Does a theory of psychology underpin your politics?

[brennan]

"one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.[8][11][12][13] Potential causes for those pulses include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanic eruptions (such as the Siberian Traps[14]), and climate change brought on by large releases of underwater methane or methane-producing microbes.[15]"

Seems like a rather wild extrapolation. Is anthropomorphic climate change going to produce an increase in tectonic activity? Attract a few asteroids?

Crazy talk like this is what is widening the political divide.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

How can it be widening it when one side literally refuses to believe it even exists and claims that it's a hoax?

What world do you inhabit where that isn't already a vast, wide chasm between the political divide?

 

[brennan]

Location: not the USA.

Edit: please tell us about your work on narrowing the divide, since it is clearly a problem you recognise. Do you feel that denouncing racists and fascists is helping to bring moderates over to your side?

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Probably not, but i don't see moderates doing anything about those issues, do you? In fact they seem to be quite squeemish when it comes to it.

 

[brennan]

Probably not

Pragmatically then, some sort of change in tactic is required, no?

 

[Cloud_Strife]

And is the status quo working currently? Moderates own that.

 

[Estebonrober]

"one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.[8][11][12][13] Potential causes for those pulses include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanic eruptions (such as the Siberian Traps[14]), and climate change brought on by large releases of underwater methane or methane-producing microbes.[15]"

Seems like a rather wild extrapolation. Is anthropomorphic climate change going to produce an increase in tectonic activity? Attract a few asteroids?

Crazy talk like this is what is widening the political divide.

The effects are remarkably similar to what we are perpetuating right now. If you read deeper it would be pointed out that all of those resulted in fossil fuel like changes the meteor and volcanic eruptions both lead to catastrophic fossil fuel driven climate change.

Near the top of the supercontinent Pangaea in what is now Siberia, a gigantic plume of magma—enough to cover the lower 48 states a kilometer deep—was burbling through one of the most coal-rich regions in the world and covering millions of square miles of Pangaean countryside in basalt lava. As the molten rock ponded underground, seeping sideways into the crust, it incinerated not only untold seams of coal laid down by ancient forests in the hundred million years before, but huge deposits of oil and natural gas as well. The ignited oil and gas exploded at the surface, leaving behind half-mile craters. The volcanoes injected as much as 40,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. This unthinkable volcanism, and the greenhouse gases it liberated, account for the extreme global warming and ocean acidification seen in the rocks spanning the dreaded Permian-Triassic boundary. It’s even been called The Great Dying. Carbon dioxide, it seems, nearly killed the planet.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/a-road-trip-to-the-end-of-the-world/532914/

 

[brennan]

The volcanoes injected as much as 40,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Uh, that's more than three orders of magnitude more than the current annual human CO2 footprint.

humans contribute 29 billion tons of CO2 each year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

These events are not remotely comparable.

 

[Imaus]

Pffft. All we need is a good nuclear war. Nothing cancels out Global Warming like Nuclear Winter.

There apparently was a algae or somesuch that was real good at eating Co2 a few million years back. I think this world is going to go into panic mode and tinker with whatever it can to keep the status quo, geopolitical wise. Algae, Aerosols, Solar Solletas, whatever it can.

Whether or not it'll work is up to what side of optimism or pessimism you're on.

As for Eugenics, it can be as simple , wide-eyed and arguably needed as wide-spread gene-therapy to help people live in a hotter, humid, more virulent, and more harsh world; getting rid of genetic diseases and a few buffs along the way. Then someone makes super soldiers. You get both; you can't pick-and-chose once the tech is out of the box. We'll deal with it, rather, we'll adapt to it, even if it leaves a lot of bodies along the way. Not like we're much good at avoiding potential casualties as a global civilization anyway. Oh, sure, we've kicked a few diseases out of the ring, we've held off famine, we've held off pandemics and epidemics...but we were in easy mode, with a world orbiting one, two, four or so major poles in a world that wasn't cooked over. It's all too fickle, however. One, two, a few cracks later, and then all hell's unleashed.

 

[Estebonrober]

Uh, that's more than three orders of magnitude more than the current annual human CO2 footprint.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

These events are not remotely comparable.

for reference that 40000 gigatons was over a few million years. we will have passed that in what 1000 at the rate we are going? We need to change, we can do it now, it is a moral imperative to due so.

 

[Peuri]

[...]
Even if we're considering bionics, it just isn't comparable to the other two though .

Maybe not on the same scale, but having an exoskeleton that makes you able to lift a tonne, or having legs with wheels or what ever, seems like a drastic change to humanhood.

[...]
damn how embarrassing that I missed this post. but yea, refer to above. sadly this is more or less consensus right now, but that might change at any given moment.

