Readit NewsMy gut says that the Great Filter is real but probably doesn't filter more than 99% of civilisations. Were I to guess complex life is uncommon, and intelligent life very uncommon. The majority of planets which do develop intelligent life destroy themselves fairly quickly.
An insect crawling around a 75 year old brick house that is covered in ivy and moss will have NO idea that the object it is walking upon is NOT part of it's natural environment. That brick house seems as natural to the environment as the grass, and trees, and rocks, and streams nearby it -- to the bug at least.
Similarly we take our telescope out and see what looks like a natural organic universe with organic galaxies and normal looking stars etc...
Because we don't have solar system sized brains and billion year life spans we are absolutely hopeless to realize that theres' a lot of massive artificial structures in this universe. We're too bug-like to even be able to perceive them from our natural environment.
*we do know of massive cosmic structures like filaments, voids, and the great wall. So it is possible we as humans are starting to notice the "house" in the woods since our theories of physics cannot really explain why these structures exist at these massive scales (we would expect uniformity at those scales). See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cosmic_structu...)
The fire meta get's postponed until trapping air inside bags happens (could be seaweed/skin based bags).
Then you need to make a habit of collecting a bunch of air and trapping it and then can begin exploring chemical reactions in the air.
ex: take dead but not decomposed organic matter, dry it out in hot air bag (maybe cover the bag in black squid ink and float the bag of air in the ocean out in the sun's rays for day to warm it up.
Then eventually you need to have the insight to do friction based experiments in the bag with dried materials and then one discovers fire in a massive breakthrough not dissimilar to when humans created Bose Einstein Condensates for the first time in highly specialized environments.
Nothing here says "impossible" to me. I bet if whales had fingers to easily manipulate matter they might've already done all this by now.
Shareholders can vote and decide the direction of a company. They should also be held liable for any problems the company causes.
If the company is fined it should come out of company and then shareholder pockets. I might even add courts should be able to award damages by directly fining share holders.
If a company does something severely illegal then very large shareholders should risk jail time.
It’s your company after all as a shareholder. You own it.
It’s no different if your dog bites someone or child breaks the law. You have to pay the fines.
If the rent in a city is too high you are not going to get the MOST interesting restaurants, bars, and clubs. You are going to get only the businesses that will DEFINITELY convince an investor to write a check to dump on such high rents; regardless of whether that is a good idea or not.
The PhD cohorts for R1 Universities hasn't really gotten any bigger than 50 years ago. The number of academic jobs hasn't really gotten any bigger either. The only people having success in the system are the types of people that seem low-risk to the system.
So of course we should expect a decline in innovative ideas as time rolls on. The only way to reverse this is to literally create more tenured jobs (or perhaps temporary tenure ex: 10 years you're guaranteed employment) and increase the size of PhD student cohorts so that they are large enough that iconoclasts can fit in again.
This is not a counterexample because exams aren't an end goal. The process of filling out exams isn't an activity that provides value to society.
If an exam poorly grades a student who would do great solving actual real-world problems, the exam is wrong. No ifs. No buts. The exam is wrong because it's failing the ultimate goal: school is supposed to increase people's value to society and help figure out where their unique abilities may be of most use.
> Similar things are true for software engineering. If you have to stackoverflow every single line of code that you are attempting to write all the way down to each individual print statement and array access it doesn't fucking matter HOW well you understand whats going on/how clear your mental models are. You are simply not going to be a productive/useful person on a team.
If their mental models are truly so amazing, they'd make a great (systems) architect without having to personally code much.
I used the example of a calculus test and not being able to do addition. But this really could be any example. It could have even been a Wide Receiver failing to read the play thats happening quickly enough despite being physically fit enough to execute the right play in hindsight.
>Re: they'd make a great (systems) architect...
But you wouldn't hire them as a programmer. My sentence was biased in the sense that "team" meant "team of software engineers". You would hire them for a different job sure.
Also good mental model here just means "Always knowing and being able to clearly articulate what I need to accomplish next to write my code". It doesn't even mean they are good at designing systems but lets go with that example anyways below:
The Architect version of this is that they perhaps have perfectly clear mental models of exactly how to code (memorizing very obscure language shortcuts and syntactic sugar and writing very clear code when they know what to build) but they cannot for the love of god think critically about what a design should be BEFORE they implement it far enough to reach a major issue.
And you would rightly say "well I would never hire that guy as an architect but I might have hired them as a programmer thats led by more senior folks". At the end of the day you are only hiring people for the parts of their mental models that are useful.
And the ability to clearly recall facts about that their domain is basically the fundamental detail here.
You can say a politically correct answer like "i don't care how they do it, as long as they get it done" but such a coder will DEFINITELY take months to finish what might take someone else hours.
Such a coder might still be able to suggest new methods to do something better and if there job description was "organizational optimizer" perhaps thats fine but as soon as you also expect software output out of this person you will quickly realize that you take for granted how valuable someone that has fully memorized a bunch of fundamentals up to and including some problem strategies truly is.
I'm not sure this counts as memorization. I don't even think you can really "memorize" high level learning and problem solving strategies, even when explained by an expert. You kind of have to re-discover them internally. And then, there are people who "memorized" the explanation and are completely unable to put it into practice because to them it's just a word sequence, instead of an internalized change to the way you perceive and work with problems.
If that isn't memorizing something and making a new habit as a kid then I don't know what memorizing means.
Said another way, the ability to remember to "____" when dealing with a problem of type "___" is what I mean by "memorize".
That doesn't mean you won't be rich. It's just some of the lowest hanging fruit are not an option.