It's at odds with "heritable or not", the interesting question to us peasants. If there's a disease that gives you spots, we want to know if you can get it from your ma and pa. We don't want to know that nearly everybody hides the spots with makeup.
Then there's the matter of whether there's just a small population with the genes for it, and whether it's polygenic, or mitochondrial, or otherwise non-mendelian, and all that gets factored into this heritability value along with cultural things like the use of concealer and the probability of having your face torn off by a bear. It kind of reminds me of inflation, as a useful measure.
You can see why this is so frustrating for laypersons, but the point isn't that you can't use a colloquial meaning of the word when shooting the shit with your friends or whatever. It's just important to keep the rigorous definition separated from the informal definition when citing the literature, or you end up in weird places.
This is what former pope Benedict XVI said about it:
> I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope... I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.
> There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!
I hope so, considering he seems to have all mental facilities intact. I hope he believes he was elected by the cardinals, which is what happened in reality. I think they usually say the Holy Spirt guides the process or similar, rather than God directly selecting the new pope.
OK, so to start with you're saying that there's a small noisy pro- side, and a small noisy anti- side, and a moderate majority. But then suddenly:
> The Majority Goes Silent - When the majority of people looks at the feed and assumes they're outnumbered, people will often self-censor.
That's not the same thing, is it? Here the majority is, say, anti-, but they are being frightened by a noisy pro- minority. They're moderates in the sense that anti- is the conventional position to take. But they have opinions. (They could also be in the minority, and this fear of speaking up would still be a bad thing.)
Otherwise, if they're truly moderate, but are frightened into silence supposedly, what would they be saying if they dared? "Everybody listen to me, I have no strong opinion on this matter"?
I have a similar intuition to yours. On many topics it isn't so much self-censorship, it is simply that for many people there is rightly no motivation to go around announcing their nuanced, moderate, or no-opinion-but-unimpressed-by-extremes positions.
Even when people do have strong opinions on a topic (and a moderate opinion can also be strong), most people have better things to do with their lives than to go around blasting their opinions to the world as a hobby. And the few in this camp that do are not very likely to be amplified by the engagement algorithms.
> OK, so to start with you're saying that there's a small noisy pro- side, and a small noisy anti- side, and a moderate majority. But then suddenly:
> The Majority Goes Silent - When the majority of people looks at the feed and assumes they're outnumbered, people will often self-censor.
> That's not the same thing, is it? Here the majority is, say, anti-, but they are being frightened by a noisy pro- minority. They're moderates in the sense that anti- is the conventional position to take. But they have opinions.
I don't follow your argument (which is different to the one in the article):
There's a small noisy pro-side, a small noisy anti-side and a majority, but not necessarily a moderate majority!
The article doesn't say anything about the majority being moderates, does it?
> Otherwise, if they're truly moderate, but are frightened into silence supposedly, what would they be saying if they dared? "Everybody listen to me, I have no strong opinion on this matter"?
Not necessarily true; there's a noisy pro minority, a noisey anti- minority and a silent majority. Who know if they are pro or anti or equally split?
And even if they were actually moderate, they could see opinions like "everyone should have guns" and "no one should have guns", and keep their majority moderate opinion of "people should be allowed guns depending on whether they cross some objective line into dangerous or neglectful behaviour".
That's both a moderate and a majority position, and yet you won't see it expressed in a forum because all the noise is being made by the two extremes.
The argument you're making is that the silent majority must necessarily be moderates, but that's not a requirement.
But that assumes a black-and-white viewpoint - one or the other. But there's a big nuanced gray area that is underrepresented everywhere.
Take immigration or refugees - the obvious thing is that you're either for or against it. But there's so many things in between, so much nuance, etc. And that takes reasonable adults to think and talk about.
Mythology is involved in inhibiting invention. I mean, after inventing invention, the concept of it, you have a certain motivation, which is lacking in a culture that tells stories about how its greatest inventions were stolen from the gods by fantasy heroes. We still indulge in those stories slightly, by mythologizing inventors. But at least we don't have a cyclical concept of time where everything's predestined by the fates, and we all have proper roles and places, and there's no progress except round and round. That's a tranquil outlook, but tends to be self-fulfilling.
