rolfmoo
9mo ago
it just doesn't even care about our problems. How much time do we spend worrying about ant habitats?
Not much, but we also don't especially trouble ourselves not to destroy them incidentally if, say, we want to build a road over them. And there's instrumental convergence to worry about - for most possible goals, you can do a lot better if you use the atoms in the apes for something else.
rolfmoo
6mo ago
A big part of the reason why new drug development is so expensive is that the clinical trial and other approval requirements are so onerous (which also leads to companies doing insane things like making and patenting random molecules basically identical to cheap unpatentable chemicals just so it's worth it to force it through billions of dollars worth of trials so it can be prescribed at all). But making them less onerous would get the FDA pilloried the first time someone took a new drug and died.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance.
Not at all - he points out that in the past it was even worse. But somehow there are still some people in something the ancients would still recognise as a kind of poverty, which is really weird considering how rich we are.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
Epistemic status total raging speculation, but I wonder if there's a significant effect of how exactly you drink (average less than 2 drinks per day, but in reality that's getting pretty drunk at 2 or 3 social events per month? A glass of wine or two with dinner with your loved ones? Or a stiff double just to get to sleep each night?) and/or of who exactly you are. Some research suggests alcohol might be beneficial for heart health but harmful to other organs systems - maybe if you're predisposed to heart problems you're better off drinking a little, but not otherwise.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
That's the whole point of being a good high-stakes risk-taker. If I challenge you to a game where you bet $6 and win $10 if you correctly guess whether I roll even on a d6, the correct high-stakes risk-taker answer is "lmao, no bet".
Some things just are pretty close, odds-wise.
rolfmoo
10mo ago
The key is that it's cancel culture. It's not a specific definable process, it's just the general cultural trend, suddenly much more prevalent, where if someone says something naughty it's appropriate not only to take it personally, not only to tell everyone how upset you are, but to try to visit consequences on them for it. There's no precise definition, it's just a vibe shift.
rolfmoo
9mo ago
But even nuclear disasters aren't that bad. Chernobyl killed a number of people somewhere in the double digits - easily within the bounds of disasters people consider perfectly tolerable for other things.
Nuclear power is the victim of bad vibes, not of anything so legible as its downside risks being localized rather than diffuse. Those bad vibes lead to insanity like the Linear No Threshold model of radiation injury that get you the "thousands dead" headlines - even though that model is, frankly, utter bollocks.
The human, because we have weapons and advanced societies to coordinate effort and now have to make an actual effort not to incidentally kill all the gorillas.
A theoretical straight-up fight for dominance is a weird fake aberration; society with all its nuance is the state of Nature.
For similar reasons, weaker, smarter, more socially adept humans are fitter. That's why humans evolved to be so much weaker than other apes in the first place.
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