If you're so rich, why aren't you so smart? is the burning question here.
It's mind-boggling to me how crypto guys can be simultaneously savvy enough to be involved in crypto, to the tune of millions of dollars, but also retarded enough to fall for stuff like this.
It's not really a matter of intelligence, and nobody's smart 100% of the time.
Let's take the average person on this forum, who's probably pretty tech savvy. Their odds of falling for a scam on a given day might be 1 in a billion. But when they're exhausted after work, they might be 10X likelier to fall for a scam. Another 10X when they're stressed out about family life, or going through a breakup. Another 10X when they're out drinking with their friends. And so on.
Eventually, whether it's due to age or other factors, everyone gets to be in situations where they're susceptible to scams. And scammers are experts at emotional manipulation, exploiting fear and embarrassment.
In the absence of any strong evidence, a wise man would be well-served in treating the ingestion of a novel chemical as deadly.
No, the wise man doesn't have strong evidence to the contrary. And no, he's not interested in finding out either. The consequences of ingesting a novel non-Lindy chemical is an unknown unknown that the wise man is not interested in discovering.
Of course, if the potential upsides are great enough, the risk of downsides might be worthwhile.
In the case of the chemical spatula, the downsides are uncertain, but there's the possibility of cancer. The upsides are...greater corporate profits?
The wise man is going to have to pass on that one.
Moderns would do well to try and be more like the wise man. Scientific studies are not the holy grail of knowledge. New studies are coming out all the time, both negating and reaffirming old conclusions. Is this schizophrenic flip-flopping not enough to convince the modern that Scientism isn't the end-all-be-all?
Unknown unknowns emerge at the tails of novel changes introduced to complex systems. Scientific studies are unable to account for these long-tail events. When it comes to your environment and your body, be more Lindy, and stop deferring to the myopicity of Scientism to guide you.
>Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years.
The problem here is you are asking for the impossible: strong evidence that novel chemicals are safe. How could you ever get that? It's impossible to prove a negative.
And doesn't this just privilege tradition? Chemicals will be grandfathered in for spurious reasons, not because they are actually any safer. Famously, chemicals in plants very often light up the Ames test for carcinogenicity and would be ruled out by your argument if they weren't "natural".
We have to compare potential downsides though, we have two choices, we can:
* not ingest novel chemicals
or
* ingest novel chemicals that may be carcinogenic, but scientific research will not be able to prove anything either way
Do you not think that it is rational to choose option 1, given our understanding of the Lindy effect?
We have plenty of strong evidence for the safety of tons of things. My ancestors have been consuming cow's milk, mache, and wine for thousands of years. If these things were not safe for consumption, we wouldn't be consuming them to this day. My bloodline wouldn't have made it this far. We don't add poison hemlock to our mache salads because thousands of years ago, some poor souls gave us strong evidence that it's not something you should eat, and that knowledge was passed down to us.
> In the case of the chemical spatula, the downsides are uncertain, but there's the possibility of cancer. The upsides are...greater corporate profits?
> The wise man is going to have to pass on that one.
We should be all happy to deliver increase value to the shareholders, in whatever way we can. After all, they are the most important people in the world. The wise man is not too wise if he doesn't believe that.
In the absence of monopoly, advances in technology result in improvement in value for the customers. Profit margins are constrained in any competitive industry.
> In the absence of any strong evidence, a wise man would be well-served in treating the ingestion of a novel chemical as deadly.
Isn't this why we (used to?) feed things to mice to learn about them? To collect additional evidence of safety after basic things like knowing what general kinds of things interact with people's biology say it's probably safe?
>> Unknown unknowns emerge at the tails of novel changes introduced to complex systems. Scientific studies are unable to account for these long-tail events. When it comes to your environment and your body, be more Lindy, and stop deferring to the myopicity of Scientism to guide you.
>>> Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years.
> I was with you until the quote at the end. What does that even mean?
I think it means "don't consume anything foodstuff that doesn't have a long record of safety (v.s. trusting the guy in the white lab coat that says the new thing is safe, since in 20 years some other guy in a white lab coat may find it's actually very unsafe in some previously unknown way).
> Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
I can see the appeal of simple, science-sceptical traditionalism.
But it does not pass the smell test.
There is a plethora of substances and practices that are quite harmful, but have been used for millenia. This is because your suggested methodology fails to detect really anything that does not cause traceable and observable harm before the next generation is raised. And that's a lot of things.
"Science" adds value compared to pure traditionalism because it analyzes precisely how things are harmful, and helps discover mitigations and strategies that pure outcome-driven traditionalism would never have explored.
Examples:
- Lead pipes (used successfully for over two millenia-- harmless? no.)
