I’d have guessed Zooble because of the whole changeable body parts thing…

Thanks, just watched the pilot and it looks really good. Which character did people think was trans and why?

Billing and Sherman have some pretty robust statistical controls to address these kinds of alternatives. Worth reading the paper.

Fully spoiled food is inedible, but there’s a long window of pathogen growth before that point, which can be lengthened further by spices. Why would some meat not be consumed immediately? Because life is messy, people make mistakes, and animals are large.

Yes. But if surveyed at a random time, including now, I’d be most likely to be classified as NEET.

Then why does people’s preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/

To elaborate a little further. “Just not eating” something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn’t that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants’ long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don’t.

I do high skill work that pays a lot. I could do a lot of it and have a lot of money, or do a little and live modestly and not work much. I chose option two.

Oh, also, no kids. Also, live somewhere where labor demand is high but supply low.

Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.