Ignoring that this clearly isn't the whole truth e.g. the liberal world we live in is basically a product of London and Paris, this statistics are always quite vague because london is the place to trade FX, particularly from emerging markets, so the money can't really not flow through it at some point.
I think he meant to give up on seeking biological immortality through science nut instead to take the possibility of their seriously. I personally can't agree with Sop's view at all, but it's his to have.
It’s not inconsistent to accept death and also make room for faith.
I’m personally atheistic but acknowledge the power of faith, and make peace with the existence of the unknowable. One can do that and simultaneously conclude that all gods that humans have ever invented are made up. And every system of religion is also made up.
Death is a subset so I don’t see the lack of consistency. There’s more to theism and faith than just thinking about dying. And I’d say theists don’t spend an awful lot of time contemplating death when there are other things to be done.
I don’t think this blog post was LLM slop, and also I don’t see how those two are inconsistent in this context. The author is talking in the first point specifically about the people who are trying to stop the aging process and extend our current longevity indefinitely. Ie they have a serious goal of trying to make human beings live forever[1]. Personally I find that idea beyond terrifying, but that’s what some people are trying to do. TFA thinks that’s a quest they should abandon.
In the second one the article is talking about rationalists rejecting thought that comes from a faith-based perspective. That’s entirely orthogonal to the prior point but I get that the two seem in conflict in that many systems of faith promise life after death etc. I am personally an atheist, but I find it really sad how it has become intellectually fashionable in certain circles to sneer at people who have faith. Certainly if you are serious about philosophy and ethics it seems to me to be ridiculous to reject the scholarship of people who approach those topics from the point of view of religious faith.
TFA doesn’t approach the main problem that I have with the rationalist movement, which is that they seem to have become exactly what they are supposed to be against: an unthinking, unquestioning “in-group” almost like an intellectual cult. The very name is offensive because it is one of those where the negative connotation is implicit. Like “non-violent communication” implying other styles of communication are violent, people in the in-crowd are “rationalist” (implying everyone else is not rational), they go to the website “lesswrong.org” (because everyone else is more wrong) etc. That seems way too smug by half.
Sounds equivalent to saying we shouldnt the words "he" or "she" because some people identify with neither. Exclusionary towards people of different mouse abilities.
The idea is that some people don’t click - that refers mainly to people using a mouse, and many people are not using a mouse. So it is overstating information about what to do.
Funny, I thought I'm quite educated and competent in more domains than one and I can't manage to land a job with an American company, but random north Koreans can? Clearly I'm not as smart as I thought...
There is no "first fish from which all fish derived".
Phylogenetic existence refers to the evolutionary history and relationships of a species as represented in a phylogenetic tree. This tree is a diagram that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of different species, organisms, or genes from a common ancestor.
So monkeys are phylogenetically related, because all monkeys that we know have common ancestors.
Fish came to be multiple times independently. Being a fish, a tree, or a crab is a strategy, not a species.
Which is ironic because we call it the "tree of life", but it should be "forest of life" (but since life originated in the sea, it should be the "sea of life"), since trees don't have a single phylogenetic root: There wasn't a "first tree that all trees descend from": Things became trees independent of one another, because being treelike is beneficial early on, much like being fishlike and crablike.
I understand the idea, I was asking for a link where the original "there's no fish" is discussed. I've seen it linked on HN but haven't been able to find it since.
It was an internet hot topic on sites like Reddit in recent months/years.
Basically, another way for nerds to demonstrate their superior technical knowledge on a subject, and afterwards a way for cool internet kids to demonstrate their superior knowledge of current memes.
a) There are fish. Sharks are fish. Trout are fish. So therefore humans are fish as we are more related to trout than we are to sharks. This is basically saying that "fish" is roughly the same as "any vertebrate" or "any vertebrate with teeth" (depending on where you draw the line).
or
b) There is no such thing as a fish. There are THREE things: sharks/rays, ray finned fishes, and lobed finned fishes (which includes humans)
