Good article. The entirety of the "epidemic" is explained by:
- Expanding diagnostic criteria for an illness with no mechanistic explanation
- Increasing access to mental healthcare
- Overmedicalization of traits that aren't causing actual dysfunction, driven by cultural changes in parenting
- Rampant non-reproducibility and pseudoscience in the field of psychology
- Weird online trends of self-diagnosis where mental illness provides clout
- Anti-vaccine paranoia trying to find some kind of mysterious epidemic to pin on vaccines
Of course, a war on authentic neurotoxins is warranted even if autism rates are declining. But only in a manner informed by science and sober cost/benefit analysis.
Seemed potentially like a new kernel, rather than a new OS, and thus potentially a replacement for the Android kernel one day.
But that would mean all of the Android SDKs would need to be abstracted away from Linux, but it seems like they abandoned some of that effort and are mostly just emulating Android on Fuschia for now.
NFTs have been extremely intertwined with money laundering. The more legitimate and interesting the original NFT, the more plausible the fictitious asset inflation will seem. The extent to which such a thing involves the actual participation of the artist probably varies.
> Complex behavior between interconnected systems, out of the purview of the formal language (OS + database + network + developer + VM + browser + user + web server)
Not really, some components like components have a lot of properties that’s very difficult to modelize. Take latency in network, or storage performance in OS.
Stross is at the cutoff of being a baby boomer. He thinks like one, and it is abundantly clear from his Malthusian preoccupations and overall cynical anti-establishment views regarding a system that he has personally benefited tremendously from.
Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.
The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.
If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.
He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...
His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.
If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.
There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
> you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions
Of course. That is why Trump received the highest voter support in counties with the lowest levels of immigration.
After governors in southern states sent migrants north, support for immigration evaporated, just in time for election season. Causing swings of like +20 for Trump in staunch blue states like NJ and IL. If that study were accurate, then those stunts should have resulted in an increase in support for immigration.
"the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals"
This appears to be you saying "look what they made me do".
Really not saying anything particularly profound that wasn't said a hundred times by the liberal and center-left intelligentsia after the arrival of Trumpism.
They correctly noted that many people feel left behind by globalization, whereas those in the professional managerial class don't feel as threatened. Liberals have long been fretting about the viability of multiculturalism since the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, and before. And the particular rise of aggressive identity politics has put the public image of left-wing people in the trash, as they are now associated with speech police and people obsessed with identity issues in ways that are often tinged with hate or which aren't related to the material interests of anyone.
All of this has been said ad nauseam in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The New Republic, WaPo, NYT, and even NPR... all of which could be fairly criticized as epicenters of the very problem they have also critiqued.
Pretending like pointing out any of this a problem is a succinct demonstration of why the Right keeps winning.
> winget search zed
Name Id Version Match Source
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Zed Preview ZedIndustries.Zed 0.208.4-pre Moniker: zed winget
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
I agree that there is a "there" there. But I'm not confident in the ability of our culture to define it in a mature way, or use the knowledge responsibly. I don't want to see therapy culture continually creeping into the mainstream. I don't want people to start medicalizing the traits of those in their families and social circles.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
Then how do we know that Freud was "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "just made up" or "a fraud"?
It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?
What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.
Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Mining helium-3 on the Moon and then returning it to Earth ultimately seems more expensive than using the resources on the Moon directly. For instance, by placing quatum computers there, or fusion reactors there, or whatever.
Would be interesting to see the economics of the various hypothetical business models.
The direct alternative is to simply make more of it in nuclear fission reactors. (WaPo fails to even mention the option?!) It scales well, as would be needed for scaling up nuclear fusion power.
The current method is neutron capture of deuterium, but you'd get much larger amounts, fast, using lithium; particularly if it's isotopically enriched. Either way you get radioactive tritium, which decays to helium-3 over a 14-year half-life. The tritium is what fusion reactors want.
It's regrettable we've let China establish a world monopoly over lithium enrichment. This is yet another thing they could have a large starting advantage on, with their immediate access to lithium-6 at scale.
Could you elaborate on this? Enriching lithium sounds much more feasible than setting up a moon base, but it still sounds like it would be economically infeasible.
First, am I understanding correctly that you aren't talking about DT fuel, but are instead suggesting that we use the tritium to produce helium-3 by letting it decay? This sounds extremely inefficient, and it also seems like it would cause supply chain issues where power production relies on helium-3 that we started producing decades ago. This would mean that the infrastructure we set up wouldn't be useful for decades, and that if production stopped for a few months there would be a helium-3 shortage decades later. Lunar helium-3 extraction would have a shorter feedback delay, making it less vulnerable to latent shortages and more useful as a medium-term power source.
Second, isn't lithium-6 a rare material? Lithium is abundant, but brine and rock deposits that are cheap and easy to extract are quite limited. Also IIRC something like 92% of it is lithium-7 which is much less useful in enrichment. And that's not even considering the geopolitical factors you mentioned. I'm obviously not saying that tapping into harder-to-access deposits and filtering for lithium-6 would be more difficult than sifting lunar regolith for helium-3, but it still sounds extremely difficult.
The article is talking about kilogram-scale amounts of helium-3, so lithium abundance (billions of tons) isn't remotely a factor.
> "there would be a helium-3 shortage decades later"
There's a conceptual misunderstanding: radioactive decay is continuous—there's no latency of waiting. You get a stream of decay product right from the start.
- Expanding diagnostic criteria for an illness with no mechanistic explanation
- Increasing access to mental healthcare
- Overmedicalization of traits that aren't causing actual dysfunction, driven by cultural changes in parenting
- Rampant non-reproducibility and pseudoscience in the field of psychology
- Weird online trends of self-diagnosis where mental illness provides clout
- Anti-vaccine paranoia trying to find some kind of mysterious epidemic to pin on vaccines
Of course, a war on authentic neurotoxins is warranted even if autism rates are declining. But only in a manner informed by science and sober cost/benefit analysis.
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