notshift

I used to think like this too, but I realized recently that actually the human brain doesn't train over ~20 years of data, it trains over ~200 million years of data. Human babies aren't an empty neural network with no weights, the entire network architecture and the entire set of checkpoint starting weights that the brain begins training from is encoded into the human genome. It would be silly to expect evolution to do anything other than this, actually.

Also at this point I'm not even sure if "general" intelligence is a thing that exists or can exist. Humans have a specific intelligence which is very specifically designed for the world and universe that we live in. Intelligent machines will have to be similarly designed.

Those are fair suggestions. I'm not typically inclined to "do the work for them" so-to-speak, by asking them what experiences & observations have framed their approach, because that's basically priming the person to have a particular response to the second question which might not be in alignment with their actual beliefs.

A lot of the time people don't have a good response to the second question because they have never actually even considered the possibility that they could ever hold the opposing view on something, or what holding that view would entail.

The question makes more sense if you additionally pose an alternative (i.e. change my position to Y). Given strictly like this, all I can really say is that I would change my position if you demonstrated to me that it was in my own or others' self-interest to behave differently?

For synthesizing new ideas maybe it takes that long. But if you hold any serious views that you expect to have challenged by others (relating to politics or otherwise), you should have clear rules for why you believe those things and exactly what evidence it would take to cause you to change your mind. Then, you can change your beliefs the exact moment that new information is provided to you.

I try to start all of my conversations about politics or sensitive issues with the question "What would you have to be shown, or what evidence would it take for you to change your position on X?". If the person doesn't have a good answer to that, then they are usually either an ideologue or have not actually seriously thought about the issue in any depth, and it's probably going to be fruitless to try and have a conversation about that subject.

I abide by this rule and can change my views at the drop of a hat when presented with new evidence.

Hilarious to characterize those as sounding like suicide notes. But people use those subject lines because they are extremely effective at getting high open rates, above pretty much everything else.

Have you looked at your diet? I used to have a ton of mucus, and cutting out bad carbs from my diet (processed bread, waffles, store-bought muffins, etc.) pretty much eliminated the issue. Peppers / nightshades can be an issue for some people too.

The purpose of mucus is so that your body can temporarily lock up some kind of inflammatory agent that it is being exposed to and limit the damage.

Usually these types of things are solved by removal rather than addition (of something in your life).

PaulHoule is correct; potassium and iron are dangerous in excess. Magnesium you can just take in a separate supplement since you really want more of it than easily fits in a multivitamin.

You can get sufficient potassium by eating 2-3 meals with plenty of vegetables or leafy greens every day, and you can get sufficient iron by eating animal meat (unless you have a diagnosed iron deficiency and need to supplement with it directly).

A large amount of computation takes place in the gut, largely by the foreign bacteria that make up our gut flora, and the gut has direct lines of two-way communication with the brain. Hence the term "gut feeling".

The brain certainly does a lot of heavy lifting, but I think if you took a person's brain out of their human body and into a robot body instead, they'd probably have dramatic shifts in personality, behavior, thought processes, feelings, worldview, etc. It would probably be on a similar level as those experiments where people use magnetic or electric pulses on their brain or whatever and observe large personality changes.

I agree with the legs example, but neural networks are basically a mathematical construct, and they solve problems that any other intelligent species in our universe would also have to face. I think if a better mathematical construct for solving those problems were possible, the process of natural selection probably would've found it by now.

We know that evolution has limitations in how it explores the state space; sometimes certain new developments depend upon past developments. But it seems to me that the development of a brain would hit relatively few of these barriers.

I sure hope we don't have mass-reproducing space mosquitos in our future.

> for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice.

You might have an alien species that can copy the brain state of someone who already knows a task, or one that can gain skills extremely quickly through practice, but I don't think practice is going away. The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this. You start out with some weights, you measure loss, you adjust weights, and then you try again.

