There’s a lot of research out there about the general flexibility of the brain to adapt to whatever stimulus you pump into it. For example taxi cab drivers have larger areas in their hippocampus dedicated to place cells relative to the general population [1]. There’s also all kinds of work studying general flexibility of the brain in response to novel stimulus like the visual cortex of blind people being dedicated to auditory processing [2 is a broad review]. I guess you could argue that the ability to be flexible is intelligence but the timescales over which a brain functionally changes is longer than a general day to day flexibility. Maybe some brains come into an initial state that’s more predisposed to the set of properties that we deem as “intelligence” but development is so stimulus dependent that I think this definition of a fixed intelligence is functionally meaningless. There are definitely differences in what you can learn as you age but anyone stating we have any causal measure of innate intelligence is claiming far more than we actually have evidence for. We have far more evidence to suggest that we can train at least the appearance and usage of “intelligence”. After all no one is born capable of formal logical reasoning and it must be taught [3,4 kind of weak citations foe this claim but there’s a lot to suggest this that I don’t feel like digging up]
Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.
Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.
This is an interesting insight I hadn’t thought much about before. Reminds me a bit of some of the mechanistic interpretability work that looked at branch specialization in CNNs and found that architectures which had built in branches tended to have those branches specialize in a way that was consistent across multiple training runs [1]. Maybe the multi-headed and branching nature of transformers adds and inductive bias that is useful for stable training over larger scales.
This is a large claim to make without any evidence that is eerily reminiscent of historical arguments in favor of eugenics programs. Society thrives off of diversity and variations in thinking patterns. Dividing all people into either neurodivergent vs neurotypical or in your preferred terms “brain-damaged” vs “non-brain-damaged”is a vast oversimplification of the reality. Your claim about neurotypical people taking over society in the 20th century isn’t supported by evidence that suggests that genetic markers in humans for things like Autism Spectrum Condition are downsampled in humans relative to other species suggesting that human evolution has selected for some of the traits of what we classify as neurodivergence while balancing out the effects of some of those traits [1]. I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with neurodivergence (that’s how I’ve been classified) but this dichotomy is dumb. Everybody is neuro-divergent and what we define as neurotypical is societally defined. You’re just trying to flip the idea of what’s assumed to be a “good” person and that need to declare one group as better than the other is the actual problem. Please read more about the wider variability in cognition among humans before claiming that anyone in your preferred definition of “neuro-divergence” is superior to others.
I'm not talking about genetics. There must be something that causes brain damage (and it would probably be a good idea to find it and stop it). The change was too fast for genetics. It was essentially one generstion mostly normal, the next one brain damaged.
I'm talking about all the mid 20th century talk about the "generation gap", "teenage rebellion", and so on. Essentially no stone was left untouched in how the society worked between the "conformist" 50s, and the 70s. Something happened then, or a bit earlier, and it's still doing the damage.
The book Modernity and the Holocaust is a very approachable book summarizing how the action of the holocaust was organized under similar assumptions and makes the argument that we’ve since organized most of our society around this principle because it’s efficient. We’re not committing the holocaust atm as far as I know but how difficult would it be for a malicious group of executives of a large company quietly directing a branch of 1000’s who sleepwalk through work everyday to do something egregious?
This article about the AT protocol (which Bluesky uses) provides a good argument for why alternative social media sites like will help prevent this feeling of lock-in in the future and is worth a read: https://overreacted.io/open-social/
Is it possible to use bluesky without a did:plc? Id rather be in control of my own identity than leave it irreversibly in the hands of yet another overlord.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... [3] https://psychologyfor.com/wason-selection-task-what-it-is-an... [4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794802.2021.1...