if only this site could manage something more complicated than the dialectic of "not retarded enough for y-combinator" and "too retarded for y-ycombinator"
one day, y-combinator will give a shit about disability. There is not enough money in the game for the powers to be to care yet.
> But no matter how well the gene therapy works, the researchers recognize that Aissam may never be able to understand or speak a language, Dr. Germiller said. The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.
This is trivially false. How are you acting like this person can be taken seriously? At best, they're wildly hyperbolic in their statements. At worst, they're funded to push a polemic.
I too have to ask why this is "trivially false". We hardly have even anecdotal references to people who never heard language until after five (except for stories about children raised by wolves and couldn't learn to speak - not exactly stories we can trust).
Of course that's goes the other way too - which studies are Dr. Germiller referencing? But again - if it was "trivially false" this would mean that it's something generally known because it's observable. And it isn't, as far as I'm aware.
Well, the part that was claimed. "The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut." The person seems to mistake the term "speech" for the phrase "language comprehension"—the field moved past that decades ago.
I was extremely confused by this statement because well... I exist. I didn't start speaking until around 5 because of various health issues and I wouldn't say I was reasonable at it until I was a preteen, but I definitely acquired language, just extremely slowly.
> Worth keeping in mind that Helen Keller didn't loose her hearing (and sight) until an illness at 19 months old.
While this is in fact an important sample, this doesn't imply much about how humans develop after 19 months, much less how they develop before 19 months.
> At this age, a child's brain has already locked in the sounds for their native language and lost the ability to learn non-native sounds (hell, research suggests that unborn infants can recognise the difference between their mothers native language and foreign languages before they even leave the womb).
We have nearly zero clue how the child's brain recognizes their "native language". We know they react differently at different stages of their development to the same stimulus, which is occasionally linguistic. We have nearly zero clue what the mechanism is that corresponds input to measurable output. This is a very disingenuous characterization of the data.
It's also worth mentioning that the root of this question is trivially false—people obviously learn language after the age of five. Such haphazard presentation (at best) should not be taken seriously.
This falls apart pretty rapidly when you move beyond one person—groups of people don't tend to act collectively rationally. Hell, the entire reason "capitalism" is a thing at all is it provides some consensus in the face of byzantine faults even if it fails to represent our collective needs with any accuracy.
I'm pretty sure capitalism is a thing because it provides a means of legal ownership and the growth of one's exercise of power through the exploitation of that ownership. Consensus would exist due to the power of the state regardless of the economic system.
Power drives consensus. Capitalism is just a means to allocate this power within a functioning state. But even in a non-Capitalist state consensus still exists due to allocated power.
Capitalism has uses other than consensus as well.
Ah. I think I was talking past you by hyper focusing on just the "capitalist" and "consensus" parts of what you wrote. I was taking it to mean that there was a special connection between capitalism and consensus, and not just that capitalism is one means by which consensus is created.
Power is able to manipulate consensus, but ultimately it exists despite consensus. Its existence is relative by definition.
> Capitalism has uses other than consensus as well.
False
> Ah. I think I was talking past you by hyper focusing on just the "capitalist" and "consensus" parts of what you wrote. I was taking it to mean that there was a special connection between capitalism and consensus, and not just that capitalism is one means by which consensus is created
There are of course other means of consensus. For whatever reason these means are not available to us now, allegedly.
I can't be the only person who absolutely doesn't care about intelligent life. Either it makes its relevance clear or it doesn't. I see no particular reason why "intelligence" is noteworthy enough to look for in the first place.... maybe that's just a quirk of self-organization rather than a common route to it.
You seriously don't understand the difference between finding alien microbes vs finding aliens that can build guns and point them at us? Or for that matter, aliens that can actively teach us new things. I just... no, I don't think you're the only one who has this position, but it's the kind of wanton ignorance that doesn't need to be shared.
I mean, I'd also like to find elves. I don't see any reason to suspect either exists. There's an assumption that intelligence is a natural progression for evolution of life, which seems irrational. Why is intelligence so special compared to other mechanisms of self-organization?
That's not an answer to my question, it's just different a wrong assertion.
To answer your new point,
Life has never once failed to become self-aware and capable of space travel in the entire history of the universe, as far as we know. What could possibly make you think it's irrational to expect it could happen again?
I didn't say every living thing became technologically advanced, but that life on earth did. It only takes one species for a planet like our to be screaming at full volume in every direction simultaneously.
one day, y-combinator will give a shit about disability. There is not enough money in the game for the powers to be to care yet.