This video got a lot of baggage in the past few years, which is unfortunate since it’s an interesting video. I won’t go into that baggage because there’s more interesting things to talk about.

One big thing is you need to define belief.

I think this video only applies to objective belief. Is elemental silver silver colored? Is elemental gold gold colored? Is pure water in smaller macroscopic amounts clear? These things can have evidence to prove one way or the other. Even if the answers seem obvious it could be that the obvious answer is wrong, but an answer objectively does exist.

For a lot of subjective belief you could argue there is no method to get from evidence to belief. It’s the ought-is problem. You can taste beets the exact same as your friend, but subjectively you think they’re terrible and your friend thinks they’re delicious.

One problem with the whole thing is that morality and ethics are purely subjective beliefs. You have a set of core values that process data in such a way that you perceive the world in a certain way, informed by many things from your DNA to your life history and culture.

So from there, I’d argue that a belief that we have a moral responsibility to back up our beliefs with evidence is a subjective belief, and not necessarily one that would stand up to scrutiny.

We take a lot of things on faith. We believe that running over someone with our car would kill them even though we’ve likely never seen someone hit by a car die and we’ve probably never even seen someone die violently. We have lots of beliefs about situations that we’ve never seen happen that we probably have little to no data to actually know about. If I walk up to some random woman and slap her in the face, I believe that she won’t like it, but I have no evidence that this is the case, maybe she’s one of the substantial group of people who’s into that shit?

Besides that, there are beliefs that are beneficial regardless of whether you have evidence of them or not. If I believe that it is more beneficial to be a good person rather than believing that it doesn’t matter how you act or you should try to get away with any evil you think you can get away with, then the world gets better as a result despite that being a really hard thing to get evidence for.

“Is the cancer terminal, doctor?”

“PENISPENISPENISLOL”

It’s gonna change the world! Right after holographic disks are released!

deleted by creator

Something like this could potentially be the solution for mobile energy, assuming it can be made physically portable enough.

The efficiency of electrical with the energy density of gasoline, you could end up with a vehicle that’s better than a gasoline vehicle and can run on carbon neutral energy.

If you want to make someone give up and just go “I guess I’m just an incel”, you tell them ugly is just an ad campaign, and that theres nothing in particular they need to do to be better and by inference that there’s nothing they can do to be better.

Oh god, and if you want to turn someone into an incel without fail, point them at dating websites. If you want to feel insignificant and worthless, just go get ignored by a few hundred allegedly eligible bachelorettes on a few dating websites. A lot of those sites actually seed their results with fake women and that’s just the tip of the crapberg when it comes to those.

Being well intentioned advice doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. A comfortable lie can be far more poisonous than an uncomfortable truth.

This guy’s philosophy, applied to a young man who is desperate enough to look for help on yotube, is a great way to become an incel. I don’t know how that would be non-toxic.

I’m happily married today with a beautiful son, but it didn’t just happen. Throughout high school I was entirely focused on things other than women or a social life, and in college the program I took was one of the harder ones out there so I was totally focused on not flunking out, so when I finally entered the adult world, I had to teach myself everything from scratch in a strange city (since I moved for my first professional job) where I had no social circle. Lost my virginity, had fun times meeting interesting women, and eventually found the best woman in town and married her. Last year I wrote a large chapter of my book “The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son” on the topic of attraction because I didn’t want my son to have to struggle like I did.

Thing is, if you’re virgin enough to need advice, odds are the whole “oh you’re just fine the way you are” schtick is probably wrong. You shouldn’t fundamentally change who you are, but odds are you need to find the ways to become your best self, and that’s going to be more than showering and talking confidently about your dwarf tossing hobby.

Most men aren’t fine just the way they are. If they want to have what they want out of life, they’re going to have to work to improve themselves, and they’re going to have to push themselves away from the phones and computers and into social situations that make them anxious and learn how to manage that anxiety and do things that make them anxious regardless. They’re going to have to actually learn about the real-life experiences of women, as well as what women want from men.

It’s not easy. Shower and be nice might work if you’re lucky, but if you’re planning to make your own luck then it’s not enough.

It’s incomprehensible how unnatural our lifestyle is.

Doesn’t mean it’s bad per se, but it does mean we probably don’t comprehend the effects.

Really interesting video… but I ain’t eatin’ that.

That’s the problem with decisions like this being made by businessmen and congressmen…

I know I always seem like I’m really negative when it comes to renewables, but it’s more like I’m skeptical because we need to build things that actually work so you need to keep an eagle eye on proposals.

