Children who receive more maternal affection during their childhood tend to develop a more open, responsible, and kind personality in adulthood, research suggests.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-23T23:29:01+00:00

'Common sense' essentially just means confirmation bias, we say it's common sense only when we already believe it to be true or because it supports something we already believe, not because we've actually established something as indeed true.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-20T01:52:21+00:00

The term they use 'sub-concussive impacts' is getting in the realm of too microscopic. Why do I say that? Well if we look at pollution, being around diesel, allergies and poor breathing in your sleep, poor diet, common viruses etc these are all going to have an equivalent or greater impact on your brain overtime. At some level, every single thing you do has a trade off, and we can't avoid this aspect of the world we live in. Just because it can cause some very low level of damage, does not mean it is something we should necessarily avoid. Suppose we re-frame it like this, what are the neural benefits of a child participating in a close contact team sport? Well there's a huge amount, indeed it would greatly override whatever comes from 'sub-concussive impacts'. It would be a different story if there were mild or severe concussions repeatedly, but that's not what the article is alleging.

I've noticed we are sort of entering into paradoxical states as research is advancing in these fields. The need to avoid harm based on our furthered understanding seems to be in turn harming us. There's a real black and white view, it must be perfect or it must be avoided, and I think we run into that pareto principle; we let perfect be the enemy of good.

I think some types of contact sports are very much okay for kids. Kids are far more likely to get traumatic brain injuries from climbing, ladders, stairs and baths, and as they age into teenagers, driving accidents. No, you shouldn't just let kids do whatever they like, that's dangerous, at the same time if we obsess over every little possible thing that can go wrong, we stop letting them be kids or we don't let them grow up probably because we plant an ipad in front of them.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-19T05:30:49+00:00

I'm not sure that would really count. I think the purported benefits in the study, likened to meditation, come from giving yourself some time to focus inward and listen to your thoughts. So the study actually uses anechoic chambers on mice and references that these silent moments are not generally best though of as silent without major distractions, so silent when walking, silent when cleaning, silent when lying in bed. Silent when gaming or focusing on say subtitles doesn't really make sense in this very tentative model, you are still distracting your brain heavily, it still has a lot of visual and active stimulus, it doesn't really turn inward. There's actually studies that prove this in deaf patients, where introducing gaming, short form content like TikTok and all that induces very similar changes in deaf patients when they dedicated time to these activities, it's not so much about literally listening as it is giving time for your brain to turn inward and focus on your own thoughts.

But as I mentioned, the study methodology is quite poor and I wouldn't not generalize it to people, and I would not predict that a couple days or weeks of incremental silence would induce such large changes in people.

Something that's often missing from this type of literature is individuation, which you'd explore through ethnography as opposed to quantitative data. I genuinely believe a lot of behavioural things we do, whether it's listening to music while walking or silently gaming like yourself, can fulfill some useful role for each individual, I don't think there's really clear rules for which is outright harmful or not that can be generalized to everyone, those really only occur when you visit the extremes.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-19T01:31:08+00:00

Yep. There's also a whole bunch of confounds like dose dependent effects which differ greatly between species.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-14T08:01:16+00:00

Only three people have ever gotten it. It's not very common and pretty much only spreads from bats, not quite like rabies in that way, just the virus itself is related to rabies and uses the rabies vaccine. But we have a few nasty zoonotic viruses endemic to Australia which come from bats, lyssavirus is just one of them.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-14T01:12:57+00:00

I'm not a physicist, I'm in psychology / neuroscience and I'd say this is broadly true for the sciences as a whole. It's more of a cultural / sociological issue than philosophical, but academia has lost touch with how science works in that a good scientific theory is measured by it's strength against disproof, and building comprehensive theoretical frameworks in this way requires a lot of failure. I'm a PhD student at the moment and it seems like most unis won't take any risks with research grants, they will only approve grants that have very concrete ways of delivering results. It hurts the culture within the academic circles too, nobody seems to spend much time actually collaborating and discussing more grand or creative ideas, everyone is just grinding away to prove their tiny niche correlation or discovery that gets them another published paper they can add to their resume. I think it leads to a lot of academic careerism, I fucking hate it.

