dmn322

" He thought that we didn't know what the hell was going on with accretion disks but that a few powerful people in the field created the impression that we did and that there was no dissent because it was so difficult to get established in the field." ... seems to be an epidemic of this stuff in academia tbh.

This seems like a great resource for referencing the various definitions. I've tried my hand at developing an intuitive understanding: https://spacechimplives.substack.com/p/observers-and-entropy. TLDR - it's an artifact of the model we're using. In the thermodynamic definition, the energy accounted for in the terms of our model is information. The energy that's not is entropic energy. Hence why it's not "useable" energy, and the process isn't reversible.

> a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved

A few notes... another way to make the economy more worker owned is to have a a portion of the shares of companies held by public entities, which then use dividends for a basic income. Public investment in companies like this could also be a way of incubating industries.

Another note: the biggest problem with businesses being democratic institutions is the pace at which decisions can be collectively made. This is an information systems problem that can be solved by software. Instead of voting for representatives who make decisions, we need an institutional programming language, and people can vote directly on implementations of modifications to this institutional code that defines every institution. Votes are essentially approvals to a PR. No need for intermediaries to misinterpret voters' intentions.

Every major religion says to take care of the poor. Maybe there's a deep sociological reason for it.

> they've checked out from the system

Everyone checks out of participation in a group that does nothing to benefit them. Rich people complain about taxes taking "their" money, but the system is taking something much more precious from the poor. It's taking their time and their ability to experience the things that make life worthwhile --- time with friends and family, time in nature. You can say all you want that people need to work for it, but they also need to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and that's not happening.

And what has that increased expenditure gone to?

Is that not mostly from social security?

I wouldn't increased costs from paying for the retirement of an aging population to be an indication of welfare program strength.

Is medicaid / medicare in there too? If so, then ballooning medical costs wouldn't really be an indication of stronger programs either.

> we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects

Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger

It does for sure

I can't tell if it's speaking nonsense or not... care to elaborate on what's happening here?

As a white guy: I met one guy who was brahmin and was bragging about it and trying to explain to me that the caste system is good.

Probably a bad idea, but just a random thought: what if there were emergency pressurized canisters of something inert like no2 that could dilute the hydrogen in case of a failure so they could protect surrounding things from fire damage?

Reminds me of a “founder” who interviewed me and told me he had done a photo-documentary on the “Flyover states”.

Just because you’ve been somewhere doesn’t mean you’ve got a real understanding of anything that’s going on there. I’m very skeptical that someone wearing a visit to a place with poor people as some kind of badge of authority on the topics surrounding them actually has any clue.

The people I’ve talked to who had “miserable, starvation at the door lives” elsewhere who now live with low incomes in the us have mixed feelings about it… nothing as clear cut as what you’re implying

> I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"...

If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all.

Look at this list of the most cited cognitive scientists in the journal "cognitive science"... https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/

#1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are.

Turns out right on his wikipedia page he wrote a book about what he thinks about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness

It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions.

It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion.

I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would.

If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.

> Ad hominem

It's not an ad hominem at all. I attacked their thought process, not their person. And the point is that they encourage other people not to use their critical thinking and brains, and just defer to others who they happen to agree with.

> Being charitable here

And why would I do that? They're not being charitable to the opposing opinion. If they were rational, they would have attempted a full catalogue of both sides of the matter, taking the actual of actual opposition, rather than making up straw men.

> The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable

This is an argument against nobody and nothing. I don't think there's a single scientist in the world who said intelligence is 0% heritable. This is a very far cry from the stance that it's mostly heritable. Which would imply greater than 50%.

So even being charitable the author's factual stance is very weak, yet they're drawing strong conclusions from it.

If it's 50% heritable that means less than 50% genetic... which implies that at least 50% of intelligence is based in environment. This is not at all evidence of the author's point. It's evidence against it.

For #2, the idea that the evidence is overwhelming is just made up. The idea that the “experts” agree with him is laughable. That’s not what the majority of cognitive scientists believe at this point except in a few niches that are largely ignored by actual members of the field. So he just cherry-picked his “experts”.

This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.

"The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked" I don't think his hypothesis really hinges on that.

> It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that this is clear. The phenomenon he describes about writing is something one can easily experience by simply reading ancient texts. It feels different. There is no self reflection.

As for the ancient-Greek scholar you mention... I guess I'd need to see some specifics. Just hearing 2nd-hand that an anonymous scholar said he made it up isn't very compelling evidence. I'm curious about these modern statistical methods you've mentioned... how did they address Jaynes' theory?

"there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek"... I didn't get the impression of a singular phenomenon other than a lack of metaphoric references to the self in early writing. The timeline for Attic Greek seems to start at 500BC which seems to be on the end side of his hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind and 300 years after the Illiad was apparently written. Jaynes suggested it may even be older, passed down through oral history. I'm not sure that we have any evidence to truly debunk that.

Of course once the mental metaphors were established, they would quickly spread through the language, so it would be no surprise to see plenty of examples of Greek that did have more mental metaphors, especially a few hundred years later.

If you can point me to some writing from before 1500 BC or so that clearly shows a mental metaphor of a self which contains or otherwise is connected to thoughts (i.e. "the thoughts in my head"), then I'll have to take that as solid evidence against his theory.

I studied cognitive linguistics in undergrad, so this is an interesting topic to me. His theory definitely goes completely counter to what I'd previously believed which is the we've probably been far more advanced for far longer than is normally assumed. For instance the idea that the clovis people were the first in North America always seemed ridiculous to me. The thing is, even though Jaynes' idea is sort of against that general sensibility, it doesn't really directly contradict it. Anyway, I'd be curious whatever details you know about it. I thought about trying to make a serious rebuttal essay to it to find the evidence against

We do know that stimulating the right temporal lobe with electrodes causes auditory hallucinations. This is the same area that is responsible for actual speech processing on the left side.

We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped).

Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing.

He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature.

There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region.

His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say.

I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.

I'm not saying I agree with his hypothesis, but I admire its craziness. He's well aware that it's out there, and he makes some pretty compelling points... doing a pretty thorough analysis of the earliest available literature. For instance in the Illiad, there are essentially no direct references to thoughts or even feeling. He lists the many points where people literally say they're talking to god all throughout ancient literature. They say it in a way that doesn't sound like a metaphor at all. The rulers say something like "<insert god's name> told me to gather 1000lbs of barley and feed him 10 lbs and take him for a procession"... so that is their edict.

I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?

In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.

Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.

As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.

Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.