pjdorrell

The hypothesis that music is caused by a "glial illusion". That is, glial cells observe the activity of neural activity responding to music, and glial cells falsely perceive certain aspects of that neural activity, which results in dysregulation of neural activity in "downstream" neurons, which causes the emotional intensity we experience when listening to music.

The results of these experiments indirectly tell us something about our chances of ever meeting aliens:

* No physical collapse => Everett interpretation AKA "many worlds"

* Many worlds gives us the Anthropic Principle for free

* The Anthropic Principle explains the origin of the first living organism, or, to put it another way, the observed existence of the origin of our first living ancestor does _not_ set any lower bound on the probability of the first living organism developing from non-living molecules.

* A very low probability of the origin of life implies the non-existence of any other life in the observable universe.

* Therefore, no aliens.

(The aliens do of course exist in other parts of the total Universal Wave Function, but we never get to meet them.)

Link to something I wrote once, which includes a discussion about absolute vs relative morality: http://thinkinghard.com/blog/BiologyOfMorality.html.

(It would appear that "moral realism" is just another way of saying "absolute morality", or "moral absolutism".)

We could ask the opposite question:

Some forms of entertainment are usually only entertaining the first time. Like jokes. Or movies.

Music seems to be a form of entertainment. But usually we are quite happy to listen to a new song more than once.

So why is that?

If your theorem provers never prove a contradiction, they are all too weak.

The author says:

"The status quo provides marginal individual benefit to the person making the decision while also causing marginal harm to society as a whole. Doing the right thing doesn’t really provide much tangible short term benefit."

This explains exactly why the majority of people living in a dictatorship don't try very hard to do all the things that they need to do if they want to change their own government.

They need to do things like finding out what is the truth about their government, and telling other people what that truth is. But doing that requires individual self-sacrifice, and most people, most of the time, don't what to do that.

In the bacterial example, each individual tumble chooses a new direction at random, and the effectiveness of the algorithm depends on the smoothness of the chemical density function in the 3D space that the bacteria is swimming around in.

In his human examples, all the "tumbles" are conscious decisions made by the person in response to their circumstances.

If there was some human equivalent of the "tumble", it would have to be something that was change just for the sake of change. Like: "I'm bored and/or frustrated, so I am going to do something stupidly different".

CO2, or CO₂ ?

I have been learning new things since I started _making_ videos on TikTok.

Ironically, making highly digestible content for social media is something that requires a certain amount of sustained attention.

All definitions of the word "music" that anyone has ever come up with are wrong.

We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music.

At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music.

There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on.

Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.

In the Speech-to-Song illusion, recorded speech is altered so that there are one or more exact repetitions. These exact repetitions are something that never occur in spontaneous conversational speech.

Last time I tried it you couldn't update titles. Which is very limiting. Some web pages have great titles and other web pages don't.

Nuclear fusion.

It's been such a struggle to get anywhere near to making it do something useful.

But what if, one day, it actually works?

What could happen if we all had access to enormous amounts of very cheap energy? Have we thought even a little bit about all the bad things that might happen as a result?

This page is dated 23 April 2020, so it might be interesting from a historical point of view, but it's rather out-of-date.

In particular, it does not contain the word "Laos".

The name reminds me of "DCOMbobulator", another software whose purpose was to turn off something that caused endless trouble and which you never asked for in the first place.

Some observations:

* The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our ears is absolute.

* Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to calculate relative pitch.

* Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical" skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the musical quality of music.

Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as an "amazing" skill.

But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should be amazed by is relative pitch perception.

My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical function.

It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a deep rumbling sound.

One could make a Venn diagram of positive adjectives used frequently in Hacker News headlines and positive adjectives used frequently by a certain US ex-president.

"Beautiful" would be in the intersection. "Modern" is popular on HN, but not so much with the ex-president.

This is an example of a triple negative in a headline: Biden can not make landlords not be able to tell you that you are not allowed to continue living in your existing accommodation.

Therefore (in some cases) this reduces to a single negative: you can not continue to live in your existing accommodation.

Music.

What is music? Is music an adaptation? If so, what is it an adaptation for? If not, how come it exists at all?

