Off-topic (except it illustrates some serious debate taking place).
How I dealt with an annoying academic and hopefully not waste more time arguing about something which is irrelevant to my priorities (I knew I shouldn't have written this blog!):
> Or take Hans Reiser
> Hunter-gatherers were healthier, better nourished and lived longer lives than early sedentary people
> But there could not have been a teleological evolutionary strategy like hey, let's settle down
You are throwing aliasing error all over the map. And I don't see a benefit to wasting my time on it.
> Although repeatable scientific tests may be out of reach, it does not mean we have to resort to conjecture. There's some evidence and we may reason based on it
It is all aliasing error, because there do not exist total orders in our universe nor in nature. Everything is a partial order and perspective is always relative. This can be easily proved by noting that a total order would be equivalent to real-time omniscience, but this would require the speed-of-light to not be finite, which would collapse the past and future into each other.
So all you will ever have is relative agreement and disagreement.
That is why I won't waste my time reading your propaganda books.
> Now really? So please point me to his major contributions to browsers, phones etc.
You are consuming my time, forcing me to refute your ignorance because you come here and attack my reputation. That is what I consider to be rude. You come off as an academic who is offended that anyone other than your fellow academics might have a theory and opinion on anything in your claimed area of expertise.
His GIF code for example is in use in all those cases. His GPS code is in use in nearly every mobile device, including the military. Now he is working on the very important problem of rescuing important large historic code bases from archaic version control systems. Man please...
> I don't want to discuss AGW as this is another field I am mostly ignorant of, but it seems to me more than accidental that the same people who had spent years on casting doubt on health effects of tobacco were later casting doubt on AGW.
Well there you go doing what you said I shouldn't do.
When we are in a mini-ice age from 2030 - 2050, then you maybe you'll realize how fucking junk that AGW science was. And that is a backtested prediction.
> Well, a mind open might also be open to bullshit.
Yeah like the variety your academic cohorts are promulgating and then accusing everyone else of being ignorant because we refuse to waste our time reading their agenda indoctrination books.
> these statistics are clearly and badly fucked up, then I have a strong reason to think this work is worthless. Not so incidentally, this can be said of pretty much everything in evolutionary psychology.
> But there's no real argument why it would be more probable than, say, a byproduct of other historical events.
> or example the os penis (the boner bone) which we humans do not have. Dawkins once famously speculated (I think in The selfish gene) which evolutionary forces could lead to humans losing the bone, but it's, well, speculation (and one that begs some obvious questions to boot). But we don't really know if it was adaptive or accidental.
Or you could consider the theory from my blog post which is that randomization is the strategy of nature. So it can all just be random diversity so as to be consistent with the Second law of thermo, that entropy is trending to maximum.
>> None of the 85% of cultures that preferred polygamy were competitive economically with the dominant Western monogamous cultures over the past couple of centuries.
> None, that is, except Islam. Yes, Islam declined over the last few centuries, but how much of it might be attributed to its preference for polygamy, and how much to other factors like, say, Mongolian invasions which barely touched the Western world but destroyed most of the Islamic one twice. Or accidental discovery of Americas
We could posit that building large family networks and having many loyal sons, would be advantageous in those agrarian and somewhat feudal or tribal societies, but would not be beneficial in the modern economy. Perhaps this is why monogamy has been winning and production increasing as a result. Granted these are theories. We write blogs to share our thoughts and impact on others. I don't think your experts should have a monopoly on influence and sharing. Knowledge creation is an accretive, bottom-up process, not a top-down cathedral.
Indeed the Americas have been a huge economic driving force, and especially during the Industrial Age where the USA had a coast on both major oceans the Mississippi River to bisect the Eastern portion and transport cargo most efficiently. And it was arguably the Puritan, monogamous conservative culture (along with a temporary boost of slavery in the South) that drove the great production to harvest that resource.
Again it is all conjecture.
