Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

Meh. Let me just ask my buddy Pete what’s going on, he’ll have all the details.

So let me get this straight, you think some hitman posed, as a school bus driver of all things, to assassinate her, and that failing, she’s so important that someone else gets sent in to get her?

Occam’s Razor is dead.

Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.

Whatever. Yo momma so fat every step she takes gets picked up by LIGO.

lol Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of a good general relativity based yo momma joke…

tbf, “manipulating time and space” is a pretty low bar to clear. You’re manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

I’m curious too. I would google her, but the number of Dr Lisa Andersons from Pennsylvania is probably fairly significant. It’s not a small state or anything.

Sure I did. Not that it was particularly hard since you didn’t support your point with anything. A single sentence of rando internet opinion isn’t too tough to deal with.

Uh, no, not really, I don’t think the reserve currency makes China subservient to us in any way, shape or form. It’s not like the US can somehow remote control the dollars in distribution out in the world, or somehow control who gets them and who doesn’t. Under our capitalist system, anyone can get their hands on some if they really want. There’s also nothing really stopping them from buying a bunch of Euros too, and honestly, they probably have a bunch of those in savings as well. And some Japanese yen, Korean won, etc etc etc, alongside gold and everything else under the sun. That’s just smart diversification of assets.

Being the global reserve of preference for everybody does confer a certain advantage in ease of trade, but it’s really overblown. It’s not like the Euro or Yuan is some worthless scrap of paper nobody wants. It definitely doesn’t confer any sort of control.

Any other thoughts?

By that logic, China is currently subservient to the US. Is it?

The inevitable end result will be subservience to China.

citation needed

These folks like to throw around words like subservience, but I’m not sure how you get that without conquering someone militarily. People like to talk about NATO subservience to the US, for instance, but Trump doesn’t seem to be waltzing into Greenland any time soon. Pretty weak subservience if you ask me, given how much smaller Denmark is than the US.

Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

It has nothing to do with wanting to actually fight NATO. The idea is to manufacture a carefully crafted situation where Article 5 is triggered, but due to internal disagreement and individual risk, it is not fully honored.

Needless to say, any such move would be very risky.

Impressive piece of journalism.