It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one could claim I prefer it. But that doesn't mean I think it's better to spend my time like that.
IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.
It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.
> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”
Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.
I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.
Beethoven’s music directly impacts human lives. It evokes emotion and inspires creativity. Its value lies in its immediate effect. In contrast, knowing that life exists millions of light-years away offers no such tangible impact. It’s a data point. An interesting one, sure, but it doesn’t feed the hungry, cure disease, change policy, or even affect your commute. So yea, Beethoven is a lived experience, whereas aliens in Andromeda are an abstract concept.
It depends what you mean by "civilization building". I think we gloss over that a bit too much. We're not the largest population, not the largest total mass, not the only one that builds large structures. We're the only one that sent stuff outside of Earth, yes, and a few other things. But discussing the definition is itself interesting
Human civilisation means intelligence and memory are collective, externalised, persistent, communicable. There's also a layer of symbolic abstraction (science and math) which makes it possible to predict useful consequences with some precision.
Individuals die but their inventions and insights remain. Individuals can also specialise, which is a kind of civilisational divide and conquer strategy.
Most animals don't have that. Some do train their young to a limited extent, but without writing the knowledge doesn't persist. And without abstraction it only evolves extremely slowly, if at all.
They have to reinvent the wheel over and over, which means they never invent the wheel at all.
We actually have this problem with politics and relationships. We keep making the same mistakes because the humanities provide some limited memory, but there's no symbolic abstraction and prediction - just story telling, which is far less effective.
Bonus points: I often wonder if there's a level of complexity beyond our kind of intelligence, and what it might look like. Abstraction of abstraction would be meta-learning - symbolic systems that manipulate the creation and distribution of civilisational learning.
AI seems to be heading in that direction.
There may be further levels, but we can't imagine them. We could be embedded in them and we wouldn't see them for what they are.
The only similar example I can think of is when, roughly 2400 million years ago (during the Paleoproterozoic iirc), the ancestors of cyanobacteria poisoned their atmosphere by overproducing oxygen which resulted in an extinction event. But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.
> But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.
The geological evidence is that that oxygen build-up first had to exhaust things that took the reactive oxygen out of the air and water. Iron oxide was laid down as huge deposits of "banded iron ore" The great rust. (1)
This is hard to get an exact number on, but as far as I know, it is estimated to have taken at least 500 million years.
And then oxygen increased again, a billion years later (2)
It was not fast. It was measured in 100 million year ticks.
Not the poster, but I don't understand the downvotes: this is exactly right. Higgs was awarded the Nobel after the mechanism he theorized was experimentally confirmed, and that is 100% the reason it took so long.
Right! Einstein didn't get the Nobel because the theory of relativity is awesome, he got it after Eddington observed gravitational lensing during an eclipse, confirming a key prediction.
Brilliant theorizing can be both brilliant and wrong.
OPTION 1. Donate to the Sustainable Island State Contribution (SISC)
Your SISC donation to the Government of Saint Kitts and Nevis must be at least $250,000 as a single applicant. Additionally, this rises to $275,000 if you include an extra dependent under 18. Furthermore, if you add a dependent over 18, you will pay $300,000.
OPTION 2. Invest in Property
The Developer’s Real Estate Option requires you to invest no less than $400,000 in an approved real estate development. Consequently, you must own the property for at least seven years. Furthermore, it can only be resold once, to a new CBI programme member.
In contrast, an Approved Private Home, either a condo or single-family dwelling, qualifies as a CBI option. In this case, you must pay at least $400,000 to the condo owner and $800,000 to the single-family dwelling owner.
Subsequently, you have to own the private home for at least seven years. Following this, you can’t resell your real estate investment to a CBI applicant unless Federal Cabinet approves. Ultimately, you must inject substantial extra investment by way of construction, renovation, or any other improvements.
OPTION 3. Contribute to an Approved Public Benefit Project
Invest at least $250,000 in a project that boosts local employment and, also, transfers all real estate to the State on completion.
A downhill where a road bike can reach that speed is pretty normal. I reach those nearly every day on my to work commute and I live in Iowa - there is a reason we are known for being flat so if I can find a hill to reach those speed surely anyone else can too. Of course I am riding a road bike, kids and mountain bikes may have limitations (tires?) that slow them down.
Reaching those speeds on level ground doesn't seem possible for a normal human, but level ground is rare.
I can hit 45 mph going down hill on my 1980 road bike... but that's just balance, carrying enough potential energy, being too stupid to slow down to a reasonable speed, and having hills that I have to walk the bike up most of the time. There's some skill and physical conditioning there, but not a whole lot; at that speed, there's a lot of instant feedback on form, which helps encourage one to get low and tight.
I think if we're talking about how fast you can get your bike to go, flat land, still air is implied. I don't have a lot of those conditions to try, but I'm happy to cruise around 15, and maybe push it to 20 if I don't need to save my energy for a nearby hill.
I'm not sure what you might mean by a "normal human".
I used to be a back-of-the-front-of-the-pack triathlete, with a previous history as an ultramarathon and touring cyclist. In my best shape (probably aged around 46), I was training on a flat loop course with some younger very strong but not professional cyclists where we would generally pull the group at 28mph for about between 20-60 seconds at a time.
I appreciate that there's a distance between that sort of thing and an "average person", but it's not a whole lot larger than the distance between the people who were in the group and, say, professional tour cyclists.
