I Speak For The Trees
Every minute there are 1400 trees in Brazil chopped down by farmers and ranchers.
More than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions for the past 40 years were from 100 corporations.
Stop feeling guilty about your "carbon footprint" and focus on what really matters for the environment.
By the time you read this, tens of thousands of trees will have been chopped down.
How much corporate waste and sewage will be dumped into landfills and oceans?
Stop worrying about plastic straws on your latte, anon.
Stop trusting BigScience's closed-source climate algorithms.
Challenge: Try to find actual non-politicized scientific papers on climate change (we not allowed to say "global warming" anymore?) where they actually show their data and algorithms.
If they tweaked their algorithms by 0.1%, would it still show catastrophe?
Open source the algos!
Let the raw data and the algorithms behind the global fear mongering be open source and let people pick them apart.
With such an important issue, are we supposed to "trust the experts" on this too?
Lotsa smart people would love to analyze this global data and fancy algorithms..
I love our planet and I love nature.
We need a strong case for environmentalism.
Conservatives should be trying to conserve our environment.
I hate how it's being used to manipulate people and distract us from the real polluters.
At the end of the day, Earth will be fine. Life finds a way. Whether we as humans will be fine is another story, and some how blindly trusting the experts to guide us doesn't quite seem like the best solution. I'm all for climate science. But actually find the levers that matter.
When it's used to make people feel guilty for using a paper towel when millions of trees are cut down so lawyers can print out 1,000 page reports, well c'mon.
Edit: 20,000 trees chopped down in Brazil since I started writing this, 14 minutes ago.
Every minute there are 1400 trees in Brazil chopped down by farmers and ranchers.
More than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions for the past 40 years were from 100 corporations.
Stop feeling guilty about your "carbon footprint" and focus on what really matters for the environment.
By the time you read this, tens of thousands of trees will have been chopped down.
How much corporate waste and sewage will be dumped into landfills and oceans?
Stop worrying about plastic straws on your latte, anon.
Stop trusting BigScience's closed-source climate algorithms.
Challenge: Try to find actual non-politicized scientific papers on climate change (we not allowed to say "global warming" anymore?) where they actually show their data and algorithms.
If they tweaked their algorithms by 0.1%, would it still show catastrophe?
Open source the algos!
Let the raw data and the algorithms behind the global fear mongering be open source and let people pick them apart.
With such an important issue, are we supposed to "trust the experts" on this too?
Lotsa smart people would love to analyze this global data and fancy algorithms..
I love our planet and I love nature.
We need a strong case for environmentalism.
Conservatives should be trying to conserve our environment.
I hate how it's being used to manipulate people and distract us from the real polluters.
At the end of the day, Earth will be fine. Life finds a way. Whether we as humans will be fine is another story, and some how blindly trusting the experts to guide us doesn't quite seem like the best solution. I'm all for climate science. But actually find the levers that matter.
When it's used to make people feel guilty for using a paper towel when millions of trees are cut down so lawyers can print out 1,000 page reports, well c'mon.
Edit: 20,000 trees chopped down in Brazil since I started writing this, 14 minutes ago.
Unpopular opinion:
Nearly everyone has a unique genius to them, if they but cultivated it more.
Too many mediocre families raise mediocre kids, not because of genetics but because the kids aren't encouraged to push themselves and test their intellectual limits.
Nearly everyone has a unique genius to them, if they but cultivated it more.
Too many mediocre families raise mediocre kids, not because of genetics but because the kids aren't encouraged to push themselves and test their intellectual limits.
Nothing frustrates them more than you being happy while they're stuck miserable.
A bitter pill to swallow is that seeing reality through the lens of power, while not as good as merely facing reality in the present moment raw, is always an applicable lens in every situation.
Beauty will save the world.
Although I hear that vanity is a sin... fine line between transcendental beauty and shallow materialism.
Although I hear that vanity is a sin... fine line between transcendental beauty and shallow materialism.
Time Dilation
Time dilation is one of the wildest concepts in physics.
Special relativity: No matter how fast or slow you're going, light always is at constant speed.
Counterintuitive.
If you're driving 60 mph and the car in front of you is going 80 mph, it looks like it's moving away from you at 20mph.
Not light.
If you go 60 mph, let's say light travels at 80 mph, it's not moving away from you at 20 mph.
It's moving away from you at... 80 mph.
Time literally slows down or space contracts so that light is always same speed relative to you.
The math is easy, it's just the Pythagorean theorem.
Imagine someone's on a moving train and shines a flashlight upwards.
They see light go up and down.
You see light travel in a triangle from the ground.
Speed = distance / time.
Light speed can't change, time contracts.
