Talk-Polywell.org

Entropy is the nature of the universe, and so everything runs down. Restricting the number of allowed states is the very definition of entropy and government. That is why I would do as much as possible to limit government. Not a very popular idea these days. The cry is maximum restrictions (mine, n...

Human traits usually stick close to the central tendency. Generation 1 are soldiers, generation 2 are traders, generation 3 are farmers, and generation 4 is back to war. Traits are not significantly amplified because of the consistent shifting around. Evolution is long-term. Not necessarily. More c...

The author Jerry Pournelle posted an article about Ashkenazi cognitive overclocking on his website over a decade ago. IIRC, the math worked out that to get the +15% consistently and stably seen in Ashkenazim IQ testing over the last 120 years would take 40 generations of Mendelian trait amplificati...

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Albrecht/2014-12-23-Bill-Gates-Sponsoring-Palladium-Based-LENR-Technology.html I would love to be wrong about LENR and Gates be right. I'm quite convinced that SOMETHING nuclear is going on in those LENR electrolytic cells. The controls to exclude external contamination hav...

The timeline for Ashkenazi IQ evolution I'm familiar with is 800-1800AD, tho a 500 year period of evolution is plausible as well. I think the intense selection pressure was from about 1300 to 1800. The markers I use are the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and Martin Luther who died in 1546...

What about all that supposed "junk dna"? Possible raw-material genetic variation on standby in case of environmental change. Rapid fat production genes are unneeded in a Mediterranean environment, but if you move to the arctic circle or an ice age starts and the arctic circle moves to you, subseque...

Sadly, no. Social conformity and the desire to hold status and the privileges thereof (sex inclusive) trumps everything. Those for whom evidence trumps all are a tiny, generally low-status and resource-limited subset of the population. Being resource limited, the NT-Rationals will not be building t...

The vulnerability is not the computers, nor the eminently digitally editable numbers we call bank accounts. The vulnerability is the electricity. Dies the fire, and everything dies. Freezers shut down and meat goes bad, pumps do not function to pump fuel into car gas tanks, batteries in the ipads d...

Oh I am very much aware of the various fMRI studies; I assume you're referring to one of the new(er) ones? But monitoring electrical signals conducted along the nerves does not per se give you access to THE MIND, no matter what the High Church Atheists like Harris and Dawkins keep screaming. The Mi...

[Prove that human minds exist, using the assumptions of determinism and reductive materialism. Absent those superstitious metaphysics, limiting oneself to the tools and methods of reductive materialism, the existence of the mind is a maddening, frustrating problem to confront. On this rock, more th...

Nature tries everything. It has always used a shotgun approach. That's why a billion sperm are sent after one egg. Throw enough biological units at the problem, and one of them is bound to get through. :) Nature tries everything, sort of. Yes, 100 million sperm bumrush for that one ovum. But there ...

What about all that supposed "junk dna"? Possible raw-material genetic variation on standby in case of environmental change. Rapid fat production genes are unneeded in a Mediterranean environment, but if you move to the arctic circle or an ice age starts and the arctic circle moves to you, subseque...

Also this argument quoted is naive. It treats religion and human mind like black box. The human mind is not that stupid. And religion itself is evidence too: aside any superstitious metaphyics, it is just another memetic variation. Culture. It's not magic. You don't rub a rosary together to trigger...

I'm only a layperson on topics like these but if DNA is the blueprint for how an organism is constructed, perhaps it also contains the blueprints for the construction of the neuron connections in higher beings. On the other hand, plants can have behaviors also in the case of the Venus flytrap and t...

I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace That's too far beyond horizon. Once/if humans go post-scarcity and scatter into cosmos, then all bets are off. You might not hear about it, but you can be sure at least one group somewhere will adopt something else th...