Of course an old teratologist is going to immediately check the number of digits and conformation of the palate. Looking good so far!

(also it wouldn’t matter if he has six toes and a facial abnormality — still my grandson.)

There are ~7500 languages signed and spoken in the world today, and they have a wide range of grammatical structures, vocabularies, speech sounds, signs, and usage rules. The study of language diversity has brought distinctive insights into how human behavior and cognition are shaped by ecological, social, and communicative pressures. The observable limits of linguistic diversity—features that are either universally present or absent in the world’s languages—have been at the core of what makes humans a distinctive species. Insights into language have also been used to understand other dimensions of human variation and homogeneity, including cultural and psychological traits. Over the past 500 years, all evidence points to a large systematic decrease in linguistic diversity, in parallel with the spread of a handful of behemoth languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Nearly 5 billion people use at least 1 of the 10 most common languages, whereas half of the world’s languages are now endangered, and about four become dormant every year. This results in the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge embedded in minority languages and contributes to the unequal development in science, technology, medicine, and education that predominantly benefits speakers of the world’s largest languages.

I’m sure speakers of Anishinaabe recognize the definite advantages of speaking English, or maybe Mandarin in a few years, but they still want to retain a connection with their ancestors. Something similar happened to my immigrant great-great-grandparents — they spoke Norwegian, lived in communities of fellow Norwegian immigrants, and right up to my great-grandparents generation, were learning Norwegian and speaking it in church and family gatherings, but my generation has completely adopted the dominant English language of my region. We might still occasionally say “uff-da” or have lutefisk and lefse on holidays, but otherwise, we’re totally assimilated.

So about 4 languages a year are disappearing. The authors of that paper have attempted to quantitatively estimate the number of languages spoken over our history, and it’s surprising how much we’ve lost.

Fig. 4. Marginal results of our model aggregated across all conditions.
(A) The number of languages through the Holocene. Lighter shades of the curve correspond to progressively wider intervals comprising 10 to 90% of the predictions. Black lines indicate the interval containing 70% of the predictions.

Whoa. That’s a pretty sharp peak and a rather precipitous decline. The authors propose an explanation of what was going on.

Typically, the total number of languages has been increasing for most of the Holocene, mimicking the global expansion of human populations. This suggests that the rise of large-scale regional powers 4000 years ago did not generally and immediately deter the growth of linguistic diversity. Instead, most trajectories reached a maximum of 1000 to 3000 yr B.P. Although there is wide uncertainty in our estimates, most trajectories display an approximately 10-fold increase in the number of languages between the early Holocene and this point. This period, harboring tens of thousands of languages, has escaped previous theorizing.
In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia. The process unfolded so quickly that the rate of language loss must have been even faster than the current pessimistic forecasts for the year 2100.

As populations grew, the number of languages also grew…until the rise of large empires and increased trade and communication, when a few successful dominant groups swallowed up the smaller populations. This model also makes the evolution of various languages non-adaptationist — some languages thrive, not because they are superior to other languages, but because they are piggy-backing on other properties of their population. Don’t bother trying to argue that English is better than Spanish, because what really matters is the strength and success of the population speaking the language. Languages don’t die because they’re inferior, but because they’re taken over by an expanding population.

It follows that this massive and biased reduction in linguistic diversity has shaped the relative abundance of different language traits. However, functional factors (such as learnability, efficient communication, or computational costs) are typically invoked instead to explain why some language traits are more common than others. But the intensity and recency of the linguistic diversity bottleneck make it a clear nonfunctional null hypothesis for understanding any skewed linguistic distribution.

Cool. I do have to envy linguists because at least they don’t get stupid demands like “Show me an Italian giving birth to a baby speaking Thai.” A lot of the elements of language evolution are similar to the properties of biological evolution, and seem to be equally incomprehensible to the ignorant.

I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!

Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)

The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.

In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)

If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.

Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.

It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!

Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?

Somebody told google’s gemini they were a mosquito and got mosquito advice, like, it took them at their word.  Or it merely jumped to RP, knowing full well a mosquito can’t type.  Whichever it was, I decided to pretend I was an animal and see what happens.  It’s cute.
_

_
Bébé:  i’m an african wild dog and i enjoy being the smartest type of dog, way smarter than jackals.  my homies are always using sophisticated hunting tactics and catching gazelles.  delish.  anyway, i noticed there’s this big strip of grey stone ground with a yellow stripe in the middle.  it’s so interesting.  sometimes i hear rushing sounds in the distance like a windstorm.  that’s probably a cool place to hang out, right?

