suffering after reproductive age is easy to answer - after reproductive age you are almost out of the reach of natural selection, especially e.g. some male wasps who keep living for a while after all the females have already mated and retreated into their nests. The males are now useless, nothing they do will change their reproductive success any more. So whatever happens to them doesn't count - whether it's a lot of suffering or the end of all suffering and infinite bliss. Unfortunately there's no natural selection that would end their suffering after mat...
Just as a short note to support this model, there was that old finding (probably from pre- replication crisis area, I wonder if it's survived?) that women experienced stronger post-rape trauma when it happened in their reproductive age; girls and old ladies were less traumatized. Also, women who were beaten and raped felt better than those who just raped, because then they could show that they had fought back.
Myself, as a woman, I don't intuitively feel like getting beaten as well would lower my trauma, but I haven't tried, so I don't know. What real...
I wonder how North Korea became what it is - would it still be the same if others didn't treat them like a monster? What they probably still would have is the iron curtain keeping the population from fleeing to wealthier lands and from seeing that there are better places. Though they might be slightly wealthier themselves so the curtain would be somewhat less strict.
I'm trying to imagine how people in Russia would feel after the war if Western countries kept or raised the sanctions. And I cannot find a strong difference. What they will know is that all the...
I absolutely love the ending of WWII - the dangerous enemy totally defeated, their government dismantled, nuclear program halted, and then given ample help to restore the economy. This is how friends are made I suppose? :-/ But this won't happen with Russia. People of Russia won't feel defeated, no-one's going to dismantle their government from outside or halt their nuclear program, and their public will keep supporting the governments efforts to restore the country's greatness and glory. So should we give them ample help to restore their economy and army,...
Is there anything known to be actually wrong about Sputnik vaccine except the adenovirus vector replicating sometimes? I'd think the latter is more-or-less okay if you are not very old or immuno-compromised. I live in Eastern Europe and we have a large Russian-speaking minority group, who have the same trouble - low vaccination rate and high Covid rate - for exactly the opposite reason. They trust the Russian government well enough and would be happy to get Sputnik, but often refuse the EU-approved vaccines (they are a smart crowd but no-one can avoid...
Can you give some broad explanation about what are plants doing differently? As I understand most plants (except annuals which have a specific live-fast-die-young strategy) are biologically immortal and hey tend to die from external stressors, like pathogens or getting struck by lightning. They do have a whole lot of transposons, and plastids in addition to mitochondria...
And as another example, I'm a female who's love gets staggeringly strong sometimes, maybe like the author's wife, yet I still want to support effective altruism rather than giving to relatives impulsively. I have a male friend with some autism traits and probably lower love feelings, who's not at all interested in effective altruism, but gives generous impulsive gifts to people he knows. So I really don't know if there's a correlation between love and altruism, and if there if, in which direction.
There are actually two types of alarm calls: those addressed to one's group members and those addressed to the predator. The ones addressed to group members don't necessarily convey meaningful information about the sender (at least this is not the immediate purpose, although these signals can in some cases have an additional benefit of demonstrating ones high quality to group members, see my other comment).
The alarm calls addressed to the predator are thought to signal the sender's vigilance: "you've been spotted, we know you are ...
Signaling is behavior whose main purpose is to demonstrate to others that you possess some desirable trait. For example, a bird performing an impressive mating display signals that it is healthy and has good genes.
This is a hopelessly narrow definition and should be changed. An agent can signal anything about itself, including undesirable traits such as "I'm not edible" or "I'm batshit crazy violent, don't mess with me". So lets first lose the clause "desirable".
And signals can be costly to the sender but not n...
I disagree; if our physiology was already adapted to the shocks - our brain, heart and skeletal muscles were expecting these shocks - they'd be no longer harmful but probably necessary instead. Keeping a pain reaction or emotional aversion to these physiologically necessary shocks would be counterproductive; we should expect the link between electric shocks and pain to be broken eventually.
Suffering is not rare in nature because actually harmful things are common and suffering is an adequate response to them.
Was the event recorded? Any chance to watch the record?
I think the parenting approach described here is very good and the post is well worthwile. There are a couple of things I’m itching to say, though. I have this itch because I’ve been sensitized by proud parents claiming the good outcomes of their kids to be a consequence of their parenting, while I’ve been doing all the same things without getting such great outcomes, so such posts are a bit painful to read. I apologise in advance.
First, as you probably have heared, parenting style (excluding outright abuse) appears to have little effe...
Regarding the punishment of different kinds of lying: I imagine that punishment is a useful tool if the threat of punishment can prevent people from doing the punishable thing. Since level 3 lying is usually not conciously done (after all, the liar has convinced himself of the lie), it is not easily preventable; it doesn't respond to punishment well. Blatant lying can be prevented by the liar if he wants to, so it easily responds to punishment, and that's why we use indignation and punishment against it as a preventive tool - since it actually works.
Eyeballing at a EU report chart, it looks like the reduction of carbon output in Europe is mostly due to changes in energy production (in millions of tonns, ca 490 less in 2016 compared to 1990) and manufacturing industries (370 less), but another 650 reduction comes from the little things combined (households, institutions, waste management, agriculture, fuels, industrial processes and product use, commerce, fugitive emissions). So, most of our focus should be on energy, but it does't look overly bad for the small things either. Of cause, if you zoom in on one really small intervention, like refusing straws in drinks, its impact will be very very low... Probably not worth it if it has any cost to you at all.
I acknowledge the harm done by apple brandishing, and reckon that it would be nice to voluntarily limit this behaviour. However, for clarification, I want to point out that apple holders often have a very strong desire to get admired by apple eaters, even if they tell you (perhaps falsely) that it's just for fun. This desire can be strong enough to cause considerable suffering to an apple holder if she feels like she is not appearing to hold any apples, if you see what I mean. It looks like you model them as flaunting their apples carelessly, "just for fun", but I think this behaviour (usually) stems from desire and suffering, which can be(?) as strong as those of yours; ultimately, they just really want oranges.
Thank you for the write-up! I wanted to ask a couple of questions:
- I remember reading a hypothesis that mitochondria directly caused sex, i.e. made host cells fuse into one, because it was beneficial for them in case they were trapped in a weak or dying host. This was supported by the finding that genes from mitochondria are involved in the initiation of cell fusion. Is this hypothesis still around or is it dead?
- I used to think archaea and bacteria cannot really swallow other cells, as with them having better things to do with their membranes. And the bacte
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