• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle

  • My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don’t really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

    As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct


  • No, not weird at all. PhD’s are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you’re good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you’ve locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out

    Edit: Also, you need to have a highly sensitive red-flag radar. As a graduate student, you are highly susceptible to abuse from your professor. There is no recourse for abuse. The only way to avoid abuse is by not picking an abusive professor from the get-go. Which is hard, since professors obviously would never talk badly about themselves. Train that red-flag radar, since you’ll need to really read between every word and line to figure out if a professor is right for you



  • Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don’t need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

    The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.









  • Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I am a biologist (more specifically, a microbiogist).

    The crux of the misunderstanding, I think, is that the definition of what counts as advantageous or “good” has changed over time. Very rapidly, in fact. The reason many diseases are still around today is because many genetic diseases offered a very real advantage in the past. The example that is often given is malaria and sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia gives resistance to malaria, which is why it’s so prevalent in populations that historically have high incidence of malaria.

    Natural selection doesn’t improve anything, it just makes animals more fit for their exact, immediate situation. That also means that it is very possible (and in fact, very likely) that the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.

    If we remember that natural selection isn’t trying to push humanity towards any goal, enlightenment, or good health, it becomes easier to acknowledge and accept that we can and should interfere with natural selection




  • I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

    But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

    If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.