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Underrated reasons to be thankful V

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Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#21

Post by arcfour »

kragen wrote: post #9
jstanley wrote: post #3

This one in particular stood out: > we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this…

Sounds better than human extinction from bioweapons.

Okay, neither of these are really what I wanted to think about on Thanksgiving though...I am not thankful for either.

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#22

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality.

I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#23

Post by kragen »

arcfour wrote: post #21
kragen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds better than human extinction from bioweapons.

Okay, neither of these are really what I wanted to think about on Thanksgiving though...I am not thankful for either.

I'm thankful humans aren't extinct yet!

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#25

Post by schoen »

kragen wrote: post #16
s1mplicissimus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 2-dimensional life is impossible because physical things exist in all dimensions. As spacetime is already 4 dimensions, no physical thing at all exists in 2 dimensions, thus no life either

Oh, that's just trivia about the contingent universe. You wouldn't say it was impossible for Carthage to have conquered Rome, would you? It just didn't, by chance, happen.

Although maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#26

Post by mlyle »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #22

Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality. I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had i…

> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world.

I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#27

Post by [deleted] »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #22

Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality. I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had i…

[deleted]

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#28

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

mlyle wrote: post #26
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #22

Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality. I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had i…

> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.

Seemed to me that the author was referring to regression to the mean, as another commenter noted.

De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.

Re: Underrated reasons to be thankful V

#29

Post by stevenhuang »

> 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s possible to fit very large expression graphs to data.

> 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs.

Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?

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