I am actively researching this friction and others like it. I would love it if you happened to have recommendations for literature that 3rd parties can use to corroborate your experience (I’ve found some, but this is harder to uncover than I expected as I’m not in the field)
This appears to coincide with the rapid rise of my wealthier friends taking extended holidays in Croatia. It wasn’t the cool thing to do, now suddenly it’s a must-see place. I didn’t get the memo about that, apparently. I wonder if it’s having an impact or if it’s just a local phenomena that feels far larger to me
Not to mention that we really are much more similar to chimps than they’re giving us credit for. If we ate a relatively low calorie, high protein diet, and maintained an active lifestyle, we’d all be pretty damn muscular and lean. Not roided out muscular, but far more so than I think the average person expects. Our body composition is significantly determined by relatively near-zero fitness demands in modern life and an overabundance of the wrong kinds of calories
Yes just 150+ years ago most field work was done by hand, including moving rocks from fields, plowing with an animal (and a lot of human strength too). Just clearing new roads was mostly manual work.
(Sure, you could blow up things, but then you still had to clear the bits and level the road. Yes horses existed, but mostly it was just people.)
Every activity took more physical effort, everything was maintained manually. Even if you were a bookkeeper, it was all hand written, and any math was with a slide rule or on paper, or in your head. It takes more calories to move a slide rule than work a calculator, more to write than type.
And all the while, the muscles of the arm, and the upper body are being used as you press against that paper. Moving over a page meant arm and shoulder and back and more got a bit of workout. Every little bit added up.
Now we often type without moving our upper arms or shoulders. Without a change in back or upper torso movement.
It takes more calories to read than just sit still, more calories to think deeply than not.
Even going to the bathroom meant putting on boots and coat, and walking to the outhouse.
Yes indeed. People 100 years ago were more or less jacked on average from necessity alone. Better or worse I don't know but I do like me some menial labor on the reg.
As Bitcoin increases in value, the reward for breaking into wallets grows. Satoshi’s is the ultimate target here, followed by wallets used to burn currencies. Some of these look like they’d only be brute forceable and that takes more time and energy than we think is plausible, but I suspect people will find the system isn’t as secure as expected in some weird and wacky ways as this bounty grows.
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?
I have been thinking of a project extremely similar to this for a totally different purpose. It’s lovely to see something like this. Thank you for sharing it, inspiring
Yeah, where Hossenfelder is getting more and more dramatic (although I can still appreciate it) she has a refreshingly calm and intelligent tone. Highly recommended indeed.
She has taken to click bait -- e.g., using the word "shocking" and showing pictures with here mouth open (actually she can't really open her mouth, but you get the idea).
Which I share. It’s haunted me for a long time, but I’ve accepted it. Much like Sabine.
We can’t predict the future but we do not have free will as most people think we have, imho. Many of those separated brain cases seem to confirm this stance.
We can evaluate various courses of action, and pick one based on that evaluation. I think something like that is what most people think of as having free will. If we discover that evaluation function is deterministic, it shouldn't change our attitudes to it imo. This is how we normally think of the past: what we did in the past is now determined, and yet we were just as free then as we are in the present. And we presently either suffer or enjoy the consequences of those past decisions, so we better take our present decisions reasonably seriously.
In general I'm quite sceptical of taking physical theories as guidance for life, even more so speculative interpretations of physical theories. Physics can tell us, probabilistically, how relatively simple systems will evolve in time, but most events in our life are way beyond what it can predict, so that should caution us against extrapolating its concepts to these more complicated phenomena. We don't know what conceptual innovations might be required to have a fully coherent and precise account of them, or if that is even possible. The best insight we can get on our life is to acutally live it and reflect on those experiences.
Other considerations are that we don't currently have a fundamental physical theory, since general relativity and the standard model don't work together. Even when they do apply, the equations can't be solved exactly for systems of more than two particles. Everything else involves approximations and simplifications, and in fact even the concept of particle is only valid in a non-relativistic approximation. That suggests to me that physical theories are best thought of at the moment as tools that have a limited domain of effectiveness, though of course within that domain they're extremely effective.
Sure, but if someone finds themselves feeling incredibly defeated by the thought, then how can we call it productive philosophy? I went too far down this rabbit hole about 8 years ago, and built up a strong mindset of all the things I wanted to be that I couldn't because I wasn't born in the right circumstances. Much better to feel like I can absolutely be those things at least in spirit, and maybe talk to other people about it and find people who are willing to see the unexpected parts of me.
Yes, we have enough accurate theories now that we can predict parts of the future with incredible accuracy in ways that weren't possible 100+ years ago, but we don't have a bulletproof theory of everything, much less a bulletproof theory of everything about humans.
Championing superdeterminism is like being the smart alec who says they can predict anything if you give them enough initial context. Sure, now go make risky investments that will only go up.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle itself shows that it is not worth fretting too much about superdeterminism.
We will never be able to replace every theory that uses probabilities with ones that don't.
Quantum mechanics itself is actually completely deterministic. It's just certain interpretations, like Copenhagen, that unnecessarily introduce nondeterminism. The Many Worlds interpretation is one that doesn't have that property.
In any case, I don't think determinism and free will have much to do with each other. Eg a classically random fair coin is non-deterministic, but can hardly be said to have free will.
In the other direction, a Turing machine is completely deterministic, but in general you can't predict what it does (without running it.)
If you want to bring up quantum mechanics, I think the no-cloning theorem is more important: no one can learn everything about you in order to 100% simulate and predict you. (Which is what you'd need for the Turing machine. And humans are at least as complicated as Turing machines.)
Another concept in this sort of realm is "Assembly Theory" by Lee Cronin. He's onto the right track with his "Causality Chain" concept, but it blows my mind he hasn't bought into the idea that with entanglement the entire chain might be a "signal carrier". He's 90% onto the right track. He just needs to realize the causality chain is "alive" at least in terms or probability waves, but as a chemist and not a Physicist he's probably afraid to delve too deeply into the realms of anything that smacks of retro-causation, even if it ever entered his mind.
I’ve been thinking about building precisely that sort of tech tree for a while, then extending it forwards in time to see if we can guess at how to work backwards from hypothetical technologies to where we are or if we can see obvious gaps
I really like what they’re going for but I’m disappointed in the outcome (so far). Then again, Apple has always managed to have a glaring oversight in design somewhere — “just hold your phone differently!”
