Curious Wonder web notes

Definitions Conservative: Aversion to change or an inclination for stability. Progressive: Inclination for change in the way of improvement. Stability: tools, structures, concepts and systems being made with methods and materials that resist stress.  Improvement: Repairing something that's broken or making things more efficient.  Entropy: A measure of disorder in a system Onslaught of Entropy Everything in existence will always change with few exceptions, i.e. mathematical constants. There's no stopping the train of entropy. Trees will wither, mountains will erode, damaged DNA turns cells into cancer or dies, the sun will consume the earth in 4 billion years. Certain changes are so small that we don't perceive them, and if their change isn't big enough to affect the purpose of that which we value, we can consider things to have remained the same. Other things require constant work to keep from changing and there are more ways for things to change for the worse than for ...

Excerpt from "how the mind works" by Steven Pinker about Margie Profet's research  Profet predicted that pregnancy sickness should confer some benefit that offsets the cost of lowered nutrition and productivity. Ordinarily, nausea is a protection against eating toxins: the poisonous food is ejected from the stomach before it can do much harm, and our appetite for similar foods is reduced in the future. Perhaps pregnancy sickness protects women against eating or digesting foods with toxins that might harm the developing fetus. Your local Happy Carrot Health Food Store notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly healthy about natural foods. Your cabbage, a Darwinian creature, has no more desire to be eaten than you do, and since it can't very well defend itself through behavior, it resorts to chemical warfare. Most plants have evolved dozens of toxins in their tissues: insecticides, insect repellents, irritants, paralytics, poisons, and other sand to throw in herbivo...

 the top analogy may seem sensible but we need to dig deeper to understand the problem and synthesize a solution. Generally people don't want flies on their food because flies regularly land on and dwell around shit and rotting stuff. comparing men with shit dwellers may seem apt, but also doesn't help with the problem/solution. The solution seems to be to take away the shit, or just don't have food near shit, then the only insects people will likely worry about is the occasional bee, which is a lot less off-putting. At this point, the analogy breaks a bit unless we pin down some definitions. shit = society/government/courts/cultural norms where women can't participate and don't have equal influence compared to men. insects = the type of harassment women tend to experience. So what's the solution? Give women the equal right to vote, ensure that every citizen can and does vote, and make votes secure and private to avoid choices from being coerced. Freedom of expr...

part 1. economic structures socialism is an economic structure correlative with capitalism and a nation's economic structure is dependent on which one of three conflicting features should give: fairness, freedom, equality. For instance: if a nation is fair, people who work harder can accrue more money. if it is free, then people will give their money to their kids. but then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit money they didn't earn. These three features need not only apply to money or homogeneously to the entire nation. part 2. governmental structures Governments lie on a spectrum colored by the three dimensions of politics described in The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith; with democracy and dictatorship residing at the edges. the dimensions of politics are: 1. the interchangeables or nominal selectorate: composed of everyone in the nation who can vote. 2. the influentials or the real selectorate: composed of everyone in the ...

Dementia is an umbrella term that encompasses the following diseases: Lewy Body Dementia, Vascular Dementia, Frontotemporal dementia, Parkinon's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's Robin Williams had Lewy Body Dementia. He had severe depression caused by his deteriorating mind while the diagnosis to his disease was still unknown to him at the time. Susan Schneider Williams wrote a paper where she recounts his life and his last days.  https://n.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308   excerpt taken from "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker     "when the visual area of the brain are damaged, for example, the visual world is not simply blurred or riddled with holes. Selected aspects of visual experience are removed while others are left intact. Some patients see a complete world but pay attention only to half of it. They eat food from the right side of the plate, shave only the right cheek, and draw a clock with twelve digits squished into the right half. Other patients lose ...

Gist on the Resource Curse Comment on watch?v=uiIg4tLTaT0 7/9/21 The most relevant concepts I know of relating to the issues in the middle east are that of Selectorate Theory and The Resource Curse. Wikipedia explains Selectorate theory pretty well but it doesn't do a good job of connecting politics to the resource curse. This book does a great job of explaining both: "The Dictators Handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics" Summary by CGPgrey: "The Rules for Rulers" here on youtube. The gist of it is that when a government relies on taxation for revenue, it will be greatly incentivized to invest in infrastructure so that the people can more easily get to and perform their work to earn more and pay more taxes. invest in education and healthcare, since healthy and educated people will earn more and pay more taxes. Allow basic freedoms like free press, assembly and ease of communication; the press to allow people to more easily learn market ...

Instead of imagining humans evolving morality, like fingers. Imagine the concept of morality as the best methods for keeping [high] civility [and well being] within large groups, and evolution forcing humans to adapt a sense of morality so as to better organize ourselves. Take for example, flight. There's the concept of flight and there's the evolution of flight. In order for something to be able to fly, animal or otherwise, it needs to be light weight, aerodynamic and be able to catch air so as to fall more slowly or get lift. Evolution needn't have evolved flight in animals for the concept of flight (or aerodynamics) to exist as a natural phenomenon. Evolution can however adapt certain animals to take advantage of this phenomenon to improve the survival chances of a species.   Humans may have evolved a sense of morality; evolution's best efforts at allowing us to grasp the better and worse methods at organizing large groups so as to allow individuals to prosper and ...