I agree. It's just hard to say anything with certainty (or even clarity) about these "mentality" components. A culture's mythology. It's "concept of concepts." It's so vague and abstract that we can't even name it legibly.
Heh, that's a fun point. Maybe even a deep point. They don't have to leave a long trail of artifacts of incremental groping toward the concept of written language, starting with seal icons and tally marks and then account ledgers and then complaint letters. Instead, somebody could just have the idea, all of a sudden, if conditions are right to suggest it. Or several people could. But this raises the question of how big an idea it's possible for one person to have all at once, without handing it between multiple people in evolutionary stages. I guess there's no real limit on that, it's just that excellent ideas require excellent zeitgeist conditions (like the availability of paper that you mention).
So... The "big idea" would be "a writing system that fully represents a language."
Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion.
Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade.
Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects.
People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present.
In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself.
The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.
> Did this small stone represent the very beginnings of writing, about 12,000 years ago? And did archaeologists really overlook such an important find all this time? (Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. And we didn’t.)
Hmm, but later in the post, discussing neolithic symbols from the wider region:
> Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge.
But totally not writing, yo.
It's unfair to attack archaeologists, who only busy diligently doing their job, increasing the store of public knowledge, and winning awards from each other. Except sometimes they deserve it, so I'm going to attack them by saying that they hate to be specific. It's a huge risk, you might be wrong, or ridiculed as a crank, or you might attract cranks. Better to couch everything in language that lets you avoid saying the thing.
On the other hand we have the 40,000 year old mammoth carving from Germany (see Sci Am article in a different comment) with decorative cross patterns on it, touted as "statistically complex" and conveying information, when they're just badly carved decoration. In that case they were simultaneously pussyfooting around about stating their case and going off on a flight of fancy, at the same time, in the style of "I'm not saying it's aliens".
>> Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge.
>But totally not writing, yo.
Children drawings have the same characteristics but are not writings
Yes, and the final sentence "But in my humble opinion we’re not seeing phonetic values assigned to specific symbols representing spoken language here yet" is fair enough.
The letter A evolved from an ox head, but that's mere coincidence, showing only an enduring interest in symbols of ox heads.
As someone who has been wearing earplugs for decades for motorcycles, firearms and other loud events, this information at face value is a bit off.
Foam by far has the most effective NRR. Silicone and wax are fine but will not provide as effective of NRR. That said, if it’s for sleeping silicone and wax are probably fine. I would argue that foam is not scratchy at all but I usually buy more expensive brands like Mack’s and it’s good to try out different sizes.
I have like 20 brands of foam earplugs in my drawer, 5 different pairs of custom silicone airplugs, unusual earplugs from Kickstarter like [1], and so on. What I'm saying is I know my way around the earplug block. Here's what I'd write for your categories:
Foam: The most effective, by far. I suspect many people wear them incorrectly and do not insert them far enough. You can use lube (they make special ear lube for stuff like hearing aids, although I think anything medical grade will do) if you have difficulty doing so. I have unusually small ear canals; the most comfortable and best I've found by a mile are Mack's Ultra Soft Foam Earplugs. These are much more comfortable than slim fit alternatives and also have very high attenuation.
Silicone: expensive (but they're reusable and last years), but the least fussy once you get them. They are moulded to your goddamn ear---it's a perfect, pressure-free fit every time and they go right in. Drawbacks include lesser attenuation and attenuation that isn't immediately at 100%---it takes a while for it to "seal". I abadoned these once moisture started to accumulate between my ear canal and the plug and I'd hear it as I moved and it became very annoying.
Wax: joke attenuations compared to foam, and bad compared to silicone. The most expensive long-term unless you're serious about reuse. Somewhat fussy and may fall out. Very comfortable (little insertion).
