There will always be things humans can do that AI cannot. And if there ever comes a point when that's not the case, there will be no need to distinguish the two.
I'm leaning towards there being no causation between skin microbiome and wrinkles.
Did anyone in the study have botox? Crow's feet wrinkles are generally caused by two things: UV damage, and movement of facial muscles breaking down collagen. Which naturally tend to increase with age. So that's where I'd wager the causation is.
If a person uses factor 50 every day on their face and gets biyearly botox injections on their crow's feet area, they'll likely have no prominent wrinkles but they will still be old and with a greater skin microbiome.
The previous controversies have been stuff that it's pretty easy to not care about. This time, it's actually affecting a fair number of people. We'll have to see if this time is different.
Previous controversies include the subreddit dedicated to jailbait and on multiple occasions protecting abusers and pedophiles.
While you might be right, super fucked up if their users care more about third party apps being killed than their long past acceptance of child exploitation.
Most Reddit alternatives were founded on the basis of defending "free speech" in direct reaction to Reddit banning places like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/The_Donald. Their userbase predictably filled up quickly with shameless bigots and generated correspondingly bigoted content.
I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.
Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.
This. The main issue is there doesn't seem to be a natural alternative like reddit was to digg (since, as you say, the ones that have popped up so far are often quickly filled with people toxic enough to get banned from reddit). So I think any transition will be a lot messier.
You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.
Using the terminology of children turning out slightly "better" in cities in the context of height is slightly distasteful, even though it is societally quite prevalent. Height is an arbitrary physical trait, much like race. Who cares who turns out taller? Discounting malnutrition, there are no health benefits to being taller. There are of course social advantages, but the same can be said for race too. When will we begin addressing heightism in the same respect as other obviously unimportant phenotypic differences?
Malnutrition is the thing to worry about. Or perhaps toxins. We know that people don't grow to their full possible genetic height due to such things, and it seems natural to wonder if there are any other unrealized effects when they fail to reach their full possible height.
Well on one hand, shorter people tend to live longer, and tend to have better health in old age. Additionally, people who eat less also tend to live longer and healthier lives. There might be a tradeoff when it comes to our height and health, like what's proposed by the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis.
Why does it matter if they reach their full possible height, barring health complications? At least 80% of height is genetic so creating a value system based upon something that has no bearing on a person's qualities, aesthetic or psychological, is of no importance. Always substitute race for height and see how the line of argument sounds. The only difference is that one trait is generally culturally acceptable to disparage while the other is not.
> does it matter if they reach their full possible height
What you’re asking is the implied question. Is the shift due to changing demographics? Or is it evidence of malnutrition, that city kids are not reaching their genetic optima?
At a population level, ceteris paribus and longitudinally, height is a health indicator. Individually or comparatively it’s useless.
It’s these reductionist arguments that lose the forest for the trees.
If we see a clear health disparity between two groups who should otherwise have equal outcomes, then it implies there’s possibly something in the environment of one group that’s negatively effecting them. And therefore could possibly have other side effects we’re not privy too.
You say height is of no importance, but a majority of women[0][1] would disagree, and men below average height would also disagree. Perhaps our evolutionary signals point to something other than “a social construct” for choosing height in mates. Wild thought.
1 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-dating-investing-match-t... (quote of note: “A former Bumble product manager says that a majority of women on the platform tend to set a floor of 6 feet for men, which would limit their candidate pool to about 15% of the population.“)
The majority of women, especially before we began to actually combat racism, would also agree that being white is preferable, as would black men who were subjected to the results of living in a racist society. We currently live in a heightist society so naturally being taller is perceived as better. The crux of the issues is that it shouldn't be considered better. It's a totally inconsequential trait.
> The crux of the issues is that it shouldn't be considered better. It's a totally inconsequential trait.
They physical advantages of height are very apparent and simple to understand. Even animals recognize the larger you are the safer you are (generally). How is that inconsequential?
Confused how one can come to that conclusion. If violence is not a trait in a modern society, how big people are should be of no consequence. Back in times of the caveman this was an extremely important trait because violence was an aspect of daily life that had real utility. Now, people can go their entire lives never having been in a fight.
