We already know about social media companies (allegedly, at least):
> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
Time to bring up a pet peeve of mine: we should change the definition of a moon. It's not right to call a 1km-wide rock orbiting millions of miles from Jupiter a moon.
I recently came to realize the same things about physics. Even physicists find it hard to develop an intuitive mental picture of how space-time folds or what a photon is.
Well, that's just the esoterical nature of physics, no? I mean the old adage that "if you think you understand quantum physics you do not understand quantum physics" is a reflection of this.
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
Everyone rightfully highlights this striking statistic. But I notice a sleight of hand ("have supported" = correlation) and would like to see a breakdown of the factors that may have contributed to this divergence.
Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for instance when it crossed the heliosphere.
This wasn’t foresight. As the comment you responded to stated, the Voyager probes were built to explore the outer planets, nothing less and nothing more. The fact that they are still working is essentially a fortunate coincidence, helped by there not being much that can damage a spacecraft in outer space.
Just like Opportunity lasted for 15 years, while its identical twin Spirit only lasted for 6. The Voyager probes could easily have failed long ago, they just didn’t. But not because of planning or foresight. Sometimes things simply work out well.
One has to wonder how far can emergence stretch given enough time, some kind of entropic limit probably exists but I'm just a layman, hopefully someone more knowledgeable can share if we already know a physical hard limit for emergence.
After a brilliant start (atoms etc.,) it starts to be problematic once one hits societies. After all, the earlier progressions are undeniably astounding stable successes in their various incarnations. A pessimist might say 'Stable' societies so far have tended eventually towards being self-destructive tyrannies.
They are increasingly unstable, hence why I pondered about some enthropic limit the higher up it goes in the enthropy ladder.
Atoms are quite stable, even though they also suffer from quantum decay; then molecules can be stable but are less stable than atoms; up the ladder to biochemistry it starts to become more unstable the more complex it gets; so on and so forth.
Stable societies might be something that humans haven't achieved yet but somewhere in the Universe some other lifeform might, each rung of the ladder will filter out the most unstable versions of it, coalescing into the emergence of the more stable versions of it. Advanced technology is very unstable for us, requiring constant maintenance by intelligent humans.
If we take a simple definition of technology - such as “tool” or some external inanimate thing we use as an extension of ourselves - then I think all animals on Earth that we have deemed intelligent to some degree use “technology”. Crows using sticks to pick things out holes, chimps crafting spears for hunting, dolphins wearing “hats”, octopuses building stone fortresses, etc. So I guess it’s important to define the limit of the definition of technology.
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