- Basically every carcinogen ever (e.g. Radon: people in affected regions did simply not know about keeping it out of cellars/dwellings, and just died of lung cancer sometimes)
- Salmonella, syphilis, cholera and other pathogens-- they are non-issues with proper prevention and/or countermeasures-- without those, people just suffer and/or die.
- Alcohol consumption during pregnancy
edit: I'm not saying that "sticking with what worked in the past" is wrong, or useless information, but its just that-- a statistical prior for harm. It won't reliably tell you neither which things are harmless nor which are harmful, it just gives a rough indication of which it might be.
> If people have been eating figs and drinking wine for thousands of years, then it's probably good and safe for you to do as well.
This is ignores the amounts consumed. Just because a thing is safe at N mg/day doesn't mean it is safe at all doses. The change circumstances of human existence make attempts to come up with simple, eternal rubrics at best a bit chancy, and at worst completely misleading.
It also ignores the particular size of the figs that should be consumed. And it ignores the season that they should be consumed. And it ignores the weather conditions that you should consume them in. And it ignores the hour at which they're consumed. And it ignores the gender of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the eye color of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the hair length of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the precise composition of nitrogen in the soil with which the fig tree has been grown in. And phosphorous. And potassium. And it ignores the day of the week in which the fig should be consumed. And it ignores the material of the utensils used to consume the fig. And it ignores the age of the person that consumes them.
It's funny that you use wine as an example of "obviously safe" drink. Because wine is chock full of not-safe-for-human-consumption chemicals (e.g., tannic acid) that would be illegal to use if it were synthetically prepared, but since it's "natural", it gets a free pass. And if you tried to remove all of those chemicals, you'd find that the resulting flavor profile is absolute garbage.
I can also point out--we've been drinking out of lead pipes for thousands of years, so they're obviously safe, right? ... right?
Can you name some specific sites where this is an issue for you? I've had nothing but good experiences buying online, in the US at least.
Every single site I've bought from has the same boring and functional checkout experience, whether it's Stripe Checkout, Google Wallet, or Shopify. They're practically all the same, and they all work fine.
Coined by Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
It's far older than that. At least a 150 years old.
Bars used to provide free lunches to encourage people to buy more drinks. Often very cheap and salty lunches, like stews or corned beef. This was very common in the 1920's-1940's, decades before Heinlein. It later evolved into just bowls of peanuts or pretzels on bars, though I haven't seen a bar with complimentary beer nuts in years.
The stew looked like a free lunch, but there's no free lunch because you paid for it in drinks.
I first heard it in person as advice from people who were born in the 1890's and I think it was something that had been explained to them as children themselves.
Seemed to me it probably originated in New York City.
Heinlein was referencing a familiar but cynical saying which is an example that was intended to be kept in mind whether you understood the full implications or not.
Bits are a unit of measurement we use in relation to computers. Humans are not computers. Do not use bits to measure anything in relation to humans. Stop thinking of humans as computers. It's dehumanizing, unhealthy, and a very narrow way to think of people. Using a computer model for humans is useless at best and misleading at worst.
I see several comments coming down hard on this man's suggestion that 60 is unusually old to be starting a business, but keep in mind that he comes from a different culture than you.
In my culture, as well as that of the critics, we agree that 60 is not old, and it's also quite normal to be starting a business at such an age. But his culture, which makes berth in Bengaluru, India, obviously has different expectations regarding age, and so that's why it's unusual (but elating) to see his father do this at such an age.
The social sciences are not science and good riddance to them.
They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs.
The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer.
Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.
Could it be that animals, like humans, aren't just sacks of chemicals? Could it be they're not computer programs, but that they are, in fact, animals?
This is why I despise practically every discussion of "why" when it comes to talking about observed traits and evolution like this. People invent this bizarre deterministic model of life as it it were purely chemical or computational and could be controlled & understood as such. As if every single little trait has design intent.
You have one guy in this thread that's like, "Would this imply that humans’ propensity to keep pets is also an association error in the brain?". Like holy shit dude, I don't know, but maybe people just like pets. Maybe pets like pets. Maybe pets like us. Maybe we aren't computer programs whose nature is defined by scripts and wiring. "Association error". The fuck? We're not computer programs. We don't have "errors".
Like what a dull and inhuman lens to view the world with: "We're all just computers", or "We're all just a bunch of chemicals". I wonder, do you also think of me as a computer or a chemical sack? Do you view my child that way? My cat? If you do, that disturbs me, because then you may be tempted to treat us as such, when we're all so much more than that.
It's mind-boggling to me how crypto guys can be simultaneously savvy enough to be involved in crypto, to the tune of millions of dollars, but also retarded enough to fall for stuff like this.