FtttG
User ID: 1175
But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life.
Funnily enough, I finally got around to reading The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich after reading Scott's review of it ~7 years ago. I'm only about 70 pages in, but Henrich has already clearly elucidated that this pattern you're describing (of humans becoming frail and atrophied in some domain because of our life-or-death dependence on technological interventions) is also known as "the history of the human species" or perhaps even "the very thing that makes us human"*. Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw, how we always lose against them in unarmed fights (even fights between a burly adult male human and a juvenile chimp). Who cares what they think? We took over the planet, not them. In the distant future, who's more likely to colonise the solar system: the humans who stubbornly insist on hanging on to their pain receptors in spite of the fact that they've never laid eyes on a rusty nail in their entire lives; or the humans who've outsourced that cognitive module to an external gadget, and can hence devote that extra processing power to optimising their local Dyson sphere? Trick question: the former group won't even exist, having been ruthlessly outcompeted by the latter, just as the proto-humans who weren't onboard with this whole "applying heat to raw meat before eating it" thing got outcompeted by those who were.
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750? Technological developments and our reliance on increasingly complex tools have been changing who we are, at a cellular, neural level, for as long as the human race has existed.
Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
FtttG
9d ago
I know that strictly speaking "pescatarian" means "eats fish", but most people colloquially use it to mean "I don't eat meat but I do eat fish and other kinds of seafood", which would include oysters and caviar. If someone describes himself as pescatarian, without further disambiguation I think it's reasonable to assume I can offer him prawn curry for dinner.
giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them.
Along these lines, I once wrote an article expressing my distaste for terms like "flexitarian".
FtttG
10d ago
FtttG
10d ago
Never heard of it before, fair enough. To be pedantic, I'd rather "ostrotarian", as mussels and oysters seem unambiguously "meat" or "meat-like" in a way that honey, dairy or eggs obviously aren't.
A few years ago I coined the terms "trans-vegetarian" and "trans-vegan" for people who aren't vegetarian or vegan, but identify as such.
FtttG
10d ago
although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey
If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.
FtttG
10d ago
On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.
I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)
When I was a kid I saw this funny ad. It shows this monk with a shaved head and flowing red robes (Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either), who's a friend to all living creatures. He's walking home when he spots a ladybird on the pavement that he almost steps on - so he leans over to delicately pick it up and places it gently on the grass next to the pavement. Then when he gets home he's sitting on the toilet, and while he's going about his business he picks up the bottle of bleach next to it and reads that it kills 99.9% of bacteria in his toilet. With mounting horror, he realises the genocide he's unwittingly caused every time he squirts bleach down his toilet.
Funny ad, clever concept. But it got me thinking - where do you draw the line in determining which animals' welfare to care about? Are bacteria animals? If we're meant to avoid eating honey because it causes bees to suffer more than they otherwise would have, why not bacteria? Are antibiotics genocide?
(Also I know this is mean, but ever since I found out Bentham's Bulldog looks like this I've been unconsciously discounting his opinions in my head slightly.)
FtttG
12d ago
(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!
It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.
I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero.
I know the feeling all too well.
- My latest post was restacked by this woman who applies data science principles to online dating. Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive. I was flattered.
- It was also restacked by Sarah Haider, whose name I vaguely recalled seeing previously and who has her own Wikipedia page, which is cool.
- "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" was shared by Helen Joyce, I think it was shared by Eliza Mondegreen in a paid subscriber-only links roundup (she definitely liked it), and also liked by TracingWoodgrains and Freya India.
- Freddie deBoer commenced one of his duh-of-course-I-support-trans-rights articles by quoting a comment I'd posted on one of his previous articles and ostentatiously announcing how "profoundly uncompelling" he found said comment, in a tone which to me strongly suggested he doth protest too much.
The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye
I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.
The difference being that, in your examples, the claimed reason for doing X really exists, and continues to exist even in the absence of the evolutionary "goal" to which it is directed. It's true that tasty food tastes good; it's true that orgasms feel good. Lots of tasty food is lacking in nutritional value, and lots of things can result in orgasm even though there is no chance of procreation resulting. People can and do consume tasty food just because it tastes good, paying no mind to the nutritional content thereof; people can and do pursue orgasms just because they feel good, paying no mind to whether or not reproduction ensues as a result.
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not. But if dressing up only feels good if you have an audience, then the claimed reason for doing X is simply untrue. Unlike the obesity crisis and porn addiction, there is no widespread societal epidemic of people spending thousands on clothes and makeup just so they can sit at home "feeling good" in their fancy clothes and makeup (obviously being an aspiring camgirl or influencer doesn't count: a virtual audience is still an audience). The audience is a necessary component to the activity in question feeling good: ergo, the claims to be dressing up "for myself" are an obvious post hoc rationalisation to rebut accusations of narcissism or attention-seeking, in a memetic environment in which women explicitly admitting to putting stock in or deriving positive feelings from male attention is seen as déclassé.
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
It sounds like you're just rephrasing @faceh's point in different words. I don't see how "evolution gave us a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive when they have an audience, but not when they don't have an audience" is a meaningfully different assertion from "any woman who claims she dresses up 'for herself' is full of shit". Surely if dressing up feels good if and only if you have an audience, that logically implies that no one is really dressing up "for themselves".
FtttG
12d ago
Because if it felt good to be sexy even in the absence of an audience, women would dress exactly the same way while lounging around at home as they do when out in public. No woman spends an hour applying makeup just so she can rot in bed watching Netflix, ergo the audience (whether male, female or both) must be a necessary ingredient in the cocktail.
FtttG
12d ago
In reference to his divorces, Stewart was once quoted as saying, "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."
So weird, my boss told me this quote the other day but he thought it was from WC Fields.
FtttG
12d ago
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez
Wow, I thought she was like a decade younger. Fair play, I suppose.
FtttG
13d ago
As documented in the Tinker Tuesday threads, I recently completed the first draft of a novel which began as a project for last year's NaNoWriMo. On Friday the 11th I'm going to start working on the second draft, and I've been doing some additional research in the interim.
FtttG
13d ago
It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett, a book I literally found on the side of the road and which, serendipitously, is uniquely germane to a project I'm conducting research into.
Is there any objective evidence that Leone saw Yojimbo before making A Fistful of Dollars, or for that matter that Kurosawa read Red Harvest before making Yojimbo?
On the topic of plagiarism: myself and the missus were recently listening to a Marvin Gaye compilation album, and I mentioned that it infuriates me that the Gaye family's suit against Robin Thicke for ripping off "Got to Give it Up" to make "Blurred Lines" was successful, whereas their suit against Ed Sheeran for ripping off "Let's Get It On" to make "Thinking Out Loud" wasn't. The latter seems a far more blatant rip than the former.
FtttG
15d ago
not even "we decided to live together in a polycule
My understanding is that Scott is still polyamorous even after getting married.
I only had them for the first time last year. The first time I had them I think they'd been frozen and weren't particularly nice, but earlier this year I had fresh ones. With some lemon juice and red onion (or alternatively, tabasco), I thought they were delicious.
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