It matters whether you grow rice (needs irrigation funded and controlled by a larger group, and coordination of when you drain your fields) or wheat (more suitable for family farms), as studies have shown (including quasi-experimental work).

The "quasi experimental" study is in my opinion very silly. Here are their descriptions of the tests of cultural differences they ran

To test individualism:

Participants drew circles to represent the self and their friends in a diagram of their social network. Later, we measured the size of the self circle and the average of the friend circles.

To test loyalty/nepotism:

The task asks people to imagine going into a business deal with a friend, who then lies during the deal, which causes the participant to make less money in the deal. Participants can punish the friend for their dishonesty by paying a small amount of money to delete money from their bank account (paying 0–100 RMB to delete 0–1000 RMB [US$148]). In another scenario, the friend is honest, and they can reward the friend by paying to add money to their bank account. Crucially, participants completed two identical scenarios with a stranger. Thus, participants completed four scenarios in total (reward/punish friend/stranger). We analyzed whether participants treated the friend better than the stranger, even though the friend and the stranger acted the same. Treating the friend better could be seen positively as loyalty or negatively as nepotism.

To measure categorical vs relational thought style:

We measured holistic thought with the 14-item picture version of the triad task. In each triad, farmers saw a target object, such as the rabbit in Fig. 2. Then they chose one of two other objects to pair with it, such as a dog or carrot. One pairing belongs to the same abstract category (rabbits and dogs are mammals), and one pairing shares a functional relationship (rabbits eat carrots). We calculated the percentage of relational pairings as a measure of holistic thought.

I'd expect (and Claude agrees) there have been extensive & rigorous study made of each of these properties in the field of psychometrics, which makes their use of these tests unnecessary & strange. If one was charitable they could say that they wanted to use tests which had previously been correlated with rice-dominated/wheat-dominated farming areas, or that the relevant psychometric tests perhaps weren't translated to Chinese.

I don't know the methodology behind how the statement you have has been drafted, I don't think you even mention the statement directly in this post, but I will say that I think the correct methodology here is not to first come up with a statement, and then email it out and ask a bunch of researchers whether they'd sign it. That is a recipe for exactly what you're encountering here. The researchers you're reaching out to have a very different perspective on public communication and how they'd like to represent their beliefs than you do, in your role as de-facto public relations managers in this project.

That is a good thing! We would like our researchers to primarily be thinking on simulacra level 1, and that means they will sign very different statements than what may seem optimal from the media's perspective.

However, as you point out, it can also be a bad thing, and decrease the PR manager's ability to... well... manage.

That is why I believe the solution is to first email out the main researchers who you'd like to sign the statement, and ask what sorts of statements they would be willing to sign. What properties must the statement have in order for them to be comfortable putting their name below it. Then you create a statement which you know will have at least some base of support among researchers. You should expect a reasonable amount of iteration & compromise here, and not to, on your first try, create a statement for which everyone you want to sign signs.

I will say also that it seems likely this is how the CAIS statement was drafted too. They spent (if I remember right) quite a while work-shopping it. That statement (to my knowledge) did not just appear out of the aether in its current state. It took work and compromise to get it.

Again, I don't know whether you actually fell for the trap I mention, but it seems likely given the pushback you're getting

¯\(ツ)/¯, but if you could...

On the subject of “capturing dark energy” (I don’t think this technically captures any energy previously existing), my favorite proposal is to connect distant galaxies together with strings, and use the resulting tension to turn a turbine. In principle your limit would then only be the strength and length of your intergalactic rope.

See Mining Energy in an Expanding Universe for what I think is the earliest proposal for this idea.

How?

I think you are partially sanitywashing the positions of your company with regards to the blogpost.

I did not read Matthew's above comment as representing any views other than his own.

There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain

Hm, I got the opposite impression from reading this sequence of blog posts from Bret Devereaux on ACOUP

The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. Let’s start with an analogy:

Let’s say you are the leader of a small country, surrounded by a bunch – let’s say five – large neighbor countries, which never, ever change. Each of these big neighbors has their own culture and customs. Do you decide which one is morally best and side with that one? That might be nice for your new ally, but it will be bad for you – isolated and opposed by your other larger neighbors. Picking a side might work if you were a big country, but you’re not; getting in the middle is likely to get you crushed.

No. You will need to maintain the friendship of all of the countries at once (the somewhat amusing term for this in actual foreign policy is ‘Finlandization‘ – the art of bowing to the east without mooning the west, in Kari Suomalainen’s words). And that means mastering their customs. When you go to County B, you will speak their language, you wear their customary dress, and if they expect visiting dignitaries to bow five times and then do a dance, well then you bow five times and do a dance. And if Country C expects you to give a speech instead, then you arrive with the speech, drafted and printed. You do these things because these countries are powerful and will destroy you if you do not humor whatever their strange customs happen to be.

[...]

Ah, but how will you know what kind of speech to write or what dance to do? Well, your country will learn by experience. You’ll have folks in your state department who were around the last time you visited County B, who can tell you what worked, and what didn’t. And if something works reliably, you should recreate that approach, exactly and without changing anything at all. Sure, there might be another method that works – maybe you dance a jig, but the small country on the other side of them dances the salsa, but why take the risk, why rock the boat? Stick with the proven method.

But whatever it is that these countries want, you need to do it. No matter how strange, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient, because they have the ability to absolutely ruin everything for you. So these displays of friendship or obedience – these rituals – must take place and they must be taken seriously and you must do them for all of these neighbors, without neglecting any (yes even that one you don’t like).

This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look). Let’s break that down, starting with the concept of…

idk about you, but the characters in my dream act nowhere near how real people act, I'm just too stupid in my dreams to realize how inconsistent and strange their actions are.

Doesn’t such a discretization run into the fermion doubling problem?

I get a conversation not found error when clicking on your first link