Chris_Jay

I have no experience with this, but there are apps you can get which turn the screen from full colour to greytone. apparently it really cuts out the addictive quality for a lot of people.

I think getting good at getting good at things is also good to do at that age. I'm in favour of encouraging kids to study broadly, but I've also ready very compelling accounts of where encouraging a kid's narrow interests got the child to learn ancillary things much more quickly (though TBF, that child was deeply on the spectrum and perhaps not a typical example)

One thing I found when looking into investing in Asia is that p/e ratios are... extreme.

I'm not an expert either, but you might be interested in the book 'Superforecasting' by Tetlock and Gardner - they have done some (IMHO) very interesting research on predictions markets. It might be the kind of thing you're looking to research more of!

Wouldn't we have a robot steer the light sail as it got closer?

Genuine question, this is well outside my wheelhouse.

Wild honeybee colonies used to exist, though granted they were a new import.

Oh now you're just tempting fate. Surely that distinction goes to the cockroaches?

The ideology of growth being dealt a genuinely humiliating defeat would involve massive depopulation event anyway. It seems far better to shift away from growth-dependent economics before any humiliating defeat rather than hope the people who survive it happen to be well-versed in regenerative economics.

I've started a meetup group for the purpose of discussing how a grassroots effort could shift some of the resources of the growth-economy to a steady-state economy while the former is still in place, but interest has been miniscule in my midsized college town.

The only thing I could possibly see working for what you're envisioning is building it on top of the Neuralink if a version 1.0 ever comes out.

When you say 'fix' do you mean 'prevent a two-degree shift' or 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy'? Or do you mean we can avoid some survivable threshold higher than two degrees?

I agree that useful action is possible and important, but I'm starting to feel that our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change was sometime last decade or the one before.

OP here on a different device, a lot of people have been asking about my beef with Youtube, so I'll try and put what I noticed in a timeline.

1. Youtube comes out with the promise of revolutionizing video, I immediately love it because of its idiosyncrasy and unpredictability. Despite low production values, the videos are varied enough that I can always find something interesting and the algorithm is quite good at suggesting things I'll like. 2. Google acquires youtube, whether because of more money or improving the algorithm, the offerings get even better 3. Youtube merges with google+. 4. Youtube hires new management and begins modeling itself after the old cable companies whose lunch it had 'till now been happily eating. 5. Youtube's algorithms progressively play it safer with their recommendations, the youtube personalities I follow either become more mainstream (Joe Rogan) or increasingly complain of being arbitrarily demonetized (Phillip Defranco). 7. Present day

If you use Youtube as a substitute for television, it might not look like a decline. But I find television generally boring, and Youtube seemed to promise a general improvement. With a better algorithm for suggesting videos and a less hostile relationship to creators it still could be, but for years now it's been moving in the opposite direction on both counts.

I always give myself five minutes in which I can flip the coin as many times as I like, but at the end of that I have to go with the face that's showing. It's pretty interesting - I find myself hesitating when it's showing one face more and more. I'm sure part of it is just reinforcing an initial bias once I notice my own hesitation, but magnifying an existing bias is after all the point of the exercise.

I believe it was Charles Stross who had a character say "We would like to have Albert Einstein working in the patent office, but it still needs to function if we hire Mr. Bean".

I would add to your list, "cheaper". Any drone that can be swarmed and taken down by cheaper drones is probably a bad investment.

Japan is probably more concerned about boosting their declining pop rate, which is inversely correlated with women's education, than expanding their economy in the short term and accelerating the population decline.

There is a school of philosophy that newton's laws of motion apply to the political realm - "any action taken to benefit a minority group will result in an equal and opposite counter-reaction". I wouldn't be terribly far off if I described Sun Zu's "The Art of War" as Newton's laws of motion applied to game theory.

I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.

Discoverability seems to be a challenge on just about every streaming platform. It doesn't seem that difficult to write an algorithm that balances novelty with comfort, and yet nobody seems to have even moved in that direction. I'm not sure what the problem is, the discoverability problem seems to have gotten worse as machine learning has become more mainstream.

>What structures today are likely to survive long term?

The Georgia Guidestones come to mind. I've been quite interested in the pre-ice age golden age theory lately but I think the part missing from your analysis is that we're farther ahead on a chemical/particle tech branch than on a social engineering tech branch. We've essentially scaled up competing warbands to a planetary scale - a class 1 civilization we are not, and seem more likely to develop one on Mars than Earth.

Building the Georgia Guidestones probably cost much less in human terms than a comparably complex henge, but we lack the mindset to collectively see the value in it. To make a gaming analogy of your point, I would say we're objectively ahead on one branch of the tech tree but we overlook simpler technologies on branches we haven't explored yet, to the point of not realizing other civilizations were farther ahead in some regards while being behind in others.

Then why is it profitable to recycle glass?

funny - King actually has a quote on this that stuck with me quite a while.

"Some books you read for the story. Don't be like the snobs who won't read a book for the story. Some books you read for the words. Don't be the kind of person who won't read a book for the words either. But when you find a book that you read for the words and the story... treasure that book".

I certainly agree with your assessment that one wouldn't read a King book for the words, but as someone who really likes the scifi-fantasy genre, that's not a standard to which I can afford to hold the authors I read...

To pro-alternative folks like myself it just means "not in the medical textbooks yet". Most 'alternative' approaches do have rigorous studies backing them up, just recent and ignored by a lot of people.

The US paving the way for such practices is not exactly reassurance. If the laws are so complex nobody is capable of operating within them, the result is a police state. Being subject to arrest at any time because the law of the land explicitly gives the government that power or because it is so byzantine that nobody can know all of it works out to the same thing in the end.

Your argument seems to be that a police state where the authorities have a lighter touch is preferable. That's obviously true compared to a draconian police state, but it's a police state either way.

weird that you're getting downvoted. The only explanation I can come up with is that some people's gut reaction to testimony against wheat is a result of addiction.

Plenty of people are doing it - that's why having the fastest bot is helpful.

Interesting question! My guess is that a part of the difference was actually doctrinal - Christianity is largely a religion for revolutionary times, more concerned with overturning a corrupt order than administering a just one. I believe that despite many of the reformers of the enlightenment coming out of the church system, they were described as revolutionaries against the monarchic system and the church that supported it because that is the sort of person idealized by the Christian religion and embodied by its founder.

Islam on the other hand is not a religion concerned with changing the existing order - its founder was not a martyred revolutionary but a successful political entity. Where Christianity advocates separation of church and state, Islam sets forward a system for religious governance.

Therefore, while both Christian and Islamic scholars generally got their education in their respective religious traditions, I think Christian scholars were seen as breaking with the past in part because that kind of behavior is celebrated in Christianity, while Islamic scholars were seen as being involved in their political processes because that is celebrated in Islam.

the simplest is to monitor prices on multiple exchanges and buy/sell depending on fluctuations.

Potency is typically assumed in the industry, the volume of methane is trivial compared to volume of CO2.

I can't help but think of that Leanord Cohen song, "First we take Manhatten".

I want to know where you bank.