Just imagine here: a billion dollars of parts, of people, of land, and all so they could turn it on then turn it right back off. It all looks great in the renders, but the reality of TCO kicks in. The energy is free, but nothing else is so that needs to be taken into account.

There’s a lot of great renewables on the table that aren’t being pursued because they’re boring technologies like hydroelectric or geothermal. They’re no good – they don’t even have really cool looking 3d renders of them running without maintenance!

In 1900, horses were the main form of transportation. They were replaced with automobiles, which were considered more environmentally friendly because we couldn’t see the pollution the cars produced. We’re doing the same today with a lot of these. We outsource the pollution to elsewhere, but the pollution still happens.

Similarly, a new tech that’s never been successfully used before will always look better than an established tech because reality hasn’t set in yet about what something looks like at an industrial scale.

Finally, sustainability needs to be holistic. The video asks at the end if taxpayer dollars should be used to help fund renewables. I think they should – but the keyword is “taxpayer dollars”. Right now the practice of spending massive amounts of debt instead of money taxed is totally unsustainable, and we’re going to leave our kids and grandkids the slaves of bankers.

Ah, so the key here is that the fossil record is probably more complete than I’d expect.

A few years I went down the rabbit hole of geology and palaeontology, and the thing I had trouble wrapping my head around was the incomprehensibly long time scales involved, and how there’s a massive amount of stuff from different eras, but timescales that long have a tendancy of homogenizing the evidence out of existence because there’s just so much stuff smushed together.

That makes two of us.

Unfortunately, the environmental industrial complex being what it is, being good for the environment isn’t necessary.

Self-cleaning humans!

Given the amount of material and energy that would have to go into all that, I hope it can create enough energy to come out in the black. Impressive either way.

They come to the conclusion in the article that it could not possibly be a common ancestor with humans, but I don’t know how they could necessarily come to that conclusion. Billions of years are a long, long time.

Not gonna pretend it looks like something that would be a common ancestor with us intuitively, but when you get that far back I don’t know…

I am highly critical of electric cars as they exist today. We are building an electric version of an internal combustion engine car and in so doing we’re using tons of materials and the like building a simulation of something that exists.

For me, this is closer to what I think makes sense. We need to step away from the assumptions of the automobile, and start looking at what options we have available once we’re working with batteries and motors. I suspect that 90% of transportation could be taken care of by a small, light, enclosed vehicle with a relatively short range that sells for less than $5,000.

Something like that could revolutionize and democratize transportation more than even the automobile did. Get the price, and the parking requirements, and the insurance requirements, and the licensing requirements down, and suddenly people in lower classes who were never going to be able to buy a car could get 4-season transportation they have full ownership and control of. Even better, despite having many more cars on the road, stress to roads would be less, less material would be used overall, less energy would be used overall.

Seems like a false dichotomy to me.

We cannot survive on either nuclear or renewables alone. We need every form of energy we can get our hands on, anything practical.

Eventually even people who think that fossil fuels aren’t going to destroy the earth are going to have to deal with the reality that there are limited resources on this earth that are easily accessible. Thing is, energy isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement for life. We need energy for nearly everything we do, and there is no shortcut or cheat code. We need energy to eat, we need energy to rest, we need energy to make it through summers, we need energy to make it through winters. Without enough sustainable energy in whatever form that takes, there will be a genocide.

So if there’s a form of energy we can make use of, we must. If it’s going to be energy positive, we need it.

There are two things that we really need to pay close attention to.

The first is nameplate versus actual. A lot of places will puff up their chest talking about how they’ve installed a gigawatt of solar panels, but then you look at the actual power produced and it’s a tiny fraction of nameplate because the sun isn’t always up.

The second is total lifespan energy costs to produce and maintain. Let’s say that I have a little box that produces no emissions and produces a kilowatt of energy every year for 25 hours, so 25 kwh. Sounds like a good deal! Well let’s say that producing that little box takes 500 KWh to make. What you’ve just created is not efficient. The amount of energy that you’ve put into it is much greater than the advantage that you got back.

It’s very difficult to come out ahead on this sort of calculus because the universe doesn’t like reversing entropy.

Properly managed biofuels can work, so growing a tree then burning the tree using the remains of the burned tree to fertilize a new tree. So can solar on a long enough timeline, but it needs to be very well manufactured and we have to be realistic about the amount of energy that we expect. Obviously water wheels and like have a history going back centuries, and windmills in the past have worked as well, but you have to be very careful about them. Start using a bunch of weird materials and getting too fancy and you blow your energy budget.

Planning to test a vertical axis wind turbine made out of pla in the near future.