The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century that gave us egalitarianism and Turing computers.
It's mostly true, but not entirely, and the few percent that doesn't fit that model is enough to matter, and perhaps explains some persistent social phenomena which don't fit the picture.
A study has found that urban air pollution - ozone and nitrogen dioxide - causes changes in general expression in sperm, with potential impacts on foetal development.
More evidence of the environment producing subtle heritable modifications to DNA.
The world we live in is still far more Mendel's than Lamarck's, but it's perhaps more like 95:5 rather than 100:0.
As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.
But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.
There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.
The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?
Absolutely, if you do strength/resistance work that'll counteract the tendency of long cardio to burn muscle.
My point is just that if you /only/ do long cardio, it'll reduce the mass of muscle that you need both to burn calories and remain uninjured. Good to mix it up a bit.
Strength training has more of a positive effect on body composition.
The problem with doing a lot of cardio is that you need muscle to burn calories (especially so without injury and as you get older), and too much medium intensity cardio will start to chew up lean mass.
No harm in doing a bit of both though, especially if your goal is fitness/maintenance rather than maximum strength or a particular look.
This feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species.
"Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".
It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.
AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
And while there's no challenging the underlying proposition "AI has value", right now 95% of corporate users are still at the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" level in terms of model usage compute.
It's sheer brute force, tons of waste, seems like very little thought going in to fitting the implementation to the problem.
The value of compute can drop significantly in the event of users figuring out how to optimise for their particular need. And yep, there are wasteful applications that can burn whatever compute is available, but how much demand for that is there when it's properly priced?
Extreme example. Generating novel 4K VR video on demand. I'm certain there's a market for it, at $10/hour probably quite a healthy one, at $100/hour not so much.
It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.
So I think you're right, but my diagnosis of the problem is a little different.
As in:
_why_ does everyone want a middle class life?
_why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?
I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.
Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.
Yep, we can measure ATP and so on at the cellular level, but we don't have much of a picture of how that maps onto the physical/psychological sensation of "energy".
Like we know at a crude physical level, we can give someone a bit of a boost with glucose and sympathomimetic stimulants, but sometimes it works a lot better than others. And it's ineffective for fatigue syndromes, but they can't be the other mechanical things commonly associated with fatigue either. (lactic acid, micro-tears and so on).
Yep - people wonder why we can't treat ME/CFS, we don't even have decent biochemical markers for "fatigue" vs "energy", beyond trivial stuff like blood oxygenation and lactic acid. Nor are there much in the way of markers which will determine whether a competing athlete is going to have a good or a bad day.
For example, we have a concept of "energy" for which calories is a rough proxy, but there's no particular reason why fighting an infection should draw on the same reserves that running either endurance or peak muscle does, especially as most people operate in a state of calorie surplus, and their respiratory system is more than capable of supplying a bit of extra O2 unless they're severely ill. And yet clearly the immune/autonomic system forces people into a "rest" state in case of infection.
Or another one, there's no particular biological reason for older people to have less "energy". Like yes there's loss in muscle mass and some small drop-offs in the efficiency of various systems, but it doesn't seem like directly compensating for those makes all that much difference.