The actual story isn’t that great but I was fascinated by this graph. The curvy line goes down to species like bottlenose dolphins that are alert 24 hours a day, with only one brain hemisphere asleep at a time.
Hours of sleep per day by species
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Who Were The Boskops And Were They Really Smarter Than Us?
[EDIT – okay, seems like this is probably nonsense. See the link at the end]
Prehistoric Eloi! Pretty speculative though. Via C.
The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.
The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.
Who Were The Boskops And Were They Really Smarter Than Us?
Buuuuuut see also this critique:
A Shoutdown at Stanford – Persuasion
Persuasion talks about events at Stanford earlier this month, when a speech by a federal appeals judge was heckled to a stop by angry students: A Shoutdown at Stanford – Persuasion
I share it here because the dean of the Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, wrote a spectacularly good response to the incident. It’s an excellent read, and I found the following moving:
There is temptation to a system in which people holding views perceived by some as harmful or offensive are not allowed to speak, to avoid giving legitimacy to their views or upsetting members of the community, but history teaches us that this is a temptation to be avoided. I can think of no circumstance in which giving those in authority the right to decide what is and is not acceptable content for speech has ended well. Indeed, the power to suppress speech is often very quickly directed towards suppressing the views of marginalized groups. We see this today, both around the United States and around the globe. And at key moments in history, robust protection for the rights of association and speech has been critical to the advance of social movements for historically marginalized groups…Thus, I believe that strong protection for freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that ultimately supports diversity, equity, and inclusion and that we must do everything in our power to ensure that it endures.
(emphasis mine)
Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahuatl word that translates to “those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors.” They are the ones who have mastered the dark energies at work in the Other World. They are the ones who allow us all to See.
In the olden days the Aztecs would conduct ceremonies in which they looked into their round obsidian mirrors for glimpses of the Other World. Today we all carry an obsidian mirror in our pockets, although in the current fashion they have rectangular shapes. There is no need for ceremony. The mobile engineers have tamed the magic. With a few swipes of the fingers — remnants of an old, complicated ritual dance — you can inquire about the intentions of the sun and rain deities, or you can cast a spell to freeze an image into eternity, or you can establish an immediate link, through the Other World, to any other obsidian mirror on Earth.
How do they do it? They have books upon books of complicated formulae, and they spend countless hours weaving them into spells. Occasionally a talented magician is able to create a useful spell by themselves, but it’s more common for large guilds of them to form and toil together, for months or years, on the making of a single complex spell.
Once the spell is done, it is packaged into an “app” — from the Nahuatl word apazyahualtontli, meaning small container — and made available to whichever Onlookers want it.
Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
The Era of Planetary Defense Has Begun
A very happy point 🙂
In Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler and I use asteroid defense as an example of a public good (see video below). As of the 5th edition, this public good wasn’t being provided by either markets or governments. But thanks to NASA, the era of planetary defense has begun. In September of 2022 NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. A new set of five papers in Nature has now demonstrated that not only did NASA hit its target, the mission was a success in diverting the asteroid.
In Defense of Chatbot Romance
People can love many kinds of people and things. People can love their romantic partners, but also their friends, children, pets, imaginary companions, places they grew up in, and so on. In the future we might see chatbot companions as just another entity who we can love and who can support us. We’ll see them not as competitors to human romance, but as filling a genuinely different and complementary niche.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/in-defense-of-chatbot-romance
A harsh critique of the Big Five / OCEAN
I’d love to hear a well-supported counter-argument.
If the Big Five are not universal, stable, or orthogonal, what good are they? They have a perfectly clear use. They replicate: the answers to many other survey instruments can be found to correlate with the Big Five survey responses, in multiple samples of survey-takers. To complain that the Big Five are meaningless is somewhat unscientific. They have a very specific meaning within the language game they belong to, and they are popular and memetically successful tools within that sphere.
The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from falsification. They make no predictions; there is no underlying causal model. As I understand it, no study could be devised to prove that the Big Five aren’t real, because they make no formal pretense to reality. They are innocent mathematical constructs that fall out of particular survey instruments administered to particular populations.
https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishment-of-the-big-five/#more-732
Legendary Human-Eating Bird Was Real, Probably Could Have Eaten People || Smithsonian Magazine
There are a lot of myths about dangerous mythical creatures, from sirens to the Kraken to the hydra, some of which preyed upon humans. In Maori legend, Te Hokioi was a giant black-and-white bird, with a red crest and huge beak. And just like the Kraken was probably based on a real creature—the giant squid—Te Hokioi was probably a real bird.
That bird would be a Haast eagle, extinct for just 500 years, according to a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The Reason Why 2,000-Year-Old Roman Concrete is Still so Strong | Discover Magazine
Income inequality has been falling for a while now
Interesting. Yglesias obviously has his own political bias, but tends to be careful about facts in my experience.
The Obama administration’s policymaking is not beyond criticism, but I do think the facts laid out in this report offer a considerably different context for assessing the administration’s economic track record. The left has often portrayed Trump’s win as, on some level, a punishment for the failures of neoliberalism with its endless inequality and stagnant wages. And a lot of elite-level thinking in progressive circles during the Trump years was driven by a determination to avoid the mistakes of Obamaism rather than to try to replicate its successes. It’s easy to forget now that he’s president, but Joe Biden received almost shockingly little elite support for a former vice president until very late in the cycle — he was seen as offering Obamaism 2.0 and was deemed unacceptable by people who saw Obama as a failure.
But if you understand the Obama record as successfully altering the inequality trajectory and bringing median income to an all-time high, that casts his other achievements (lower greenhouse gas emissions, marriage equality, etc.) in a different context and makes the idea of “let’s beat Trump and keep on keeping on” look more plausible.