[HN Gopher] Underrated reasons to be thankful V
___________________________________________________________________
Underrated reasons to be thankful V
Author : numeri
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-11-27 20:37 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.net)
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah! Screw you, cobalt-60! And I'm sure glad I'm not two-
| dimensional, but maybe I could poop through my mouth like a sea
| anemone.
| jstanley wrote:
| People say that 2-dimensional life is impossible because it's
| impossible to make a 2-dimensional digestive system.
|
| But you just need to make it work like a zip. The two halves of
| the body have interlocking hooks, and they move out of the way
| to let food pass through, and then reconnect.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, Dynomight suggested that in the article.
| jstanley wrote:
| Oops, I missed that!
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I think 2-dimensional life is impossible because physical
| things exist in all dimensions. As spacetime is already 4
| dimensions, no _physical thing at all_ exists in 2
| dimensions, thus no life either
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, that's just trivia about the contingent universe. You
| wouldn't say it was _impossible_ for Carthage to have
| conquered Rome, would you? It just didn 't, by chance,
| happen.
| schoen wrote:
| Although maybe
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I
| remember that Godel may have thought so?
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe! In that case there would be no contingent
| universe, only the necessary one. You can see how this
| would appeal to theists.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I assume the contingent universe is where my existence
| happens and thus a potential thankfulness should be
| placed on. I'm for example not gonna be thankful we're
| not in a higher-dimension universe, because my experience
| would likely be unfathomably different and things might
| look very different from there.
|
| As history shows, Rome _did_ win, so I wonder just how
| you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just
| have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was
| possible) Was there another universe where the first apes
| that would later become Carthagians found more bananas,
| thus had higher population and resources and won this
| way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this
| counterfactual history :D
| jstanley wrote:
| This one in particular stood out:
|
| > we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like
| panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily
| individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant
| surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating
| interlocks or having people walk around in little personal
| spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn't sound
| awesome, I see no reason this shouldn't be a battle that we would
| win.
|
| Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing
| these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
| paganel wrote:
| A hopefully tongue-in-cheek entry, or I certainly hope so. Or
| the guy (or lady) who wrote this is an arrrr ZeroCovidCommunity
| regular on reddit.
| kragen wrote:
| Sounds better than human extinction from bioweapons.
| arcfour wrote:
| Okay, neither of these are really what I wanted to think
| about on Thanksgiving though...I am not thankful for either.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm thankful humans aren't extinct yet!
| GPerson wrote:
| I found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.
| pcleague wrote:
| Same. Not quite sure what it was going for.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Eating cardamom as I read this. My go to spice to keep mouth busy
| and flavorful and stay away from junk food.
| facialwipe wrote:
| This whole thing reads strange. I'm not thankful for any of the
| presented reasons to be thankful.
| schoen wrote:
| Not even cardamom?
| dalanmiller wrote:
| Many days I worry that HN has lost its humanity and then
| something with a bit of levity and weird shows up and I am
| relieved.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I experience a similar sensation. I even feel it for my own
| self. Sometimes I go weeks, months just thinking about AI,
| productivity, hustling, taxes etc and then suddenly something
| with a bit of humanity and weird shows up and I am relieved.
| It's not completely lost (for now).
| thefz wrote:
| Opposite reaction, this article reads like it was written by a
| care bear.
| vr46 wrote:
| "Cheddar cheese and pickle. A Vincent Motor-sickle. Slap Bang
| Tickle"
|
| - Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
| smj-edison wrote:
| I know absurdist humor isn't for everyone, but man it cracks me
| up. So bravo to the strange and the weird, and that it holds this
| crazy place together!
| ggm wrote:
| 2. This is "regression tends to the mean" which my dad used to
| say with a smile when we discussed his excellent degree and his
| offspring's (including my) average degree.
| flatline wrote:
| > That sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit to
| reproduction, it's a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with
| success.
|
| Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half
| of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal
| data, I have to question the metric of "success" here. You also
| don't have to go very far back in history to decouple these
| factors!
|
| For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and
| companionship sans hierarchy.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally
| inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the
| modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are
| extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less
| extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant
| mortality.
|
| I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a
| joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out
| more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable
| cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of
| this statement, look around you.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally
| inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the
| modern/Western world.
|
| I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are
| expected to be less fit on average because -things can go
| wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a
| counterweight to this.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Seemed to me that the author was referring to regression to
| the mean, as another commenter noted.
|
| De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it
| is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are
| extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going
| to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo
| mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both
| 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the
| mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a
| statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both
| parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression
| penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| > 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable
| elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient
| that can itself be written as an expression graph, and
| furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same
| size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it's
| possible to fit very large expression graphs to data.
|
| > 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence
| does not appear to make use of that property of expression
| graphs.
|
| Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately
| apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it
| mildly), but is that the extent of it?
| abrookewood wrote:
| Hadn't thought about this one previously ... "That if you were in
| two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your
| body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth
| to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you're in
| three dimensions"
| rnewme wrote:
| We are basically a donut.
| layer8 wrote:
| I can recommend this nonfiction book on the topic:
| https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-27 23:00 UTC)