stupid questions I
from September 2021–December 2022
from below; with various answers and attempted answers in the twitter thread, but only questions here.
Why are there so many Turkic and Germanic tribes?
Why are shields different shapes?
Why so few (no?) Christian steppe nomads?
Why is there no Nile/Euphrates like river system in Saudi Arabia / why is it so dry? (same latitude as India, Myanmar, north Vietnam)
Why so many Swiss mercenaries? Conventionally, supply of more sons than land for farming/herding meets demand of soldiers for 1500s/1600s war; but true for all countries in Europe... Swiss state avoids war but extra men still had to go somewhere?
What exactly is making farmers work harder than foragers? Marginal foraging still brings more calories... shouldn't the forager landscape 'fill up' and undergo boom-bust cycles too? Maybe violent defense of foraging territories keeps them above subsistence but ++ death rate? [re: the Sahlins ‘original affluent society’ picture]
Is it really true that farmers didn't travel more than 1-2 day's walk from their village their entire lives? How do we know?
(Eventually they would run into cultural or linguistic boundaries, but even before big national language pushes the range was >> 2 days walking.)The early industrial revolution unlocked a lot of energy in the form of coal and steam power. But how did that actually get turned into more food? (energy usable to raise the malthusian ceiling). Or did that only come later?
Puzzled why European states before WW1 could organize into two blocs of credible mutual defense agreements, but couldn't go the one small step further into a single 'sovereignty guaranteeing' block that deterred and punished aggression.
What's the efficiency lifecycle of new weapons and tactics. Do they work best at first, because of shock value and counters not found yet? Or later, because they’re refined and better integrated? Some kind of U shape? Or varies too much to stylize as one pattern? [go through a list]
In ethnic cleansing among neighbors, like St Bartholomew’s Day massacre’s, is it typically only a few people doing all of the killing, with most Catholics in role of mob supporters or bystanders? Or do a large # participate directly in violence.
Sometimes see arguments about the disadvantage of Chinese divisions being smaller than Japanese, or Italian smaller than other European powers... the number of soldiers is the same, just divided into divisions of larger or smaller size? I don’t get it.
Why the cycling between sword/shield and spear/pike/halberd infantry several times before guns replaced them both. Relative strength of cavalry? Material costs? Local traditions + randomness? Cost/efficacy of drill and command and control? Social basis of recruitment? (what’s the total graph)
Why do guns recoil up instead of down
Why do most traits turn out to be very polygenic?
Why did it turn out that light speed was constant and time was variable, instead of relative light speed / absolute time?
How many years was it before the Columbian Exchange was a net benefit to the Old World? (rapid harm of syphilis vs slower(?) benefit of productive new world crops)?
(Within the lifetime of anyone alive in 1492?)Why is the genetic code base 4 instead of base 2? (why didn't the simplest encoding evolve first)
Why don't females take <50% of male genes, instead of diluting 50%? Can get the long run benefits of variance without giving up so much.
(molecular machinery is so intricate that it can't cheat in units less than 1? some equilibrium around male countermeasures?)Why does gravity decrease with the square instead of the cube of distance? (spreading out in 3 dimensions, not 2). In Lineland, does gravity not decrease with distance at all...?
Without redshift, is there another way to tell how far away distant stars are? I.e., if the universe was not expanding, would it be impossible to tell distance of other galaxies?
(probably some calculation based on expected mass compared to brightness)Why are there so many kinds of dogs
How fast would a new smallpox outbreak be contained, compared to covid? (different viral properties; more intense policy response because of 10x or higher lethality; more prior knowledge of virus & vaccine design)
Do infectious diseases generally favor the offense or defense, or neither, at comparable levels of immunity?
(besieged/walled cities, interior lines, need to concentrate forces for a breakthrough, optionality about when to fight)How do animals without hands get rid of ticks
Were a lot of the early Christian converts Jewish exiles from the sack of jerusalem in 70CE? (2-3 generations after crucifixion)
(would be echo of Weber's 'Protestant destruction of the monasteries -> unleashing capitalist ethic into general circulation') [is this itself true]Why are external organs mirrored around the central axis, vs. internal organs only partially mirrored?
How many years (months?) until the GPT/DALL-E of music [posted May 2022]
How convergent are human emotions?
-behaviors synced to global state variables that change together from stimulus, vs. (some other way to do this)
-the specific directions and discreteness of *these* emotions: seeking, fleeing, fighting, mourning. some seem unavoidable, others...What structural difference between the music and film industries produces the opposite outcome in streaming libraries: Spotify has almost everything, but no single movie streaming service does, AND most movies aren't available on any service (e.g. >50% of my IMDB watchlist).
In the war for user attention, why doesn't machine learning work defensively as well as offensively. i.e. click one thing -> see hundreds of related things; but not the inverse mute one word -> mute constellation of nearby words/penalize sites or accounts that use them.
(technical obstacles? (interacting with endless APIs, that are fighting against it); market obstacles? (maybe most users don’t care, those who do care won’t pay, hard to monetize negative space in advertising— diffuse benefits to other advertisers vs. concentrated harm to one))Why don't dense cities have water fountains every block or two? Main cost must be the pipe network, which is already there.
