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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 10 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.

    In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.

    Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.

    Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.


  • That’s exactly the answer given to you above - the line is murky and grey, there is no clear point that everyone agrees is the right point.

    In such a circumstance, the right answer is open to interpretation, and the right solution for a society is to accept that the best person to make that decision is the person involved.

    If you want my answer, it’s when brain cells develop enough to start looking like a functioning brain (somewhere around 16-20 weeks). Before that it’s just a brain dead mass of cells regardless of how it looks.

    Clearly you have a different moment, and that’s fine, but you don’t get to ignore that the issue is open to interpretation. Otoh, I admit that both sides are guilty of trying to railroad a “simple” interpretation as the only right answer, it’s always tempting to force a simple answer and declare the problem solved, it’s harder to let people decide for themselves what the right answer is, but that’s the right thing to do when we as a society cannot reach a consensus, and we certainly don’t seem to have a consensus on this one.






  • I disagree, they are not talking about the online low trust sources that will indeed undergo massive changes, they’re talking about organisations with chains of trust, and they make a compelling case that they won’t be affected as much.

    Not that you’re wrong either, but your points don’t really apply to their scenario. People who built their career in photography will have t more to lose, and more opportunity to be discovered, so they really don’t want to play silly games when a single proven fake would end their career for good. It’ll happen no doubt, but it’ll be rare and big news, a great embarrassment for everyone involved.

    Online discourse, random photos from events, anything without that chain of trust (or where the “chain of trust” is built by people who don’t actually care), that’s where this is a game changer.




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzT. rex
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.

    I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.

    I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
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    2 months ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.


  • Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

    Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.