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Underrated reasons to be thankful V
- kragen 10mo agoYeah! Screw you, cobalt-60! And I'm sure glad I'm not two-dimensional, but maybe I could poop through my mouth like a sea anemone.
- jstanley 10mo agoPeople say that 2-dimensional life is impossible because it's impossible to make a 2-dimensional digestive system. But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way to let food pass through, and then reconnect.
- kragen 10mo agoYeah, Dynomight suggested that in the article.
- jstanley 10mo agoOops, I missed that!
- s1mplicissimus 10mo agoI think 2-dimensional life is impossible because physical things exist in all dimensions. As spacetime is already 4 dimensions, no physical thing at all exists in 2 dimensions, thus no life either
- kragen 10mo agoOh, that's just trivia about the contingent universe. You wouldn't say it was impossible for Carthage to have conquered Rome, would you? It just didn't, by chance, happen.
- schoen 10mo agoAlthough maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?
- kragen 10mo agoMaybe! In that case there would be no contingent universe, only the necessary one. You can see how this would appeal to theists like old Kurt. A buddy of his had a saying about dice...
- s1mplicissimus 10mo agoI assume the contingent universe is where my existence happens and thus a potential thankfulness should be placed on. I'm for example not gonna be thankful we're not in a higher-dimension universe, because my experience would likely be unfathomably different and things might look very different from there. As history shows, Rome did win, so I wonder just how you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was possible) Was there another universe where the first apes that would later become Carthagians found more bananas, thus had higher population and resources and won this way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this counterfactual history :D
- kragen 10mo agoIn our timeline, the Cunctator, having provoked the Second Punic War through diplomatic maneuverings in his old age, held Hannibal at bay in Italy for over a decade while weakening him, until Scipio forced Hannibal to return to Africa, where the Romans defeated him. But, in another timeline, a mosquito stung the Cunctator shortly after war broke out, giving him malaria, which was then endemic in Italy. He would have recovered if not for another piece of bad luck: clumsy from the fever, he stumbled on the way to the latrine and cracked his skull on a rock, dying instantly. The Cunctator's friend and rival Gaius Flaminius was given command of the Roman forces, who attempted direct confrontation with Hannibal's forces, suffering a series of increasingly disastrous defeats until finally Hannibal marched his elephants into Rome and put the Roman Senate to the sword. The same mosquito hatched in our timeline, but mosquitoes are not strong fliers, and the air currents were slightly different in our timeline, so it instead stung the Cunctator's slave, who got malaria but survived. Air currents are of course chaotic¹, and the divergence between the timelines has been traced to the thermal emission of a single photon from a warm rock thirteen years earlier in Karnataka, resulting in the rock being slightly cooler and producing an almost undetectably smaller thermal updraft that night. How our universe could have ended up two-dimensional is a much more difficult question. ______ ¹ https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/25/387/2018/npg-25-387-2018.pdf https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/25/387/2018/npg-25-387-2... estimates the maximum Lyapunov exponents of well-regarded atmospheric models such as PUMA in the neighborhood of 0.02, i.e., a Lyapunov time of a few months. As I understand it, that means that the 10⁻²⁰ joules of an infrared photon emission creates atmospheric disturbances of about a joule in about six years and about 10²⁰ joules in about 13 years, which is a couple of milliseconds of solar irradiance.
- jstanley 10mo agoThis one in particular stood out: > we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win. Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
- GPerson 10mo agoI found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.
- mise_en_place 10mo ago[dead]
- _sr6i 10mo agoSame. Not quite sure what it was going for.
- globalnode 10mo agoseems to be a trivia list of things the author thinks about. not sure why its even listed here.
- doormatt 10mo agoWhat specifically disturbed you?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- musicale 10mo agoRight? At least we can be thankful that there is no US holiday devoted to this sort of thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065955
- ketanmaheshwari 10mo agoEating cardamom as I read this. My go to spice to keep mouth busy and flavorful and stay away from junk food.
- facialwipe 10mo agoThis whole thing reads strange. I’m not thankful for any of the presented reasons to be thankful.
- schoen 10mo agoNot even cardamom?
- fastball 10mo agoNot thankful for democracy? Dentistry? Clean water? Peroxisomes? Sleep? Air travel safety?
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoNot even the end of slavery?
- dalanmiller 10mo agoMany days I worry that HN has lost its humanity and then something with a bit of levity and weird shows up and I am relieved.