General Relativity is trickier, particularly the math (remember how hard it is to solve partial differential equations anyone?)
But the principal is gravity bends and warps spacetime.
So if you're closer to the center of the Earth (a gravity well), time slows down.
Einstein showed gravity is not a force as Newton believed, but instead is just a bent spacetime where objects fall inwards together.
Time dilation is crazy - you can have a twin and literally age at different rates based on how far or close you are to massive gravity wells.
He also showed that gravity bends light.
Or rather, he predicted it and later was proven right during an eclipse. That's what made him famous.
He actually came up with equations, made a prediction, and then years later was vindicated when it was proven right.
Newton's equations for gravity were all well and good, but as real science actively looks for examples where something is INcorrect (the opposite of The Science™), the perihelion of Mercury was a bit off in his equations.
Einstein's equations perfectly predicted the perihelion.
Imagine an AI coming up with the clever idea that space and time are not separate things but rather a 4-dimensional spacetime block that bends and warps.
This required human creativity.
And symbolic math.
The beauty of good science is the accuracy of equations' predictions.
Anyway, the point is that time dilation is a real, measurable phenomenon. Clocks tick at different rates depending on how fast you're going and how close you are to gravity wells. Insane. Tough to conceptualize. But it's real. And Einstein figured it out by thinking in 4D not 3D.
Time dilation is one of the wildest concepts in physics.
Special relativity: No matter how fast or slow you're going, light always is at constant speed.
Counterintuitive.
If you're driving 60 mph and the car in front of you is going 80 mph, it looks like it's moving away from you at 20mph.
Not light.
If you go 60 mph, let's say light travels at 80 mph, it's not moving away from you at 20 mph.
It's moving away from you at... 80 mph.
Time literally slows down or space contracts so that light is always same speed relative to you.
The math is easy, it's just the Pythagorean theorem.
Imagine someone's on a moving train and shines a flashlight upwards.
They see light go up and down.
You see light travel in a triangle from the ground.
Speed = distance / time.
Light speed can't change, time contracts.
General Relativity is trickier, particularly the math (remember how hard it is to solve partial differential equations anyone?)
But the principal is gravity bends and warps spacetime.
So if you're closer to the center of the Earth (a gravity well), time slows down.
Einstein showed gravity is not a force as Newton believed, but instead is just a bent spacetime where objects fall inwards together.
Time dilation is crazy - you can have a twin and literally age at different rates based on how far or close you are to massive gravity wells.
He also showed that gravity bends light.
Or rather, he predicted it and later was proven right during an eclipse. That's what made him famous.
He actually came up with equations, made a prediction, and then years later was vindicated when it was proven right.
Newton's equations for gravity were all well and good, but as real science actively looks for examples where something is INcorrect (the opposite of The Science™), the perihelion of Mercury was a bit off in his equations.
Einstein's equations perfectly predicted the perihelion.
Imagine an AI coming up with the clever idea that space and time are not separate things but rather a 4-dimensional spacetime block that bends and warps.
This required human creativity.
And symbolic math.
The beauty of good science is the accuracy of equations' predictions.
Anyway, the point is that time dilation is a real, measurable phenomenon. Clocks tick at different rates depending on how fast you're going and how close you are to gravity wells. Insane. Tough to conceptualize. But it's real. And Einstein figured it out by thinking in 4D not 3D.
Forwarded from Atlas' Majliss (۞ Atlas ۞)
A word about overthinking and ruminating:
What does it mean to ruminate?
This word actually has a fascinating history:
The word originates from the Latin term rūmināre, which literally means to chew over.
This is why animals that “chew the cud” such as cows are called “ruminants.”
It’s an apt way to describe a particular kind of thinking we all engage in from time to time.
A cow ruminates by regurgitating partially digested material and re-chewing it, usually several times over.
Mental rumination is just the same—we regurgitate old memories, ideas, and stale old themes to chew over again and again and again.
But whereas chewing a cud is healthy and normal for a cow, rumination is seldom healthy and normal for a human!
Let’s say you had a weird disagreement with a loved one and you keep playing the conversation over again in your mind.
Maybe you imagine you saying something else, or you’re filled with regret or remorse.
Something doesn’t feel right about it all, so your brain keeps returning to the same scene, dwelling on it, putting a bright spotlight on every ugly detail, trying on different interpretations and hypothetical endings.
Basically, rumination is overthinking.
It’s chewing ideas down into a pulp, and it’s unproductive.
Often, we bring out an old memory that in turn triggers other (usually negative) memories, which catches us in a tightening loop of distraction and even more overthinking.
You’re chewing and chewing, but your problem-solving capacity is only getting worse, and your anxiety is rising.