Oh, is it the Siberian metane pockets? Got any good articles on this?

 

[Narz]

I'm a misanthrope at heart, but even I cringed when reading this.

the average human being definitely is not stupid, you even admit as much yourself by saying that our methods of manipulation, control and suggestion are getting ever more sophisticated. it's not mine or your fault that we are at this point, it's the fault of people abusing human psychology and weakness with bad intent.

People that we allow to have power over us.

you, as a psychologist/psychiatrist (sorry I don't remember), know that we readjust IQ scores every so often, because human beings, on average, get ""smarter"" with almost every generation (this is a common claim, especially w/r/t the Flynn effect.

We can memorize & manipulate abstract data, that doesn't make us smart. Plenty of geniuses are idiots and almost no one would survive a long enough disruption of our highly delicate industrial society (if the internet/electric grid/global-economy/transportation system collapsed we would be quite helpless, like Lab rats if the scientists didn't show up to feed them. We have more intelligence of an algae bloom, grown out of control, we can see the doom ahead, but that isn't helping us change en masse.

I speculate that the average human is probably quite a bit dumber in everyday life than people 1,000 years ago when one physical or social slip up would mean your doom (now you can trip on the sidewalk and break your arm & profit off of it)

however I am just citing it, not actually agreeing with it, just saying). of course IQ is some dumb psychometric horse****, but still. personally I don't think that we've gotten significantly smarter nor dumber in the last decades and centuries, we've just amassed more knowledge, which is independent of intelligence.

Agreed. The Internet proves that access to information doesn't create a more informed human being.

Humans could have potential in an ideal environment, but in our current modern industrial treadmill society we are being propelled to our doom just as certainly as a factory farmed chicken.

 

[Hehehe]

Are you sure these are reliable studies? Both are quite old. And more importantly, they're about 5-HTTLPR, which spent a long time attracting a lot of attention and fanfare, including hundreds of studies. But most of those were recently demolished pretty decisively. See this and this. That being said, the paper I'm talking about focused on links to depression and 5-HTTLPR. But I'm suspicious anyway.

I remember reading about that. Didn't it mostly apply to old studies that were done in the 90's, or possibly early 2000's, before low cost genome sequencing was available? Thus they used very low sample sizes? But I suppose you're right, science is a self-correcting process, so scepticism is always warranted.

Sure, which explain maybe 10% of the variance (e.g., this, which is about educational attainment in particular).

Yes, the work is still ongoing. But it is interesting that they've identified so many of them so far. So even as things stand, technically, gene editing could make humans some 10% smarter.

Yes, it was commonly believed for a long time that small numbers of genes could explain large amounts of variance in complex traits.

I still disagree with this. Just the fact that a trait follows a normal distribution suggests that it is govern by a large amount of genes. The mainstream has to have known this for a long time.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Yeah, you probably know about how geneticists and psychologists spent decades looking for some kind of "smarts gene." Even as they broadened the search to dozens and hundreds of genes, they still kept turning up empty handed. And now the consensus is that almost the entire genome contributes. Which makes a lot of sense. In retrospect, it's nuts anyone thought super complex traits were really being caused by just a few proteins. It's like being there for the copernican revolution.

This also makes me think re-engineering humans to be much smarter, taller, more attractive, or whatever is going to be very, very complicated. Just figuring out what we'd like to edit is a crazy complicated modeling problem. Not to mention actually performing the edits and keeping the side effects limited.

another thought: people in the middle ages usually had horrible dentistry, and therefore kinda disgusting mouths. they often smelled bad. they didn't have shampoo, probably had scraggy hair compared to people today, probably had bad skin, and maybe, just speculating, worse posture from working hard physical work.

so it seems utterly clear that today people are more attractive. if we were to meet a farmer girl from the middle ages, she would probably smell horrible to us, not look attractive at all compared to the average 21st century western woman. so, if we find a way to increase attractiveness via gene editing, and everyone gets way more attractive, wouldn't it merely cancel itself out? wouldn't our beauty ideals adapt, get even more specific, find rare traits, fixate on other superficialities, so that in the end absolutely nothing happens?

 

[yung.carl.jung]

some stuff on climate change

At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires.

But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.

Losing close to ALL of the biomass of (water-based) plants and flying insects is what would cause the downfall of the entire world, though as Peuri correctly mentions there are also other factors at play that we currently cannot even assess properly, like gas pockets




https://interactive.carbonbrief.org...degrees/?utm_source=web&utm_campaign=Redirect

Dude, climate change means the planet finding a new, warmer, equilibrium state. Not becoming a second Venus. There are negative feedback mechanisms.

imbecile.

