red flag that nearly everyone ignored.

Which brings us back to the matter at hand; devastating plagues have happened many times in Europe. This one is probably not going to be devastating, but we really don't know the effect of this disruption in today's society.

But back to the discussion about the WHO, their bland attitude is greatly to blame for the inaction of the CDC, and the rest of the world.

As a case study, for some days half of all confirmed cases outside of China were in the Diamond Princess, and the proportion held until very recently with 1000+ cases worldwide (sans China). Why? Sampling bias. Even arguing that a cruise is more virus-friendly cannot possibly account for a single ship holding half of the world's cases. And then came about Iran and Italy, with no clear path of spread. It's hurtfully evident that there are so many more cases and there's a huge visibility issue, and the WHO delaying measures aggravates the matter dramatically.

They showed a strong unwillingness to declare the high state of emergency from the start, which dragged the numbers 30 fold through delayed action. They were the one institution with the moral authority to drive prevention (incentivising testing, the closure of air travel, etc). People act as if the only possible responses are complete inaction or panic. This is terribly misguided. Had the WHO declared high alert a month ago, it would have meant a whole month to take it all in, plan, condition your touch-your-face reflexes, rethink your lifestyle, etc. Maybe they didn't want to be the boy who cried wolf after SARS, MERS and H1N1 were declared global outbreaks and ended up not being full-blown pandemics. But now what? Is the watchdog scared to watch? They act as if Chinese numbers are trustworthy, and I can only guess that it's half political reasons, half delusion. The CCP has a history of under/misreporting catastrophe that should be factored in, at the very least as a warning label. With a mostly mild disease that spreads like wildfire there's bound to be huge visibility biases which were not taken into account, and then you end up with things like Italy where they don't even know how it spread.

Instead there's a discourse vacuum where people seem to decide what's going to happen more on the basis of pre-existing narratives than reality. Examples; People mistrust the US believed it's all exaggerated to hurt China, for a while some "journalists" wrote more about racism and stigma than the actual ongoing development, politicians kept ringing the everything's OK alarm, and finally, mindless optimists are the worst.

The Chinese government decided to establish an economy-crippling quarantine on January 23rd with only 1000 confirmed cases. Something was awry. And in the following week all the warning sings have been available (the quick spread, reports of CCP measures and life in Wuhan, research papers about the spread, incubation, etc). But for a month now the WHO refused to read the writing on the wall, only god knows why.

It's way thinner and full of holes. It's not so much about the skin on your cheeks, but your mouth, eyes, nose membranes. And even if you just dirty your cheek, the contamination might spread elsewhere with further touching. Think about this: How do you take drugs? Eye dropplets, oral blotters, snorting.

the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation.

By advancing human knowledge you are arguably working for hundreds of profit-driven corporations at a time

AI-fueled eternal September

We will see in our lifetimes how droves of spureous personas flood the internet forever

I wonder if one could earn a living as a professional shitposter for AI training purposes.

secret mind control programs. The human brain, being a computer, is expected to be alterable. But the extent of secrecy, shadiness and memory-holing of secret government programs never ceases to amaze.

Mathematics was never focused on proof until the formalization of math became popular approximately 100 years ago.

We are transitioning surprisingly fast from kinda explaining stuff to automatically and systematically advancing exclusively through rigurously formalized proofs.

The second tribe sounds more like engineering than science though

It's a good learning opportunity then, and it should be pointed out

Professional lawyers posing as peers psychologically tortuting him to shatter his worldview, while the professor that led the experiment manipulated him to continue.

Given that he secluded himself and wrote about his ideology for years like a comic book villain origin story, it's safe to say they took to too far, whatever it is they did.

Also, afaik MK tested lacing with different doses, and only the big incidents were disclosed. Why wouldn't you suspect drugging here too?

Imagine if the NSA suddenly had to spy on 5 million people. Oh wait.

"I am 12 and what is this" needed a comeback

I've posted several times about law lagging behind technology, and this is what I mean. If a new tech is in the horizon, you should already be able to realize what can be done with it, what damage it can cause.

I can't believe they call it sexual assault. It's as if it was beyond the realm of possibility to create new lexicon and they had to use only existing terms.

People discussing stuff and having those daily inconsequential political debates is what shapes society and culture.

I do understand the practicality of the advice, and I've implemented it in the past, but so just nobody fool themselves it's not far from meaning "You might be happier if you detach yourself from society". Not so dramatically, but it's like becoming a guest and partaking in cooperation but not culture.

Gamma correction and monitor settings usually go criminally unnoticed. I had problems just working with designers, I can't imagine what silent mistakes it produces in color-critical applications, like medical imaging. Some monitors are a finger brush away from auto-adjusting and messing up carefully selected settings.

This is why I liked their C2 approach

Today, you are not you, you are your data, a persona. And you are somehow responsible for it or anything that casts a similar shadow.

Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts

Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.

The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.

Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.

Well, I agree there is not that much merit in the article for pointing out the obvious, but if the emperor has no clothes someone needs to say it.

The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.

PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.

Perhaps the real evolutionary advantage of Sapiens was abstract thinking put to use in advanced sexualization of different species.

Goes to show that every field has its own inferred "dark matter" of sorts.

Not the reason at all. Even if you left the charge of the word "race" behind, no one ever uses that word to describe such a distant variety of humans as the ones described in the article. I've read they compare to neanderthals and denisovans in their relationship with sapiens, and there's surely a reason why they were classed as Hominins (a two million year old tree) and not some narrower class. I'm still trying to get a better clarification, but the theorized extinct groups seem to require a far stronger word than race by any metric. Maybe subspecies would have preserved the idea of separateness while reconciling the interbreeding, but as you said, what you call this group of hominids is not that important anyways, but race gives the wrong idea in biological terms.

And I'm sad so many people just downvoted the comment without clarification. I thought too it was political correctness at first until I looked into the time-frame more closely. It merited a decent reply.