Some toplined melodies - https://whatismusic.info/melodies/index.html

The authors of the paper do various calculations to arrive at 36.

How do they determine f_l, the probability of life originating on a suitable planet?

They follow the "Principle of Mediocrity", ie life exists on Earth, and we are not special, so probably it exists anywhere it can exist and f_l = 1.

This is the exact opposite of the Anthropic Principle, which says (correctly) that we cannot deduce anything about the probability of life originating from the fact of our own existence.

If f_l isn't 1, and it's some smaller number, like 1^-1000, then there won't be 36 alien civilisations in the galaxy - there will only be zero.

Even in the observable universe, there will be zero alien civilisations.

Useful arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03968

As always, the critical assumption is f_l, the probability that life of any kind will originate on a "suitable" planet.

The authors invoke the "Principle of Mediocrity", which says something like, "We're not special, therefore f_l = 1".

This is exact opposite of the Anthropic Principle, which says: "From the observation that life has originated on Earth, we can deduce nothing at all about f_l."

If f_l is some other number, like 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001, then the expected number of alien civilisations won't be 36, it will be 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000036.

Also 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001 could be wildly optimistic. The true value might have so many zeroes after the decimal point that it exceeds the permitted size of Hacker News comments.

It's not just a matter of not understanding, it's also the tendency to assume the default, which is a linear scale.

One suggestion would be to make the logarithmic scale super-obvious and in your face.

"1 10 100 1k 10k 100k" in small print obscures the unusual nature of the scale.

Instead, show 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 and show those numbers in a large bold font so that they are the most noticeable feature of the graph.

(Possibly use an increasing font size.)

You won't see the black hole in your telescope, because it's black, and there isn't any stuff currently falling into it (which is one way that black holes can make themselves very visible).

Also, using "your telescope", you won't see the orbits of the black hole's companions with sufficient precision to deduce that the black hole exists and that it's a black hole.

How much do monoclonal antibody treatments cost, per patient, usually?

For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570079/

Also, how much of the high cost is research cost, and how much of that is per-unit production cost?

Some useful links for more technical background info: https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part1 (& parts2 & 3), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-018-0118-9 and https://www.ijbs.com/v16p1686.htm.

https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

All we need now is a "this 'does not exist site' does not exist" site.

For l_c, which contains the probability of the origin of life from non-living precursors, the authors suggest an LU (orders of magnitude) of ~200, and say "though one could easily argue for much larger LU".

Indeed one could argue. For example, the simplest known self-contained organism has ~500,000bp of genome which is roughly equivalent to LU (which is log base 10) of 300,000.

Obviously simpler organisms _could_ exist, and could have existed in the distant past. But how much simpler they could actually be is pure speculation.

300,000 is much bigger than 200. It is so enormous that it completely dominates all the other LU values.

It is so enormous that it is difficult to make any informed estimate about the probability distribution of log f_c.

But it tells us not to be surprised that we are completely alone in the observable universe.

For most forms of passive audio-visual entertainment, we strongly prefer new to old, for example:

* films

* jokes

* stories

* news

* documentaries

Music is unusual in how much we _don't_ seek out new items.

The author appears to have the honest intention of analysing this question as thoroughly as possible.

If there is some other website or paper that goes through this in more detail, it would be good if someone could post a link to that website.

It could be that next week someone discovers the intermediate host (like the civet cat was for SARS), and the whole discussion becomes moot. But for the moment I think we are still in "don't know either way" territory.

Also we may eventually come to a deeper understanding of the nature of zoonotic events, and whether it is at all possible that a scientific laboratory could accidentally become part of the chain of transfer.

For example, it might be that a coronavirus only rarely and temporarily exists in a state where it infects the source host and is capable of infecting the destination host. In which case such a transfer will only ever occur in a situation where large numbers of indidivuals from both source and destination species exist, ie in rural areas where wildlife mixes with people, or in farms, or some combination of those two.

Another thing I would note is that all the examples of laboratory accidents were of organisms already known to be dangerous human diseases. Those types of accidents can and do happen. Whether it is at all probable that such an accident could generate a _new_ dangerous human disease is not so obvious. This comes back to the question of what probabilities are involved in the events leading up to a typical zoonotic event.