Thanks for informing about the typo. LW doesn’t understand brackets in links, had to put a backlash in the closing bracket and embed the link in the text to get a working link.
Words can be very tricky. If you want to learn a more general lesson of where that mistake might have come from, you might find this series of posts interesting.
If there are mistakes made or the environment requires adaptation, a sufficiently flexible intelligence can mediate the selection pressure.
That’s really not what is meant by framing) in this context.
My training is in engineering/programming, and my genetics knowledge doesn’t much exceed anything taught at the high school level. I am, however, prepared to read college-level textbooks on the subject.
We read this in med school, a bit too wordy for my taste but easy to understand.
I am very interested in how evolution started [...] How did evolution work in the beginning?
Nobody knows for sure. The primordial soup is just an educated guess based on the fact that complex molecules had to arise from simpler ones. This paper focuses on the evolution of multicellularity and briefly references other necessary milestones in early evolution.
A god smart enough to know what’s good for us is smart enough not to need a prayer to be summoned.
It’s a mistake, it should say higher.
I assume that by evolution you mean biological evolution specifically, since the general mechanics of any evolution can be accurately described in a few sentences after reading The Selfish Gene. People here could probably write a program in a couple of lines of code that fits the bill.
If you want to simulate biological evolution, the simplest form of it would be in the realm of bacteria, and I’d search books about bacteriology and bacterial evolution. Any introductory text in cell biology will describe how genes are copied and expressed and how mutations work. I predict you’ll be painfully surprised by the complexity of the specifics.
If you let money decide or do tests you lose the statistical benefits of randomization. I don’t understand how you see no ethical problem in ignoring preferences or not matching best students with best schools, perhaps I misunderstand you.
That deals with the costs but I doubt consent would be easy to obtain unless the schools are very uniform in quality/status and people don’t have preferences about which languages to learn, hence the possible problem with ethics. Schools have preferences too, quality schools want quality students.
Quality observational research is probably very difficult to do since you can’t properly control for indirect cognitive benefits you get from learning a second language and I’d take any results with a grain of salt. You also can’t properly control for confounding factors e.g. reasons for learning a second language. I think you’d need experimental research with randomization to several languages and this would be very costly and possibly inethical to set up.
I have without a question gotten a huge boost from learning English since there aren’t enough texts in my native language about psychology, cognitive science and medicine that happen to be my main interests. My native language also lacks the vocabulary to deal with those subjects efficiently. I have also learned several memory techniques and done cognitive tests and training solely because of being fluent in English.
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
I think there’s some form of the mind projection fallacy going on here. I think the oddness is a result of expectations based on the principles of culture, instead of the principles of biology.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
What are you trying to do when you “meditate”?
If by meditation you mean concentrating on the breath and observing whatever sensations arise, when boredom strikes you could try concentrating your attention on the sensations of boredom until it goes away, then returning to breath. Same trick works great with physical pain or itching.
How much of the research is done on children? Did you train children?
Much of the effect you attribute to training is likely just maturation of the brain. There’s going to be a lot of natural improvement in cognitive functions until your son reaches his 20s. Can’t see harm in the exercises though, and I think you can assume by default that training will improve at least the specific functions trained.
That was a wonderfully clear introduction! I’d definitely want to see more posts on sleep since I think it’s one of the most important, if not the most important aspect of optimizing cognitive performance.
I second Mirzhan_Irkegulov’s disinterest in polyphasic sleep though, at least until several lower hanging fruits have been picked. Polyphasic sleep is likely to be excessively difficult to maintain by most people, even if it were a viable alternative. Since sleep is enormously important as you stated and likely interesting as it is to many people, your posts will have a greater positive impact if you explore the less niche venues first.
Most people in society follow the same sleeping patterns so I can’t see why disabling circadian control at will would be extremely useful unless you do shift work or have to socialize at nights. Could expand on that? I think it’s much easier to not get sleep deprived in the first place. Problems of shift work are increasingly mitigated by the internet as work is computerized and thus can be done by people on the sunny side of the planet while you sleep.
Suggestions for subtopics based on my personal interest
alcohol, nicotine, caffeine
exercise and its timing, nutrition and its timing
chronological age
optimizing artificial lighting and the bedroom
z-drugs and their dangers
melatonin, mirtazapine, mianserin, quetiapine
stress, depression, anxiety
effects of antidepressants on sleep structure
If you need help with article paywalls PM me and I’ll see what I can do.
Why is the experience of color not physical knowledge? Why is Mary’s experience of learning the science physical? What would the science of color vision look like if nobody experienced color?
But I did not think cold/flu virus comes from the hand, I thought it only works with droplet infection from the air, such as people sneezing.
You can use normal saline and oil sprays to get your nose clean so you don’t have to pick it. Or pick it with a clean tissue.
I doubt drug allergies and environmental allergies correlate in a meaningful way.
Nobody runs clinical trials to show that the cup of salts has ideal properties.
Nasal irrigation seems to have been pretty successfully commercialized, so I suppose you could commercialize heated salt and run trials with some inventive marketing.
The pre-packaged food in grocery stores has to be preserved somehow, perhaps most importantly with excess salt, which often makes it pretty unhealthy. Fresh made food also tastes better.
Our stated preferences are predictably limited and often untrue accounts what actually constitutes our well-being and our utility to those around us. I’m not sure I want to wake up to a god psychologically incompetent enough to revive people based on weighing wishes greatly. If there are resource constraints which I highly doubt it’s especially important to make decisions based on reliable data.
I think this much more likely reflects the dynamics of the discussion, the perceived unlikelihood of the hypothetical and the badness of death than actual preferences. If the hypothetical is improbable enough, changing your mind only has the cost of losing social status and whatever comforting lies you have learned to keep death off your mind and not much upside to talk about.