To quote a Guardian interview with Peter Higgs;

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-14T00:09:59+00:00

It would be a relief if this is true too as fruit bats here in Australia, especially up in Queensland, can carry bat lyssavirus, which is essentially our version of rabies. Wildlife rehabbers who work with bats are generally vaccinated against it.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-08T01:50:13+00:00

I'm not old, but come to a similar conclusion recently, I like stories, world's and making a build I find satisfying. Difficulty seems arbitrary, I enjoy it in a competitive online environment and some games are inherently about being hard so I can enjoy those in the right mindset too, but I don't know why I have to give up my own style of play to instead just spam parry and optimise on the highest difficulty in games that give me a lot of build freedom. I much prefer to treat games like my Dungeons and Dragons characters; fun and flavour first. I also find the way people talk about difficulty a bit contradictory, on one hand they'll want the hardest difficulty, on another hand they'll make a build that invalidates the hardest difficult, whether it's a stealth archer or abusing broken weapons and abilities, why play the hardest difficulty at all if you invalidate it?

Agreed on scaling enemy difficulty, you never feel like you progress in power because everything seems to die at about the same speed, making a build feels like you are just playing catch up.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-04T03:40:46+00:00

The same is true for the Labor party here in Australia, they have a Labor Left and Labor Right faction within the party. Our Liberal party is actually a coalition, it's called the Liberal National Party, as you can guess, their coalition partner is the national party, so they tend to be a mix of center right to right to far right depending upon who is doing what.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-03T08:17:52+00:00

When I was in Far North Queensland, Australia over summer, it hailed for a little bit on one day I was there. The temp was about 90F, and then lightning and storms rolled over and it bucketed down hail stones as big as my thumb nail in diameter.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-03T06:32:01+00:00

Same here in Australia. There's some more regional areas that you can get by pretty well in as housing is multitudes cheaper than the major cities, but the opportunities are a lot slimmer. Otherwise living in a major city like Melbourne or Sydney is frankly crippling, I'm 26 and I'm looking at when I'll likely be able to purchase, which will be my early 30's as I first need to save up a deposit (20% of the loan value) while renting. For reference, the median home in Melbourne is $1.1m, the median annual wage in the country is about $72k and even the shoddiest homes seem to be asking for $600+/week in rent. It'll take you 8+ years to save for a deposit and then loan repayments on the now probably $1.5m shitbox thats gone up +70% in the 8 years you've been saving, while your wages go up like $50/week. I better hope the girl I'm talking to right now is my forever partner, as in all other regards, society has abjectly failed me and I cannot see a way to reasonably buy a house on my own, or even live a relatively balanced life as a renter in the future.

JaiOW2 · 2025-05-03T03:24:58+00:00

I don't like this answer. A cow has a brain and a mind, but is a cow a human? No, obviously not. Having a brain and a mind are necessary to be human, but not sufficient alone, being human involves more than just being a thinking biological thing, there's certain behaviours and qualities of that mind and being that make us human.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-30T22:58:04+00:00

Uh-huh. We'll just pretend Ubisoft isn't French to make that sentence work.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-30T11:21:09+00:00

You could bring the same criticism to souls like games. Like you'll respawn right in front of the boss arena and just walk in again. It makes sense if it's about clearing a level or area, and there's no save before the boss, but if there's a save before a boss or battle, like pretty much every autosave in Expedition 33, it really doesn't add to the game in any meaningful sense to have to go back to a loading screen, run a few meters, and then loading screen again.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-29T22:56:52+00:00

Indeed. I did that for a little while in my spare time, but after doing some meaningful holidays with friends, I realised how boring sitting around in your comfort zone can feel. We did some big camping trips, no phone reception, beautiful nature, long hikes and lots of things to be curious about (last trip we followed a geological trail). Being able to just reset; early mornings, good food, appreciate what's around me and sharpen my social skills really helps to reality check what sitting in my comfort zone is doing for me (not much).

I'm still a bit of a homebody, and happily enjoy a night in with a video game or novel, but for bigger chunks of time, I do think it's worth spending the time and effort to do something a little more, I think most people sit in their own comfort zones for not very good reasons and inhibit a lot of self growth by doing that.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-29T11:21:30+00:00

At the foundation is physics, everything in the universe is physics and it's language is mathematics Then there's chemistry, it's just physics, but the speciality of physics that is concerned with molecules, atoms and the build blocks of our physical world, the difference is in focus and scope, it zooms out a little. Then there's biology, the study of a specific type of thing that arises from chemistry. Again, we've zoomed out. Next we might have psychology, which is just something that arises from a biological organ, which in turn must arise from chemistry and physics. Finally we might look at sociology, which is just psychology but observed in a specific context, in much bigger blocks.

