I propose that the rational act is to investigate approaches to greater than human intelligence which would succeed.
This. I’m flabbergasted this isn’t pursued further.
Jordan
Karma: 1,423
Definitely works better than any supplement or herbal remedy I’ve tried, but I usually don’t feel rested the next day.
Fully agree, especially because I suffer from chronic insomnia =D
All i’m saying is that people attribute evolutionary reasons to things that have many separate causes and are unproven because they think they understand it.
I agree, however, reverse stupidity is not intelligence. You say
the behavioral pattern that polyphasic sleep requires isn’t evolved into our system its just a natural response to the natural light patterns of our world
but this seems like an unsubstantiated claim, just as much as people claiming sleep must be an evolved behavior. I agree that sleep is at least partially behavioral, but it’s unclear to me that there isn’t an evolved component. See this blurb from Wikipedia, which suggests that human sleep patterns are not completely dependent on external stimuli.
I would discount polyphasic sleep as being natural on grounds of my current knowledge of anthropology. As far as I know there are no known human cultures that engage in polyphasic sleep (not counting biphasic sleep). That seems like pretty strong evidence that it isn’t behavioral, it’s physiological, which in turn suggests (but doesn’t guarantee) an evolutionary basis for human sleep patterns. Of course, some amount of human sleep patterns is behavioral, e.g. the siesta.
Great post, great review of the literature.
Where do you get most of your references? Do you wade through the literature, or do you use review papers? I’d love to see a book length compilation with the same density as this post.
you had better start imagining pretty hard and consider every possible unexpected event of that order of improbability, including black swans
With QS you must guard yourself against all local Everett branches. Those branches could conceivably contain black swans, like a few electrons tunneling out of a circuit preventing a CPU from performing correctly. Even that is a 1:1,000,000,000 or more event. But they will not contain something macroscopic.
If I look around and notice no one nearby, I might say “I am only 99% confident that there isn’t anyone near.” If I then sample all local branches (with a device that has a 1:1,000,000 fail rate), killing myself in those branches that no one appears, what is the probability that I will find myself in a branch with another person nearby? I would say about 1%. The presence or absence of another person should behave classically for the small numbers we are talking about. Quantum probabilities are different than my own Bayesian probabilities.
In short, while some failure modes will become more common, others will not.
If I were to build a death machine it would be based on high explosives. I would encase my head in a mound of C4 clay (or perhaps a less stable material). The machine could fail, most likely at the detonator, but it’s difficult to imagine how it could maim me.
It’s difficult for my brain to parse a sentence with ‘alieve’. I guess I’ve watched too many commercials, and my brain associates ‘Aleve’ with ‘relieve’, which has an approximately opposite meaning. I have to mentally substitute ‘alieve’ with something like ‘actually believe’ in order to comfortably read the sentence.
The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick. When I go to view all my comments, the way they are listed there is much more aesthetically pleasing.
I like the new header. The footer is a great improvement.
Mixed feelings about the thumbs up/down icons. I like icons, and they are smaller than the text “Vote up” and “Vote down”, but they actually end up taking more space than the text, because their vertical height is greater. Perhaps they can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon? You could potentially hide all the icons unless you’re mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.
I think an unforeseeable edge case or bug that requires deep refactoring and severely cuts into allotted development time fits the bill for a black swan dead on.
What if the subreddit was an actual reddit subreddit?
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
Can you comment on what the end goal is for all your scholarship, aside from satisfaction?
I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.
It’s ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
You’re right, the guideline is not too well worded. You should probably replace “what you wouldn’t eat raw” with “what would be toxic to eat raw”.
Meat is edible raw. There’s nothing inherently toxic about uncooked meat. Many other foods require cooking to diminish their toxicity (potatoes, grains, legumes). There’s definitely concern about parasites in raw meat, but parasites are not an inherent quality of the meat itself.
There’s actually a whole raw paleo sub-subculture. I wouldn’t recommend it personally, and I’m not keen to try it myself, but it’s there.
I think it’s likely humans are evolved to eat cooked food. The guideline don’t eat anything you wouldn’t eat raw isn’t intended to dissuade people to not eat cooked food, but rather to serve as a heuristic for foods that were probably less commonly eaten by our ancestors. It’s unclear to me how accurate the heuristic is. A big counterexample is tubers. Tubers are widely eaten by modern hunter-gatherers and are toxic when uncooked.
There isn’t really a rigorous definition of the diet. One guideline some people use is that you shouldn’t eat anything you wouldn’t eat raw, which excludes beans. Coffee beans aren’t actually beans though. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people consider coffee not paleo, but there are big names in the paleo scene that drink coffee (Kurt Harris, Art de Vany).
Really, I would say paleo is more a philosophy for how to go about honing in on a diet, rather than a particular diet in and of itself. There are hard lines, like chocolate muffins. I don’t think coffee is close to that line though.
Fluid dynamics. Considering jumping over to computational neuroscience.
I’ve put some serious thought into a paleo coffee shop. It’s definitely on my list of potential extra-academic endeavors if I end up leaving my ivory tower.
Hear, hear. I encourage everyone to buddy up with an academic and use that academic’s library’s access to journals.