Scientific research doesn’t have to directly impact personal decision making to be useful and interesting. This study provides a data point suggesting a link between having tattoos and skin cancer - it’s certainly interesting to the medical field to better understand what increases the risk of cancer. A lot of research into smoking cigarettes and cancer also didn’t have much impact on people who decided to smoke, but it was also valuable knowledge.
I’m going to try with a counter argument here that might seem trivial at first but encourage you to think a bit more deeply on it.
Multimedia consumption does directly alter your behavior.
You see an add for fries and you want fries and you go out and buy and eat them. If you hadn’t watched that video you wouldn’t have done that. Yes, it was still your choice to do so (avoiding the question of free will), but it was also the choice of the addict to shoot up one more time. Seeing the burger introduced psychoactive chemicals (endogenous ones): dopamine is one of the most relevant and well understood.
And to be clear - it’s not unique because it’s related to food and therefor a substance you put into your body like a drug. As others have pointed out gambling and porn addictions rely on similar mechanisms, and doom scrolling/compulsive news checking are tied to the same chemical mechanisms in the body.
From a medical perspective this is pretty well understood. Social expectations and norms that feed into regulations and laws are wildly subjective, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of inconsistency in how and what is regulated and illegal when looked at from the perspective of biological mechanisms.
It's worth making, but there's some serious drama queen vibes that make it feel pretty overblown. If an uber is late to the airport a reasonable person doesn't threaten the driver with covering the cost of their flight.
If an Uber driver caused you to miss a flight by driving around a parking lot in circles at a speed you can't exit the vehicle, you don't think it would be a reasonable request for the customer to ask Uber to make it right?
Fair enough, there is a difference. But now we are not looking at a missed flight so much as attempted kidnapping or imprisonment or some other much more serious crime. Which is interesting to think about with the Waymo example, but hard to take seriously in the context of the video since the rider declines to do what the customer service rep asks them to do (at least appears to for the sake of producing additional outrage for their video)
It’s not so much that a weld _can’t_ be sufficiently strong to be safe in a steering column, it’s the QA and validation needed to be sure the weld was done properly. Obviously it’s possible the folks involved in this have the experience and equipment required to do that, but it’s unlikely.
Now, how much of a risk there is, and whether or not it should be allowed on public roads where the failure could kill them and/or other people is a question for the local society and legal system :)
The QA in this case is that the welder knows he doesn't suck and he knows when he does a good job. A 3/4 or so (approx the size most steering stuff is) shaft is going to be more than capable of handling steering wheel torque
Not everything needs to be treated like a nuclear reactor.
With a competent welder it's basically never a question of whether or not the weld was good. It's a question of what's sufficient for the application. If you care enough you can make perfection happen but caring that much on everything is time consuming and unnecessary.
X-ray and other inspection processes are mostly there to force people to behave like they give a crap.
There are some great, thorny, philosophical and physical arguments to be had with your proposed conclusion, but let’s say we all agree with it.
The bigger, more relevant, and testable challenge is premise #2. The gap between this proposed research tool and “a perfect digital replica of a human brain” (and all functionally relevant inputs and outputs from all other systems and organs in the body) is monstrously large. Given that we don’t understand what mechanism(s) consciousness arises from, a model would have to be 100% perfect in basically all aspects for the conclusion to be true.
I don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.
I'd nuance that argument a bit; we know of the concept of honor and can distinguish between "honorable" and "dishonorable" behaviour, and / or the definition thereof depending on culture, whereas animals only have instinct. But then again, smarter animals do know right from wrong, or honor, if you will.
But this is a philosophical subject, which I'm not educated in.
The biggest nutritional change in bread in what type of flour is used (and if any other grains/seeds are used). The bran and germ of the wheat berry contain a decent part of it's nutritional value in protein, fat and insoluble fiber. The more refined a flour is the less of those parts it contains. Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins from the endosperm.
What really sets apart the typical white flour seen in most processed products in the US is the bleaching process, which mostly serves to make the flour more visually appealing. It also destroys a large percentage of the micro-nutrients. For many flour products the added vitamins you mention are added back in making the flour "enriched", but really this is just trying to match the nutrient profile of unbleached white flour. It's unlikely the added vitamins you see in the nutrition label alone would make a bagged, commercial pan loaf healthier than even the equivalent you would make at home.
Lack of whatever mythical micro-nutrition you speak of in bleached white flour is not going to meaningfully make any difference in folks dietary outcomes. It's certainly not what is making people fat, or what is making them crave to eat too much bread.
the root cause, at least for bread, is pretty simple; US supermarket bread has a lot more sugar than freshly baked bread, because sugar is a preservative.
Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.
In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.
I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.
You can't really tell how much sugar there is in baked bread simply based on the amount added in a recipe.
Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.
I mean, that’s double the added sugar. The US recommends only 50g of added sugar per day. And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread; in the US breakfast mainstay that is peanut butter and jelly, both the peanut butter and jelly also usually have sugar.
I think that speaks more to your diet than anything else. Regardless of the amount of added sugar, that’s an absurd amount of carbs to be getting just from bread and cannot be particularly healthy, no matter the type of bread.
That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!
"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.
Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.
If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).
What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.
Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.
My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.
Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.
No shade to the juggernaut of the open source software movement and everything it has/will enabled, but why the hate for a project that required people’s time and knowledge to create something useful to a segment of users and then expect to charge for using it in the future? Commercial trap seems to imply this is some sort of evil machination but it seems like they are being quite upfront with that language.
Roe v Wade wasn’t a law. Actions by the Supreme Court which are unfavorable are much more likely given that there are only 9 justices, they are appointed regardless of popularity, and they have lifetime appointments.
The discussion is you comparing the overturn of a law to overturn of Roe v Wade. The weight is completely irrelevant because we’re discussing the difficulty of the action.
Anyone who knows basic federal government structure in the US knows court rulings are significantly easier to move quickly compared to passing real laws.
This isn’t “playing semantics”, it completely invalidates your point. Look at how well overturning obama care went to see how difficult law passing is.
<< This isn’t “playing semantics”, it completely invalidates your point. Look at how well overturning obama care went to see how difficult law passing is.
You do have a point. I disagree that it invalidates mine, but it does weaken it based on how it was originally present it. That said, we are absolutely playing semantics, because while Roe vs Wade was not the law, it was a precedent that effectively held back even a consideration of law changes at bay. So it is not irrelevant, but you are correct from a purely technical standpoint.
<< Anyone who knows basic federal government structure in the US knows court rulings are significantly easier to move quickly compared to passing real laws.
