For the curious, above is how Crassus died.

TLDR: Got over his skis and mad with power and money. Decides to invade Parthia. Gets wrecked by horse archers. That ends up being typical for Romans, but this was the first-ish time that happened. Some of those captured legionaries may have ended up in China, though it is unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liqian#Lost_Romans_myth

This is a bit dated, but I think the message out of UW is right.

To your point on bosses: Turns out, you can very much bullshit a bullshitter.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” ― Fred Rogers

Not in a 'oh the rich don't so they control the media and so we don't' sorta way. But like in a 'lets educate people on the pluses and minuses, debate a while, and then come to an informed conclusion' sorta way.

Like, deep down, does the average person actually want a stable economy? Because it seems to me that there is an even split historically between the folks that want stability and a little patch of land and weekly rhythms, and the folks that just want to drunkenly burn couches in the street every full moon, or some such thing.

Not to be glib here at all. I like, would actually like to know the answer. Sorry if this comes off the cuff seeming.

Carcinisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation)

The same seems to be true for trees too (arborescence).

There is also the practice of not using anesthesia on infants when undergoing medical surgery.

Anesthesia is hard to do even on adults, harder on children, and very difficult on infants. Not accidentally killing one is quite hard.

So, for a long time we just didn't. I think some countries still don't, but can't remember.

The idea really gets back all the way to philosophy. If you can't remember if you were in pain, did you get hurt? And then you add in the medical problem itself, the duty to do no harm, the difficulties, etc. The conclusion was to just not use pain meds.

Thanks for this. We really need this kind of crazy and levity and whimsy more on the internet.

Speaking of sponsoring, what is the best way to get into contact with them? I'm not really in the market, but I know of some church bake-sales that might be (no joke).

Keep going!

Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.

While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.

Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.

Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA

I've worked with mammals from gerbils to dogs fro research. And, yeah, it is really hard to get a mammal to not to want to reproduce (you can go snip-snip, of course). Humans are not like other mammals, of course, we have 'reason' and the like, but still.

I think that little quote is really doing a lot of load bearing in the fertility crisis debates.

Humans, as I am sure we are all aware, really really like reproducing. The other things that come with it are, of course, the issue that stop us from completing the 'job'. But, even things like access to contraception do nothing to the falling birthrate. It's not the prophylactics, it's the participants.

We talk here about the cost of a kid, and rebuttals about Norway abound. The cultural conditions, and then someone mentions Mongolia or Israel. The support afterwards, and then you talk about Sweden. This structure, that structure, this exception, that exception. How we need a recipe not a single policy to fix the birthrate. And still nothing works.

Suffice to say: We are being really badly abused.

Want to fix the birthrate? It's a whole-ass thing where you have to change the whole-ass culture so much that people actually want to just have kids. I know that seems tautological, but like, it's just true. We just have gotta stop hurting each other.

Tahrir Square, 2011 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square)

The singularity framing is really tough here, right? It comes from black hole physics. Essentially, at the event horizon, the way we know how to do physics stops working, and we rightly conclude that we can't currently say anything about the other side of the event horizon. It is not saying that nothing is occurring there. Matter, time, space, energy, whatever, that still is there (maaaaybe?) and is still undergoing something. It's just that we don't know what that is.

The same is true with using these tech singularity arguments. Like, in the age of superintelligence (if that happens), there will still be thing happening, the dawn will still come every day and the dusk will still too. It's just that we say our current ideas about that new day aren't that applicable to that new age (God, this sounds like a hippie).

However, unlike with black hole physics where we aren't even sure time can exist like we know, we are likely all going to be there in that new superintelligence age. We're still going to be making coffee and remembering bad cartoons from our youth. Like, the analogy to black hole physics breaks down here and maybe does a disservice to us. It's not a stark boundary at the Schwartzchild radius, it is a continuous thing, a messy thing, a volatile thing, and very importantly for the HN userbase, a thing that we control and have the choice to participate in.

We are not passively falling into the AGI world like the gnawing grinding gravity of a black hole.

This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it.

TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions:

1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored.

2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral.

If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.

Then I sat in LA traffic all day long in early September in 100+ heat, and I looked over and saw some old bitty in a very nice Bentley. Not a drop of sweat on her, couldn't hear a horn honking if she tried, music was probably perfect quality, seat was probably massaging her the whole ride home.

That's when I finally got it. It's not the engine that mattered to her.

But, I think it gets to a deeper issue with education.

Like, the cynic in me will say that the student learned a new tactic, one that got rewarded, and they are likely to repeat it over and over.

But the teacher, the hopeful part of me, the one that wants growth and striving, that part of me says that the student learned a lesson and is unlikely to repeat that hack. That they got dragged about, told a lot of very tough stories, saw the consequences, and then saw the light, and they will never do it again. And that experience taught them more than the class ever could about life - a much more valuable lesson in the end.

I hope that is what occurred. I think that's probably what the many admins told themself what would happen. I have worked with Princeton grads though, and it is much more likely that nothing of the sort occurred.

Most 'elite' grads think they pulled it over on the school, like they always have, that they were cleverer, somehow. That they 'won', when they really lost and learned worse than nothing, they learned the wrong thing. And then they get out into the real world and they get a successful bigjob and a nice little manageable coke habit and a not as manageable addiction or two. Then a spouse when that time comes and that other line says something no-one really wants, but not with a person they respect or that respects them. And by the time the second kid is done teething, the divorce is done and they think they are 'free' again. So they dive off a cliff in some azure water as the grandkids aren't well taken care of by expensive as hell help.

The ayahuasca vomit dries on the corner of their mouth as they check their actually-personal account for the half dozen 39th birthday wishes, they wonder where it all went wrong. They decide that it was others, not themselves, surely, that can't be true, because Dad was an asshole and Mom really wasn't ever 'there'-there when you think about it.

Because they are still trying to pull one over, to be cleverer, to be the 'good' one at whatever life is in their mind: A long fucking ladder covered in degrees and accolades and tears and jackasses. They live in the derivative.

So, look, don't be butthurt about a jackass undergrad that is too blind and treadmilled to ruin their own life.

But do be butthurt that the system is too fucking tired and old to really deeply care anymore about the young and not just hurting their 'future' - as if that could ever be measured by only a GPA.

https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp...

Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he goes over and over again that non-violence is not unaggressive. It is typically quite militant when done well.

Non violence is a tactic, one that is typically better at achieving results than violence, as it tends to change the other side that is violent to adjust down to non violence as well. Like getting a drunk to be quieter by whispering to them (Note: that is a poor analogy).

Rick's book is just so very good and my poor internet comment can't possibly do it justice. He convinced me that the Civil Rights movement is so big because it gave the US a brand new tool in conflicts. It's not just violence or submission anymore.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121490

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