"But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes?"
Nom nom yummi ideas nom
- Corvids are very, very intelligent. Plus they can use human language. And breed fast. Could we make them superintelligent?
- You can get pretty high by just breathing. Be warned, it probably works by depriving your brain of oxygen and alkilinizing your blood, so maybe don’t make a habit of it, but I definitely recommend at least trying it.
- There’s a whole computing platform based off doing bitwise operations on continuous random streams.
- Basically every idea, decision, and solution you make is actually just subconscious thoughts bubbling to the surface. Also, you can maybe tune the algorithms that decide what comes to the surface, which will maybe make you either a genius or insane.
- A single neuropeptide called Orexin-A can maybe*** decrease your body’s stress response - increasing your calorie consumption without making you gain weight, reducing your sleep need by 2-3 hours per night, increasing risk-taking behavior, reducing alzheimer’s risk, and making you happier. Strong claims require stronger evidence but this sounds pretty awesome.
- There are microorganisms in the clouds! Also, certain microorganisms can nucleate ice crystals at high temperatures!! And they’re probably a big part of the way precipitation is produced!!! What if we used them to seed precipitation?
- It’s plausible that Askenazi Jews have higher IQs due to genetic tradeoffs that came from very hard selection on intelligence.
- Taking caffeine every few days can MASSIVELY improve productivity and happiness without creating a tolerance.
- Music probably evolved for group-coordination/trolling the shit out of predators.
- Religion is a meme and is selected for maximal virality.
- Almost every mass extinction in history was caused by a disruption to the carbon-silicate cycle (Warning: this is an incredibly good documentary).
- Gender imbalances in careers could* be caused by androgens’ high-level effects on people-oriented vs things-oriented interests. This could also explain the much higher incidence of autism in men.
- Idk, conlangs are very fun and you can learn toki pona in 10 hours.
- If quantum immortality is true, we could make a machine that, like, nukes the shit out of society if a quantum RNG doesn’t produce the correct solution to an NP problem (ideally guaranteeing everyone dies; otherwise rip to the few people it doesn’t kill). Then we get a magical polynomial-time oracle. Because of some fucky time-delay stuff this is probably just an actual-suicide machine/an always-make-random-quantum-tunnelings-in-the-detection-apparatus-give-false-positives machine. But it would be cool if it worked.
- Everything You Care About is just a fucking abstraction of cold physical laws and quantum fluctuations and will inevitably disappear. And you have to live with that fact.
- DMT is a pretty good psychedelic. It’s fairly (?) unaddictive, probably doesn’t affect brain structure or chemistry, enhances creativity, and can instantiate hyper-intelligent “DMT entity” hallucinations which are maybe direct links to your subconscious. [Not super confident on this one, but DMT should probably be decriminalized.]
- Technology use probably causes alexthymia (aka feeling numb and emotionally bland). And you can actually start feeling emotions again by just touching grass.
- Chytrid fungus is fatal to almost every amphibian and is ravaging South America right now. Could we save them by gene-drive-engineering them to secrete antifungal substances? If not, the next decades few will be an amphibian-mass-extinction bloodbath.
- Ramjets but thermonuclear! Potential application: could a huge ramjet skim the sun’s atmosphere, creating a massive fusion explosion and propelling a tiny payload at close to the speed of light?
- A combination of basic typewriter-monkey theorems and the uncertainty principle seem to say the universe will after a finite amount of time evolve into any arbitrarily complex configuration. Could our observed universe just be a random post-heat-death artifact in an otherwise massive, boiling sea of entropy? Probably not - something something anthropics something - but it feels like these principles guarantee that even if this is the first incarnation of the universe, arbitrarily far in the future it will enter the exact same configuration it’s currently in again. So even if entropy guaratees we’ll all die (which it seems it does), it also guarantees we’ll eventually reappear.
- Is consciousness informational? Can an upload of your brain be you? How high-fidelity would it have to be? Are there degrees of you-ness? Could you be an upload even though you’re currently experiening the real world from a real body (kinda complicated, related to an idea I’m calling splinter theory). What’s the probability that you’re currently a Boltzman brain/a dishbrain being fed ideas by an evil demon? Does consciousness persist from moment to moment? Can we ever know or would the proof be susceptible to evil-demon-MITMing and thus suspicious?