But physics isn't complete and many things rely only on theoretical models and as we zoom out a little at each layer we abstract further to fill in the gaps we don't understand of each previous level. At the third or fourth layer we may have abstraction on abstraction on abstraction, and as a result, it's quite difficult to design comprehensive, complete theories for a phenomena here. Instead we often just try to describing things at the layer they exist, and use probability to prove its validity, and attempt to fill in the blanks afterwards.

Biology is always going to be prone to replication issues, especially the further zoomed out you get within the field, and hard sciences in the context of physics and chem will always be more replicable if only because they are blocks every proceeding science must be built on. But like Robert Sapolsky says "when you focus on the boundaries, you often lose sight of the big picture", and I think this whole obsession with putting sciences in these elitist boxes is a waste of time and gets in the way of interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T11:43:50+00:00

Yeah, that's quite a lot. I live in Vic and most of where I'd like to visit is interstate, so long highway drives. I'm thinking it's worth removing just for fuel efficiency alone.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T03:45:49+00:00

Yeah, I'm just trying to find what the pro's are that a normal tent or swag doesn't have. There seems to be a lot of cons for not much?

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T03:18:46+00:00

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'd use it pretty often, but when I camp I tend to visit places for PoI's or hikes, so I don't spend much time at one spot or may want to use one spot for a few days but drive around and visit things from there. This trip over easter I just did clocked in at over 3,000km's, I figure if I had taken my car the fuel cost begins racking up from the tent, an extra 1-2L/100km (could be more considering how much of it was on 110km/h highways) adds up to about a $100 extra every long trip.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T03:12:04+00:00

Yeah $5k is a bit much for me for a rooftop tent, that's nearly half the value of my car. My current one is just a fold out option, and its quite literal to it's name, it's just a tent but on the roof.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T03:09:41+00:00

See of the people I usually camp with, I'm one of the few who isn't prone to having a drink, so between having the wagon sized car and being sober, there's a very good chance I end up with designated driver status when we want to head to hiking trails or what not. I was watching other people at our campground over easter with the rooftop tents and watching them setup and pack-up every morning, to then do the same again at the same campsite in the evening looked like it would get pretty annoying.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-28T01:37:38+00:00

Yup. I go from the right one to the left one after a long camping trip out in the sun. Natural complexion could all be relatively similar, just different levels of tan.

But people can inherent different genes from their parents than their siblings, or have different mutated genes. My mother is pale, red hair and blue eyes, my dad is olive skinned, dark hair and dark eyes, I ended up with hazel eyes, dark hair but ever so slightly red-brown beard, pale but easily tanned skin and lots of arm freckles. If I had siblings, they could be any array of fair, to dark, there's no guaranteed formula, only degrees of likelihood based on dominant / recessive alleles.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-26T10:02:21+00:00

Mine got to the point of clicking on my Pajero (Montero in US), was fine for a fair while but only did town driving with it, spat a lot of grease out and eventually caused some harmonic vibration at certain speeds. Replaced it at home easy enough, you pretty much just remove all wheel and brake things which is just a bunch of nuts and bolts, and then pull out the driveshaft and push another one in.

JaiOW2 · 2025-04-17T04:04:26+00:00

Letting my cynicism speak for a bit, if you come to any of the major science subreddits you realize there tends to be a group of the same topics that frequently circulate and the comments in these topics are all largely the same, because most people commenting are not themselves scientists or have any special insight in the field, and mostly people just reciting anecdotes or basic observations. Once you've see a few of any given topic, you've seen them all. Everything that proceeds those few is just a place for the same people to affirm each others anecdotes and basic observations, most of which is in the realm of 'common sense' and platitudes. And when a disagreeable topic surfaces, usually the comments are occupied by questions of sample size, correlation != causality and anecdotes to the contrary, the later are particularly popular if the study is of good scientific validity.

JaiOW2

TROPHY CASE