7 ms·
On Being the Right Size (1926) [pdf]
- andrewl 3y agoThis is by the fascinating J.B.S. Haldane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane The essay title is also the title of an anthology of his essays which you can still sometimes find in bookstores. One of his famous quotes is “Not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”
- ggm 3y agoHe wrote very sweet, innocent children's fiction "My friend Mr Leakey" which is about a rational scientist who lives next door to a wizard. Haldane did amazing work on decompression and other things, using himself as a test subject in quite dangerous experiments. His family was interesting, quite apart from himself. His sister Naomi is a well known Scots Author under her married Name Naomi Mitchison.
- sdeer 3y agoI think the work on decompression was done by his father? His father did experiment on both himself and his son. His uncle was the Liberal Party politician Richard Haldane who was the secretary of war for UK just before WWI and carried out some reforms which were pretty important in setting how the British army fought in the early part of the great war.
- ggm 3y agoJ.B.S. by Ronald Clark is a good biography.
- abecedarius 3y agohttps://jbshaldane.org/index.html https://jbshaldane.org/index.html was pretty interesting too.
- eru 3y agoAt the end, the author gets slightly political, when talking about the size of human institutions. People interested in that kind of speculation might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
- arisbe__ 3y agoI hope in the future the notion of scale (or just more concrete conceptual frameworks in economics and politics) will be made more known in the popular consciousness. I find Taleb to be onto some interesting writing here: PRINCIPIA POLITICA Politics & Ethics under Scaling and Uncertainty. see https://www.taesch.com/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/lib/request/request.dl.php?api_user_id=4825977&dlkey=YQVGK25I&content_type=application/pdf https://www.taesch.com/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/lib/reque...
- WWWWH 3y agoThe author was an interesting character (and a very prominent scientist--some of his work on enzymes is still taught to undergraduates) and a committed communist. Many of his essays were first written for the a newspaper. I think it was the Daily Star.
- eru 3y agoThat's very interesting! I would have read that ending of the article as a dig against communism. But perhaps the other had a more interesting point in mind.
- earthboundkid 3y ago> At the end, the author gets slightly political Lol, that's the whole point of the piece! The whole rest of it is just a set dressing to sell you on his political theory. It's political from beginning to end, but you just don't know where he's going with it for most of the piece.
- jhbadger 3y agoNo, it really isn't, any more than Darwin's Origin of Species is primarily about the evolution of humanity (Darwin later wrote an entire book on that later). It's just that most non-biologists don't care that much about the parts where Darwin or Haldane were talking about animals and their evolution or optimal size and just fixate on the parts dealing with humanity.
- walterbell 3y agoFour stages of acceptance [of a scientific theory]: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. this is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.
- ftxbro 3y agostages of llm skepticism 1. llm are stochastic parrots and blurry jpegs they can never be good at language because it would need a world model and symbolic understanding 2. so what if llm are good at language they were trained on it lol. they can never be good at human creativity and emotions 3. it's bad that llm are so good at human creativity and emotions. it makes them hallucinate too much 4. ai is obviously better than humans at every cognitive capability which makes them dangerous and untrustworthy. i was always against ai
- quickthrower2 3y agoIs there any species with as much adult size variation as dogs (probably about 100x by mass from smallest to largest)?
- alberto_ol 3y agoThe differences between dogs is due to selective breeding not to natuaral selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding
- ghaff 3y agoWhile true it probably means the answer to the posed question is no—but there’s a reason for that.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoIt really means the answer is yes to a rare number. We are able to have a dog like a chihuahua because we choose to maintain these diminutive trait inducing mutations that are already there for us to select upon in the population. There probably are elephants being birthed that are 1/100th the normal weight but they probably are nonviable and we therefore don’t see them marching in adulthood.
- eru 3y agoSome ants probably do something like selective breeding to their mushroom colonies.
- eru 3y agoAre you talking about any species at all, or only about animals? Fungi and even plants can easily span that kind of size range. Some animal species with extreme sexual dimorphism also count. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish > Some anglerfish are notable for extreme sexual dimorphism and sexual symbiosis of the small male with the much larger female, seen in the suborder Ceratioidei, the deep sea anglerfish. In these species, males may be several orders of magnitude smaller than females.[4]
- j7ake 3y agoThe clarity and authority in his writing is remarkable. His writing is in contrast to todays blog post style writing. Today it is a catchy intro graphic, a low-information intro paragraph, a barely relevant graphic separates every two paragraphs, a gigantic quote in bold letters separates every four paragraphs, and the entire essay can be digested by rapidly scrolling down website without reading any content.
- HenryBemis 3y agoI came in JUST to comment on the writing. I usually 'autodownload' PDFs posted in HN, and (almost immediately) read the first paragraph. And WOW what writing was this (unlike mine just now). I am looking forward to read this, and it's a pitty it's only 8 pages long.
- walterbell 3y agoSome of his other writing is available: https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/
- benbreen 3y agoAgreed, the style is strikingly crisp and witty in a way I associate with early twentieth century English writers, especially around Oxford/Cambridge (Isaiah Berlin, C. S. Lewis). The title is notably good too. I love how Haldane writes.
- arcanemachiner 3y agoSome also have meme images every page or so. Blegh.
- earthboundkid 3y agoIt's very well written, but also it's bullshit. The basic argument is "I, a biologist, know a lot about how animals need to be different sizes, therefore I also know about whether socialism or democracy or whatever is a good idea now." When you write it out like that, it's very clearly a bullshit argument that relies on appeal to authority, but because the essay is well written, it just comes across as logical and commonsense when you read it.
- jomic 3y agoI can only recommend "Scale" by Geoffrey West who covers this and equally interesting scaling laws in nature to great detail: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31670196 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31670196
- dredmorbius 3y agoA strong second to that.
- froh 3y agofour and a half pages of build up to come to this: > And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers. > To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business 5 concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge I love it
- rexpop 3y agoThis is confusing because Ford was a fascist autocrat.
- michael1999 3y agoPerhaps Haldane was making an analogy between fascist autocrats and the commissars that run a Leninist society.
- rexpop 3y agoAh, of course. I always feel a bit stupid when I read assertions like "Henry Ford could run a socialistic enterprise" as though that weren't a contradiction in terms. The man was violently anti-worker. He publicly opposed the New Deal as a “socialist scheme” and refused to cooperate with its programs, eg the Social Security Act. He hired thugs and spies to prevent unionization and in 1937, at his “Battle of the Overpass”, Ford service members beat UAW officials and union supporters who were trying to distribute flyers at the plant. Hardly a "socialistic" undertaking. His Americanism, was based on individualism, nationalism, nativism, and Protestantism, precepts anathema, certainly, to the "internationalism" prevalent among his socialist contemporaries. All in all, I highly doubt the guy could tie his shoes in a socialistic fashion, let alone "run" a commune.