Moderator Action: This is flaming. Don't do it. It isn't nice and it incurs moderator action. --LM
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marinespecies[6][7] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct.[8] It was the largest known mass extinction of insects. Some 57% of all biological families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of land-dwelling life took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[6] possibly up to 10 million years.[9] Studies in Bear Lake County, near Paris, Idaho, showed a relatively quick rebound in a localized marine ecosystem, taking around 2 million years to recover,[10] suggesting that the impact of the extinction may have been felt less severely in some areas than others.

There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.[8][11][12][13] Potential causes for those pulses include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanic eruptions (such as the Siberian Traps[14]), and climate change brought on by large releases of underwater methane or methane-producing microbes.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event

You lack imagination good sir, the amount of chemical changes going about now is closer to the Permian extinction event which yes could lead us to the total collapse of civilization and possibly humanity.

so what's the problem here? we simply wait 10 MILLION years and everything will be fine again, no? seems like climate change ain't a problem after all. THANKS BRENNBAMA

 

[brennan]

Presumably in your rush to throw insults you missed the part about us having to emit CO2 at current levels for a thousand years to equal that event.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Maybe not on the same scale, but having an exoskeleton that makes you able to lift a tonne, or having legs with wheels or what ever, seems like a drastic change to humanhood.

So was the ability to drive cars or access the internet, however. I'm not convinced bionics offers anything more drastic than those, in contrast to what gene editing or AI singularity might do.

I also think you're falling into a trap when you think that we can use eugenics to breed exactly the type of people we need

I'm actually more worried that someone with the power to attempt this will think they can do it, as opposed to us actually being able to do it.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Presumably in your rush to throw insults you missed the part about us having to emit CO2 at current levels for a thousand years to equal that event.

I didn't miss that, it's just utterly irrelevant. everyone with a shred of intelligence knows that climate change will cause the single biggest catastrophe the earth has seen in the last thousands of years, or since "civilization" has been around. your claim about different CO2 emissions has already been put into perspective by Estenrobber, but even if it WAS correct, it would STILL be irrelevant w/r/t our CURRENT predictions for climate change, so the argument was useless from the start.

 

[Truthy]

I remember reading about that. Didn't it mostly apply to old studies that were done in the 90's, or possibly early 2000's, before low cost genome sequencing was available? Thus they used very low sample sizes? But I suppose you're right, science is a self-correcting process, so scepticism is always warranted.

Low confidence answer: it did refute studies from the 2010s and bogus studies about 5-HTTLPR and depression are still being published.

Yes, the work is still ongoing. But it is interesting that they've identified so many of them so far. So even as things stand, technically, gene editing could make humans some 10% smarter.

I'm puzzled about the viability of doing this. The Chinese kids who were CRISPRed recently had one gene edited iirc. How realistic is it to edit 1,000 genes in the near future? How many people or governments are going to be OK with the risks this entails just to grab a small fraction of a standard deviation? I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it's a very complicated and risky endeavor that makes me skeptical of it's viability in the near future.

I still disagree with this. Just the fact that a trait follows a normal distribution suggests that it is govern by a large amount of genes. The mainstream has to have known this for a long time.

I'll concede defeat but say a couple things.

I don't think it was crazy to imagine ~10 genes plus a bunch of supposed environmental effects being sufficient to produce a normal-looking distribution. Though that could have issues. Like it would be hard to account for extreme outcomes without a lot more genetic variables. So people would have to imagine really big environmental effects or some exogenous genetic effects (e.g., with Down's syndrome). But something along these lines was a common line of thinking. For example, the amount of hype people like this guy got (and still get) for having some really smart daughters. But ultimately, yes, we had things like Fisher's infinitesimal model 100 years ago. I think you're right that if geneticists were claiming small amounts of genes explained a lot of variance in normally distributed traits, they were either exaggerating to hype up their results or being stupid. Perhaps hardly any of them ever did that and it was mostly just the media/non-geneticists misunderstanding how little variance they were talking about.

I will say the broader shift to massively polygenic/omnigenic modeling for non-normally distributed traits is a recent thing. E.g., this article mentions in the 90s is was commonly thought autism was caused by just 10-15 genes. This paper advancing omnigenic models is super highly cited and only 2 years old. But you'll point out that they're not talking about traits like intelligence that are obviously normally distributed; they're talking about things like diseases.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I also wonder about what effects gene-editing would have on viruses and bacterial infections:

if a virus that we've already "dealt with" spreads to someone who is heavily genetically manipulated, in what ways would the virus adapt? would it change so much that it could possibly become dangerous again for vaxxinated "normal" people? a lot of interesting questions open up once you REALLY consider the scenario beyond the constantly repeated "superior humans", "nations of geniunses", "genetic supersoldiers" bs.