Epistemic Status: extreme, unhinged speculation. Possibly a small Basilisk-like effect from reading this that directionally seems neutral-to-positively aligned to the cause of human survival. Hopefully entertaining. Big if true. Over the weekend Trump was very nearly assassinated. By sheer luck he decided to tilt his head before the 20-year-old would-be...
> Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the...
Epistemic Status: extreme, unhinged speculation. Possibly a small Basilisk-like effect from reading this that directionally seems neutral-to-positively aligned to the cause of human survival. Hopefully entertaining. Big if true.
Over the weekend Trump was very nearly assassinated. By sheer luck he decided to tilt his head before the 20-year-old would-be assassin pulled the trigger, causing the bullet to graze his ear instead of piercing his brain. This was a probabilistically ridiculous event that had huge implications for America's future. What updates should a Bayesian make to his beliefs in response to this event?
The only mundane hypothesis that explains away the extreme luck is that the assassination was a false flag on behalf of... (read 1444 more words →)
It's really puzzling that evolution decided to manifest taste receptor signals as qualia. You can absolutely imagine a counterfactual human whose whole decision process about whether/what to eat is subconscious, and the human just gets a reward signal when it's eating a good thing. Food selection seems like a very simple ML problem, simpler than e.g. metabolic regulation, that could have just been done by the unconscious brain.
"<Democrats/Republicans> want to destroy the country" is ridiculously unlikely just from first principles.
Take a mental step out from your own country and look at people from other democracies, where the divisive issues are different, and you'll find in all of them people who believe that the rival big tent party is malevolent.
Partisan ideoculture is a waste product of democracy - parties are incentivized to encourage in people a vague hatred of the opposite party instead of having them focus on concrete policies or issues. Getting ensnared by it is shameful.
Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace
If you spend any large amount of time in a community that discusses things, particularly online forums, you will probably get brainwashed by the community ideology. This happens by a process of gradual alignment towards status incentives. This article is about fleshing out the "community ideology" concept and using it for some reactionary political... (read 1785 more words →)
A possible example in humans is the boob. Other primates don't have boobs – they are flat most of the time and only swell for lactation. Maybe, at the beginning, swollen boobs was a sign of fitness, then human males got really into swollen boobs, then human females started padding them with fat to appeal to the males' instincts, leading to the persistent round boobs we witness today – even if the pad of fat isn't actually very useful for lactation.
It seems odd that humans have such extensive female ornamentation, something which is barely ever seen among other species. This goes beyond boobs. Why is it women who wear makeup and not men? It's an invariant across different cultures that women are the ones who care and put more effort into their appearance.
What's the state of the field's thinking on this? Is it an open mystery with some crackpot theories, similar to the mystery of the existence of gay people?