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How much effort is required to build an entirely new 'modern' operating system from scratch?
How much effort can be saved in that effort of producing obscene amount of complexity if you start with a small idea that is fairly generic and is able to be incrementally grown?
The Boltzmann brains specifically relies on an argument of statistical mechanics, which is really a statement about the average energy costs. But brain neurons forming spontaneously to the hallucination-in-isolation kind require extreme amounts of hidden Joule fees in creating that structure compared to a slow ramp up of complexity lowering the next set of energy barrier costs at an increasing rate.
This just scratches the surface of the idea of _catalysts_, that there are huge barriers between highly structured states arising from the chaotic, and even if the absolute energy cost is smaller it's still very possible to be more unlikely to spontaneous form if the physical dynamics of the universe itself have caveats as to how the successive tiers of compounding catalysts are constrained in ability to form, rate of formation, and bottlenecking supply of input reagants and the expedient utilization of outputs.
A simple rule like Conway's Game of Life that isn't too physically realistic but is instructive because of how intimately it's been analyzed while exhibiting some relatively high complexity, shows remarkable compressibility using techniques such as memoization in HashLife[0].
Even more striking is the potential for superspeed caching where different nodes are evolved at different speeds often allowing _exponential_ speedups of pattern generations to be calculated for longer than the timeframe of the universe we speculate about today for real physics.
Unfortunately I don't have data either, but I do have a hypothesis that may or may not end up surviving scrutiny when the relevant data becomes available. If someone can refute these ideas, please contribute.
The ultimate cause: demographics changed.
The recent decades have seen native populations reduce their fertility in the US. This is analogous to ecological succession of pioneering species colonizing barren land building up new soils by quickly flourishing and in turn crowded out in competition as other species take hold in niches opened by the pioneers laying a rich framework however being unsuccessful at sustaining dominance due to the energetic and fitness costs of extreme adaptation in resource poor environments that are unable to be useful traits relative to other species that can quickly capitalize on existing infrastructure when there's no need to divert capacity to build anew when resources become abundant. Today when applied to populations of humans in the US, the same principal goes under names like "white flight" as fleeing urbanization to recreate past conditions that were more favorable in competition strategies, "gentrification" when enclaves of urban areas decay and are then susceptible to recolonization efforts, and "immigration" to relieve bottlenecks in reproduction and the resulting scar of exposed barren land and poor nutrient circulation in the ecosystem that are caused by pioneer individuals stockpiling reserves without reinvesting in reseeding efforts.
Heart disease is typically a progressive terminal stage of diabetes and other metabolic disorders that intertwine risk factors such as poor nutrition, excessive calorie consumption and resulting unhealthy body fat percentages, alcohol abuse, cigarette use, and high stress. Looking closure at the medical literature, I'd actually reconsider the idea that statins produce beneficial health outcomes, but I won't get into that in this comment.
The point here is that in heart disease being the cumulative effects over a lifetime and diabetes as a _leading_ (not trailing) indicator of population risk for heart disease, what you're really seeing is the transition of health since WW2 when war rationing forced the agricultural and food processing industries to change course in providing massive amount of calories at low cost and effective propaganda and marketing to ensure sustained demand when the war was over to not shock the economy back into depression. Heavily processed foods like spam, American cheese, and canned/dried foods are technological means to make food supplies go further with less waste and higher caloric density. Add in things like pushing cigarette consumption heavily after the war and you get the perfect storm that kills off a large percentage of the lower class baby boomer generation early in life by around the 1980s. What's left since then are the middle and upper class baby boomers whose children reproduce in far lower numbers, being replaced with immigrants. Those immigrants come here with very different cultures regarding food consumption, nutrition, and healthcare that for a period of time did decrease the incidence of influence of the cultural epidemic of war-era food technology.
Usually after one generation though, immigrant families transition to the already establish cultural expectations and shift dietary and consumption patterns. Therefore you get the next surge of diabetes as the form of the next incarnation of the cycle. In a few decades you'll see another recurrance in more prevelent heart disease.
If you happen to wonder "what went wrong with this guy that caused him to become so jaded?" and contend that "he doesn't speak for all of us, I'm different!" well I will say it is very true that I am sort of an anomaly in current sentiment. Most people do not like how I end up deconstructing the world I perceive and view my analyses as ususally extremist, having getting kicked out (or desperate attempts at 'rehabilitative' disciplinary action) of nearly every organization I've ever been a part of from gatherings of family and friends to Sunday schools and churches, scouting, schools, and companies alike. I realize due to the repeating pattern the problem is most likely seated in myself, but if you're listening you still may like to entertain the idea that the superficial gloss we paint the world in vain attempting to heal our souls could in fact only be concealing a necrotic core. Maybe not out of actual belief in such a situation, but only to check due diligence off the list and set your mind at ease that judgement of our times will be favorably looked upon and your decisions were made with principled reason rather than excuses of being led astray by deception.
Of course, the story is more of a feel-good rationalization of fickle lottery tickets, due to the realism of "the market can be irrational longer than you can remain solvent" even if you're correct and especially due to the incentives involved to keep the insanity going as long as possible, bail out insiders, and conveniently backtrack on contracts due to concerns that actually losing money as a counter-party is not acceptable for the entrenched interests because the boogeyman of contagion would spread as the house of cards comes collapsing down with highly leveraged banks and pension funds unwinding the horrible bets they made that were rationalized by a feeling of untouchability when cozzying up with politicians.
