roceasta

17 ms·

91.
by roceasta 9y ago
People who notably stop thinking are those living in totalitarian regimes who are afraid to incriminate themselves by careless speech. If TV in general were capable of turning people into morons then no TV shows could be made. This is becau
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by roceasta 9y ago
Effort in any field has the property that if you are bloody-minded enough it can bring you up to the wall beyond which talent lies. I hit this wall as a result of over-practicing piano aged 28 which I had to give up due to repetitive strain
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by roceasta 9y ago
Haven't read the article but what if General Intelligence precisely is the ability to explain oneself to oneself (or to others)? This could turn out to be a chicken and egg problem.
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by roceasta 9y ago
The word 'spirit' is vague but the older idea is more accurate than the modern assumption that geniuses are merely 'smart' above a certain threshold. In reality creative genius expresses itself through those who love tru
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by roceasta 9y ago
Bear in mind that everybody loves something , even if it's just beer, or ice cream, or criticizing other people. 'Love' means giving something full attention (metaphorically speaking, to "open your heart fully" to
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by roceasta 9y ago
>But many animals - if not all - do have a language! They do signal to each other. They even use symbolic representation (e.g. in the case of dancing bees). But they don't explain things to one another. If they did then I expect w
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by roceasta 9y ago
You're not necessarily wrong. It's a matter of whether one has a well-developed dream or talent that isn't child-related. The reason this matters is because we need long-term sources of meaning and responsibility in our liv
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by roceasta 9y ago
It's not that your partner's attributes are unimportant, it's that if you are clear that you do want to start a family then this fact is rightly at the front of your mind when looking for a partner and the decision will flo
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by roceasta 9y ago
I like the way this article flips the commonplace 'What are the criteria for selecting my perfect mate?' to 'What are my motivations for getting married?'. However, it needs to be said that if and when children arrive on
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by roceasta 9y ago
>anthropogenic SO2 emissions, and how much of a cooling effect these have on our climate Anthropogenic SO2 emission as a fringe strategy for global cooling: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-
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by roceasta 9y ago
The Illinois sketch looks magnificent. I hope we build it someday.
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by roceasta 9y ago
Excellent! I wonder how many laws and regulations he (harmlessly) broke during the quest.
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by roceasta 9y ago
I'm reminded of the Mike Tyson quote: "Everyone has a plan until..." So if I saw friend or family being sprayed with an unknown substance I hope I would err on the side of caution rather than exhibiting the learned helplessn
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by roceasta 9y ago
>socialization doesn't provide that reward that it does for most other people Exactly. If one doesn't get the reward then it's too easy to commit errors and not worth the effort to correct them. However I do think 'sp
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by roceasta 9y ago
My guess is that animals are indeed conscious. However, without language they aren't capable of doing what human beings (embedded in culture) uniquely do: creating explanations for things.
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by roceasta 9y ago
Right, plus it's a 30 metre diameter tube. The bulk of the air moving up the centre would be insulated by the outer layers of air near the inner skin of the tube.
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by roceasta 9y ago
I doubt it has to be a good insulator. The air is travelling up the tube at high speed and there isn't time for it to cool significantly before it emerges.
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by roceasta 9y ago
http://compleatlecturer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-compleat-... Historically the original mode of lecturing was simply the transcription by the students of the manuscript the lecturer was reading.
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by roceasta 9y ago
There's a huge difference between eliminating known mutations and somehow engineering for enhanced positive traits. The latter requires knowledge that we simply don't have. Even if we did obtain it, it doesn't follow that Jo
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by roceasta 9y ago
As a young man of low social acumen I particularly benefitted from the TV/film adaptations. The best are faithful to Austen's texts and contain added knowledge from the actors and directors. For instance they show something of how
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by roceasta 9y ago
Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are. Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying
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by roceasta 9y ago
Thanks. I should read up a bit. Can you link to any decent info or discussion about allele frequencies?
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by roceasta 9y ago
>Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales. Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea
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by roceasta 9y ago
Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engen
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by roceasta 9y ago
Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near future, and it's raining. Nothing against LA, but I think I used
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by roceasta 9y ago
That's a pretty subtle case but I don't think it's relevant to the issue of human evolution for at least two reasons: (1) humans have universal intelligence which gives us the ability to adapt to any environment, (2) human
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by roceasta 9y ago
I'm not making a formal claim just sharing my thoughts. Though I do believe at least one evolutionary biologist has written about this: Hamilton W.D. (1999). The hospitals are coming. Narrow roads of gene land (Oxford University Press)
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by roceasta 9y ago
>Our rapidly growing species has only accumulated mutations that don't cause us to die Hygiene, nutrition and medicine (all good things!) also cause us to remain alive where previously natural selection would not have favoured those
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by roceasta 9y ago
The talk is of 'genetic enhancement' but the potential benefit seems more boring and necessary to me: removal of many new and as-yet-unidentified mutations. It is thought that these have been accumulating generation by generation
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by roceasta 9y ago
>But if his tendency to follow his curiosity wherever it led sometimes rendered him less productive, he also had the patience to keep coming back to his best ideas, over the course of years. [snip] >“He never argued his ideas. If peop

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