Viewing profile — tjs8rj

Is happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical …

Back-of-the-envelope - Road area. World road length ≈ 60–70 million km. Using an average paved width of ~8–10 m ⇒ area ≈ (0.9–1.3)×10¹² m². Earth’s surface is 5.1×10¹⁴ m², so roads…

Or the simpler answer: there’s a drug problem in the US and people want solutions. The republicans make a show of solving it by “blowing up boats carrying drugs”. Democrats make a …

Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp? How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound kn…

As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, dist…

Really? 20 mid sized Googles is better for US power than 1 mega Google dominating the planet? Repeat for any corporation. Breaking these megacorps benefits little guys like you and…

Englewood for instance, increased likelihood of murder being the main disadvantage.

In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils? The state derives a lot of its power glob…

White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place. …

Great to acknowledge luck but too often it’s used as an excuse. Even the story you laid out has to do with a lot of persistence, grit, determination, learning from mistakes, etc A …

This is pretty obvious when you know what to look for. How many people did it take to build the pyramids? Now how many would it take today? Look at revenue per head and how it’s tr…

AI and technology is already replacing jobs. The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can …

It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster. As much as our brains seem to be …

The alternative is what? “Working to live” is often just making more money so you can spend it hiking, traveling, and maximizing your dopamine. Maximizing your happy chemicals is a…

“A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people” The problem …

And yet the innovation density is lower

This only seems confusing to people who valorize intelligence as the most valuable trait one can have. What really matters is the impact you can have on others lives: making them a…

Norms against nudity being based on abrahamic religions is still wrong. It’s like saying norms against murder are based on abrahamic religions because the 10 commandments say so. C…

A norm is a norm, the normal, the usual. Not the “always”. Every culture has times where nudity is acceptable or encouraged (it’d be ab-norm-al for you to shower or use the bathroo…

So China and Japan are abrahamic? India is abrahamic? Every civilization on earth has norms against public nudity. Seems to be something more fundamental than blaming abrahamic rel…

Every civilized culture on earth has norms against public nudity. Objectively there appears to be something more biologically successful about cultures where nudity is reserved for…

Why do we need to make mental healthcare available to everyone? For all of human history people have got along just fine, happily in fact, without “universal access to mental healt…

This isn’t about research topics, this is about money being spent on activism I said “nobody except a fringe”, which is correct

Nobody is complaining about research into stuff we’re not sure is useful yet. The problem is public dollars are being spent on activism.

The problem is our public institutions (universities) are using public dollars on things that are not desired by the public. Institutions have accountability to the people. Nobody …