In fact I would argue having an arms race for ever bigger humans is antisocial and detrimental... just the carbon footprint aspects alone is a good reason to discourage that. The extra stress on our food system. Bigger cars, airplanes, fuel, etc... as opposed to women dig it and you can beat people up. Really?
I'm not implying anything about the biological racial differences between humans. When I say racism, I'm talking about people of colour who experience prejudice based on the colour of their skin which is indisputable.
It's an indicator for overall health, and more specifically for health during childhood. When indicators for health go down it's important to study them. A child who is taller is not necessarily better than one who is shorter, but a child who didn't catch a serious growth-stunting disease is definitely better off than if they had, assuming the disease had other effects.
Back when polio was common you could tell what areas had been hit the hardest and in which year by looking at average height in school photos. My grandfather had oddly short legs but a long torso because of a very mild bout of polio as a child. This is important not because he was shorter than he might have been, but because more serious cases of polio can cause paralysis, permanently malformed legs, and death. Height in this case is a proxy for worse things.
Height discrimination may actually be due to its usefulness as a proxy for genetic damage and disease load during mate selection. The same thing that causes people to unfairly discriminate makes it useful for studying population changes.
You misread the headline. People outside cities are taller.
Also, taller people are healthier (admittedly only indirectly because of their height). It’s not just a comment on health. Height is a social advantage.
That being said, the article is a gross oversimplification. The top comment accurately points out a lack of control for even ethnicity (which would completely explain the difference in height in the US).
My point doesn't relate to whether rural or urban children become taller. Height is largely genetic, and discounting malnutrition it has no bearing on a person's health. Shorter people actually live longer on average.
Social advantages based on arbitrary phenotypic traits should not be encouraged. White people generally have social advantages given the fact that racism exists.
> Height is largely genetic, and discounting malnutrition it has no bearing on a person's health.
But nutrition is what's being measured here. People from poorer countries are on-average shorter, and that is largely driven by diet, although childhood illness is also a factor.
The issue isn't height really, it's that people are having their growth stunted. They did not reach the height they would have if they'd gotten better food, better sanitation, etc.
That's a good corroboration of my point that height being a positive characteristic is largely cultural/societal and of no true importance as it relates to a person's worth.
Fair enough, I was mostly responding to you shoehorning the white thing in there, again, being white in China/Japan isn't a social advantage, because of racism. So we can just table it at "racism" exists and is bad and should be actively discouraged, how about that?
To me, that's even further evidence that both race and height are totally inconsequential. That fact that these things can bestow social advantages is no reason to view either of them in a positive light.
Racism is certainly bad and should be discouraged. Somewhat controversially, apparently, so should heightism.
How is that valuable in a modern society that outlaws violence of that nature?
Or it is simply that you can physically intimidate people to get an upper hand in situations where such an upper-hand shouldn't be given... just because. How noble. What a useful and admirable trait to encourage.
I do not make the rules, but I do have to play by them. Even in the most “modern” societies, ask women how often they have felt their relative physical weakness used against them.
Because laws don’t do you much good when there is nobody around to enforce them. Relying on others to ensure your own life is fine, but being able to defend oneself has obvious advantages.
Even if no one is around, if you are assaulted, you can file a report and the assailant can go to jail - because by definition, they are now a criminal.
There is that deterrent in place, that social constract. Sure it can be violated, but your argument is along a similar line of folks who advocate for open carry.
Highly context-dependant. You don't see too many dwarf NBA stars, for example. "The fight does not always go to the strong, nor the race to the swift. But that is the way to bet."
I think we can ignore the outlier of basketball players playing at the highest level. We could also point to CEO's of Fortune 500 companies and their races but that shouldn't lead us to make judgements about which phenotype is better.
Again, substitute the "socially beneficial" arbitrary trait of height for race and ask yourself if that sounds acceptable. Should people opt for white children simply because racism exists? Should people opt for tall children because heightism exists? How do you make the distinction in your own mind?
