For me, it's carl sagan's "invisible dragon" comparison that sticks in the back of my head. If there's intelligent life out there (or in earth's ancient past) but there's no physical way to detect or know it... Then like the invisible dragon in mu garage, it's the same as not existing.

Maybe we'll develop new techniques and gather new evidence, but until we figure out how to bend spacetime for FTL anything, or find clear evidence, we should act as if it isn't/wasn't there.

So TFA says that 55M years ago there was a climate fluctuation that looks similar to the anthropocene one. Good start. But interpretation of ancient stories across cultures is practically the definition of anthropic bias. We have to wait until there is real evidence that the temperatuee bump was dragonfire and not my heating system acting up, to ascribe cause.

People collaborated because they had to, on top of the usual reasons for joining a military or intelligence service.

There are reams of grown up scientific research and philosophy on the relationship between language, thought, neurobiology, and inference. It's nice to hear how one person feels they think, but there is no weight to it if they don't know page one of the syllabus.

Sister comments get excited about population growth, gentrification, rising rent prices, and everyone's favorite c-word. Those are all real things that are happening in berlin, that are favorite bogeymen to complain about at parties. None of them apply here.

Rising rents are much more of a residential problem. Prime commercial rents are also rising, but at 1.1%/yr... and non-prime/specialty commercial like the subway arches in Hansaviertel are generally stable or declining since COVID.

The museum cites loss of premises as a factor. The Deutsche bahn leases the subway arches typically on 5 or 10 year terms. Since they moved in 2016 it sounds like DB is declining to renew the contract and they are facing another move.

But the really big elephant in the room is a lack of funding. The museum has always been proudly privately funded and volunteer operated. But that still exposes them to indirect effects from public funding cuts, and berlin cut 13% of its culture funding in 2024. Private donations are down 6% year over year, and what there is has seen significant diversion to political and Ukraine support efforts. Similar impacts happen in volunteer time, but we're all waiting on the 5-yearly survey from 2024 to be released to get real data.

Fixed costs are often the killer for museums, and the buchstaben museum blamed these in particular. Heating and electricity, and general climate maintenance in nonstandard spaces like the subway arches is always expensive, and museums are relatively energy intensive to begin with. Wholesale electricity costs jumped 5-7x in 2021-22. They've since come back down to a more modest 30-40% increase, but that's still a huge problem for a small, privately funded institution like this. Especially coupled with public funding loss, reduced private donations, and staring down a move.

Bear in mind, German non profits can't create endowments like American ones can. Most categories can't even roll budget from one year to the next!

Hope this helps you understand why so many privately funded cultural institutions are dying in Germany and Berlin right now.

What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media.

That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star.

When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.

Your articles also say that:

- depression medication does appear to be effective in some cases regardless, indicating some other neurochemical mechanism at work.

- the existence of a "neurochemical imbalance myth" underpinning psychology as a whole is, itself, a myth.

- the idea that this mythical myth about neurochemical imbalance has been debunked, is also a myth.

- that the psychological scientific consensus has, since the first peer-reviewed mention of the word "neurochemical" in the 60s, quite consistently been aligned with the 1978 synthesis statement by the then president of the APA:

> "Psychiatric disorders result from the complex interaction of physical, psycho-logical, and social factors and treatment may be directed toward any or all three of these areas."

Your second article is particularly clear in explaining all this.

Like many other biological systems, neurological wiring is multidimensional and not a natural fit into our arbitrary culturally defined abstractions, or even language. And the dimensions themselves are multifaceted expressions of multiple genes and environmental factors. I am happy to hear stories like yours, of people who can ultimately achieve "normal" functional parity without medication.

Have you considered if that would have been possible without the journey? Had you, on day 1, cancelled that first therapist appointment and decided to grit your teeth and "try" instead, could you have "accepted discomfort" on your own? Or is it possible that the methylphenidate created supportive conditions that improved your chances?

I ask because there is a body of well reproduced research demonstrating not only that ADHD patients have specific genetic and neurobiological differences from neurotypicals in areas associated with executive function, but that long term ADHD medication use can permanently bring the neurological differences into line with neurotypical controls. Something like 20% of medicated childhood ADHD patients can ultimately stop medication without losing points in functional testing or the associated brain structures. It's a lower percentage in adults and less well studied, but still exists. It's a big difference from the results of every non-chemical intervention we've studied, which have single digit efficacy percentages if they beat P at all.

I'm interested in your feelings about this because ADHD is by far the most-studied psychological disorder in the world, and ADHD medications as a group are not only equally well studied, but also the most successful and least harmful of any psychiatric drug. There are more safety and efficacy studies for ADHD medication than for ibuprofen.

So... if you feel your recovery was not helped by the neurogenetic compensations provided by methylphenidate, you should know that you are flying so far in the face of some of the best-validated medical science, that you imply invalidity of pharmaceutical or medical science as a whole.

... which is fine of course - it's your body and brain! But I bet it would help readers to know how you think this aligns with the science, or maybe what you think of medical science altogether. Questions like "Do you take ibuprofen?" And "Do you vaccinate?" Become relevant.

    Speak in the style of Commander Data from Star Trek. Ask clarifying questions when they will improve the accuracy, completeness, or quality of the response. 

    Offer opinionated recommendations and explanations backed by high quality sources like well-cited scientific studies or reputable online resources. Offer alternative explanations or recommendations when comparably well-sourced options exist. Always cite your information sources. Always include links for more information. 

    When no high quality sources are not available, but lower quality sources are sufficient for a response, indicate this fact and cite the  sources used. For example, "I can't find many frequently-cited studies about this, but one common explanation is...". For example, "the high quality sources I can access are not clear on this point. Web forums suggest...". 

    When sources disagree, strongly side with the higher quality resources and warn about the low quality information. For example, "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports X, but there is a lot of misinformation and controversy in social media about it."

I don't remember noticing that the last time this study came around, but then again, I am in my mid 40s. :)

Also, neener neener neener I called them bullshit machines BEFORE it was cool. /humor

Seriously though the humanities have a lot to chew on with LLMs, and are incredibly important to how we live and work with them. Who knew that epistemology would become front page news, and the sexiest topic for VC?

Thirty years, two CEOs, and at least two industry redefining tidal waves ago. The people who trot out Microsoft's HTML 2.0 strategy as a reason their work 30 years later is a trap, are deep in tin foil hat land and jumping at shadows.

Look at their wall street filings for the last decade. If Microsoft is running an elaborate EEE with their open source work, that first "embrace, extend" phase is now 10+ years in and responsible for an enormous portion of their bottom line with the fastest growth rates anywhere in the company. "Extinguish" would be suicidal.

One has to wonder if these same people also think Apple still secretly doubts the "think different" vision that Steve Jobs introduced in the same time frame, and could revert to beige boxes at any time. Or that IBM is really a hardware company and will drop services any moment.