Justice as an emotion might go away or exist in a different form, but the underlying reason why humans have a sense of justice is evolutionary psychology / game theory. Probably any life form which is shaped by evolutionary forces would have some similar instinct. (Certainly not all possible intelligent life forms though, I'd agree.)

I agree with this exactly. I think appeals to SOLID or any other design principles are generally not helpful when arguing/discussing about code quality. I think people should just talk about readability and maintainability instead, since those are what we are actually interested in - not following some dogma.

Opening and closing your comment with ad-hominem, by calling the person's argument a conspiracy theory, makes you less persuasive, not more. It makes me more inclined to think your own arguments are coming from a biased position rather than an unbiased look at the facts & an open mind.

I don't think most of the people in power in an organization having a particular agenda or set of beliefs is "a conspiracy". It happens all the time. (Actual 'conspiracies' happen all the time too. People conspire - hence the existence of the word.)

(I don't have a dog in this fight about the NRC.)

I built a new PC recently and installed Windows 11 on it. The bluetooth & sound UIs were completely broken. I had two headsets connected, one was displaying as "Default for audio" but sound was coming through on the other one, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to change sound to the other headset. I think it wasn't showing up in the Sound menu despite clearly showing as connected (disconnecting and reconnecting didn't help).

Definitely agree with the sentiment to hold off on the upgrade as long as possible.

Is that a broken link or is my browser broken? That opens to an empty Hacker News page for me.

> Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok.

Everyone says this, but do you really know? Those statements are after-the-fact observations of engine evaluations. They don't speak to the amount of mental work that Hans would have had to put in to play optimally (or 'ok' as you say) in those positions.

You might find yourself making the same remarks when looking at the post-game analysis of any top player against an engine. Everyone crumples eventually against perfect play.

Starch converts to glucose, which is processed VERY differently from table sugar, sucrose, or the type of sugar found in fruit, fructose.

So, sugar is not all sugar. I believe Lustig has argued that the latter two are much worse than the former.

I agree overeating of carbs is not good, but is the reason why America is so fat because we just magically eat more bread, noodles, and potatoes than comparable countries? Probably not.

Probably sugar consumption has gone down because people have replaced it with artificial sweeteners, which have similar metabolic effects in the body to what Lustig has attributed to sugar. It'd be nice to see a combined graph of sugar + artificial sweeteners.

Why so hostile? We're just talking about fast food man, lol.

> Do you eat a lot of low quality fast food? That could be one reason your gut bacteria are craving food from a fast food joint instead of something that isn't deep fried and covered in Polynesian sauce.

No, I don't, which is why I don't crave fast food. I get Chick-fil-a once or twice a month for fun.

I don't have much evidence to support this claim, but as best I can tell Chick-fil-a has far superior food quality than Raising Cane's. Chick-fil-a holds their ingredients & preparation to the same high standard as they do their customer service, whereas Raising Cane's is much more hit-or-miss, a lot more like the McDonalds or Burger Kings out there.

One thing you can look at is the nutrition label. Total calorie counts aren't so useful IMO, but Raising Cane's reports that their foods have unhealthy trans fats, while Chick-fil-a reports 0 trans fats.

Raising Cane's makes me sick whenever I get it, whereas Chick-fil-a is extremely well digested for me.

Do you eat a lot of junk food generally in your diet? That could be one reason why maybe your gut bacteria are craving the worse quality food & causing you to not enjoy CFA as much.

Am I an outlier? I think probably most people could focus on a red triangle for 10 minutes or something, if they wanted to, to "prove" that they had free will.

Changing major habits is much harder, I would agree, but it's just something you have to work at & study. Nobody will change if they aren't motivated to do so. I don't think that really is a free will issue.

I can focus on a red triangle for as long as I would like. I can also change any of my major habits that I would like (and I have done so recently).

I don't think that study shows that we don't control our own actions. Certainly 99%+ of our actions on a daily basis are instinctual/unconscious, but my unconscious is something that I consciously shape and develop over time. Nobody has perfect agency in a particular moment; your immediate choices are the outcome of the agency you exercised over the past months and years. You still have the free will to change, it just takes time.

