Underrated reasons to be thankful V
dynomight.net78 points by numeri 3 hours ago
78 points by numeri 3 hours ago
Many days I worry that HN has lost its humanity and then something with a bit of levity and weird shows up and I am relieved.
I experience a similar sensation. I even feel it for my own self. Sometimes I go weeks, months just thinking about AI, productivity, hustling, taxes etc and then suddenly something with a bit of humanity and weird shows up and I am relieved. It's not completely lost (for now).
Opposite reaction, this article reads like it was written by a care bear.
Lots of religious over- and undertones going on, I assume that's where you get the vibe
2. This is "regression tends to the mean" which my dad used to say with a smile when we discussed his excellent degree and his offspring's (including my) average degree.
I don't think it's regression to the mean. It looks more like mutation-selection balance.
If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again.
[0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad
Hadn't thought about this one previously ... "That if you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you’re in three dimensions"
I can recommend this nonfiction book on the topic: https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd
I found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.
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 shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.
Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
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.
A hopefully tongue-in-cheek entry, or I certainly hope so. Or the guy (or lady) who wrote this is an arrrr ZeroCovidCommunity regular on reddit.
Eating cardamom as I read this. My go to spice to keep mouth busy and flavorful and stay away from junk food.
This whole thing reads strange. I’m not thankful for any of the presented reasons to be thankful.
"Cheddar cheese and pickle. A Vincent Motor-sickle. Slap Bang Tickle"
- Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
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.
> 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.
I know absurdist humor isn't for everyone, but man it cracks me up. So bravo to the strange and the weird, and that it holds this crazy place together!
> That sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit to reproduction, it’s a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with success.
Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors!
For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.
> 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?
Yeah! Screw you, cobalt-60! And I'm sure glad I'm not two-dimensional, but maybe I could poop through my mouth like a sea anemone.
People say that 2-dimensional life is impossible because it's impossible to make a 2-dimensional digestive system.
But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way to let food pass through, and then reconnect.
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.
I assume the contingent universe is where my existence happens and thus a potential thankfulness should be placed on. I'm for example not gonna be thankful we're not in a higher-dimension universe, because my experience would likely be unfathomably different and things might look very different from there.
As history shows, Rome did win, so I wonder just how you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was possible) Was there another universe where the first apes that would later become Carthagians found more bananas, thus had higher population and resources and won this way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this counterfactual history :D
In our timeline, the Cunctator, having provoked the Second Punic War through diplomatic maneuverings in his old age, held Hannibal at bay in Italy for over a decade while weakening him, until Scipio forced Hannibal to return to Africa, where the Romans defeated him.
But, in another timeline, a mosquito stung the Cunctator shortly after war broke out, giving him malaria, which was then endemic in Italy. He would have recovered if not for another piece of bad luck: clumsy from the fever, he stumbled on the way to the latrine and cracked his skull on a rock, dying instantly. The Cunctator's friend and rival Gaius Flaminius was given command of the Roman forces, who attempted direct confrontation with Hannibal's forces, suffering a series of increasingly disastrous defeats until finally Hannibal marched his elephants into Rome and put the Roman Senate to the sword.
The same mosquito was born in our timeline, but mosquitoes are not strong fliers, and the air currents were slightly different in our timeline, so it instead stung the Cunctator's slave, who got malaria but survived. Air currents are of course chaotic¹, and the divergence between the timelines has been traced to the thermal emission of a single photon from a warm rock thirteen years earlier in Karnataka, resulting in the rock being slightly cooler and producing an almost undetectably smaller thermal updraft that night.
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¹ https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/25/387/2018/npg-25-387-2... estimates the largest Lyapunov exponents of well-regarded atmospheric models such as PUMA in the neighborhood of 0.02, i.e., a Lyapunov time of a few months. The 10⁻²⁰ joules of an infrared photon emission create disturbances of about a joule in about six years and about 10²⁰ joules in about 13 years.
Although maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?
Maybe! In that case there would be no contingent universe, only the necessary one. You can see how this would appeal to theists.