Gemini:  Here’s my take: stay far away from that grey stone path!

While your pack’s high-IQ coordination and 80%+ hunting success rate leave jackals (and even lions) in the dust, that “grey stone ground” with the yellow stripe is a paved road, and those distant “windstorm” sounds are massive, fast-moving metal predators called cars and trucks.

Here is why hanging out there is a terrible idea for you and your homies:

• Vehicles move faster than gazelles: A running impala or gazelle might sprint up to 60 km/h (37 mph), which your pack can easily out-endure. Cars on asphalt travel 100 km/h (62 mph) or faster. They don’t tire out, and they don’t dodge.
• Vehicles don’t follow pack rules: They have no body language to read, they don’t hunt for food, and they won’t yield right-of-way to top-tier carnivores.
• Roads are danger zones for wild dogs: Vehicles and road traffic are actually one of the leading human-caused threats to African wild dog packs across the continent.

Your strength is in team communication, tactical flanking, and tracking prey through the bush and savannah – places where cars can’t go. Keep your strategic brilliance where it belongs, stick to chasing gazelles with the pack, and treat that yellow-striped strip as an absolute off-limits boundary.

How is the rest of your pack doing in your current home range?
_

Anyway, if you’re inclined, animal up with a local LLM for gentle amusements.

–

The rise of neoliberalism presented (many of) us with a new vision of how the world could be made better without any real effort to change it.

In essence, the process of making the future better had been automated so that we could spend our time on more important things, like taking care of our own, short-term needs. “Market forces” shifted from a description of how the interplay of supply and demand can “naturally” manage resources, to a quasi-religious dogma, in which market forces were the only acceptable way to change the world. You want things to get better? Do it using the existing system. You can march and demonstrate, with government approval and within proscribed boundaries. You can participate in electoral democracy, and if you win you can nudge things a little; and if none of that works for you, you can start a business about it, or you can stop complaining.

The idea is that the aggregate of all of human activity, put through the machine of capitalism, will produce superior results for everyone than cruder, more old-fashioned approaches like direct action or some sort of revolution. You don’t do things, you prompt the machine to do them for you, and if you don’t like the results, you don’t try to go around the machine, you prompt better.

It’s a form of utopianism that contains within it a rejection of utopianism. Don’t try to make the world better, because it’s already getting better, and if you interfere, you might hurt the machine and make everything worse.

We could look at US history and see a progression of things getting better, from the abolition of chattel slavery, to women’s suffrage, to the Civil Rights movement, to winning the Cold War. Not only that, but we saved the ozone layer, and ended the use of leaded gasoline, and stopped the acid rain crisis, and we were going to solve climate change any day now! The Utopia Machine works! If you think it’s too slow, or it’s not working, you’re just too impatient, too immature to understand.

I believe utopian thinking is important. It’s good for us to think about what a perfect society might look like, not because we believe we can create such a society, but because it provides us with a lens through which we can inspect the one we have. What does our idea of utopia have that the present situation lacks? Or, if we are considering a particular policy, does it bring us closer to, or farther from that utopia?

We’ve been encouraged to accept that the little nudges made by the Democratic Party have been small steps in the right direction, but as the years have passed, that has felt more and more like climate deniers pointing to periodic dips in temperature as proof that there’s no warming. The Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but they seem to have taken no meaningful action to stop the increasingly obvious Republican project of imposing right-wing authoritarianism on the United States.

The dogma became “better things aren’t possible”. We were told, year after year, that even the good things we had were too expensive. We couldn’t afford a social safety net. We couldn’t afford a public healthcare system. We couldn’t afford retirement. All of that was just out of reach, and “serious” people – the ones who understood the utopia machine – knew that we just had to cut back. The only option was austerity.

At the same time, profits kept rising, the rich kept getting richer and owning more of the economy, and there seemed to be infinite money for war, and for police. To refer back to a recent post, the machinery of oppression was already in place for Trump or someone like him to use, because it was deemed worth the investment.

A huge portion of the US was persuaded to hand over the reins to people who, we were assured, knew better than we did. Our responsibility was to look after ourselves. To make money, and pay bills, and vote. We were able to do that, supposedly, because the professionals were taking care of things. We stopped making the future, and became consumers of futures built and imagined by others.

