I'm surprised that Scott Alexander's blog post didn't go for what I think is a more obvious connection between conservatism and conservationism: religious fundamentalism.
The way man acts these days... [shakes head, downcast] forswears a God-given charge to protect this God-given Earth. The way he chokes the air with smokestacks, plunders the oceans of her fishes, and paves the green hills flat with concrete—it sickens me. Gets me [thumps chest with mic] right through the heart. His vainglorious pride to try to change the natural order of things, the intricate tapestry of birds and deer, trees, antelopes, and groundhogs, from the mighty whale down to the humblest anthill—modern man thinks he knows better how to till the Earth. What does he till it with? Monoagriculture and pesticides! And what does he reap? Monoxides and pestilence! [Swell of the organ, roar of the audience]
I see a grave judgement coming! I see the cry of the Earth, rising up to the heavens, carried on winds of carbon dioxide, of nitrous oxide, the methanes and the synthetic fluorinated gases—all!—rise up to the heavens! And they cry out to the Lord, "My God, how long?" [long pause] And the Lord answers. "Not long. No, not long now." For there is a judgement coming. Indeed, the stench of our industrial civilization is both sin and the wages of sin. Silently sealing us off from the heavens, to bake in the stew of our own filth. As in the days of Noah, the waters will rise.
Oh Lord, save us from this mighty cataclysm! Make us turn in our hearts from the plastics and the petroleums of our idolatry to the wholesome fruits of your loving kingdom. Yes! We long to return to the fields and meadows of your abundance, Lord. Help us break our addiction to the spoils of modern life that poison your garden. Give us moral strength to abstain from consumer culture, from gas-guzzling SUVs, from industrial meat production, from coveting a bigger house, a bigger yard, fast fashion, and the latest i-Phone! Yes! Save us from the harlots of modern convenience, and return us, Lord, return us to the bosom... of your care.
This is both interesting and (I think) an important thing to know about science: plans and strategies are systematic, but discoveries sometimes are and sometimes aren't. In particle physics, the Omega baryon and Higgs boson were discovered in deliberate hunts, but the muon and J/psi were serendipitous. The ratio might be about half-and-half (depending on how you count particles).
Thinking about this, I have two half-answers, which may be leads as to why sweetener discovery might be discovered by serendipity, even though there are systematic searches for new drugs.
(This suggestion also has an analogy with particle physics: hundreds of particles were discovered in the 1950's because accelerators had just been invented that could illuminate the strong-force mass range, which has rich phenomenology. At the current frontier, though, there are very few particles.)
Other comments in the comments section that sound quite likely to me are: (1) perhaps the very sweet compounds could be smelled, which prompted chemists to try tasting them (@mako-yass), and (2) maybe some of these origin stories are scientific folklore (@d0themath). Scientists, who are very concerned to get the description of physical reality right, are surprisingly cavalier about describing their own history in an accurate way.
This story from the perspective of the Thing did get into the notion of what it would be like to be an amorphous consciousness (and how odd it is that Earthlings aren't). It's still a little different, though, from the trajectory of being human and then realizing what it's like to be multi-human. A version with Pod People would be a different kind of story...
Cool! I'll read that one, too, thanks!
What I was thinking about with the pod people was their group mentality. (After all, it has long been considered a metaphor for communism.) I'd like to see someone imagine—or do it myself—the poddified people not as soulless outer shells of their former selves, but as themselves, "melted" into a group consciousness. As an example of something similar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "The Wish" did an excellent job showing characters who remained themselves, but as evil versions of themselves, as vampires.
In the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes, the reason the poddified people are hard to distinguish from their former selves is because they're good at mimicry. They were only pretending to be their former selves. However, if one person's consciousness really isn't distinct from another's in a fundamental way, just by a much thinner channel of communication than that between the parts of one's brain, then thickening the channel of communication between people by telepathy would probably feel like a kind of awakening—realizing that there are all these other parts of you that had been hidden until now. These people would probably talk and act as they did in the Body Snatcher movies: they'd tell the anti-pod antagonists that there's nothing to fear from poddification, that they haven't lost anything, they've only gained a wider consciousness, etc., while the antagonists recoil in horror because it's a threat to their individuality. Whenever someone is poddified, they change their mind not because they've been overcome, but because now they, too, see what they've been missing.
Personally, I can't say which side I'd be on. It would be underwhelming for the author of this remake to just reverse the moral (individualism is bad; all is one, baby!). It is horrific to think of one's personality melting into a larger brain. Also, the end-state of that is sopolistic: there would be only one consciousness, with no one to talk to. (But then again, wanting to talk to others is wanting to thicken the connections between bits of consciousness, so that's the same thing again.)
Although G.K. Chesterton wildly misunderstood other cultures and was triumphalist about his own, I've always rather liked this image from The Romance of Orthodoxy (1908):
The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him.
What this "nuclear consciousness" mental model doesn't have is an account of knowing someone without being that someone. But then, is there such a thing?
That's why I'd like to see a rewrite of the Body Snatchers: to explore that idea, even if it doesn't come to a solid conclusion.
But if that observer is in the universe, then there's more in the universe than just the circle.
I was examining this universe from the outside. We can't actually do that, though we act as though we do in the physical sciences. (One idea in the physical sciences that takes seriously the fact that experimenters are a part of the universe they observe is superdeterminism, and it's one of the possible loopholes for Bell's Inequality.)
Panpsychism! (Sort of!) But I guess that makes sense, since panpsychism is trying to make sense of divisibility of consciousness, too.
I will read it, thanks!
Sorry that I didn't notice your comment before. You took it the one extra step of getting kinetic and rotational energy in the same units. (I had been trying to compare potential and rotational energy and gave up when there were quantities that would have to be numerically evaluated.)
Yeah, I follow your algebra. The radius of the ball cancels and we only have to compare and . Indeed, a uniformly solid sphere (an assumption I made) rolling without sliding without change in potential energy (at the end of the ramp) has 29% rotational energy and 71% linear kinetic energy, independently of its radius and mass. That's a cute theorem.
It also means that my "physics intuition trained on similar examples in the past" was wrong, because I was imagining a "negligible" that is much smaller than 29%. I was imagining something less than about 5% or so. So the neural network in my head is apparently not very well trained. (It's been about 30 years since I did these sorts of problems as a physics major in college, if that can be an excuse.)
As for your second paragraph, it would matter for solving the article's problem because if you used the ball's initial height and assumed that all of the gravitational potential energy was converted into kinetic energy to do the second part of the problem, "how far, horizontally, will the ball fly (neglecting air resistance and such)?" you would overestimate that kinetic energy by almost a third, and how much you overestimate would depend on how much it slipped. Still, though, the floppy track would eat up a big chunk, too.
Sorry—I addressed one bout of undisciplined thinking (in physics) and then tacked on a whole lot more undisciplined thinking in a different subject (AI alignment, which I haven't thought about nearly as much as people here have).
I could delete the last two paragraphs, but I want to think about it more and maybe bring it up in a place that's dedicated to the subject.
This sounds like it's using Russell's theory of descriptions, in that you're replacing "Colorless green ideas do Y" with "For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X does Y." Not everyone agrees that this is a correct interpretation, in part because it seems that statements like "Dragons are attacking Paris" should be false.
I think it would be reasonable to say that "colorless green ideas" is not just a set of objects in which there are no existing members, but meaningless (for two reasons: "colorless" and "green" conflict, and ideas can't be colored, anyway). I think that was Chomsky's intention—not to write a false sentence, but a meaningless one.