- gnulinux 10mo agoI experience a similar sensation. I even feel it for my own self. Sometimes I go weeks, months just thinking about AI, productivity, hustling, taxes etc and then suddenly something with a bit of humanity and weird shows up and I am relieved. It's not completely lost (for now).
- thefz 10mo agoOpposite reaction, this article reads like it was written by a care bear.
- s1mplicissimus 10mo agoLots of religious over- and undertones going on, I assume that's where you get the vibe
- Aeglaecia 10mo agowould you care to explain exactly what gives you the impression of religious undertones ?
- vr46 10mo ago"Cheddar cheese and pickle. A Vincent Motor-sickle. Slap Bang Tickle" - Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
- smj-edison 10mo agoI know absurdist humor isn't for everyone, but man it cracks me up. So bravo to the strange and the weird, and that it holds this crazy place together!
- ggm 10mo ago2. This is "regression tends to the mean" which my dad used to say with a smile when we discussed his excellent degree and his offspring's (including my) average degree.
- strken 10mo agoI don't think it's regression to the mean. It looks more like mutation-selection balance. If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again. [0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad
- ggm 10mo agoBut he does say the mother is a total babe doesn't he? Well "hopefully hot"
- pavlov 10mo agoSince the blog post is addressing a person cooking up babies, we can assume the reader is the mother and the “hopefully hot” people are the fathers of the children being cooked up.
- smohare 10mo ago[dead]
- strken 10mo agoIn hindsight, this explanation was a bit sparse, so here is the actual text from TFA: > your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have This is a nearly word-for-word explanation of mutation-selection balance, e.g. check out the Wikipedia explanation: > an equilibrium in the number of deleterious alleles in a population that occurs when the rate at which deleterious alleles are created by mutation equals the rate at which deleterious alleles are eliminated by selection Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon about, well, measurements that regress to the mean. In the given quote, the average baby isn't regressing to the mean, the average baby is carrying a higher number of deleterious alleles and is less fit across the board. TFA then describes fitter babies having more babies themselves, which is irrelevant to regression to the mean but an integral part of mutation-selection balance.
- flatline 10mo ago> That sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit to reproduction, it’s a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with success. Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors! For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.
- A_D_E_P_T 10mo agoPoint #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality. I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.
- mlyle 10mo ago> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.
- A_D_E_P_T 10mo agoSeemed to me that the author was referring to regression to the mean, as another commenter noted. De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
- mlyle 10mo agoAuthor was explicitly not-- > That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit ... You're right that it's a relatively weak effect-- which is a good part of why the effects of variance and selection (incl sexual selection) win out and fitness doesn't decline with each generation.
- stevenhuang 10mo ago> 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s possible to fit very large expression graphs to data. > 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs. Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?
- kragen 10mo agoWe haven't found anything in nature that resembles reverse-mode automatic differentiation, either in evolution or in neuroscience.
- mountainreason 10mo agoWhat would that look like. Is there an implementation of the finite difference method in biology somehow?
- kragen 10mo agoI'd be surprised.
- mountainreason 10mo agoYeah thanks, me too. So I'm wondering what point 22 is getting at. How could that even be possible?
- kragen 10mo agoBiology can use discrete methods; we have discrete neurons (and other cells), discrete chemical species like ATP, discrete amino acids, discrete genes made of discrete nucleotides, etc.
- abrookewood 10mo agoHadn't thought about this one previously ... "That if you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you’re in three dimensions"
- rnewme 10mo agoWe are basically a donut.
- abrookewood 10mo agoBut WAAAY less tasty
- layer8 10mo agoI can recommend this nonfiction book on the topic: https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd
- cvoss 10mo agoAnother option is endo/exocytosis. No rule that says the path between ingress and egress has to be open all at once.
- elzbardico 10mo agoReads like the canon of The Neoliberal Elite Human Capital secular religion. Banal, a-historical, and assumes a lot of things as certain just because.
- sfpotter 10mo agoAh, man, thank you writing this. I read through bits of it and found his writing really crazy making, and have had the same response to other articles of his I've seen on here. Your response sums it up perfectly.
- Scubabear68 10mo agoThanks to the author, I needed this today. Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!
- donkey_brains 10mo agoI had never thought about the puzzle-piece solution to the 2D digestive tract problem before. That’s amazing! Maybe being 2D wouldn’t be so bad after all.