What actually is the connection between inflation, unemployment, and exchange rates (and balance of trade)? I don't know.
What’s NAIRUWhat's the decay rate of someone's genes in the gene pool whether or not they have children? (presumably most of their gene mass is NOT in their descendants—most common genes will also be shared among the most people)
re: “Random thought: It still kind of boggles the mind that as late as mid 90s, nobody really knew how to fight another human. Millions of years of human history & the entire population remained clueless, as exposed to the world by Royce Gracie. The early UFCs are so worth your time.”
Is this claim mostly an artifact of other combat sports using a different ruleset? On the one hand, other sports were efficient for their rules— there was no revolution IN boxing or kickboxing (?); and on the other hand, close to all real combat would be armed, at least with a blade, which shifts the equilibrium towards ‘striking’ and away from grappling, i.e. away from the MMA meta.
Between ubiquitous cameras, DNA matching, cell phone GPS, and search history, are there are a lot fewer false convictions than there were a generation or two ago? And a downward trend in the future?
Is there some connection between this pattern and planets orbiting the sun elliptically
Matt Henderson@matthen2circles emanating from two points meet at ellipses10:37 AM · Jun 2, 202218 Replies · 131 Reposts · 1.11K LikesIf someone looks more like one parent, that bears no relation to personality inheritance, I think? The effects are independent and unrelated? But not completely sure of that.
Continents moving at the rate fingernails grow: why so slowly?
Didn't know there were female heterogametics(?)... is it just random which sex it is? Or some efficiency tradeoffs in one sex vs. the other?
Royal Society Publishing@RSocPublishingThe sex with the reduced sex chromosome dies earlier: a comparison across the tree of life ow.ly/HlOJ50EAbto | #BiologyLetters #sexualdimorphism #longevity #PEQG22
10:55 PM · Jun 8, 20222 Replies · 23 Reposts · 88 LikesWhy rocket artillery instead of shell artillery
The heuristic ~1:1 ratio of production budget to advertising budget in film; what is it in other areas? And what's the general theory of how to split investment between creating quality and signaling quality?
Is there a single big geoguessr decision tree where the leaves are every country?
(road type, sign type, car type, plates, road markings, soil color, house design and coloring, plants, cloud patterns, fences, pedestrians, poles/wires)Are there countries that do a car insurance/liability insurance model for guns? Seems like an obvious solution to the basic problem of sorting the ~0 risk normal user from the heavy-tailed, uninsurable high externality user without blanket restrictions; and existence proof of cars.
What's the connection between the surprise of Moravec's paradox in the past and the surprising competence of large language models/scaling hypothesis/the bitter lesson now? Surprise in the same direction, or two unrelated directions? [June 2022]
The main practical and distinct use of cryptocurrency seems to be in sending remittences or removing money from a closed or hostile banking system. The main actual use case is gambling/speculation/ponzis/fraud/(ransomware/extortion). Speculative, unrealized use is diversified investment/gold-like inflation hedge.
The common pattern is that the productive, practical uses all want low volatility and the actual, popular uses all want high volatility. Is there some alternative coin design that keeps the value storage and transfer aspects, but w/ minimal volatility? Probably not? But doesn't seem impossible on its face.[noticing I don't understand] What actually is the proof that a Turing machine (read/write head + tape + symbol language + rule table) can execute any computation? Is this just definitional of what "computation" means? Or is it nontrivial?
[for 4 years] whats a monad
“In many cases men deliberately avoided eating before a battle, for fear of being shot through a full stomach.”
Does this actually help?How is the 'face of battle' infantry experience of Ukraine war different from WW2 battles in the same area?
(seems much closer to them, than they were to napoleonic era battles, or even WW2 to WW1 battles) [June 2022]What's the practical import of the halting problem? Is there any? Like if Hilbert was right, how would computers or cryptography today look different?
Also... given a language and an arbitrary statement in that language, you can't guarantee that you can prove it if it's true... but can you prove (estimating seems simple, just sample) what % of these undecidable statements there are in the language? Probably not?
Why is inflation showing up now instead of during covid? [June 2022]
Is BFS from the start and end of a maze faster than just BFS from the start? I think so...?
Why do running and walking cost the same # of calories per distance?
Has anyone speculated on how long it would take dinosaurs to evolve ~human level intelligence, vs. starting over with the mammal bodyplan? What do arguments look like that it would be a) faster or b) never.
How does an abacus work
I don't really understand why the Nazi and Imperial Japanese empires were separately *both* so genocidal towards civilian populations in a way that, while not historically unprecedented, was out of norm for wars of that era, including recent major war. Just coincidence? Some convergent policy evolution of relatively small occupation force in much larger conquered population, in context of continual ongoing war?
Why isn't Pol Pot's grave vandalized (more?)? Weird to see it intact, though shabby, in photos.
