What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, transmute handfuls of sand into powerful djinn, and generally manipulate matter in any way not strictly forbidden by the laws of physics, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum? What tectonic forces have torn such a chasm between us and our surviving cousins, still banging rocks together in the animal kingdom? For most of history this was no great mystery: only humans have a...| Deep Dish
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across. Never mind the bit about how there are trillions of copies of you constantly branching throughout the multiverse. Deutsch also claims there is nothing in principle stopping us from colonising the stars, transmuting matter like the alchemists of old, bringing an end to death, reversing global warming, and solving any other problem that arises. But that's not ambitious enough...| Deep Dish
Human and animal sunk costs often aren’t, and sunk cost bias may be useful on an individual level to encourage learning. Convincing examples of sunk cost bias typically operate on organizational levels and are probably driven by non-psychological causes like competition.| gwern.net
Ergodicity - the average outcome of the group is the same as the average outcome of the individual over time.| Taylor Pearson