In other words, you can’t stop telling yourself a really bad fairy tale over and over.
What does it mean to ruminate?
This word actually has a fascinating history:
The word originates from the Latin term rūmināre, which literally means to chew over.
This is why animals that “chew the cud” such as cows are called “ruminants.”
It’s an apt way to describe a particular kind of thinking we all engage in from time to time.
A cow ruminates by regurgitating partially digested material and re-chewing it, usually several times over.
Mental rumination is just the same—we regurgitate old memories, ideas, and stale old themes to chew over again and again and again.
But whereas chewing a cud is healthy and normal for a cow, rumination is seldom healthy and normal for a human!
Let’s say you had a weird disagreement with a loved one and you keep playing the conversation over again in your mind.
Maybe you imagine you saying something else, or you’re filled with regret or remorse.
Something doesn’t feel right about it all, so your brain keeps returning to the same scene, dwelling on it, putting a bright spotlight on every ugly detail, trying on different interpretations and hypothetical endings.
Basically, rumination is overthinking.
It’s chewing ideas down into a pulp, and it’s unproductive.
Often, we bring out an old memory that in turn triggers other (usually negative) memories, which catches us in a tightening loop of distraction and even more overthinking.
You’re chewing and chewing, but your problem-solving capacity is only getting worse, and your anxiety is rising.
In other words, you can’t stop telling yourself a really bad fairy tale over and over.
COVID pushed some anti-antifragile people to their breaking point and we're seeing the aftermath of that now.
But it's good if you zoom out because it's unearthing some latent issues in our society, and as they say, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
But it's good if you zoom out because it's unearthing some latent issues in our society, and as they say, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
Take a group of 10,000 people of all different demographics, and give them 6 IQ tests over 6 months to establish a baseline. Then have people who make IQ tests train that group for 6 months, trying essentially to see if IQ is fixed genetically. After the 6 months, would IQ go up?
Emergent Consciousness of Complex Systems:
I saw a tweet saying corporations have emergent consciousness, a self-awareness of, for instance, "I am Microsoft."
If that sounds silly to you, realize it's the same argument that technologists use to say AI can be conscious. Whereas AI is just silicon chips.
Although I guess atheists say we are just neurons...
TLDR: Saying an AI system or a robot is conscious is like saying a corporation is conscious and thinks of itself as a corporation.
I saw a tweet saying corporations have emergent consciousness, a self-awareness of, for instance, "I am Microsoft."
If that sounds silly to you, realize it's the same argument that technologists use to say AI can be conscious. Whereas AI is just silicon chips.
Although I guess atheists say we are just neurons...
TLDR: Saying an AI system or a robot is conscious is like saying a corporation is conscious and thinks of itself as a corporation.
Of course if you're smart and you think about the future, you're going to see disaster looming - it's the most obvious thing to predict.
But to see the black swan events which make the future better than yesterday - those are harder to predict.
Thus smart people end up doomers.
But to see the black swan events which make the future better than yesterday - those are harder to predict.
Thus smart people end up doomers.
In terms of evolution, does an increase in pattern recognition ability (what IQ aims to measure) bring us closer to God?
When a new mathematical proof emerges, it always seems more like a discovery than a human invention...
When a new mathematical proof emerges, it always seems more like a discovery than a human invention...
Natural Selection has selected the species with the best pattern recognition as the apex predator.
The courage to stick with what you believe should work versus the courage to adapt and face reality of what's not working.
Knowledge is always a destructive process that self-perpetuates as needed. That's why knowledge that someone died spreads the fastest - people inform others immediately, sensing a conduit-like need to share that knowledge to not let loved ones live in ignorance that someone died.
Knowledge is like sanding down a sphere of glass until a clearer reflection of reality shines back.
It has marginal returns after a certain resolution, but more knowledge will always make the orb slightly more spherical and thus reflect a slightly more accurate image of reality.
It has marginal returns after a certain resolution, but more knowledge will always make the orb slightly more spherical and thus reflect a slightly more accurate image of reality.
Awakening, spiritually, is like when actors break the 4th wall in tv, a character speaking directly to the audience saying they know the audience is watching. Most think awakening is like behind the scenes interviews with the actors. No, it's the CHARACTERS aware of the audience.
In reality there are real winners and real losers, things don't always work out as you think they should - violence gets shit done, and a more powerful person can utterly demolish a virtuous person who truly deserved to win.
The good guys sometimes lose.
The good guys sometimes lose.
New religions being engineered before our very eyes.
How, you ask?
Symbols and rituals and worship.
Some even make spiritual claims, for some added flavor.
How, you ask?
Symbols and rituals and worship.
Some even make spiritual claims, for some added flavor.