acadapter

I agree, it would be interesting to see if there are some cognitive advantages associated with the "special interests" personality traits, in general.

This has existed for a long time before LLM, although in a slower form. On Wikipedia it's called "citogenesis".

Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...

False etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Yes, but similarity alone is not a guarantee that words are related. The words val and [h]val are not related in Swedish, even though they ended up with the same pronunciation and spelling in the modern language. Sometimes, words can end up as "fossil words" because the main usage of the word was lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.

It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.

What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?

The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.

This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.

"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.

With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).

I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?

This is sad though. I'd rather see that ethics gets upgraded so some problems can be fixed.

For example, about 8% of men get excluded from certain professions such as being a train driver, due to color blindness. And society doesn't seem to care enough to switch to colorblind-friendly signaling.

With gene editing, this problem could be repaired in the other end, so that men will have the same chance as women to get perfect vision.

I was hoping that this article would be about a hypothetical future where people have evolved to have a lower amount of bravery and a lower "fighting spirit", so that they're simply to afraid to fly fighter jets or be nuclear submarine captains.

Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

I also noticed that part in the article.

>Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?

It could be that some gender-neutral behavior patterns are part of the modern Western equivalent of "tatemae", and that they easily appear in studies because of interaction with strangers.

Most of the research on this, has been done in the US though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved.

Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.

Social media no longer represents "many people are saying it".

The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.

I assume the unspecific "they" is a linguistic shortcut for "people in power"

The things people say in the era where comment fields have been removed from news websites (in the name of "avoiding misinformation")...

Both Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian have these multi-character letters, but these Unicode points were created for the typographical needs (or rather, bad habits) of Serbo-Croatian. The "Dz" was probably included for the use-case where someone transcribes something in Macedonian.

One example can be seen on the Croatian 2kn coin, which features a tuna and a title written T U NJ.

Hungarian has more of these multi-symbol letters (with each letter having 1-3 symbols. It also has some other complications, such as having two "sz" in a row appear like "ssz", unless separated by a line break or a hyphen (then it's just two "sz").

IMO it was probably a mistake to let the article focus so much on Hungarian, as these Unicode points don't seem to be created for the purposes of the Hungarian language.

We are also not descendants of the 18 year old who eagerly followed a leader and died in a trench.

What is it with people nowadays, can't there be at least some room for touching this type of sensitive topic?

My post seems to become a downvote magnet. I just wanted to try an unusual perspective that is seldom talked about.

But there are nuances to that.

I know several people who have escaped a war-torn country and had a successful life elsewhere, instead of getting affected by military propaganda, and possibly losing everything just because of other people's territorial conflicts.

Another interesting aspect of modern human evolution is the fact that brave men have a higher risk of dying in war, extreme sports, etc.

Will male risk behavior be more similar to female risk behavior, 10000 years from now?

Nowadays, the use-case for masculine bravery is more or less obsolete. It had a purpose when there were wild animals roaming around human habitations, but nowadays it may very well trick a man into becoming a war casualty.

Historians of the future might look back on pro-conscription advocates as those who stood in the way of the modern human.

The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.