But the details of the story are more interesting in that the methods used, such as realtime satellite based photography to more accurately estimate sales are definitely out of the current realm of accessible infrastructure and data collection methods for mere mortals who know in the back of their mind the stats are a ruse but can't possibly prove it.
These feelings are universally shared, but only visible to most in times of scarcity and fear. When economies are bubbling along in mania, people tend to lose sight of the eventualities regarding unsustainable societies. It's easy for people to rationalize their actions as charity, benevolence, and empathetic concern when they themselves are rewarded daily for vocalizing the whitewash and justifying what should be by what is now. When the music stops and individuals are left to fend for a chance at a seat, the full intention of previous actions becomes apparent as if malice is not something definable by planned greed and desire but puppetered unknowingly by a more clairvoyant self that protects its fragile present with the blessing of moral amnesia.
On the surface, we like to say how we're providing care and have their best interests in mind as they "age well" and as we repay the debt of elders who took care of us so dutifully for years.
But in reality, the main usage is to get rid of very burdensome, cantankerous, and irresponsible leeches who because they left their children with a sense of hatred will not give in to the idea of putting up with their crap ever again, so let them rot all drugged up in a coma where they cannot escape as they watch TV in a urine-soaked room and play bingo every Wednesday night until they die off.
It's more a short-term fix for us though, a pretty typical American form of cutting off the nose to spite the face since national spending is sprialing out of control from dealing with the old and will become a larger economic problem. Ironically, it does force the hand of the young in later years once filial laws come back in full swing enforcement who will end up saying enough is enough and euthanasia legalization legislation will come swooping in to deal with this.
Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like 'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with dubious constructed data.
If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death risk. Stay tuned for v.7!"
On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called 'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle.
Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles, peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering. I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets. And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float.
[0] https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf
If you're in a metro area, go to your nearest hospital with a labor wing and ask any nurse on staff if they can describe any pattern between characteristics of a woman and how fast she delivers her offspring. The greatest predictor of risk in death of either an infant or a mother in childbirth is duration of labor. The second greatest predictor of labor death risk is age of the mother.
A growing trend in fertility for a long time by now is positive correlation with poverty, illiteracy, and religious susceptibility. There's also a very effective self-interested cultural and economical push towards _certain_ women fully embracing the (in)action of stopping their lineage either actively through choice or even passively through delay by necessity against the ticking time bomb that is menopause to receive better individual outcomes than creating children for sake of retirement insurance when now such old-age risk can now be offloaded to a pooled global society that has a huge reserve of more fertility-friendly cultures. In addition legal incentives and even unintended economic punishments push _certain_ demographics of males towards rationally opting out of procreation in order to stave off undesirable consequences for their wealth and happiness.
Tangentially, it's not something that people like to talk about in public discourse, but there has also been a very prominent trend of decreasing age in the arrival of puberty especially for girls.
All of these factors are are the outcomes of individuals, demographics, and society in general implementing changes to their reproductive strategies and over time these choices reinforce themselves through natural selection. And of course this will reflect on some opaque metrics such as "average life expectancy" if you are not able to sub-categorize the averages.
There's a lot of these scenarios that are well documented, anything from the loosely defined and often poorly understood epigenetics processes, but also the signaling regulation of cell growth and death, resulting changes with hormesis, acclimatization, availability/scarcity of nutrients, hormones, pharmaceuticals, viruses, and even mental state.
(1) is typically the largest factor of all that listed, with experiments showing repeatedly that 'genetic markers' specifying risk for heart disease, cancer, etc all vastly improve with a reduction of excess body fat and elimination of recreational drug usage such as excessive alcohol and cigarettes.
And as for (4), definitely a trump card is not taking a dump in your drinking water supply without reasonable recycling treatment. Many people tend to associate the medical industry as responsible for the supposed improved living conditions of modern developed countries. However, if you look at the repeated succession stages of colonialization throughout the past several hundred years, it's obvious that when people in underdeveloped countries stop shitting in their food and water, illness and resulting death plummet until a few generations later when economically enforced diets and 'sensible medical care' are in full effect leading to a rebound of misery.
I do understand that the 'value' in DNA testing is largely the ability to follow the social graph of inheritance along with phenotypical metadata. This is pretty much at direct odds with privacy even for the strictest of 'anonymizing' setups considering that the greatest context-dependent 'utility' such as curing a truly unpleasant genetic disease or persecuting an ostracized person or group is due to identifying and understanding highly anomalous genes, phenotypes, or linkages of interest that come down to damning specificities.
There is one case I can think of that I _might_ be willing to participate in the "Human Genome Revolution", and at first thought it seems to me to be useful to both those that submit their samples and to humanity as a whole: a 'simple' counter of every allele across all DNA samples uploaded. However, I would appreciate feedback as to what are the gotchas here that will be abused, because I'm positive I have not thought such a system through at all and the Monkey's Paw [0] will grant my wish. :(
It would be a project that requires three components listed in increasing importance:
1. Cheap commodity DNA sequencer that can export its data in a free format. 2. A network protocol for uploading DNA alleles to a swarm of peers that archive and distribute the total counts. 3. A probablistic anonymizing data structure that combines something like a generalized crypto accumulator[1] and a zero-knowledge negotiation process between the network and a client for incrementing the common counters above a fairly large threshold such as maybe several thousand or million submissions. Perhaps uses a modification of something like the approximate counting algorithm[2] in a game setting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey%27s_paw [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulator_(cryptography) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_counting_algorithm