If you take a bunch of people and measure their baseline behaviour, and then subject them all to a hormonal change, is it really that surprising that you’re then able to find measurable group-level differences in how they behave?

Does it really matter? Less bad doesn’t mean good. We’re talking about the lives of innocent bystanders here. If taking additional risk is avoidable, it should be avoided.

Humans are highly adaptable for both good and bad. I’ve heard that even people who have lost their ability to see or walk are back at baseline happiness in about a year.

Measures of subjective well-being are higher among treated participants in the first year of the transfers but then revert to control group levels.

I have no idea what you’re even talking about. Neither of these people is an AI researcher and neither is making the claims you’re here arguing against.

Anthropomorphizing them isn’t going to suddenly change reality…

No more than thought terminating clishes do.

Consciousness gets mentioned the first time at 1 hour and 26 minutes into the episode. The discussion is about cognition - they’re not the same thing and nobody is claiming that they are.

I didn’t claim it’s badly built - but it’s typically unmaintained, with outdated doors and windows that leak heat and draft, old plumbing that’s prone to leaks and low pressure, dangerous electrics that haven’t been updated in decades, unhealthy old building materials that off-gas or contain asbestos or other hazards, and almost definitely poor air quality due to mold, moisture problems, and inadequate ventilation. We have houses like that in Finland too - and rather often they’re abandoned and/or for sale basically for the price of the plot, because the cost of bringing them up to modern standards exceeds what anyone is willing to pay for the building itself.

I’m not saying all houses in Russia are like that but throw a dart on a map of Russia and go see the houses there and it’s going to be one of these ones.

To be fair, you too can own a house if you’re willing to settle for what the average house in Russia is like. In-fact you can often get the house for free and only have to pay for the plot.

You used the term predetermined there so I just want to note to others that no-free-will doesn’t imply fatalism. It’s not that whatever was going to happen is going to happen anyway whether you do anything about it or not. That would imply cause without an action and it’s the exact opposite of what the idea of no-free-will in a deterministic universe means.

Determinism is about everything following from past events and the state of the universe at that specific moment and that the ability to have done otherwise is an illusion. So you didn’t grab a chocolate bar at the checkout because it was predetermined at your time of birth that this would happen but you also didn’t grab it because that’s what you chose to do there and then and you could’ve also chosen not to grab it. No - you couldn’t have. You didn’t choose to be hungry, you didn’t choose to notice the chocolate bar there, you didn’t choose to like Snickers more than Twix and so on. Everything that ultimately led to you grabbing that specific chocolate bar was outside of your control and the fact that you did grab it means that if we rewind the universe back to that same moment, everything else being equal, you’ll just grab it again, and again, and again. How could you not grab it? That’s like saying 4 + 4 is 8 but it could also be 6. No it can’t. It’s always going to produce the same result no matter how many times you run the calculation.

We do things for two reasons: either you want to or you have to. There’s obviously no freedom in having to do something but you’re not free to choose your wants either.

Who “everyone”?

I thought it’s pretty common knowledge that solar panels are more efficient in cold climate.

Choosing to filter out content from your social media feed isn’t necessarily about denial or apathy. For many people, it’s a conscious decision to preserve their mental clarity and avoid being constantly pulled into emotionally charged, tribal, or manipulative discourse. Being well-informed doesn’t require immersing yourself in an endless stream of outrage, nor does stepping back from that mean you’re turning a blind eye to anything.

There’s a difference between ignoring reality and choosing how and when to engage with it. Most of what passes for “news” online isn’t a sober presentation of facts or ideas - it’s performance, manufactured outrage, and algorithm-driven noise. If someone wants to stay sane and focus on things they can actually influence in their immediate life, I don’t see that as sticking their head in the sand. I see it as setting healhy boundaries in an environment that’s often designed to provoke rather than inform.

People aren’t morally obligated to be constantly exposed to negativity just to prove they care. In fact, thoughtful action tends to come from those who can step back from the noise and think clearly, not from those who are perpetually consumed by it.

There’s some amazing stories of identical twins discovering eachother at later age. I believe the claim there was that it’s among the strongest bonds between humans that there is. You’ve never met before but when you do, it all immediately just clicks.

I guess the question that remains is: how much of that is due to being hit and how much due to having the genes of parents who hit their children?

With pictures like this it’s so hard to convince my brain that it’s not just a picture of a random boulder taken with flash at night.

I was trying to think how much I’d be willing to pay for that. I wouldn’t outright reject eveen a few thousand euro offer.

As if jews are not indigeneous to that region

The article is not talking about infertility - it’s talking about fertility rate which are different thing.

The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime, if they were to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) through their lifetime, and they were to live from birth until the end of their reproductive life.

I bet the people upvoting that don’t know either.

Media likes to focus on girls but it’s still worth remembering that 3 out of 4 people killed by suicide in the US are men.