- mberning 10mo agoPoint number two seems dubious at best. At least 50% of all offspring would need to be as fit or more fit than the parents to have any hope for the continuation of a species. And it’s probably a much higher percentage than that due to mortality before procreation.
- ozzyphantom 10mo agoThis is a great post. I’m thankful that many of the comments here reminded me why this website’s comments section is not worth reading, ceaseless negativity. Not wasting any more time reading them!
- lucketone 10mo agoYou are free now.
- herpdyderp 10mo agoBut I think HN’s comment section is the only one worth reading!
- seizethecheese 10mo agoHow ironic.
- komali2 10mo ago50/50 for me. I've had significantly impactful reads here, leading to experiments with new IDEs, to-do systems, ADHD management techniques, and insight into political ideologies I disagree with. Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
- phito 10mo agoThis was the only comment I disliked reading here...
- _sr6i 10mo agoNo, they're correct. I was downvoted for a reply to a comment further down. I appreciate it. I visit the site mostly for the comments as well. Some of the things the post mentions are possible to do and good and some are not. There's much to be grateful for yet there are still many problems to solve if we could focus as a society...
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
- ompogUe 10mo agoWent down the rabbit hole. And having found: https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ #18 Can't agree more. Thank you
- leflambeur 10mo agoWill someone please explain 14 on Gregory of Nyssa?
- Izikiel43 10mo agoSlavery is a sin, don’t sin, that’s the gist of it. He lived around the year 400, so pretty progressive for his time.
- sleeplessworld 10mo agoHow did you reach the conclusion that the author specifically meant this part of Gregory of Nyssa's religious thinking? It could just as likely be that the author has come to realise that Gregory of Nyssa was correct in his arguments for the Christian Trinity...? I am just wondering. The author's statements are very entertaining, but they do not seem to be articulated as objects for detailed scrutiny...
- Izikiel43 10mo agoRead the Wikipedia entry, it was the other notable thing besides theology, and something I think everyone, no matter the creed, agrees with today
- beeflet 10mo ago> 16. That sleep, that probably evolution first made a low-energy mode so we don’t starve so fast and then layered on some maintenance processes, but the effect is that we live in a cycle and when things aren’t going your way it’s comforting that reality doesn’t stretch out before you indefinitely but instead you can look forward to a reset and a pause that’s somehow neither experienced nor skipped. This is pretty understated. We live in a strangely beautiful world such that our experience of time is shaped like so due to the interplay of energy on the surface of the earth
- yapyap 10mo agoI mean you _can_ in theory yeah but practically when I find myself in a cycle (or multiple) where things don’t go my way that that “reset and a pause” can also be easily interrupted, shortened or messed with in some way. Would be great if the stressors didn’t affect sleep though.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoFit can mean hot in English slang
- yapyap 10mo ago> That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have, and thus complex life can persist in a universe with increasing entropy In an ideal world. But in our current world I find that economical stance in the world influences amount of children more than if you’re “fit”. E.g. the poor(er) people of the world and the ultra wealthy of the world are having more kids while the middle class is having less, sure they have to meet some kind of ‘fit’ threshold but not the kind implied IMO.
- mvkel 10mo agoWhat a cool piece/person/perspective. We need more of this unorthodox thinking in the zeitgeist
- alister 10mo agoRemember blogs on the old web when the author would plaster his name in a huge font on every page along with his photo, and have an extensive bio about himself and perhaps even his resume? Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
- koziserek 10mo ago> That of all the humans that have ever lived, the majority lived under some kind of autocracy, with the rest distributed among tribal bands, chiefdoms, failed states, and flawed democracies, and only something like 1% enjoyed free elections and the rule of law and civil liberties and minimal corruption, yet we endured and today that number is closer to 10%, and so if you find yourself outside that set, do not lose heart. according to V-Dem Institute [0], 72% of population live in autocracies.. does it include the US nowadays? https://v-dem.net/publications/democracy-reports/ https://v-dem.net/publications/democracy-reports/
- anthk 10mo ago>That every symbolic expression recursively built from differentiable elementary functions has a derivative that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions, although the latter expression may require vastly more terms. Lisp programmers disagree from the first lesson at learning Lisp.
- kazinator 10mo agoReasons to be glum: [...] #20. That not every symbolic expression recursively built from integrable elementary functions has an integral that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions ...