197 karma · joined March 7, 2019
Also, they are tools in a much more narrow sense as well, but that is left as an exercise.
The thing is though that those later years of people’s life are often worth very much to those around them.
For instance, what about a four year old whose primary caretaker is their grandmother? Four is a precious year with an outsize effect on the trajectory of someone’s life. The calculations are not so simple then.
Turn off watch history, then only the videos you explicitly like will affect your recommendations.
Bonus Points: Use extension to turn off recommended panel on side of videos, then you only see recommendations when you go to home screen.
What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent.
Further info:
The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'
The notion humans might have rose to supremacy among the apes, not by brainpower alone, but by a combination of brainpower and mirroring, i.e. our almost magical ability/tendency to copy others.
This then, goes the hypothesis, allowed a thicker channel of intellectual transmission, and faster development of species technology, even though Neanderthals had 20% larger brain mass and appear to have made many of the hallmark human discoveries first.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.
The "nasty brutish, and short" bit follows in an elaboration of this condition in the next paragraph.
and THIS is contradicted, if not by the article, then by the book it is reviewing. In particular:
To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our 'natural state'. Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare. In later periods, it's a different story. 'War does not go forever backwards in time,' says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. 'It had a beginning'
Lot of assumptions embedded here, making it pretty remote from tautology.
(1) People want their problems solved
(2) People are indifferent to how their problems are solved
(3) The resolution of people's problems do not conflict with one another
(4) People will have their own AGI
(5) AGI will not cause problems of its own, etc.
Beyond that, I think the question is more an aesthetic choice of "What kind of universe do you want to live in?"
The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.
Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey, and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. Quite apart from being the designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.
Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world— a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.
Scott, James C.. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (p. 37-39). Yale University Press.
"Still, Ms. Barth said there was reason to be optimistic about the fate of the trees.
'They’re meant to resist and even thrive in response to wildfires,' she said. 'If any place is going to be able to withstand this conflagration it’s Big Basin.'"
Has anything from the right similarly been censored for cinematographic reasons alone?
https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/12854428530369085...
Mostly just unflattering cuts of Trump talking...
https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2019/07/06/what-if-ge...
Don't know how to make the shortened archive.is urls.
"Dr Wagner suggests that the most efficient way to deliver it would be for geoengineering aircraft to be loaded with solid sulphur, which they would burn at altitude in their engines to produce SO2. All this would cost around $3.5bn a year (at today’s prices) to deploy."
Granted, this is about altering global temperature a few degrees, not destroying the world. Also, it would take some time, and they would have to contend with the powers that be. Maybe there's another way though...
Edit: and I think remorse is a healthy and useful check on the excess of police violence we've been seeing. I suppose if you think it's all just fine, we're not going to have much common ground for understanding.
+ Police driving down the road with facial recognition devices scanning the faces of all the private individuals walking down the street and allowing them to pull up records on any of them.
One of these things is not like the other (and the second is a current reality!)
edit: or rather, to feel dystopia creep more from the idea of monitoring how police are taught to use surveillance technologies, than from the actual police use of surveillance technologies itself.
https://snew.notabug.io/r/worldnews/comments/h7ghoc/zoom_say...