How much of the German economic disaster of early 30s, and ensuing Nazi popularity, was the result of avoidable fiscal and monetary policy errors by the Weimar government? (could be errors of understanding; or lack of coalition will; or it was in fact unavoidable)
It's much cheaper to load generated images than to run prompts, right? So could DALL-E offer a free autocompleting search engine of generated prompts, as well as the 15 cents/image batch or whatever?
(double benefit of searchable images and of giving prompt text autocomplete ideas) [July 2022]*Why* does high stress/nervous system activation cause uncoordinated performance? It makes sense for the fear/panic/flight half of fight or flight but if calm people fight better, why is incompetent flailing the untrained normal effect? Undampenable side effect of more important fear half?
How does a grigri work?
For that matter how do seatbelts workWhy does shaking a bottle of carbonated fluid move(?) the carbon from the fluid to the trapped air? (?)
What's the valence of communism/communist branding in China today?
Have large language models resolved any debates in human linguistics around specialized vs. general mental modules? [August 2022]
Are humans specially evolved to recognize details of faces or is it just that we stare at faces for about 100000 hours but feet (or rocks) would be as discernible.
Why isn't air full of plankton?
Have domesticated trees changed as much as corn and dogs?
Is there an OCEAN/big 5 model for monkeys?
For other mammals? Other animals?Appetite is partly regulated by hormones... why can't people artificially regulate appetite/weightloss by dosing those hormones directly?
How is it possible that lifetime small boat fishermen don't know how to swim? First chinese fishermen in Guo's "Once Upon a Time in the East" and now northeast(?) Spanish in Lewis's "Voices of the Old Sea". They cite ‘superstition’, but... ???
Why do some leaves have big holes in them (from design, not parasitism/predation).
They already paid for the stalk structure/vascular infrastructure, why not have a solid surface area for photosynthesis.Given his dread of death and unique abilities, why didn't von Neumann move into biology towards the end of his life? Too interested/distracted by other things? Thought the problem was hopeless? (more hopeless than deathbed conversion...?)
Cells in the body are constantly individually replicating, in a population of trillions... how does individual replication keep the population "birth rate" at exactly 1. If they're off by even 0.01%, you'd end up with too many or too few very quickly. Some negative feedback on both ends?
Ducks and geese coexist in urban ponds... what are the relative fitness advantages of each?
Apparently it was common to disassemble steamboats and then portage and reassemble them above rapids, especially in Africa where the elevation drop to the ocean made unnavigable rapids common on major rivers... why didn't Kinski in Fitzcarraldo just do that.
Many European WW1 battles involved or crossed rivers: why no use of gunboats? Too vulnerable to artillery and mortars? Redundant with wheeled artillery + dense rail network? Or they were used and I just haven't see them mentioned anywhere?
What's the Smil type materialist redescription of how exactly plundering the New World metals made Spain enormously rich? They got a lot of gold and silver, but those metals on their own don't do anything (compared to say coal or guano, direct inputs into energetic industrial processes)... so they traded a lot of them to the other economies of Europe (and later, China) in exchange for a share of their agricultural and industrial output, and military labor; but those countries were happy to take the trade, although *they* didn't get anything energetically/materially better either... was this mostly just redistributing wealth (and if so, why were they okay with their relative impoverishment) or was it net enrichment from increasing gains from trade/specialization/market interlinkage, and if so why wasn't it just arranged without the surplus metals? Extreme difficulty of trustworthy currency locking these old economies into artificially low levels of trade/marketization/monetization? Silver mines also a big source of ancient Athenian wealth, to a lesser extent Roman...
What's the ELI5 why humans/other animals can't do anything with a 5x or 10x daily calorie abundance besides put it into storage as body fat? There's the metabolic phase change of hibernation for low calorie mode, why no opposite 'high burn' mode when calories not a bottleneck famine so common that this mode not selected for? Side effect damage more trouble than its worth from overclocking metabolism, muscle movement, etc.?
How do otters eat sea urchins
Why hasn't industrial chemistry invented more foods? In other words, the foods we eat are only an infinitesimal % of the space of edible substances, and ~entirely still self-assembled (plant, animal). What are the bottlenecks to either artificial foods (entire), or just artificial spices?
Why do boxers lean their head forward? What compensates for the slightly reduced reaction time + travel distance of opposing punches?
Why didn't they evolve to not do this?
Emily Finch@DrEmilyFinchALL the eels in Europe and America are born in the Sargasso Sea (in the Bermuda Triangle! Ominous? Yes). Eels might even live in a landlocked part of Europe and yet they will travel thousands of kilometres over land (yes, land!) and sea to get to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. 2/?9:15 AM · Oct 18, 202226 Replies · 198 Reposts · 5.38K LikesWhy didn't the Black Death become endemic?
At this point, what are the major unsolved problems between now and mobile robot assistants? All of these seem basically solved:
-balance, proprioception, navigating
-understanding visual environment
-understanding natural language
-hearing speech, outputting speech
What’s left? [December 2022]How to square the high intricacy, sequentiality and nonobviousness of cultural evolution like cassava processing with not realizing malaria was caused by mosquitos, that doctors should have clean hands for delivery, that citrus prevented scurvy, etc: all "1 step" and life & death.
