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> 16. That sleep, that probably evolution first made a low-energy mode so we don’t starve so fast and then layered on some maintenance processes, but the effect is that we live in a cycle and when things aren’t going your way it’s comforting that reality doesn’t stretch out before you indefinitely but instead you can look forward to a reset and a pause that’s somehow neither experienced nor skipped.

This is pretty understated. We live in a strangely beautiful world such that our experience of time is shaped like so due to the interplay of energy on the surface of the earth

Many days I worry that HN has lost its humanity and then something with a bit of levity and weird shows up and I am relieved.

I experience a similar sensation. I even feel it for my own self. Sometimes I go weeks, months just thinking about AI, productivity, hustling, taxes etc and then suddenly something with a bit of humanity and weird shows up and I am relieved. It's not completely lost (for now).

Opposite reaction, this article reads like it was written by a care bear.

I'm thankful that I don't actually have to read the whole thing.

Lots of religious over- and undertones going on, I assume that's where you get the vibe

would you care to explain exactly what gives you the impression of religious undertones ?

The invocation of Gregory of Nyssa, for one.

I dunno, I associate Gregory of Nyssa with the unequivocal rejection of slavery.

it seems very clear to me that the inclusion of a singular religious reference does not justify labelling an entire excerpt as having religious over/undertones ... not sure what im missing

2. This is "regression tends to the mean" which my dad used to say with a smile when we discussed his excellent degree and his offspring's (including my) average degree.

I don't think it's regression to the mean. It looks more like mutation-selection balance.

If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again.

[0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad

In hindsight, this explanation was a bit sparse, so here is the actual text from TFA:

> your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have

This is a nearly word-for-word explanation of mutation-selection balance, e.g. check out the Wikipedia explanation:

> an equilibrium in the number of deleterious alleles in a population that occurs when the rate at which deleterious alleles are created by mutation equals the rate at which deleterious alleles are eliminated by selection

Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon about, well, measurements that regress to the mean. In the given quote, the average baby isn't regressing to the mean, the average baby is carrying a higher number of deleterious alleles and is less fit across the board. TFA then describes fitter babies having more babies themselves, which is irrelevant to regression to the mean but an integral part of mutation-selection balance.

But he does say the mother is a total babe doesn't he? Well "hopefully hot"

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This is a great post. I’m thankful that many of the comments here reminded me why this website’s comments section is not worth reading, ceaseless negativity. Not wasting any more time reading them!

But I think HN’s comment section is the only one worth reading!

You are free now.

How ironic.

50/50 for me. I've had significantly impactful reads here, leading to experiments with new IDEs, to-do systems, ADHD management techniques, and insight into political ideologies I disagree with.

Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.

This one in particular stood out:

> we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.

Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?

Sounds better than human extinction from bioweapons.

Okay, neither of these are really what I wanted to think about on Thanksgiving though...I am not thankful for either.

I'm thankful humans aren't extinct yet!

A hopefully tongue-in-cheek entry, or I certainly hope so. Or the guy (or lady) who wrote this is an arrrr ZeroCovidCommunity regular on reddit.

I found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.

Right? At least we can be thankful that there is no US holiday devoted to this sort of thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065955

What specifically disturbed you?

Same. Not quite sure what it was going for.

seems to be a trivia list of things the author thinks about. not sure why its even listed here.

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I know absurdist humor isn't for everyone, but man it cracks me up. So bravo to the strange and the weird, and that it holds this crazy place together!

Thanks to the author, I needed this today.

Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!

"Cheddar cheese and pickle. A Vincent Motor-sickle. Slap Bang Tickle"

- Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1

Hadn't thought about this one previously ... "That if you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you’re in three dimensions"

Another option is endo/exocytosis. No rule that says the path between ingress and egress has to be open all at once.

I can recommend this nonfiction book on the topic: https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd

We are basically a donut.

