jhedwards

17 ms·

91.
by jhedwards 6y ago
> Have cultural factors not been ruled out? How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's
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by jhedwards 6y ago
> Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but
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by jhedwards 6y ago
OK let me invent something: A fignaft is a small pink bird from the island of slamp. It has a short triangular beak well adapted to plucking seeds out of the hard cones of the humnit bush. It was nearly hunted to extinction by the umaglots,
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by jhedwards 7y ago
> If an online community is mature, empathetic, and self-aware - why would it require strong moderation First off I think you make a point. However, the reason I think strong moderation is still required, even if those previous qualifier
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Mentioned in my other comment above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogeny_and_Phylogeny_(book)
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by jhedwards 7y ago
This idea is explored heavily by Steven J. Gould in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. I highly recommend anyone interested in this idea to check it out. As far as I remember the "fallacy" is not that these stages exist, but that ev
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Philosophy of Math: Naturalized Platonism vs. Platonized Naturalism [pdf](mally.stanford.edu)
2 points by jhedwards 7y ago|0 comments
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by jhedwards 7y ago
This is a fascinating question, and I don't think I'm qualified to give an authoritative answer to it, but I think the _primary_ property of brains and brain-like neural complexes is that they encode behavioral responses to stimul
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by jhedwards 7y ago
It's handwavey because many of the details aren't known, but what is known is complex and can't really be fit into a HN comment. Also I'm condensing what I know from everything I've read about biology. It's not
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by jhedwards 7y ago
The various processing and encoding pathways in our brains have developed over millions of years of natural selection. You could think of human behavior as a "program" where each generation is an iteration on that program. Plastic
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by jhedwards 7y ago
This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was conv
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event its
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I agree with this to an extent because I love yards, but you're talking about the generation that smoked indoors and drove without seat belts. Moving forward a bit, my mother grew up thinking margarine and canned goods were better than
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by jhedwards 7y ago
You're definitely missing out. Some of the most challenging intellectual experiences of my life have been obtained from books. Rarely, if ever, does a digital media experience come close. Take one for example: _The Logic of Life_ by Fr
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by jhedwards 7y ago
This kind of confirms a hunch I have which is that macro social beliefs change faster than corporate cultures. So a society as a whole might decide "men and women can work wherever they want" and start to teach children these valu
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I don't understand this sentiment. In-state tuition for state school in still only around $15,000 a year. Assuming your children get no financial aid and take out zero loans, you still only need to have $60k saved for four years. That&
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by jhedwards 7y ago
For classical Chinese that would be An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller. That will open you up to most pre-modern Chinese lit.
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Have you read any Chinese poetry? AFAIK it inspired the "concrete" movement in western poetry. In just a few characters a Chinese poem can create a whole world. So while western poetry to me often just seems like word craft, Chine
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by jhedwards 7y ago
That makes sense, I guess I was focusing in on a particular font in the article that clearly has the mark of Yan Zhenqing's style. I'm talking about whatever font is used in the characters 使使 over the red background. Even the shap
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Interestingly, the thick vertical strokes and skinny horizontal strokes you see in the Chinese characters in some of those fonts are the result of one individual's[0] personal style being adopted as the standard for non-cursive calligr
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Aren't alkaline hydrothermal vents[0] a pretty good candidate for that? AFAIK they provide almost everything necessary for the creation of cellular life. Once you have cells and RNA everything else is just time + evolution. [0] https:
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Part of my point is that this is being done by the CCP. If you want to say the CCP doesn't have ethics that's a different argument than "China doesn't have ethics", and I don't think that's too pedantic to
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I would say the biggest thing is the emphasis on public works. Wherever I went I was awed by the extent of things that were built just for the public. In the city where I lived there they built a new fancy bridge[0], and a massive park with
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by jhedwards 7y ago
> Present-day China essentially has no ethics Source? I lived in China and didn't ever feel like I was in a place without ethics. Different ethics, sure, but it really looks to me like you simply don't know or understand China.
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by jhedwards 7y ago
The article presents this idea specifically because it is incorrect, and goes on to explain the newer, more accurate understanding of genes, which is (as far as I understand it) that they encode various options and patterns that can be leve
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by jhedwards 7y ago
Not necessarily: I always had anxiety issues with cannabis until I tried a pure sativa strain. The problem is that indica gives we weird bodily sensations which trigger my anxiety, whereas sativa only affects my mind. I think the important
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I would imagine there's a fundamental limitation in DNAs ability to be copied over and over without information loss.
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Reddit Tests Live Streaming – In a Cautious Way(forbes.com)
1 points by jhedwards 7y ago|0 comments
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by jhedwards 7y ago
I ran into this problem recently when I asked someone I know, who is in the coast guard, if they knew about alkaline hydrothermal vents. They said "Yes! But I just listen to the scientists, they draw a square on the ocean and say &#x27
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by jhedwards 7y ago
That's the amazing thing about evolution: the products of evolution don't have to be well engineered, they don't have to be perfect, they don't even really have to make sense. They only have to confer a marginal benefit

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