By analogy, there’s some loose link to be made between this and the Dark Forest Hypothesis.
Given that the internet is filled with explicitly predatory algorithms and deceptive ‘dark patterns’ both trying to attract attention, thereby extract personal data or cash from humans, letting them know you are a human is merely to invite attack.
There may be advanced civilisations hidden online, but we are not them.
Like, resources and energy are fairly abundant in the universe. There's really nothing of material value that we have here in Sol that other species wouldn't be able to get closer to their own systems. So, scarcity isn't a big factor, I think.
Instead, the more scarce thing in the universe is life, with intelligent life presumably more scarce than that. We, ourselves, are the valuable things.
But Dark Forest theory isn't totally an economics argument, it's more of a security argument. With the vast distances and times, other species could become dangerous quickly, so kill them before they are. Again, the vastness and long time scales are just too loose of a thread. Even in the books, humans manage to seep out and hide among the dust and planets, doing things in the dark or in the blinding radiation of stars. So, I don't buy the security argument either. There's just too much space and material out there to really ever be sure that you could ever really sterilize the other species and not have them come back to haunt you. Especially by the time you actually figured out they existed, they'd be everywhere. (The books invent this dimension collapsing weapon idea as a way around this).
So, I think we should have the counterpoint to the Dark Forest theory of hunters with flash lights in a dark forest.
We should have "Used Car Salesman / Lemon Law" theory: Since you can't really beat them 100%, intelligences realize that you should join them; but on favorable terms, of course. So, beware of alien civilizations that appear in your system with lots of flags and balloons and bad ties and big smiles and want you to sign on a dotted line, fast. You can't really know if they are trying to sell you a lemon before the other civilizations show up and negotiations can really start.
Hmmm, I'm not so sure. If bots are perfectly mimicking humans then instead of a dark forest, it's more like a forest with a noisemaker fitted to each tree.
Founders of funded startups (<100) who feel like their teams are stuck and the right stuff isn't being done.
They pay thousands per employee on saas tools + remote office reimbursements + give iphones and cell plans to their employees. What flowy offers is (hopefully) priceless to them; that is, if the promise is fulfilled. They want to try it for a few teams for a couple months, and go from there.
Indeed, a dimwitted article. The author seems keen to uncover ‘racist tropes’ and so on: ‘Challenging the notion of history’ appears to be the preferred route.
The contemptuous phrase ‘lifestyle business’ is just VCs saying the quiet part out loud. You want to run a company that feeds your family and provides some decent stable jobs, indefinitely? You must be a clown, they think.
The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you build your business successfully?
I think maybe it's the case that the VC's biggest competition for top talent and good ideas are from the innovators that they hope to invest in.
If they encourage a thousand lifestyle business bloom, one might turn into a boot-strapped "unicorn" that didn't take their money, so it's in their own interest to make lifestyle businesses seem like a terrible idea.
The more talented people are convinced the only way to start a business is with VC, the higher a value VCs can extract from talented people. If we actually had more socially acceptable options, more folks would have the leverage to walk away from the table and shove the VC's non-competes, non-disclosures, preferred shares and meddling board seats in their face.
Lately I’ve been a bit depressed by startups I respect going down, most of all post.news which was a refined product developed in one and a half years by a moderate-sized team and funded by Scott Galloway and Andreessen Horowitz. The official statement was that it was not growing fast enough to make it as a consumer product:
Though I think there could be more to it than that: (1) the full development of that site would have required cooperation from the news industry that isn’t easy to get and (2) I don’t think they got the word out well because despite star-studded founders and investors and my being interested in that sort of thing (to the extent of doing market research and product analysis for that kind of thing) I never heard about it until the last week…. And that’s for a business much more interesting and innovative that the comparable Threads or Bluesky.
From the outside though it seems like 1.5 years is not a lot of time to exhaust the possibilities of growth for a site like that. (As I see it Reddit took more like 3 years for subreddits to become what we know)
On the other hand there are the zombie unicorns.
I have been watching Temu: I saw the ads, I bought what could be most of my halloween costume this year and two rolls of fox stickers (not sure if that was a mistake or a dark pattern) and a dragon figurine. Almost everything was smaller than I expected and afterwards I got a huge volume of irrelevant but seemingly personalized emails. I think they’re a paper tiger: I can be impressed by their advertising spend but they don’t seem like masters of marketing and algorithms to me.
The of course there is Uber and the other ride hailing and food delivery services. Uber has spent over $25 billion on giving subsidized taxi rides and there is no end in sight. Even at American prices, $25 billion could have built a lot of subway or light rail but Uber won’t leave such a legacy. Or if it does it will be breaking the economics of both chain and independent restaurants who have reshaped their businesses around a delivery business for which the economics doesn’t really work.
The strength of VC is it can make it bets like Temu and Uber but that can be very much a finger trap.
I think of the $15 billion sale of WhatsApp to Facebook.
On one hand that seems like a great outcome to founders and VCs, but from the viewpoint of Facebook it is like extortion. I suspect Facebook uses every kind of influence it has to suppress the next WhatsApp because they don’t want to be doing that every two years or so, particularly when prices for things like that go up over time and not down.
This makes me think of monkeys cheerfully building their own cage.
Sorry, but I can’t just ‘cool-project-bro’ this one. Does nobody else have the faintest misgivings about where we’re at right now: human surveillance as just scratching a technical itch?
Apologies if this comes over all grumpy, but wow. Seriously.
Shein is basically a polyester company, as well as an even more egregious design thief. This makes them faster than the rest, as well as environmentally and socially undesirable.
That's a pretty low bar to call something click bait. It's not click bait just because you disagree with the content. Edit: and I think the title matched the content fairly ok?
The title is "The Worst Outcome is a Mediocre Success" and that's what this is about. How is this deceptive? The "substance" part might be debatable. I personally don't think every post has to go in-depth on everything. I enjoyed his nugget of insight.
It's deceptive because the title is being used in a way that you would not guess without reading the article and suggests highly that it is referring to something completely different. "Mediocre success" is not a synonym for "ambiguous result" and in context most would assume it is referring to financial success.
As someone who went through the startup grind, I think the entire message is in the title and its spot on.
Did you read the article? Running experiments means you need to have a null hypothesis - and in a sales conversion experiment, for example, the null should be calibrated to ensure your conversions are scalable wins and not just one-offs.
Here’s hoping. Autism is pure hell for some families. Unless of course self-declared leaders of the ‘neurodivergent community’ declare such efforts to be genocidal, modern eugenics, and so on.
Relatedly, I was struck to see the recent breakthrough in curing congenital deafness condemned by members of the ‘deaf community’ on Twitter. So we unfortunately have good reason to expect the same kinds of folly here.
I've seen the same protests among certain deaf communities and it baffles me that someone would oppose a cure to what is obviously a medical condition.
In the same vein, I wouldn't oppose a cure for autism, despite my own diagnosis. Why go through the pain and suffering that comes with autism in a world of non-autists? I've seen more than enough of the lives of people with non-high functioning autism to realise the absolute living hell a cure like this could prevent.
I'm wary of the "cures" people have tried, most of them based on fake psychology or pseudoscience, but I have no reason to expect the authors of this paper to be in it to show how their kid is "normal", like most people looking for "cures" seem to be. I expect this article to be quoted many times in the terrible Facebook groups that will also recommend things like bleach enemas to desperate parents, but I also expect good developments from the real scientists trying to understand and perhaps cure (the worst cases of) autism.
> it baffles me that someone would oppose a cure to what is obviously a medical condition
Ultimately, not everybody seeks to be "normal", and there is plenty of reason to fear the imposition of normalness when simply being functional would have done just fine.
When you are close to the norm, it’s much easier to ignore your differences. When you are farther away, you have to decide what to do: deny them, accept them, mask them, amplify them.
Remember, the article is talking about people with profound disability, not people who can comment in forums. I think it would be fantastic _if_ there's a set of markers in a young infant that can be acted on preventing non-verbal, constantly in terror, withdrawn inmates of special hospitals. I don't think they're talking about my dislike of telephones, or fear of shopping centers, or frequent confusion with figurative versus literal language.
Even though the last thing has got me in fights more than once. Fights that are sudden, surprising and unwarranted to me, but completely expected given how I reacted to what someone said.
Mmm, that sounds rather uncharitable. While obviously Deaf people aren't a hivemind, I think people who are not Deaf (and fully-abled people in particular) should listen when they each speak for themselves instead of coming to broad conclusions of "folly".
For me it began to click due to somewhat similar discussions I've had about my sight (I'm moderately myopic in both eyes and significantly astigmatic in one), where I've explained that:
- yes I actually like wearing glasses, and am not interested in contact lenses at all
- yes I also like my uncorrected vision: I like the softness and the smoothing over of details, and the way that lights scatter, and the fact that I can focus on things that are right in front of my nose
- no it isn't anxiety that's stopping me from getting the likes of LASIK; I actually like having both corrected and uncorrected vision
And it is astonishing how much people who are caught up in their own complexes about vision deficiencies try to convince me that I'm stupid or even lying because I don't share their aversion. It was rather off-putting, to be honest.
So yeah, that was how I began to see how people whose condition (for lack of a better term) is much more strongly linked to their identity[0] would end up with their hackles permanently raised against the idea of a cure for a life experience that they find neutral and/or positive coupled with the prevailing sentiment that they must be so grateful and excited about its existence (and if they aren't then they must be stupid or crazy). Theoretically it's good that the capability exists because it gives the choice to those who do want it, but when a person is part of a group without much societal power to begin with, I don't think it's irrational to fear that it would eventually end up as an imposition rather than a choice (especially when we get obstetric treatment).
0. For example, sign languages are distinct linguistic phenomena and not simply a cipher for spoken language. And wherever there is distinct language, a distinct culture soon follows. This is why "Deaf community" and "Deaf culture" are real things in real life not just something that someone on Twitter made up, contrary to many abled people's assumptions.
I'm not trying to convince you that you should get LASIK if you don't want to, that's your prerogative, however:
- Anyone can wear glasses (or even contacts) for fashion, frames are sold without prescriptions. One can have glasses and perfect vision.
- People with 20/20 vision also have the option to wear glasses that make their vision worse for whatever reason, or see things closer to their nose.
The point of this comment wasn't to belittle your own choice to correct your vision or not, but to point out why someone might not understand your aversion to correcting it given those reasons.
I'm sorry, if I'm reading you correctly you think that I should...pay for eye surgery, go through the recovery period and then...continue to use vision correcting glasses, albeit with a different prescription (one that simulates myopia and astigmatism)?
And this supposedly makes so much sense to you that you cannot understand why someone would not do that?
My first sentence literally says I'm not trying to convince you, and the reasons you gave in your previous comment for not doing so are different than the ones you're giving now.
The history of Autistic Psychopathy/Aspergers specifically, which has a direct throughline to the modern concept of autism, is inexorably tied to the history of Austrian and later Nazi eugenics. Sterilisation was supported especially more by Nazi hardliners, although catholics tended to support voluntary abstinence. Involuntary euthanasia was practiced, not openly, against the autistics deemed to be life unworthy of life - of no use to the Volk - who lacked gemüt (Soul, spirit, etc). Those deemed at one time redeemable, but ruined by their parents were also purged. Those deemed more useful, brilliant, geniuses in the sciences, with good Nazi parents, but with lacking gemüt due to their hyper-masculine nature, were to be rehabilitated and treated with patience and understanding, but even there reproduction was to be AT LEAST discouraged. The ideal Nazi autistic was either dead, or like a worker bee, sterile and working tirelessly for the good of National Socialism and the breeding stock Aryans. One of the goals the child welfare system had was identifying which category each child fell into as young as possible, so as to treat them accordingly with haste.
We also have the western eugenics movements, and while autism wasn't really conceived in their heyday, they had much more of a family-centric take on eugenics, although it was still at the time largely oriented around the good of the welfare state.
For the autistic activist, nothing makes more sense than to stymie such research, as autism's diagnostic prevalence expands each year, seemingly driven largely by a loosening definition of autism, so to delay the research which enables eugenics, people are going to see Autistics as having relatively high gemüt and productivity compared to the past, which should discourage eugenics. They plainly value the right/value of the existence of autistics/themselves, above the potential reduction of suffering allowed by such research. Eugenics after all never actually died and remain popular, it's just become politically incorrect to openly admit to supporting or doing it, and we're currently engaging in a quite successful eugenics campaign against downs syndrome[1], oh, and the ongoing eugenics against autistics [2]. Perhaps these autistic activists would have more confidence in such research if modern eugenics were not legal, accepted, and practiced against them? Or perhaps they should just get over their own egos and admit that this research is for the good of the Volk, which is certainly a take I've heard from autistics themselves.
That all being said - metabolic research is probably going to be less controversial than say genetic research, since it's unclear that you can use the former to facilitate selective abortions or screen sperm donors. So I think in this case, the self-declared neurodivergent leaders will let this slide, as if such research can't be used for eugenics but makes autistics more popular it should make eugenics less likely, not more likely.
Taste is absolutely linked with temperature. Cold vs hot coffee for example. Don’t know exactly why. Most things tend to taste “more” when hot. Could be the intensity of molecular activity, which is what temperature is, that varies and so registers more or less strongly with our taste preceptors
I'd guess much of this difference is also due to the fats in the cheese & meats solidifying at cold temperatures, and thus less readily coating taste receptors.
1) We actually can sense "coldness" or "hotness" as separate tastes. Think about mint candies or pepper for example.
2) Our receptors have different sensitivity based on the temperature. For example cold sweet drink feels much less sweet. That's why warm cola is disgustingly sweet for example.
And water does contain a lot of dissolved salts which have a taste.
3) More than half of the taste we feel is actually coming from the smell, and warm water contains more vapour, and therefore, more smell.
So our brain takes all these inputs from different sources and synthesises the feeling of taste in our brain.
Given that the internet is filled with explicitly predatory algorithms and deceptive ‘dark patterns’ both trying to attract attention, thereby extract personal data or cash from humans, letting them know you are a human is merely to invite attack.
There may be advanced civilisations hidden online, but we are not them.
Discuss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
reply