- tjs8rj parentIs happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical reaction?
- Back-of-the-envelope - Road area. World road length ≈ 60–70 million km. Using an average paved width of ~8–10 m ⇒ area ≈ (0.9–1.3)×10¹² m². Earth’s surface is 5.1×10¹⁴ m², so roads cover ~0.09–0.13% of the planet.
- Albedo change. Dark asphalt is ~0.05–0.10. “White” coatings can push toward ~0.4–0.6 (fresh), but weathering quickly dulls them. So a plausible Δalbedo for roads is +0.2 to +0.5.
- Global albedo change. Δα_global ≈ (road fraction) × (Δalbedo_road) ≈ (0.001)×(0.2–0.5) ≈ +0.0002 to +0.0005.
- Radiative forcing. Globally averaged incoming sunlight ≈ S₀/4 ≈ 340 W m⁻². Forcing from an albedo change is ΔF ≈ −Δα_global × 340 ≈ −0.07 to −0.17 W m⁻².
- Temperature response. Using a standard sensitivity ~0.8 °C per W m⁻² (≈3 °C per CO₂ doubling): ΔT ≈ −0.05 to −0.14 °C at equilibrium.
- Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp?
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
- As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, distribute propaganda.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
- In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
- White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place.
A Japanese person has Japanese privilege in Japan, an Egyptian in Egypt, etc
If you’re “culturally American” in America (regardless of race), you will benefit.
If you’re White and culturally American in parts of America where White American culture dominates (like our institutions, which reflect a country that has been historically 90%+ White), you will benefit
If you’re White and in a place where non White culture dominates, you will be relatively disadvantaged. Most countries around the world, and even parts of the US (parts of Chicago where you have significant disadvantages from being White).
- Great to acknowledge luck but too often it’s used as an excuse. Even the story you laid out has to do with a lot of persistence, grit, determination, learning from mistakes, etc
A better way of putting it is probably: barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough. And even if you get terribly lucky, it just makes your odds worse - there are people out there who’ve had worse luck than you and still became more successful than you.
- AI and technology is already replacing jobs.
The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.
Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.
This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.
Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.
And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.
- It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster.
As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.
As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action
- The alternative is what? “Working to live” is often just making more money so you can spend it hiking, traveling, and maximizing your dopamine. Maximizing your happy chemicals is also materialist.
Working a substantive job contributing positively to the work is among the most important and fulfilling things one can do with their life, alongside raising a family
- “A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people”
The problem with Hitler wasn’t that he wanted German people to be successful, it was his proposed solution that involved mass murder between genocide and global war.
This is a problem that requires thinking beyond lazy pattern matching
- This only seems confusing to people who valorize intelligence as the most valuable trait one can have. What really matters is the impact you can have on others lives: making them a lot of money, saving them a lot of time, making them happy, etc contributing to them or addressing their needs
Being smart is valuable, but it’s only one ingredient among many. You need to be able to communicate with others, take risks, work hard, have empathy, be a creative problem solver, etc
Being a brain with a body attached is not enough and that’s good
- Norms against nudity being based on abrahamic religions is still wrong.
It’s like saying norms against murder are based on abrahamic religions because the 10 commandments say so.
Cultures the world over have general norms against nudity in nearly all contexts, and also have norms against murder in nearly all contexts. Clearly the driving force that makes humans have norms against nudity or murder is more fundamental than religion.
Abrahamic religions may add a particular flavor to it, but it’s icing on a big cake
Anthropologically, given that every mass civilization that’s ever existed regulated nudity in public settings, there’s likely some sociological advantage to it that enables communities of people to reach scale and endure.
Do you have a single counter example of a large scale human community (10,000+ people) where public nudity was normal?
- Why do we need to make mental healthcare available to everyone?
For all of human history people have got along just fine, happily in fact, without “universal access to mental health care”
This just sounds like a bandaid. The bigger problem is we’ve created a society so toxic to the human soul that we need universal access to drugs and talk therapy or risk having significant chunks of the population fall off the map
- The problem is our public institutions (universities) are using public dollars on things that are not desired by the public.
Institutions have accountability to the people. Nobody except a fringe wants universities to be maga centers, most people just want them to reflect “common sense” and forward the will of the American people
- This is where climate skepticism comes from by the way. Even climate skeptics will acknowledge that climate scientists are well educated, they don’t deny science as a process of truth seeking, the problem lies in the incentives.
There’s a lot of prestige and grant money that comes with insisting climate change is true.
There’s a lot of political power that gets ceded to the people in charge if we “just accept that we’re in a crisis and us elite are the only ones that can stop it”.
I believe climate change is real and human caused, but many of the claims and doomsday speak feel like self interested humans following their incentives beyond the scientific truth
- Scrolling through here I get the sense that these answers are from people who’ve never actually done 0-1.
The truth is when you’re as tiny as you are you almost certainly won’t have any scalable channels. What you need to do is hand to hand combat to secure each customer. Focus on getting 1 paying customer first by any means necessary. Call them, email them, just get in touch and see if this solves a problem enough for them to pay for it.
What’s going to happen is the face to face of actually finding someone to use your product is going to teach you a ton about: the problem and how painful it is, how well your solution solves it, who your customer is, how much you can charge, and how to get to them.
After you’ve gotten 1 paid customer (by any means necessary), now try to get a second one (by any means necessary). Keep doing this.
After the first few you’ll start to notice a pattern in the ways you capture customers: the way you reach out, the medium you reached out with, the types of customers and triggers in their life that made them receptive, the messaging that convinced them to buy, etc
You’ll stumble upon the ways to scale your customer acquisition.
Focus on getting that first customer doing whatever it takes. Get a customer to pay you TODAY. Then repeat
- This is 100% correct but because society is increasingly apathetic about everything we're only interested in the low lift solutions.
You don't fix a drug epidemic by going after the symptoms: narcan and other drugs that are a bandaid only at the very last stage.
You go for the root: we've created a society where people are overprescribed pain killers, and where the general outlook is so bleak that escapism is more popular than ever. It's the same reasons people don't have children and mental health is all record lows.
- We’re the cohort putting our hand on the stove to remember you get burned.
Vices like gambling, obscenity, prostitution, drugs, etc are banned or heavily controlled societies over because they have significant negative cultural effects. “Why do YOU care what other people do in their private lives?” was always a stupid justification: if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me.