yeah Microsoft could never conceivably develop an extensible source available IDE people love so much they even fork to build $3B companies on the scraps of. absolutely alien!
Human brains were peak size few thousands years ago or something like that. Since then, average human brain started to shrink. I can't help, but think that's because of civilization freed our brains from the necessity to think as much, so evolution decided that spending so much energy on brain is wasteful and started to make it smaller.
I'm not really sure evolution works this direction today, we are not living in a food scarce world right now... But just food for thought.
Human brains are not the largest in the animal kingdom. Are elephants and whales smarter than us? We don't think they are, but we don't really know. It could be that they're much smarter but in different ways, maybe somatosensory or social or other ways we don't understand. It could also be that their brains are less efficient due to less selection pressure for efficiency.
In humans there is only a weak correlation between brain size/mass and IQ or other metrics of intelligence.
Then there's utterly wild stuff like this that reminds us of how little we really understand about brains and intelligence:
The fact that someone can function like this is incredible and indicates that the brain must contain a lot of redundancy, or something even weirder is going on.
Stuff like that is enough to make you wonder if we know anything at all.
Another similar data point is the spooky intelligence of many birds, like crows, who have tiny brains. Flying animals are under extreme selection pressure for efficiency because they need to be small and light, so their brains have gotten very efficient.
You can't compare humans with elephants or birds. We are extremely different species with different evolution paths. It is very possible, that bird brains is much more optimized, but that tells nothing about our brains.
We can compare humans with our ancestors and trend is clear: our skull was getting bigger, despite the fact that it's not good for evolution, until some point after which it started to shrink.
Whether it translates to cognition increase or decline - we probably will never find out, we don't have time machine. But that's the most obvious assumption. Big skull is bad for birth, so evolution pressure on making skull smaller is enormous. Big brain is bad for energy efficiency, because brain consumes a lot of energy and food is scarce in the wild, so that's another evolution pressure. The fact that our ancestors kept growing head despite that evolution pressure meant that advantage was bigger. And intelligence is the only factor that comes to mind which can offset the negatives.
> So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,
> Or even watching a 3 hour movie.
I agree with your thesis in general, but I don’t think these two in particular are comparable the way you’re phrasing them.
I have read books in a single five or six hour sitting but those were “by accident” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting to finish the book the day that I started them, I went into them with the expectation there would be pauses. Books work well with this type of interruption and have well-defined chapters.
A three hour movie, on the other hand, I see as a commitment I must try to not interrupt because it is designed as a single experience. Breaking it up detracts from the artist’s goal. Before starting it I must immediately look at clock and do some math: can I even begin to watch this movie, considering that in two hours I should <be preparing dinner | sleeping | picking someone up | something else>?
A similar phenomenon is when we don’t feel like watching a two-hour movie “because it’s too long” but then happily binge watch fours hours of some TV show instead. Even if we ignore TV shows are often designed to be more addictive, the fact that you have clearly delineated stop points—chapters, if you will—makes them a more manageable commitment.
Modern authors may be forced to spend too much time in the sludge pits of social media for any hope of financial success, but we don't need to pretend that's being "empowered."
Also, publishing on your own website and nowhere else will not work. Such is the modern age of platforms.
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
How your angle of criticism doesn’t apply to Trump?
Felon. Crypto grifter (selling corruption out in the open?). Known adulterer. TV personality - so he “makes good TV” when in front of cameras.
Whole world thought Ukraine will fall in 3 days (just like Putin). Zelenski asked for “bullets and not evacuation”. He stood his ground, united the nation, with kremlin’s assassins trying to constantly get him and he still visits soldiers on the front line regularly. Trump and JD are scared for their lives to even visit Kyiv.