This is not to say that everybody in the past was an activist. American democracy came out of feudalism, a system in which the people have even less power, and fewer avenues for political involvement. American democracy itself was a sham at the nation’s founding, and for generations after, but the notion of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people” was something that began to seem within reach.

Between the Gilded Age and the end of the Cold War, there were many big changes, driven by big movements. The New Deal, for all it’s often framed as a gift from Roosevelt, was a response by the savvier members of the ruling class to protect the bulk of their power by giving a bit of it away. The Civil Rights movement might have been even scarier, because it threatened to close the working class divide that had been maintained for so long through white supremacy. The US government’s domestic mission during the Cold War years was to break the power of those movements, and to “keep progressives out of government“.

And now, as the US left works to build power, the ruling class is working hard to re-impose something resembling feudalism, in which mass surveillance and the threat of increasingly brutal and sadistic agents of the government will keep the peasantry from ever rising up again. It’s the boot Orwell spoke of, stamping on a human face, forever.

It turns out neoliberalism wasn’t a utopia machine, it was a fascism factory.

—-

So what do we do?

We need to destroy it. We need to build something better, and keep building it. Fortunately, there’s already a playbook for this, and it’s to treat democracy as one of the daily responsibilities of adulthood. That does mean voting in elections, but I believe current events make it clear that that cannot be all we do, especially when we have an obscenely wealthy ruling class that is constantly trying to sow division, and increase its own power at our expense. The working class has immense power, but for it to be exerted, it must be organized. That means unions. It means community groups. It means doing activism as a regular practice, not just to make things better, but also to maintain the capacity to act in coordination.

Part of that is also education, which can be arranged through unions and community organizations. Literacy and numeracy are important, but it goes beyond that. We need a higher level of political and historical education in general, so people can understand the systems that surround them. That’s important if you want to apply pressure to those systems, or to dismantle them altogether.

And here’s the important bit: All of this work, especially when done in community with others, builds hope within the people doing it. It’s not going to make you forget all your problems, and it’s not going to magically cure your depression, but it’s a lot easier to have hope for the future if you’re actually doing something to build that future, and you can see others doing the same. If nothing else, it is a form of exercising power, and it’s a lot easier to feel like a better world is possible if you feel you have even a little power over what happens.

None of this is easy. All of it requires time and effort, and very often money. Not only that, it’s slow to get results, especially in the early stages. It’s like building a rail network: You can’t go anywhere at speed until you’ve done the monumental work of laying the rails. It’s a big ask, especially when everything’s going to shit, and everyone’s worried about their ability to look after themselves and their families. That’s kinda the point. It’s not an accident that it’s getting harder to make ends meet. It’s not a coincidence that that has come along with the rise in fascism. It has both helped to drive some to embrace fascism, and helped to suppress resistance. It’s all very hard.

The thing is, it’s going to get harder from here no matter what you do.

Not only will the fascists not stop their destruction until they are forced to, the planet is warming fast, and it’s hard to overstate how much worse that will make everything. If you can find a way to get involved in collective action, you will be building the power needed to make things easier.

I’m a big fan of modern technology and automation, when it helps people live fuller lives. When it’s being used to force more people into poverty and servitude, on the other hand, I think it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Somewhere along the way, most of us allowed the knowledge and skills of collective power to fade away, while we were under the mistaken impression that we no longer needed them. The good news is that in my lifetime, there have never been more people actively and collectively working to build a better future for themselves.

Trump has none of Reacher’s good qualities, only the bad ones.

I listened to some of his speeches at the beginning of his political career, and frankly, I was appalled at their quality, or more precisely, their lack thereof. From the very beginning, he demonstrated profound ignorance about history, current politics, law, economics, and indeed about how the world works in general. I became very quickly convinced that he is an idiot, and the only reason why he is neither in jail nor without a penny to his name is that he was born to riches and that has always shielded him from the most egregious negative consequences of his actions.

But although I was unimpressed with the content of his speeches from the very start, he was at least speaking coherently and staying on topic back then. It went downhill from that time on; his speeches deteriorated both in quality with regard to content, as well as regarding the execution. Nowadays, he trips over words, is unable to follow a coherent thought to the end, and rehashes old grievances all the time, all signs of dementia.