Foam + wax: this is what you really want if you care about maximum attenuation. My ear canals are slightly too short to comfortably insert an entire Mack's earplug, so I snip the ends off mine, lube them up, and insert them completely flush into my ear canal. Then, I take a wax plug and mould it on top. It's perfectly comfortable and it performs better than any other option I'm aware of. I tend to also wear a Bluetooth sleep mask and play rain sounds on 100% volume and it just comes through the double earplug situation to mask any very loud/spurious noise. To remove the flush-inserted earplugs, I use a pair of blunt tweezers.
When I used slim fit foam earplugs I'd routinely get ear infections. Switching to silicone fixed that, but suffered from the aforementioned issues. With the ultra soft earplugs + wax method I never get ear infections. I make sure to always insert a fresh pair (but I reuse the wax ones for a few days) and to always do so with clean hands. I think the infections are due to friction between the plug and the canal during insertion as well as plugs that are too large/exert too much pressure once expanded---the lube and very soft plug addresses those issues.
Oh well lube would make a huge difference, it's true. Some places require me to wear foam ones for health and safety reasons, and I always put water on them, for softness and a good seal. By calling the silicone ones fussy I just meant that they need washing, really (I am lazy). I buy big boxes of wax ones, they cost approximately nothing and come with a little storage container, and then I throw the current pair away after a week or two, mainly because they start to look gross (I suspect bacteria don't actually find paraffin wax hospitable).
How so?
I use the 3M yellow ones for many years and I find the pretty good. I buy like a box of 200 pairs and use them for a couple of times, so they are also pretty cheap.
Foam are indeed the best, but there's a lot of variation in sound blocking quality and ear comfort. Experimentation is needed to find what works for you.
White noise also helps without the need for ear plugs. Depends how loud the disturbances are.
There, patterns of electrical signals are said to be good, and not bad, but at the same time "morality" gets dismissed. But ideas of good and bad are morality!
Note that moral ideas don't have to be correct. "I should burgle a house" is a moral idea, an idea in the domain of morality. 1920s disapproval of the seductive decadent jungle rhythms of jazz was moral (I guess we say "moralistic" to indicate that we don't agree). The opposite attitude, praising jazz, is also moral. Treating Dylan as a traitor for going electric was moral, and attending the metal love-in that was Ozzy's farewell concert was also moral.
Then, a couple of posts up the thread from you, there's an imagined scene of people "vibing" to music at a party where everything is AI made. This sounds disgusting, somewhere between vaping and using a vibrator, and so I think I have to grudgingly give it my full approval. These imaginary young people are enjoying the vibe that they have vaguely selected. Maybe they had some input about the genre, maybe implicitly. They're choosing not to turn it off, anyway, because they like it, they think the vibe is good.
You imply that everybody saying "It's not real music" is wrong. OK, kind of, but they're not completely wrong. It doesn't follow that just because of our long history of snobbery, therefore everything is real music. The snobs are doing gatekeeping, but they're also doing discernment, and participating in the kind of moral ideas that music and art is made of. It's such a pain to define art that I'm liable to be downvoted for trying: some people are certain that relativism is the way forward, and that it's a brilliant insight to throw our hands in the air and give up. You're quite right that it has to encompass lots of different things, and no one defining feature will withstand counterexamples, but it can still be defined in a vague way as a collection of optional qualities, under which we could say that an instruction manual is not really art, but arguably artistic or artfully made.
So, I'm not judging the AI music as art or not-art right now, but I'm saying that it's amenable to so being judged. Anybody claiming that it's good music is admitting the possibility that it might be bad music, and this is a moral matter, about the value of feelings, meanings, and affections. That even applies to good or bad elevator music, it's trivial background sound, but approval or disapproval of it is moral. This is not about its worth as patterns of signals, because that's reductive. Those patterns mean things, or matter to us in ways that we have preferences about, which are value judgments.
Then there's the matter of whether there's just a small population with the genes for it, and whether it's polygenic, or mitochondrial, or otherwise non-mendelian, and all that gets factored into this heritability value along with cultural things like the use of concealer and the probability of having your face torn off by a bear. It kind of reminds me of inflation, as a useful measure.
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