291–300 of 344 posts
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Damn. 8-12? For me the peak always lasted 2-3 hours and I was sober again after 7 hours.
yea people in this thread saying 8-12 for psilocybin and 12 is short for LSD tells me these are either heroic doses or hyperbolizing.
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In stark contrast to what you're claiming, I have absolutely zero patience for intelligent design and the likes -- that’s exactly my point. All I'm saying is that the whole point of the theory of evolution is that blind enumeration of mutations is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges in spite of the vastness of the search space. It is already well known that mutation bias exists, so none of this i…
great, but we still cannot say anything beyond "what survives, survives". fitness is a central concept to natural selection and ultimately evolution, but it seems to bother nobody that its an empty concept, a tautology. its a nice observation but doesnt actually explain anything, and I expect science to explain the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design
Intelligent Design is a religious ideology, not a scientific theory. The Discovery Institute is the evangelical advocacy organization that systematized and promoted it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute
After Intelligent Design failed legally and scientifically, the Institute pivoted to the "Teach the Controversy" strategy -- not to advance new science, but to manufacture doubt about evolution in public education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy
That approach -- revealingly effective -- became a template for later efforts to reintroduce religious ideology into secular institutions. Project 2025 represents the political continuation of that same strategy at a much larger scale: shifting from attacking a single scientific theory to reshaping education, governance, and public policy along explicitly religious lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
These are not isolated phenomena. They are successive adaptations of the same agenda after earlier versions failed.
Exposing Discovery Institute Part 1: Casey Luskin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxq1Vrf_Js
>Have you heard of the Discovery Institute? Have you fallen under the impression that they know what they are talking about, or can be considered an even remotely legitimate source of information?
>Well, you've come to right place. They aren't. They're a propaganda mill, and all of their content is full of lies.
>They hide behind a paper-thin roster of scientists who have deluded themselves into dishonestly preaching outside of their expertise, and they blatantly misrepresent any scientific research or scientists they are referring to. Constantly. Sometimes they even commit slander.
>That's what this video is about, and it is the first installment in a series where I will expose the fraudulent activity of all the major contributors at the Discovery Institute, one clown at a time.
>Part 1 addresses Casey Luskin, and it is centered around some very serious slander he committed against an esteemed anthropologist.
>But don't worry, I cover lots of other lies and stupidity that come out of his mouth as well.
>If you're a fan of the DI, do please find the courage to watch this rather than running to the comments section to yell at me.
>It's not all that long, and I promise that I make it extremely clear and undeniable that Casey is a liar. If you have a shred of honesty within you, you will quickly see that this is the case. Enjoy!
This dives into the "Junk DNA" cannard:
Exposing Discovery Institute Part 10: Casey Luskin Again (Because He's Such a Loser Fraud)
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I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at. All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.
In stark contrast to what you're claiming, I have absolutely zero patience for intelligent design and the likes -- that’s exactly my point. All I'm saying is that the whole point of the theory of evolution is that blind enumeration of mutations is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges in spite of the vastness of the search space. It is already well known that mutation bias exists, so none of this i…
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> What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world? It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm. Yes, the strong force is part of the implementation, because the strong force can play a role in selection events, cf nuclear bombs and radiation. The gravitational pull of remote galaxies can also influence selection events by changing planetary orbits…
> It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm. But you don't know (and to some degree, cannot know) which parts of it. So you cannot really know if the implementation encodes a goal or not. > What goal are you referring to? Whatever goal was being used in the case of genetic algorithms or artificial life systems. Those systems have goals, but the early stages do not embod…
But we seem to agree that natural selection doesn't have a goal. In my observation, any purported overarching goal that is ascribed to natural selection, including the measure of inclusive fitness[0], can be reduced to some function of the context in which it is being observed, like moth coloration was influenced by soot levels.
As to my main claim, I do believe it is necessary that an encoding of a goal is necessary for choice among actions in pursuit of a goal, because some kind of reference to a goal is necessary to compare options in a decision algorithm. In the case of a-life systems which have goals, that encoding is somewhere in the algorithm of evolution rules combined with the initial state of the simulation. In the case of nature, I don't see a place where that encoding could exist, except the trivial "goal" that all elements will follow the laws of physics.
Please note though that I never put it that "the implementation must embody the goal," I was more careful with my language by saying that it must have an accessible or working encoding of the goal, one its decision process or evolution rule would need to reference in order to make decisions that favored it. The encoding need not be internal (so embody is definitely not necessary), and none of these things are necessarily explicit or well partitioned (e.g. an evolution rule can implicitly encode a goal).
edit: addendum: [0] On inclusive fitness being reducible to situational factors, I'm just following the direction of M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita and E.O. Wilson on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205
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yea people in this thread saying 8-12 for psilocybin and 12 is short for LSD tells me these are either heroic doses or hyperbolizing.
definitely not hyperbole. last time i took LSD i dropped at 5pm before going to dinner and ended up at a bread factory 15 miles away at 5am watching them run the big mixers. no idea how i got there just remember walking all night.
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Some argue that THC in cannabis actually works similarly because when herbivores regularly ingest it, they become lethargic and lazy, causing them struggle to survive in the world. Kinda like my roommate.
But cannabis the needs heat to convert, it’s more likely it evolved with Human influence considering the years of overlapping land races tied to our trade routes
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You appear to lack the historical knowledge to appreciate the joke: The war on drugs was specifically designed to allow the government to go after the left and black people. Nixon's domestic policy chief said this in 1994: * https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminal...
What makes you think I lacked the context here?
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> how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness Its really fairly simply: natural selection requires two things: heritable genetics and a source of variation in the genetics between individuals. Mutation is the most basic source of variation, and that produces new information. But new information isn't necessarily knowledge. Assuming a sc…
> Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis this is the problem i have with natural selection... it has no predictive power. You can never use natural selection theory to say if an organism is "fit" before it exh…
Only in situations with a powerful selection pressure (like an asteroid strike causing a nuclear winter, or antibiotic applied to a petri dish) can one have a hope of reliably predicting which variants will be selected for or against.
However, these situations are not irrelevant, especially if we can predict the likelihood of those situations developing. Real predictions of the theory of natural selection can be applied to managing antibiotic resistance in populations of bacteria. For example, we know that antibiotic resistance mechanisms that bacteria evolve will often have an energy metabolism cost to their maintenance. This means that, absent pressure to be resistant to antibiotics, we'd expect a population to gradually lose individuals with the genes for the resistance mechanism, because they would be incurring a metabolic penalty for possessing those genes. So natural selection theory accurately predicts that if you remove the selection pressure of the antibiotic, the bacteria will evolve to lose the resistance mechanism, and become susceptible to the antibiotic again over several generations of natural selection. Using this knowledge, some rural regions will discontinue use of a given class of antibiotics in agriculture to allow for resistant strains to decline, and then resume their use when they are again effective. By intelligently rotating use of antibiotics in this way, we can enjoy their benefits without incurring too much inefficiencies and worse tragedies from antibiotic resistance.
That is real & useful predictive power.