But WAAAY less tasty

Eating cardamom as I read this. My go to spice to keep mouth busy and flavorful and stay away from junk food.

Went down the rabbit hole.

And having found: https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ #18

Can't agree more. Thank you

This whole thing reads strange. I’m not thankful for any of the presented reasons to be thankful.

Not thankful for democracy? Dentistry? Clean water? Peroxisomes? Sleep? Air travel safety?

Who is thankful for sleep? It’s a biological necessity that robs us of a significant portion of our lives. I’d much rather be able to meditate for half an hour and reap the mental reset.

Not even the end of slavery?

Not even cardamom?

Fit can mean hot in English slang

Will someone please explain 14 on Gregory of Nyssa?

Slavery is a sin, don’t sin, that’s the gist of it.

He lived around the year 400, so pretty progressive for his time.

How did you reach the conclusion that the author specifically meant this part of Gregory of Nyssa's religious thinking? It could just as likely be that the author has come to realise that Gregory of Nyssa was correct in his arguments for the Christian Trinity...? I am just wondering. The author's statements are very entertaining, but they do not seem to be articulated as objects for detailed scrutiny...

I had never thought about the puzzle-piece solution to the 2D digestive tract problem before. That’s amazing! Maybe being 2D wouldn’t be so bad after all.

> That sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit to reproduction, it’s a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with success.

Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors!

For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.

Reads like the canon of The Neoliberal Elite Human Capital secular religion. Banal, a-historical, and assumes a lot of things as certain just because.

Ah, man, thank you writing this. I read through bits of it and found his writing really crazy making, and have had the same response to other articles of his I've seen on here. Your response sums it up perfectly.

Yeah! Screw you, cobalt-60! And I'm sure glad I'm not two-dimensional, but maybe I could poop through my mouth like a sea anemone.

People say that 2-dimensional life is impossible because it's impossible to make a 2-dimensional digestive system.

But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way to let food pass through, and then reconnect.

I think 2-dimensional life is impossible because physical things exist in all dimensions. As spacetime is already 4 dimensions, no physical thing at all exists in 2 dimensions, thus no life either

Oh, that's just trivia about the contingent universe. You wouldn't say it was impossible for Carthage to have conquered Rome, would you? It just didn't, by chance, happen.

I assume the contingent universe is where my existence happens and thus a potential thankfulness should be placed on. I'm for example not gonna be thankful we're not in a higher-dimension universe, because my experience would likely be unfathomably different and things might look very different from there.

As history shows, Rome did win, so I wonder just how you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was possible) Was there another universe where the first apes that would later become Carthagians found more bananas, thus had higher population and resources and won this way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this counterfactual history :D

In our timeline, the Cunctator, having provoked the Second Punic War through diplomatic maneuverings in his old age, held Hannibal at bay in Italy for over a decade while weakening him, until Scipio forced Hannibal to return to Africa, where the Romans defeated him.

But, in another timeline, a mosquito stung the Cunctator shortly after war broke out, giving him malaria, which was then endemic in Italy. He would have recovered if not for another piece of bad luck: clumsy from the fever, he stumbled on the way to the latrine and cracked his skull on a rock, dying instantly. The Cunctator's friend and rival Gaius Flaminius was given command of the Roman forces, who attempted direct confrontation with Hannibal's forces, suffering a series of increasingly disastrous defeats until finally Hannibal marched his elephants into Rome and put the Roman Senate to the sword.

The same mosquito hatched in our timeline, but mosquitoes are not strong fliers, and the air currents were slightly different in our timeline, so it instead stung the Cunctator's slave, who got malaria but survived. Air currents are of course chaotic¹, and the divergence between the timelines has been traced to the thermal emission of a single photon from a warm rock thirteen years earlier in Karnataka, resulting in the rock being slightly cooler and producing an almost undetectably smaller thermal updraft that night.

How our universe could have ended up two-dimensional is a much more difficult question.

