All of tpc's Comments + Replies

tpc10

From Paul Graham's essay:

How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter-- just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least em

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9Risto_Saarelma
I think it roughly means to subtract the teenage girl's model for how the world works from the streetsmart guy's model for how the world works. You expect to get the subset of experience a sheltered upbringing would shelter people from.
tpc40

Wrongbot, I wanted to note a disparity between what you say here:

The most recent common ancestor [chimpanzees] share with humans lived somewhere between 3 million and 800,000 years ago.

and what that Wikipedia article on bonobos says twice:

The chimpanzee line split from the last common ancestor shared with humans approximately six to seven million years ago.

1WrongBot
Yup, it looks like the consensus is around 6 million. I think I confused the human/chimpanzee split with the chimpanzee/bonobo split, which did seem to happen in that more recent timeframe. Thanks for pointing this out; I've edited my post to reflect the correct figure.