Nah, I can come up with countless examples of companies making decisions to maximize their market cap over the next 0-2 years, that are obviously going to have a huge negative impact over the next 5-10 years (a much greater negative impact than was gained in the short term).

Serious long term thinking by those running companies (on the time-scale of 7-10+ years) is extraordinarily rare and represents a massive competitive advantage for those who actually do it (almost no one).

Companies do not adequately select for or reward long term thinking behavior by CEOs and upper management. Mostly you only see this coming from company founders who actually have enough of a stake and political capital to make doing so viable.

I don't think it's arrogance, I think you have far too much faith in large groups of people.

Of the 4.4 million software developers in the US, most of them produce really bad code and have a lot of wrong ideas about development and don't think twice about what they're doing.

Same with the medical field - rife with dysfunction and malpractice.

Pretty much all fields work like this as far as I can tell. It sometimes takes hundreds of years for new correct ideas to be actually accepted and integrated into the mainstream knowledge/practice in any given field. Most people have giant egos and are resistant to change.

Ah, fair enough. I was mostly skimming the linked article and clicking through to the referenced studies. You're right, you'd certainly have to throw out that particular IQ study in that case.

The second article you linked cites several studies. I looked at each of them and pretty much all of them conclude that breastfeeding is better than bottle, except the childhood obesity one, which found no effect (I wouldn't expect breastfeeding vs bottle to have an effect on weight or height).

The first study cited only looked at height, weight, and blood pressure after breastfeeding, which are not the variables I would expect to see gaps in for breast fed vs bottle fed (other metrics are much more important, in my opinion)

The second study cited concluded that breastfeeding "had a significant reduction in the risk of 1 or more gastrointestinal tract infections (9.1% vs 13.2%; adjusted OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.40-0.91) and of atopic eczema (3.3% vs 6.3%; adjusted OR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.31-0.95), but no significant reduction in respiratory tract infection (intervention group, 39.2%; control group, 39.4%; adjusted OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.59-1.28).".

The third study had similar results: "Our experimental intervention increased the duration and degree (exclusivity) of breastfeeding and decreased the risk of gastrointestinal tract infection and atopic eczema in the first year of life."

The fourth linked study on IQ concludes: "These results, based on the largest randomized trial ever conducted in the area of human lactation, provide strong evidence that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improves children's cognitive development."

If these are the best studies that an article whose goal is to debunk the breastfeeding narrative can find, it looks like a clear win for breastfeeding to me.

Do you have a source for the claim that breastfeeding is no better than formula? I don't have a study to the contrary off hand, but everything I've read/studied has agreed conclusively that breastfeeding is the preferred option and has tangible developmental effects. Multiple books and a couple of college courses on early human development.

The conclusion that formula is for sure just as good as breast milk would also be shocking given that breast milk was designed by evolution over millions of years to be exactly what the developing baby needs. The human body does a lot of miraculous things that our technology isn't yet quite capable of matching (or even fully understanding).

We're still discovering new plant molecules and the effects they have on us all the time. Supplements are never going to be able to completely make up for a diet lacking in real whole plant food & animal meat.

With respect to the question about underdeveloped jaws, that development takes place primarily during your childhood, so if you didn't have optimal nutrition at that stage you won't be able to fix that retroactively.

The problem and solution has been known for almost a century now; check out the book 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration' by Weston Price. 'The Dental Diet' is also solid reading.

I'm still working through the book, but the tl;dr is that it mostly just comes down to nutritional deficiency. People in the past ate pretty much strictly nutrient-dense foods, people today eat a lot of junk food, empty carbs, and generally foods that just aren't nutrient dense compared to what our ancestors ate (mostly vegetables and meats).

Does he talk about that in one of his videos? I'm curious to hear more. It looks like there is still a bitchute page up with his brand and videos.