mjollnir's comments

This is a really useful resource overall.

Some of these alternatives, however, offer low content moderation compared to their corresponding Google products.

I see no disclaimer, for example, that bitchute is known for harboring conspiracy theories, often after they are banned from youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute

It is worrying to see it presented as an "alternative" to youtube without this disclaimer.

I'm not sure it went anywhere, because this is a pretty accurate description of the PhD system.

"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a new type of language."

The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1].

This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation".

[0] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This is assuming additive growth, not multiplicative growth. The expectation is relevant when you have additive growth, but multiplicative growth is the relevant model here because you are increasing by 50% of your wealth vs. decreasing by 40% of your wealth (not adding fixed amounts, e.g., +$0.50 vs. -$0.40). Multiplicative growth also returns 0.95 per unit time, whereas the (irrelevant) expectation value is 1.05 (hence the violation of most people's intuition). Here is some R code demonstrating it:

set.seed(123)

# simulating multiplicative growth

n <- 1e4

init_wealth <- 1

x <- sample(c(0.6, 1.5), n, replace=TRUE)

init_wealth * prod(x)

# analytic model

n1 <- length(x[x==0.6])/n

n2 <- length(x[x==1.5])/n

rate <- (0.6^n1) * (1.5^n2)

init_wealth * (rate^n)

(Edit: formatting, and wording for clarity)

Exactly. Mentioned briefly in the article (e.g., the habituation of chimpanzees to researchers), but the idea of non-human "culture" has been strange to/dismissed by researchers for some time, only because we did not have enough data to understand the diversity of their behavior. This is almost certainly an example of researchers simply getting new (and interesting!) data.

I'm not sure it's that cut and dry, nor that any learning needs to be "undone". The study itself (referenced in this article) is co-authored by Pinker, and these ideas take time and research to develop.