bonsaii
6mo ago
I have a baseline high level of suspicion towards Youtube polyglot videos. These people are like magicians in that they give an illusion of an ability when their real talent is for something somewhat orthogonal (that is, less about being actually proficient, but rather about looking proficient in select settings that they tune). A few tricks include:
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Controlling the conversation: The main skill many of these "polyglots" have is in pushing conversations towards topics about which they have the appropriate stock phrases well rehearsed. Sentences about how much they "love the culture", "I always thought [insert country] was so beautiful", "the [insert cuisine] is delicious" etc. If someone says something the "polyglot" doesn't understand they'll smile, nod, say "that's great" or "hmm, I'm not sure" and quickly try to change the subject. The better ones can do this more subtly, but even the clumsier ones can get away with it since most viewers aren't watching critically.
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Selective editing: The format lets them use staged videos or simply to selectively include footage of their best performances. Given the incentives on Youtube I don't really trust most to not do these things. For every free-flowing Mandarin conversation there may have been 10 where the polyglot just totally misunderstood the native speaker.
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Optimizing study: Words and phrases are Pareto distributed, so you can get to a basic conversational level in most languages with about 3000. If you're good at point 1 above you can probably get away with much fewer. For comparison, a native speaker is estimated to have a vocabulary of 20k to 35k. If you're loose with the definition of "fluent" you could just study these most optimal 3k for several languages instead of becoming highly proficient in one.
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Piling up on highly similar languages: The distinction between a "language" and a "dialect of a language" is more political than anything objective to the forms of speech themselves. An English-only speaker could likely become fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and French with less effort and time than it would take to get equivalently fluent in just Japanese (or Mandarin or Arabic or Korean). By largely focusing on clusters of highly similar languages, they more easily inflate their "language count".
Most genuine "polyglots" (high proficiency in 3 or more) I've spoken with say that they can only have thorough, complex conversations in 2-3 highly distinct languages at any given moment. Even a few months of disuse is enough for them to feel significantly sluggish retrieving words and forming sentences in their native languages, albeit still highly proficient. If they know they'll need a particular one soon (like they'll be traveling to [insert country] next month), then they can review for a week or two and revive the quick access (like putting it in RAM), but trying to keep all of them active simultaneously makes organizing thoughts a bit chaotic.
bonsaii
6mo ago
The scenario I find most difficult to solve is exactly mind control, since it's a crime that leaves no evidence. Further, just by the existence of such power, every actual criminal could start using "a psychic mind controlled me to do it" as a defense. I just don't see how society could continue to function. (Also, will be sure to add your novel to my backlog.)
bonsaii
6mo ago
It's also somewhat interesting that X-Men is very (US) liberal coded. In contrast to typical US liberal positions favoring collective safety over individual freedom (stronger support for lockdowns, gun control), X-Men is rather explicitly opposed to government infringement on the liberties of mutants to use their powers freely. Ideas like the Mutant Registration Act or mutant power suppressive collars are often cast in a strongly negative light. All while Cyclops sneezing hard enough to drop his glasses is more dangerous than any gun.
So I've been watching X-Men '97 and started wondering what opinions here would be on how to deal with mutants if those kinds of powers started to show up in random people. Would you support registration? Something more serious? Nothing at all? Is it really ok to let someone with the destructive capabilities of a nuclear bomb just walk around, or board a plane, etc.?
Again speculative:
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I can't seem to remember the source, but very recently I saw a journal article speculating that our desire for spices had to do with anti-microbial properties? For example, I know historically salt and pepper were used for their preservative properties in addition to their flavor profile. Another possible explanation for seeking variety is that before food safety standards, every specific food item had some levels of particular toxins. By varying diet, an organism could avoid building up too much of any one toxin. The fact that we can now make a variety of flavors and textures with the same ingredients using modern culinary knowledge could just be a workaround for what was a crude byproduct of certain organisms never eating enough of the same thing to hit LD50's in the past.
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My guess here would be that our ancestors were selected for finding the set [not emaciated] attractive. Since there was no one obese in the past, preferences gradient descended into the most common body type that fell into that set, which would be close to what we might today call a "healthy weight". The reason for finding obesity less attractive would just be its distance from that body type (albeit, in the opposite direction).
bonsaii
6mo ago
Purely speculative answers:
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Most food items don't individually have everything we need for survival, so a preference to have something high in protein/fat with something high in carbs makes sense. Having them at the same time probably has to do with hunger being a relatively non-specific signal (it usually doesn't induce cravings for foods high in specific nutrients), so someone who gorges on carbs in the afternoon without meat won't necessarily achieve the same balance throughout the day as someone who preferred their carbs with meat. There's no easily evolutionarily available mechanism to make the former crave compensatory meat when they're next hungry.