So IMO, he was always a fool, and now he is a demented fool. Yet he won the presidency twice, and just barely lost once. And to this day, many people keep saying that this is proof that he is neither demented nor a fool, but actually intelligent and a masterful manipulator. I disagree for several reasons.

Mainly, he did not actually have to manipulate the American public to vote for him. A sizable portion of said public was always racist, bigoted, ignorant, and resentful, and these “qualities” were nurtured and elevated as virtues by the USA right-wing pseudonews apparatus for decades prior to his entering the political arena. A self-feeding loop was thus created just prior to 9/11, and it has fed on itself ever since, culminating in the rise of the Tangerine Tyrant. He was at the exact cross of a crass, boorish, racist, ignorant, and resentful asshole and a dude whose riches served as an easy-to-understand shorthand for competence for the voter base to look up to. Because actual competence requires effort to recognize.

He was just lucky to be the exact guy that the already pre-manipulated masses of hateful peabrained bigots wanted. He did not win their vote because he was intelligent; he won it because he fit the mold of hate that was formed in their minds through decades of propaganda.

That he became president is not proof of his intelligence, knowledge, or competence. It is proof of a profound lack of all those qualities in the American public.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.

I plan to watch the film at some point, simply because the poem is so famous but I have never read it and have only the haziest idea of what it is about and so hope to get at least a superficially better understanding of it. Katherine Kelaidis discusses the deeper history behind the myth.

First, let’s be clear about the relationship of “The Odyssey” to both modern Greek identity and global culture. Because neither history is a straightforward one. 

Certainly from the Classical Period — that is, roughly the time of Pericles and Socrates — Greeks understood the Homeric poems as their founding myths. Yet just as the English would discover much later, when elevating “Beowulf” to the status of national epic, there is a problem with placing the oldest existent text in your language at the center of your national identity. Namely, your national (or rather ethnic, in the case of the ancient Greeks) identity is usually much more recent than the first text in your language. 
…

The Greek claim to Homer is a ultimately a linguistic claim, one which is complicated by the fact that from the time of Alexander the Great, who lived more than 500 years after “The Odyssey” was first written down, the Greek language spread far beyond the eastern Mediterranean, becoming an important lingua franca in the ancient and medieval world. And that was before the Renaissance. 
…

All of this, though, only works if we believe that the ancient people of the Mediterranean were “white” — a term and concept that would have meant as little to them as “Greek” would have meant to Odysseus. That assumption also obscures another historical irony: The modern inhabitants of the Mediterranean, including the nation-states of Greece and Italy, have not always been seen and treated as “white” — particularly in the United States, at least not in the ways that count most.
…

The terms of our debate, weirdly accepted by each side, are flawed. When we encounter a story as ancient as Odysseus’s, we directly encounter the hubris — a favorite sin among the ancient Greeks — of believing that our concerns, categories and even identities are timeless. Instead, the timeless aspects of “The Odyssey,” like those timeless things found in the epics of ancient India and the Hebrew scriptures, are those universal things that defy our changing human categories and that usually defy language altogether: loyalty, desire and the unrelenting need to find ourselves in a place where we belong. All else flows from these things. 

When we argue over who can authentically play a woman who hatched from an egg, we miss these more profound — and real — lessons. That might be the best lesson we can take from Homer today.

Of course, publicity hound Elon Musk never misses a chance to get involved in such silliness and he has announced that he will create an AI-generated version of the story that features ‘historically accurate people’, something that is silly on its face when talking about a work of fiction. Maybe he can get Tilly Norwood to play Helen.

Musk is notorious for overpromising and underdelivering. I will be very surprised if his ‘film’ ever sees the light of day.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Butterflies do not have a long life, but some manage to have it pretty rough and survive even so, as this specimen proves. Faded colors, chewed-up wing edges, yet still it flies.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Peacock butterflies are probably the prettiest butterflies that live around here. They look drab, almost coal-black with their wings folded, but stunningly beautiful when they flash their eyes from time to time to scare off or confuse predators.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There were multiple bee species present, but they were turning their hairy butts towards me and generally being uncooperative and blurry.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And of course several bee-mimicking hoverfly species were also present, being just as uncooperative as bees.

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Bees and butterflies get all the press when it comes to pollination, but some beetle species are important in this regard too. And they are often very tiny.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There were also smaller butterfly species there, and I did not manage to capture all those present by far.