It seems doubly worthwhile to experiment with in this case since it would both keep a food tradition viable and protect the orchid species from disappearing. When I google Orchis mascula I do find info about cultivation (though cultivation on a commercial scale might be a different matter).
I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.
The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.
What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".
I've used a Zoho Mail account for years as my primary email. Last time I attempted to sign in after not doing so for a few weeks, I was prompted to enter an OTP from SMS to a long-defunct mobile number, though I had not activated 2FA myself. No recovery options or alternatives are offered. I contacted customer support and was advised to re-activate the mobile number, which is impossible.Relying...
"Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise?
Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms.
Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No.
By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning them or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy imagining them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.
> "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory
To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.
> eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.
Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.
More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in thriftwy's comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or non-relevant standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation thatn essentializing them as "parasites"?
>> hence why they won the fight.
More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "silk road" to the oceans.
>> those are the only societies with formal, documented anything
You can't be serious.
Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).
The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.
Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.
Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
Inability to procedurally generate highly stochastic forms or textures (for instance what a haboku painter, or any kindergartner, can get by splattering paint); reliance on a finite bank of source or "training" images; no way for the artist to turn an artistic vision into a meaningful input for an I/O program; no demonstrated ability or proposed algorithm for producing on its own (without human inputs) anything most people would recognize as art.
> AI us nothing but a human given no constraints.
I think you have a key insight that productive constraints lie at the living core of the arts, and I agree that if some hypothetical entity that was a human with no constraints produced imaginative works, Kipling's devil[0] would finally get to make a point. I had a similar objection to the hype when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol – Lee was playing under the constraints of (albeit remarkable) human cognition, which the "AI" with its sheer computing power did not even pretend to approximate, yet still did overall quite well.
But no existing or proposed AI is anything like "a human without constraints."
There are productive constraints, and their are counterproductive constraints. The 5-7-5 haiku form is a productive constraint; complete exclusion of the letter "e" from an novel[1] turned out to be an unproductive one. Having to include anything generated by Midjourney in an extremely unproductive constraint.
[0] https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_conundrum.htm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
Many people have become reliant on platforms like AirBnB, Paypal, and Facebook to the extent that losing access would have a significant adverse impact on their lives or livelihoods. At the same time, many of these platforms are well known for suspending or banning unsuspecting users without providing information about their reasons for doing so, and without providing any clear path to appeal...
Your classic comment certainly stands, though. Based on how they recruited their testing sample, it could easily be that the gamer kids were just wealthier. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study all.
But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).
I think this is exactly why it is so maddeningly hard to engage critically with those who espouse these theories – they keep an 'authoritative' death-grip on the frame.
I feel a need to add that conspiracy theorists deserve no grudging credit for "ingeniously" pulling this off, any more than sociopaths deserve credit for "ingeniously" manipulating people. With little enough intellectual integrity, any dope can do it.
As an off-topic aside, did you know that the Wuchang Uprising (a key 1911 anti-Qing rebellion in Wuhan) had a coronavirus on its flag?[0] It's worth asking why the media never reported on it, and what shadowy Tongmenghui revolutionaries are behind the events of the past few years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#/media/File:C...
Assuming alternative sources of the same essential nutrients, I agree – no single food is nutritionally necessary or ever was. In the real world, meanwhile, dairy products are a key source of protein etc. for people in at least some regions where sufficient alternative sources are not widely affordable or available. Certainly, milk was crucial to the survival of many populations as recently as a century ago (not "aeons ago during some ancient famine").
> Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods
Evolution is an open-ended history of accidents, with much to say about what works for us (as opposed to what cannot).
> but it does not control us.
Indeed. Not only does it not control us, we cannot even conclude based on it that a novel environment or resource will not be advantageous. In the case of ungulate milk consumption, it turns out it was.
> Not sure what you mean about telos.
Evolutionary adaptations are in the nature of accidents, not guided by any purpose or implying any optimal "natural" state. Populations taking advantage of accidental fitness for new niches is a defining pattern in the evolution of life on earth, and consumption of milk by some human populations fits that pattern. Drawing conclusions about the suitability of drinking milk because "we didn't evolve to drink it" is fallacious (in contrast to, say, explaining most people's lack of lactase persistence by their ancestors' non-consumption of milk, which is sound, non-teleological reasoning).
Are you claiming that most people who consume milk as a major part of their diet suffer health problems from it? Or that grain-based diets do not cause health issues?
> That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material.
Evolution has no telos. Evolutionary leaps into new niches are the norm, and hunting had formative impacts on the evolution of modern humans. We've also evolved for orders of magnitude longer walking on all fours (and walking erect causes health issues, such as stressing the back), but that has no bearing on what is healthy or suitable.
> It's not a good argument to take a small exceptional population and apply that reasoning to the general case.
I don't believe I did so. Northern European-origin populations are not small or insignificant, but I agree that for lactose-intolerant populations who have no tradition of using milk-based foods they are generally nutritionally unnecessary.
Whence this transcendent purpose that limits suitability? Likewise, quinoa grains are to grow into full-sized plants, and not for consumption by humans, etc. etc.
Most people may be "lactose intolerant", but some of them find ways to survive and thrive on milk-based foods; meanwhile, some populations have developed tolerance to lactose, presumably because milk-based foods are important.
Are lactose intolerance symptoms widespread among Mongolians? If not, and if Mongolians are really genetically lactose intolerant, then it is worth asking whether the fermented dairy foods (as opposed to kimchi) they consume are mitigating that intolerance.
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