Sure, some forms of intelligence or other personal qualities could be opted for when choosing a mate. Should inconsequential physical traits such as race and height? You tell me. Or at least explain the distinction between the two as you see it.
I cannot agree with your premise of those physical traits being inconsequential.
For example, there is lots of construction and heavy equipment type work that require strong wrists and forearms, and if you are not born with them, then you are not going to be able to do those jobs.
Even race (or whatever classification of tribal affiliation you want) is consequential. Some people have very curly hair (for example black peoples), and it takes a lot more work to maintain. Some races have higher risk of heart disease/cholesterol problems. Some people’s skin is so lacking in melanin that they get sunburn on a cloudy day.
The premise isn't exactly that people shouldn't select for traits that they desire, rather that it is irresponsible for journalism and other forms of media to make allusions to height being a positive trait.
If people want to make judgements about a person's worth based on their racist or heightist tendencies that's their prerogative, but we have seen with racism that negatively portraying people of colour only serves to propagate negative stereotype beyond that which is "innate". It is clearly equivalent for height, given the many examples people provide of height not providing societal advantages in certain other cultures. It's by and large a cultural phenomenon, not biological.
Is it really that preposterous to expect the media not to mischaracterise people born with an arbitrary genetic trait as lesser individuals?
Re the AppleCare+ point. If you are unlikely to break a screen more frequently than every 2 years on average, it's more economical to just not get the service. This is ignoring other benefits the AppleCare+ may provide.
It's hard to neatly elucidate, but what I find really strange for this ostensibly highfalutin mass-market enlightening text about the essence of humanity, is that it's been written by someone who absolutely hates the human race, and that comes across quite clearly if you read between the lines. Avoid it. There's better books and you already likely know much of the content.
My solution was to generate random sentences in my head. I then iterate through the letters of each sentence, and if the letter is M or later in the alphabet, I select right. If the letter is before M in the alphabet I select left.
According to English letter frequencies [1] that gives a right probability of
3.0129+6.6544+7.1635+3.1671+0.1962+7.5809+5.7351+6.9509+3.6308+1.0074+1.2899+0.2902+1.7779+0.2722
= 48.7294 %
even though you summed 14 of the 26 letters (a 13-13 split would lower the probability to 45.7165%).
I wonder if the patterns of letters in English language usage would still yield predictable patterns of left-and-right. Like naively 'the' is more common than 'zzz', so right-left-left may be more common than right-right-right.
That's likely to introduce bias because the probability of the two halves aren't equal... My initial instinct would be that the latter half would be less likely (since it has Q, X, Z), but maybe not - as a rule of thumb the most common letters are ETAOIN SHURDL - so 6 from the second half, and 6 from the first.
I mentally labeled my pulse as left... right... left... right... and whenever I blinked I took that direction. The tricky part is not thinking about what should be next. It's also a slow way to play, but I was winning until I clicked randomize!
This was a nice way to generate random numbers fast! My go-to method is the second hand on the clock, but that's of course highly autocorrelated if you need numbers quickly.
I don't think it does. Being an atheist, you display your fine intellect for all other readers to see. 2b is a logical outcome for me, and if you think sth is wrong with it, you are implying that an atheist reads scientific works that he does not understand! ...
that explains the fairy tales called big Bang, Natural Selection, and other assorted amusements.
If you atheists were indeed smart you would not have felt so hurt and downvote my original comment. Also, IQ tests are rubbish (and you didn't know that--which shows your intelligence level).
Among us, we look down on any work that is written by an atheist. It is the ultimate mark of low intelligence.
it is the WE that does not care for the works of an atheist because of the fundamental intelligence flaw. If YOU do, then by all means, sate your thirst for second-rate knowledge. I'd rather stand with the likes of Descartes and Leibnitz, minds vastly greater than any modern atheist's.
anyone who does not have and practice a standard code of morality does not earn my respect, and should not feel hurt if I don't read their books... I am free in my choice as are atheists. I simply said I don't read their books because they are not clever. They are welcome to say to same about me.
