Viewing profile — astazangasta

Actually, would you please ban me? I'm not sure i agree with you about ideology vs. curiosity, I'd say rather that ideology is one of the primary things I am curious about and some…

It's not a hand wave - my argument is that those things could all be better developed, and indeed have been, by programs that are directly focused on that kind of technology develo…

Yeah, where would we be without LASIK? I'll also note that that article notably elides things like ICBMs and the other myriad military applications, since it is clearly intended as…

Most industries get their start in the military because that is where the money always is; however, semiconductors have definitely moved on to other applications, whereas rocketry …

Space enthusiasts are always trying to sell their fetish with this line, but the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted…

Exactly this; also, as a computational biologist I cringe at the stacking of dubious models that produced this "mapping". First is the "interactome", a terrible way to model biolog…

I find those terms particularly perplexing because the idea of ridiculing people for their sensitivity to particular political concerns is an exercise in demonstrating your sensiti…

This is in the category of "outrage outrage", where we are outraged that other people are getting outraged about things.

I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightenin…

Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception…

>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. This is exactly what social construction is: reifying …

I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly p…

Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again…

This is garbage. Contrary to popular belief, remission is in fact common in schizophrenia, so n=2 demonstrates precisely nothing. In addition, there is no evidence that schizophren…

No, this is not right. Most power generation is done by steam in the US (85%). Steam can get much hotter than boiling water, and it is cheap and makes no waste.

You're right, I didn't read enough or do enough back-of-the-napkin math. I read more; this seems plausible in life cycle terms, but now I have doubts about the economics. At $30/to…

Thanos doesn't understand exponential growth. If you actually want to have an effect, cutting a population in half does nothing, it'll just grow back in whatever the doubling time …

This is exactly the kind of logic that led to Silent Spring. "We think we have a viable solution, we haven't really evaluated any of the side effects, but we need to act, and act f…

This seems like it would fail energetically; the amount of energy required to mine and transport a bunch of rock to a beach would surely exceed the amount of CO2 sequestered.

The problem is that people routinely underestimate the scale of vested interest. Bill McKibben famously quantified the problem as the amount of actual capital (as in, can be used a…

Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure garbage. There is no moment…

Given the gaps in our knowledge of early life, a definite statement in either direction is unlikely to be in the offing. However, terrestrial life is decidedly unlikely. Life is de…

This is idiotic. We don't need a recession to clear detritus from the economy, that should be the result of routine investment. We get recessions because the economy as a whole ove…

>the same as the privacy populists who obsess about data, most of whom lived in advanced democracies in which the data isn’t used for serious assaults on people This observation be…