> Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
It is worthy of note that John Polidori's model for a vampire was, in fact, Lord Byron.
Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.
What, you weren't alive when the last mass extinction event occurred? Why didn't you communicate or at least write the last handful down or something? Aren't you smarter than a chicken?
It's funny that you think we know what happened to humans anymore than a chicken knows what happened to chickens.
Look that’s the thing: we know about mass extinction events. So we can use these to extrapolate.
A 10+ kilometer wide asteroid will most likely cause global mass extinction, by blocking sunlight and collapsing ecosystems. That’s how the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago.
Such events are estimated to occur roughly once every 100-200 million years. That’s not fiction that’s science. If we get hit by one of these we’re probably gonna all die.
But we never had a robot revolution. That’s why anything about it belongs in the realm of fiction.
That's the whole point of the Turkey illusion. From the Turkey's point of view, it is safe and fed. It has never witnessed other Turkeys being killed, it has never been killed before.
If you are the turkey, it's difficult to predict your death and all the available evidence appears to support the hypothesis that you will not be suddenly slaughtered. If you are a very smart turkey, you might notice that the farmer is sharpening his knives the day before, and reach a strange hypothesis, but generally if you are the turkey, you don't know you are the turkey.
We are in a situation where we have never gone extinct before, never faced a threat like this before. It's difficult to know if we are in the same position as the turkey.
The frame is not from our view. It is from that of this singular chicken who has only ever known its keeper's care. As that chicken, we simply do not know if Christmas will ever come.
The collapse of civilizations has happened many times. Today, all of humanity is bound tighter than ever before. In the latter half of the last century, we were on the brink of nuclear war.
New things are happening under the sun every day. If we were that exceptionally smart chicken you describe, then we have reason to expect Christmas.
Thank you for pointing this out. It’s a good catch.
But if we’re starting to discuss basics... As firm Popperian I am definitely not a proponent of induction.
However comparing us with a chicken is highly problematic to begin with.
I would argue that anyone using the Russell Chicken as a reason to fear AI is making a category error.
They are treating intelligence as a process of induction (collecting data to predict the future) rather than explanation (creating new ideas to solve problems).
The stupid chicken had a bad theory about reality and it got killed for it. But we’re humans that have problem solving techniques not chicken.
We can create hypotheses and test these. Like asking ourselves why we find dinosaurs. Then we create a hypothesis and try to falsify it… the scientific process. That’s not what the chicken did.
If it was a smart (human-like) chicken living on a farm with many other chickens (more realistic if you ask me), it might have come up with a theory about humans and would fail to falsify it every time a friend of hers died.
Suppose a civilization (but not species) ending event happens.
The industrial revolution was fueled (literally) by easy-to-extract fossil fuels. Do we have enough of those left to repeat the revolution and bootstrap exploitation of other energy sources?
I love the question; James Lovelock came up with Gaia Theory, the idea that Earth was a self-regulating system, illustrated by a warming Earth evolving flowers which reflect more sunlight so they can stay cooler, and a cooling Earth evolving flowers which absorb more sunlight so they can stay warmer, which act to cool/warm the planet (sortof; IIRC). In one of his last books before he died (written at age ~100) he suggests that the warming and expanding Sun means there isn't enough time for Earth to re-evolve sentient life again.
We used oil that seeped out of the surface, and coal that was accessible by pick and shovel. That's become much harder to find now, we have to make floating oil rigs and drill kilometers under the Gulf of Mexico to extract oil, and ship it internationally to refine it. There's no way primitive people could do that again.
Buckminster Fuller was thinking about this 75 years ago when he came up with the idea of 'energy slaves', nicely illustrated by this online comic[2] about how much oil energy we use to keep modern comfortable civilisation going.
So I guess it depends how far the collapse goes! And whether there is heavy farming and earth moving machinery still around and the resources to fill them with biodiesel to pick up from existing farms and mines, and if there are nearly working industries to feed electricity into, or if we have to fall back to making charcoal from wood, or if we're back to a few remote tribes a few generations removed from anyone who lived in a high civilization with no knowledge of any of it or the languages used to write the rotting textbooks.
298,000 of those years didn't have toilet paper. It was utterly impossible for a single person to "end humanity" even 200 years ago; now, the president can do it in minutes by launching a salvo of nukes. Comparing the present moment to the hunter/gatherer days is preposterous.
For pretty much every single person you or I personally know, that would be the equivalent of the end of humanity.
Let’s not nitpick here. Worldwide human suffering and tragedy is equivalent to the end of humanity for most.
We can sit here and armchair while in the most prosperous, comfortable era of human history. But we also have to recognize that this era is a blip of time in history. That is a lot of data showing humanity surviving sure. But it’s also a very small amount of data showing any kind of life most would want to live in.
I like it but it's not amazing. And I've seen it ... 4 or 5 or more times. It's just such an easy watch.
I think the deal is that the emotional beats in it work so well that the plot can be set aside. It's also not a problem that those beast aren't particularly clever or imaginative.
It's like a jump scare in a horror movie or Old Yeller. Even when you know what's going to happen you still startle or shed a tear. Honestly even when you know you're being manipulated and think it's cheesy you still get that response.
The weird thing to me about Shawshank is that it's not a monster out of the dark or a dog getting killed. It's not a cathartic thing but something else.
It's good for a single watch. I don't get how people can rewatch it without groaning non-stop. We get it, he's smarter than the warden and the warden hates him for it, prison sucks, and Morgan Freeman can make even the lamest cliches sound "deep".
@padjo said it well. Schmaltzy and manipulative. Freeman's folksiness is eye-rollingly clichéd. I cringed throughout the film the first time I tried to watch it, and I haven't lasted more than a few minutes every other time I've tried.
Their work includes pedagogical research to develop a consistent terminology which abandons lots of outdated and confusing terms such as you mention. No more ambiguous words like "project" or "space" or "support".
Their research also includes using endosciopic cameras to directly observe the vocal tracts of professional singers.
I've not actually trained with them, I just like their research and approach.
Check local/national advice. In many places it is officially advised to take vitamin D supplements, especially in winter or if you have a darker skin tone.
My solution: auto-export to a folder then sync using your preferred method. Use the betterbibtex plugin to rename and move all necessary files. Fiddly to set up, but reliable once it's working.
Not OP and this is mere anecdata, but on a modest several-years-old ThinkPad, Zotero was slow when my single collection started pushing over 1,000 papers, most of which had PDFs attached. Starting up would take many seconds (half a minute?) and heavy operations such as bulk-renaming would take minutes. But for day-to-day use (adding references to my collection via a browser plugin) it was fine.
Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary.
On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...
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