This is pretty understated. We live in a strangely beautiful world such that our experience of time is shaped like so due to the interplay of energy on the surface of the earth
Would be great if the stressors didn’t affect sleep though.
Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
Some of the things the post mentions are possible to do and good and some are not. There's much to be grateful for yet there are still many problems to solve if we could focus as a society...
Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
> we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.
Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again.
[0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad
> your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have
This is a nearly word-for-word explanation of mutation-selection balance, e.g. check out the Wikipedia explanation:
> an equilibrium in the number of deleterious alleles in a population that occurs when the rate at which deleterious alleles are created by mutation equals the rate at which deleterious alleles are eliminated by selection
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon about, well, measurements that regress to the mean. In the given quote, the average baby isn't regressing to the mean, the average baby is carrying a higher number of deleterious alleles and is less fit across the board. TFA then describes fitter babies having more babies themselves, which is irrelevant to regression to the mean but an integral part of mutation-selection balance.
- Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!
In an ideal world. But in our current world I find that economical stance in the world influences amount of children more than if you’re “fit”. E.g. the poor(er) people of the world and the ultra wealthy of the world are having more kids while the middle class is having less, sure they have to meet some kind of ‘fit’ threshold but not the kind implied IMO.
according to V-Dem Institute [0], 72% of population live in autocracies.. does it include the US nowadays?
> 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs.
Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?
[...]
#20. That not every symbolic expression recursively built from integrable elementary functions has an integral that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions ...
Lisp programmers disagree from the first lesson at learning Lisp.
E.g. look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_rule
Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors!
For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.
And having found: https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ #18
Can't agree more. Thank you
He lived around the year 400, so pretty progressive for his time.
But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way to let food pass through, and then reconnect.
I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.
The worst thing out there are those arrogant folks who think they know better than everybody else and go and try to create some sort of (self-centered) utopia, based on flawed expectations who we humans are, ignoring basic human traits we all share like selfishness. The more anybody tries to stick out of grand design and forge their own way (or even god forbid criticize), the harsher they are put down to not spoil the paradise.
I'd take democracy and freedom with corresponding risks and rewards any day over that.
Ancient Greek-style democracy -- where every citizen votes on every important issue -- can now be implemented in the US and any European country, with ease. It's not like we don't have the technology. Why do we need corrupt intermediaries? To simplify things a bit, it is because we're going to get oligarchy or ochlocracy, and the oligarchs want to make sure they're on the winning team, whereas direct democracy is a path to ochlocracy within a mere handful of years.
The Ancients knew all of this, of course.
All that said, a state's form of government has very little (in some cases nothing) to do with that state's ability to benefit from material progress.
It's a real laugh to suggest that our ancestors were "suffering enormously" on account of the fact that they were ruled by a feudal lord who descended from his mountain fortress once a year to collect taxes in the form of a handful or two of grain. Our ancestors had a place, a duty, a strong faith, and a connection to their superiors and inferiors. Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music. On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.
I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.
De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