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¹ https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/25/387/2018/npg-25-387-2... estimates the maximum Lyapunov exponents of well-regarded atmospheric models such as PUMA in the neighborhood of 0.02, i.e., a Lyapunov time of a few months. As I understand it, that means that the 10⁻²⁰ joules of an infrared photon emission creates atmospheric disturbances of about a joule in about six years and about 10²⁰ joules in about 13 years, which is a couple of milliseconds of solar irradiance.

Air currents are highly complex and almost impossible to model in detail, that does not mean that they are not the outcome of conditions that preceded them (regardless of whether we know the formula).

So why were the air currents slightly different? Oh I guess because the surrounding weather must have been slightly different. And how did that happen? Because the surrounding climate was different. And how that? Because earths development facilitated that different climate. Maybe the moon was bigger? Earths mass smaller? Well that's a big ask for a historical event we know happened on our known earth surrounded by our known moon.

No, it wasn't because the surrounding weather was slightly different. The surrounding weather was exactly the same. The air currents were slightly different because a warm rock in Karnataka thermally emitted a photon 13 years earlier that it didn't emit on our timeline. (This happens, as far as we know, completely at random, without any cause; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy.) That was enough to cause the global atmospheric system to diverge enough that the mosquito stung someone else.

The findings of chaos theory are counterintuitive, but they are absolutely fundamental to how our universe works.

Although maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?

Maybe! In that case there would be no contingent universe, only the necessary one. You can see how this would appeal to theists like old Kurt. A buddy of his had a saying about dice...

Yeah, Dynomight suggested that in the article.

Oops, I missed that!

> 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s possible to fit very large expression graphs to data.

> 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs.

Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?

We haven't found anything in nature that resembles reverse-mode automatic differentiation, either in evolution or in neuroscience.

Point number two seems dubious at best. At least 50% of all offspring would need to be as fit or more fit than the parents to have any hope for the continuation of a species. And it’s probably a much higher percentage than that due to mortality before procreation.

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Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality.

I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.

> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world.

I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.

Seemed to me that the author was referring to regression to the mean, as another commenter noted.

De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.

Too harsh on democracy, literally everything else is much worse. Attested by enormous suffering of tens of billions humans before or now who could only dream of freedoms like you have here, criticizing it openly without mortal fear of repressions on you and your loved ones.

The worst thing out there are those arrogant folks who think they know better than everybody else and go and try to create some sort of (self-centered) utopia, based on flawed expectations who we humans are, ignoring basic human traits we all share like selfishness. The more anybody tries to stick out of grand design and forge their own way (or even god forbid criticize), the harsher they are put down to not spoil the paradise.

I'd take democracy and freedom with corresponding risks and rewards any day over that.

Peak Whig History. You may want to consider whether you're mistaking temporary anomalies for permanent truths. A review of history illustrates that democracy is simply the mechanism by which the merchant class destroys the traditional aristocracy. It is a transitionary phase, not a permanent state. It will inevitably transition to mob rule or oligarchy -- and you can see this all around you! Answer me this: If "democracy" is so great, why is it that every Western political establishment is terrified of direct democracy and plebiscites?

Ancient Greek-style democracy -- where every citizen votes on every important issue -- can now be implemented in the US and any European country, with ease. It's not like we don't have the technology. Why do we need corrupt intermediaries? To simplify things a bit, it is because we're going to get oligarchy or ochlocracy, and the oligarchs want to make sure they're on the winning team, whereas direct democracy is a path to ochlocracy within a mere handful of years.

The Ancients knew all of this, of course.

All that said, a state's form of government has very little (in some cases nothing) to do with that state's ability to benefit from material progress.

It's a real laugh to suggest that our ancestors were "suffering enormously" on account of the fact that they were ruled by a feudal lord who descended from his mountain fortress once a year to collect taxes in the form of a handful or two of grain. Our ancestors had a place, a duty, a strong faith, and a connection to their superiors and inferiors. Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music. On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.