roceasta

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e8/54/ef/e854...

Bear in mind that everybody loves something, even if it's just beer, or ice cream, or criticizing other people.

'Love' means giving something full attention (metaphorically speaking, to "open your heart fully" to that something).

Btw, this Roald Dahl extract from 'The Twits' is relevant to visual attraction:

roceastaon An octopus is the closest thing to an alien here on earth

>But many animals - if not all - do have a language!

They do signal to each other. They even use symbolic representation (e.g. in the case of dancing bees). But they don't explain things to one another. If they did then I expect we'd find chimps working in translation agencies.

You're not necessarily wrong. It's a matter of whether one has a well-developed dream or talent that isn't child-related. The reason this matters is because we need long-term sources of meaning and responsibility in our lives. Starting a family is ipso facto the traditional thing to do and our traditions know more about us than we do. Changing course is possible but one ought to have good reasons in mind first.

It's not that your partner's attributes are unimportant, it's that if you are clear that you do want to start a family then this fact is rightly at the front of your mind when looking for a partner and the decision will flow from it. If you don't wish to start a family then other factors will come into play. However in the latter case you still need to include questions like whether you or your partner might have a change of mind later on, what options will remain, what retirement without children might look like, etc.

roceastaon The asteroid impact which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs

I like the way this article flips the commonplace 'What are the criteria for selecting my perfect mate?' to 'What are my motivations for getting married?'.

However, it needs to be said that if and when children arrive on the scene, everything changes. So really, in my opinion, the predominant issue is 'Do I want to have children and how do I want them to be raised?'

>anthropogenic SO2 emissions, and how much of a cooling effect these have on our climate

Anthropogenic SO2 emission as a fringe strategy for global cooling:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-p...

roceastaon Ways of Looking at Frank Lloyd Wright

The Illinois sketch looks magnificent. I hope we build it someday.

roceastaon A Quest to Make a Toaster from Scratch (2011)

Excellent! I wonder how many laws and regulations he (harmlessly) broke during the quest.

roceastaon Fears for tourists in London as acid attacks escalate in recent weeks

I'm reminded of the Mike Tyson quote: "Everyone has a plan until..." So if I saw friend or family being sprayed with an unknown substance I hope I would err on the side of caution rather than exhibiting the learned helplessness that so many of my fellow Brits seem to have succumbed to. I also expect my judgment as to exactly where that line of caution is would be impaired.

roceastaon There Have Always Existed People Who’ve Simply Wanted to Be Alone

>socialization doesn't provide that reward that it does for most other people

Exactly. If one doesn't get the reward then it's too easy to commit errors and not worth the effort to correct them.

However I do think 'spergs' have a better knowledge of the rules than normies. Just as a native speaker doesn't need to know grammar in order to speak correctly, so normies don't need to know the rules of social interaction.

roceastaon An octopus is the closest thing to an alien here on earth

My guess is that animals are indeed conscious. However, without language they aren't capable of doing what human beings (embedded in culture) uniquely do: creating explanations for things.

roceastaon A tall chimney to facilitate heat exchange in the atmosphere

Right, plus it's a 30 metre diameter tube. The bulk of the air moving up the centre would be insulated by the outer layers of air near the inner skin of the tube.

roceastaon A tall chimney to facilitate heat exchange in the atmosphere

I doubt it has to be a good insulator. The air is travelling up the tube at high speed and there isn't time for it to cool significantly before it emerges.

roceastaon Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye to Lectures

http://compleatlecturer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-compleat-...

Historically the original mode of lecturing was simply the transcription by the students of the manuscript the lecturer was reading.

roceastaon Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

There's a huge difference between eliminating known mutations and somehow engineering for enhanced positive traits. The latter requires knowledge that we simply don't have.

Even if we did obtain it, it doesn't follow that Jo Slow would be worse off. We're all of us already better off living in a world with smart people in it. We're obviously better off living in a world with healthier people in it (reduced healthcare costs)

Futhermore it doesn't make sense to be personally jealous of smart people. It seems that being smart can be a significant burden; you're an outsider at best or you veer into mental disorder at worst. Only rarely do smart people flower into creative geniuses, the kind of people who contribute to progress. Most people use their smarts to be more normal than the norm...

roceastaon Jane Austen shaped a vision of personal flourishing that still feels modern

As a young man of low social acumen I particularly benefitted from the TV/film adaptations. The best are faithful to Austen's texts and contain added knowledge from the actors and directors. For instance they show something of how the author's scenes might manifest in terms of speech tone and facial expression. My favourites are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_(1995_TV_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility_(film)

Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are.

Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying to make money; to be famous.

Unconsciously: perhaps trying to project their despair onto the public. By attributing the feeling of despair to an external cause (which they help to create!) they get relief because they don't have to acknowledge and face it internally. Crazy, I know, but ultimately evil is unknowable and it's better not to dig too deep.

Thanks. I should read up a bit. Can you link to any decent info or discussion about allele frequencies?

>Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales.

Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end.

>>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings.

>That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.

Good point! Makes me think of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables. Must take another look. (If I recall correctly these are moral tales rather than pessimism, however.)

Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engenders despair and nihilism imo.

Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near future, and it's raining.

Nothing against LA, but I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. Then I sort of got the idea that the point was to generally make us more humble so that we'd stop creating new technology and thus risking the environment.

Now I think we absolutely need technology to protect the environment. I also wonder what the effect of film-after-film implying how guilty and wicked we are has on the Western psyche. I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery.

That's a pretty subtle case but I don't think it's relevant to the issue of human evolution for at least two reasons:

(1) humans have universal intelligence which gives us the ability to adapt to any environment, (2) human evolution is now swamped by the evolution of memes, not genes. We now decide what to do (including whether to speciate or not)

A more realistic analogy from the animal kingdom would be something like the case of farmed salmon which within a very few generations are less healthy than wild salmon. Also the famous 'mouse utopia' experiment. Both situations where the environment has been artificially manipulated by (human) ideas, just as our present environment is. Mutational loading is one explanation for the results.

So have you considered the issue of mutational load: what's the greatest load we can sustain and what's its present level? Is it responsible, for example, for the declining birth rates in the West or is the explanation for that purely sociological?

I would like to know the answers. However I presume that we'll start by using CRISPR or similar tech to eliminate known genetic diseases like Huntington's and Tay-Sachs. From that precedent should follow the identification and elimination of new and more silent genetic abnormalities. Which is reassuring.

I'm not making a formal claim just sharing my thoughts. Though I do believe at least one evolutionary biologist has written about this: Hamilton W.D. (1999). The hospitals are coming. Narrow roads of gene land (Oxford University Press). Btw the phenomenon of 'mutational meltdown' is a closely related topic and may re-pay googling.

>Our rapidly growing species has only accumulated mutations that don't cause us to die

Hygiene, nutrition and medicine (all good things!) also cause us to remain alive where previously natural selection would not have favoured those bearing too great a mutational load.

I doubt that existing mutations have been fully 'tested'. We know that the majority of mutations are harmful and that the brain is far from fully-developed prior to birth, for instance. Being complex there are many genes which control its development and it seems plausible that the result could be sub-optimal without obvious signs of disease or disability. Other things being equal, we could be slower, less resilient, less fertile, etc, than our 18th century forebears.