zebrask

I admit to having missed that footnote, but I think I am intending to make a subtly different point here, which is that not only does a mismatch with ancestral environment undercut the "our ancestors didn't have sunscreen" argument, but rather the strong correlation between UV intensity and skin color indicates that this is not a weak selection pressure and getting exactly the right amount of sun is probably kind of a big deal.

Especially if it is true that it's just vitamin D that was imposing pressure towards lighter skin and we can get the same effect that through dietary supplementation.

Also, it’s worth noting that our ancestors have been outside all day every day for millions of years.

It is also probably worth noting that skin color in indigenous populations is extremely correlated with average UV levels in the region, which to me indicates that if you are living in a location other than where your ancestors lived, you can't really use "our ancestors dealt with this just fine" since it seems the ancestors that didn't look like the people who evolved in your region failed to breed at much higher rates than the ones who did.

Of course that... (read more)

Two questions: 

1. I am guessing that since this is just about capital gains, the advice doesn't necessarily hold for RSUs (if you sell your RSUs immediately), is that correct? I usually only have nominal capital gains due to a few days or weeks' delay between RSUs being issued and me selling them. 
2. The way this is framed it sounds like it mostly applies to the situation where you have assets but not cash and you would sell the assets to get cash to donate, but it sounds like even if you have cash to donate, if your assets have a lot of capital gains

Interesting viewpoint, is this personal experience, another source, or both?

To be clear, I don't have high confidence in the direction, much less the magnitude, of the effect here, and I do not have any personal experience of tight communities.

My thinking on this was from a general sense that humans devote a lot of our cognitive resources into social games — signalling, fashion, politics, mating, etc — and it's plausible that modern society allows us to opt out of a lot of the most challenging parts of these by interacting with institutions with formal rul... (read more)

In the mental realm, the opposite may be true: the average person may be experiencing a pretty thorough mental workout just from day-to-day life.

Depending on what counts as a "mental workout", the direction of modernity's effect on one's mental challenges seems unclear to me. Many people have much more cognitively demanding jobs these days, but our social life has atomized so significantly that we no longer rely so heavily on being woven into the larger social fabric of a community, where we'd need to devote many more of our mental resources to the task of... (read more)

Oh sorry! Having recently been deep-diving on this when considering the process I forgot some people might be squeamish about it. I've put the detailed description under a spoiler block.

(Spoiler block contains description of eye surgery.)

You may be thinking of PRK? LASIK

heals. With PRK the outer layer is removed entirely.

Not that I'm saying you should get LASIK — I got it done recently and it's been marginally better than glasses or contacts, but it hasn't been life-changing in any way so far.

Plus it doesn't really solve your problem, since one of the nicest things about photoc... (read more)