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Excess fat simply wasn't a factor, since food scarcity was the natural state. Therefore, there were no pressures affecting our preferences for degree of optional adiposity (no one really had any).
bonsaii
10mo ago
If you could choose anywhere in the US to settle down, where would it be and why (ignoring job/family ties for present purposes)? I'm thinking of making a move and have a preference for proximity to major urban centers and despise humid weather. Unfortunately, (maybe I've spent too much time online) recent news on crime and the like has got me feeling rather bearish on the futures of NYC, LA, Chicago, and SF.
bonsaii
10mo ago
Are you on good-to-neutral terms with any other neighbors who might share your sentiments? It might be more effective if police are receiving complaints from multiple sources.
It really saddens me how little importance is placed on noise ordinances. There's probably a decent societal level productivity loss from concentration and sleep disturbances by having that one asshole on every block.
bonsaii
10mo ago
Have you considered Singapore? Developed, English-speaking, short flight to India for visiting relatives, great food.
bonsaii
10mo ago
Are you going at this from a soft sci-fi angle or hard? I struggle to think how speeding up any cell types locally results in anything but disease states. Any rapidly dividing cell: tumors, CNS neurons: seizures, cardiac myocytes: arrhythmias, any endocrine cell: hormone imbalance. Not to mention, the increase in metabolic rate means your characters would need to be eating non-stop to keep up with energy demands. I could maybe see an argument for having all cell types uniformly and globally sped up might work (if you also locally distort time so things like diffusion rates for gas exchange in the lungs also increase), but going into specific cell types seems like a hard sci-fi coating on a concept that fundamentally only works as soft sci-fi.
bonsaii
10mo ago
I think about it often, but at the end of the day it's hard to let go of being in walking distance to work. >95% of my neighbors are great. I just wish it were easier to coordinate making that 100.
bonsaii
10mo ago
Then you're just one of those people who think "the courteous thing is to let people do what they want", which is perfectly fine. I just want to live around people who believe otherwise.
It costs me nothing to not have dogs or subwoofers or cigarettes. In fact, I strongly prefer not doing those things (certainly nothing approaching walking on eggshells). All I'm saying is that I'd like to find a few dozen others who agree to live together and keep the ones who disagree out.
I am actually planning a soundproofing enhancement, but nothing's going to fix the fact that opening a window at any point means I'm assaulted by some combination of dog piss and cigarette smoke from the balcony two below mine. Not much I can do about that.
bonsaii
10mo ago
I'd echo what others have said about locality. There are tons of behaviors for which my deontological side wouldn't necessarily support a national ban. Unfortunately, on a practical level, there are often so few options for local bans my consequentialist side wins out and gets me wishing for a general ban.
There seems to be a spectrum of positions on any given nuisance ranging from "the courteous thing is to not make the nuisance at all" to "the courteous thing is to let people do what they want". I'm on the rather extreme end of the former on a many issues (no one should have to hear your dog bark, smell your cigarette smoke, or feel the vibrations of your subwoofer from within their own homes).
Most people, in my experience, seem to lie moderately in that direction (they'll deal with a dog barking for a few minutes or a subwoofer for an hour in the afternoon without getting too annoyed). These people usually act responsibly without needing a ban to force them. Unfortunately, in an apartment building, all it takes is 1 inconsiderate tenant to ruin it for everyone else.
Frankly, I would pay double to live in a neighborhood of likeminded people who agree that barking, smoking, and subwoofers just don't belong in a shared building at all. Let the people who want those things live in their own building and deal with the constant smells and noise. The problem is it's actually really hard to find a place willing to actively exclude the latter type of individual. The best you'll often find is noise ordinance that is "enforced" by a half-hearted "warning" but rarely any real consequences for offenders.
bonsaii
1yr ago
This doesn't track with personal experience or with any polling I've ever seen. Indian Americans are the Asian American group that is usually most consistently supportive of Democrats (e.g. 2020 and 2012). It's possible that East Asian Americans are just less likely to engage deeply in politics overall, so your observations may just be a variance effect.
How much of this is just a leftward shift in the definitions of social "liberal" and "conservative" rather than a rightward shift in beliefs themselves?
20 years ago, "social liberal" mostly just meant supporting abortion, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in schools. Today it seems for many the term is linked to positions with less popular support, like defunding the police, reparations, drag shows, etc.
bonsaii
1yr ago
I know nothing about MMA. If all weight classes were abolished, would it essentially just be the heaviest fighters at the top? Is weight such a dominant factor that there's no point where some combination of diminishing returns, weight/agility tradeoff, and the larger population in the lower weight classes would yield a smaller top ranked fighter?
I suppose, but in the context of the original post, polyglot feats were given as a supporting example for there not being much of a "crowding out" effect on other skills/knowledge.
I imagine these senior clerics tend to specialize in specific subregions of the world with similar languages (though do correct me if I'm wrong), which is why I emphasized "highly distinct languages". Furthermore, their conversations in those secondary languages are likely to be limited to a well-trodden Catholicism-focused subset of all possible topics. Sure, speaking about Catholicism in English plus 5 Romance languages is impressive, but it doesn't compare to the cognitive load of having depth and breadth of proficiency in English + Mandarin + Arabic, where I'm positing that you will start to see crowding out effects at least on the level of "quickly, effortlessly accessible" if not on the level of having the actual knowledge somewhere buried in the brain.
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