The Monarchs are here.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The Monarchs are here.
We’ve got ultrasound images of the grandson who will be born in November.
Of course an old teratologist is going to immediately check the number of digits and conformation of the palate. Looking good so far!
(also it wouldn’t matter if he has six toes and a facial abnormality — still my grandson.)
My university offers courses in several languages with a relatively tiny population base, like Anishinaabe, the language of the indigenous peoples of the upper Midwest. I’m sometimes, but not often, asked why we bother, because these languages are so “impractical”, and it’s because they’re good for sharing the culture and history of groups of people, or because someone wants to understand their grandfather’s perspective (or the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers). We should value the diverse ways of the multitude of different groups that have grown and changed throughout history. Unfortunately, many of these languages are dying out, and being replaced by a small number of “behemoth languages,” and we’re losing world languages at a steady rate — which is why it’s important to preserve as much as we can. This paper, The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene, tries to model the appearance and loss of languages over the last few millennia.
There are ~7500 languages signed and spoken in the world today, and they have a wide range of grammatical structures, vocabularies, speech sounds, signs, and usage rules. The study of language diversity has brought distinctive insights into how human behavior and cognition are shaped by ecological, social, and communicative pressures. The observable limits of linguistic diversity—features that are either universally present or absent in the world’s languages—have been at the core of what makes humans a distinctive species. Insights into language have also been used to understand other dimensions of human variation and homogeneity, including cultural and psychological traits. Over the past 500 years, all evidence points to a large systematic decrease in linguistic diversity, in parallel with the spread of a handful of behemoth languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Nearly 5 billion people use at least 1 of the 10 most common languages, whereas half of the world’s languages are now endangered, and about four become dormant every year. This results in the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge embedded in minority languages and contributes to the unequal development in science, technology, medicine, and education that predominantly benefits speakers of the world’s largest languages.
I’m sure speakers of Anishinaabe recognize the definite advantages of speaking English, or maybe Mandarin in a few years, but they still want to retain a connection with their ancestors. Something similar happened to my immigrant great-great-grandparents — they spoke Norwegian, lived in communities of fellow Norwegian immigrants, and right up to my great-grandparents generation, were learning Norwegian and speaking it in church and family gatherings, but my generation has completely adopted the dominant English language of my region. We might still occasionally say “uff-da” or have lutefisk and lefse on holidays, but otherwise, we’re totally assimilated.
So about 4 languages a year are disappearing. The authors of that paper have attempted to quantitatively estimate the number of languages spoken over our history, and it’s surprising how much we’ve lost.
Fig. 4. Marginal results of our model aggregated across all conditions.
(A) The number of languages through the Holocene. Lighter shades of the curve correspond to progressively wider intervals comprising 10 to 90% of the predictions. Black lines indicate the interval containing 70% of the predictions.
Whoa. That’s a pretty sharp peak and a rather precipitous decline. The authors propose an explanation of what was going on.
Typically, the total number of languages has been increasing for most of the Holocene, mimicking the global expansion of human populations. This suggests that the rise of large-scale regional powers 4000 years ago did not generally and immediately deter the growth of linguistic diversity. Instead, most trajectories reached a maximum of 1000 to 3000 yr B.P. Although there is wide uncertainty in our estimates, most trajectories display an approximately 10-fold increase in the number of languages between the early Holocene and this point. This period, harboring tens of thousands of languages, has escaped previous theorizing.
In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia. The process unfolded so quickly that the rate of language loss must have been even faster than the current pessimistic forecasts for the year 2100.
As populations grew, the number of languages also grew…until the rise of large empires and increased trade and communication, when a few successful dominant groups swallowed up the smaller populations. This model also makes the evolution of various languages non-adaptationist — some languages thrive, not because they are superior to other languages, but because they are piggy-backing on other properties of their population. Don’t bother trying to argue that English is better than Spanish, because what really matters is the strength and success of the population speaking the language. Languages don’t die because they’re inferior, but because they’re taken over by an expanding population.
It follows that this massive and biased reduction in linguistic diversity has shaped the relative abundance of different language traits. However, functional factors (such as learnability, efficient communication, or computational costs) are typically invoked instead to explain why some language traits are more common than others. But the intensity and recency of the linguistic diversity bottleneck make it a clear nonfunctional null hypothesis for understanding any skewed linguistic distribution.
Cool. I do have to envy linguists because at least they don’t get stupid demands like “Show me an Italian giving birth to a baby speaking Thai.” A lot of the elements of language evolution are similar to the properties of biological evolution, and seem to be equally incomprehensible to the ignorant.
I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!
Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)
The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.
In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)
If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.
Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.
It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!
Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?
Now you can. It’s pretty amazing how much silk she can produce so quickly.
This is not good news. The Trump administration wants to radically change how science is done in this country.
On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.
The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.
The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”
“Gold standard”? So he wants to buy some cheap crap from Home Depot, spray paint it gold, and call it science?
Jesus, but he made the oval office kitschy and cheap, and now he’s going to give science the same treatment.
Wyoming students aren’t allowed to get a degree in philosophy.
Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy.
It is unclear what the justification for this decision is.
It’s not unclear at all. Wyoming is a very Republican state, and the people who run the government there are doofuses who’ve never taken a philosophy course or even thought about philosophy. Ignorance breeds ignorance.
Apparently, the Odyssey is fully engaged with pop culture now.
I think the threat that a whole civilization will die
is kind of like the prophecy that Delphi gave to Croesus. Another phrase associated with Croesus is “Count no man happy until the end is known”, and I’m waiting for the ending.
I’m hoping the end will be something like that of another fabulously wealthy man of the ancient world, Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Oh no. I’m getting so old. Now my oldest son, Alaric, and his partner, Katarina, have announced that they are expecting, and that we can expect our third grandchild in November. We’ve been sent a gift registry and have been invited to a baby shower next week. I guess this is real. This will also mean that each of our 3 children have produced one grandchild each.
The baby is a boy, and they’re planning to name him Vittorio, after his mather’s grandfather.
It’s weird how we suddenly start thinking we need more grandkids, because they’re so fun and we don’t have to do any of the work. Three’s enough, and it’s actually four, since this event brings along an additional boy from a previous relationship. I guess I should be calling myself Grandpa4, but I don’t want to encourage an increasing series of exponents.
Also, the baby shower is going to have a Lilo&Stitch theme to explain the illustration above. That’s not a picture of the baby, but I won’t complain if he’s big-eared, furry blue, with big teeth. He’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of us weirdos.
This grubby-handed gentleman left a jar of raw milk outside, in 90°F heat, for two days, until the solids started to separate, chunks formed, and I see some discoloration appearing, although that could just be from the filthy state of his glassware. He says this is an “experiment.”
I’m not showing you the video, because next…he takes a big swig of the rotten, curdled milk, and I nearly lost it. Would you drink any milk, let alone raw milk, that had been left to fester in the sun for a few days? I wouldn’t make you watch that.
But if you insist, here’s a link to instagram. Mmmm. Warm lumps of slimy coagulated milk.
Then he insists that it was probably better for him than when it was fresh, because the bacteria have had time to culture and develop more complexity. He reassures us that it is totally safe.
The raw milk fanatics are totally insane.
