2+ hour, 17+ min ago  (650+ words) As an atheist, "Mary was a true hermaphrodite" sounds a little heretical, as does the cited opposing theory that Mary became pregnant through parthenogenesis and Jesus was chromosomally female. [2] But what do I know. Theology aside, is Bayraktar right? Is…...

5+ mon, 1+ day ago  (263+ words) Note: I spent my holidays writing a bunch of biology-adjacent, nontechnical pieces. I'll intermittently mix them between whatever technical thing I send out, much like how a farmer may mix sawdust into feed, or a compounding pharmacist, butter into bathtub-created…...

5+ mon, 2+ week ago  (1012+ words) Epistemic status: a tale, a collection of archetypes From my fourth-floor window, I can see the branches of an oak tree moving in the wind. However, these movements are radically different from the movements of an animal. They are a…...

6+ mon, 3+ week ago  (377+ words) When you are born, nobody knows your face. And in particular, you don't know your face. But these are both relatively recent inventions. The first daguerreotype portrait was taken in 1839, and the earliest traces of manufactured mirrors were polished obsidian…...

7+ mon, 5+ day ago  (206+ words) Three months and many deep intellectual discussions later, I am yet to receive a strong counterargument to my contrarian world-model for superintelligence. Indeed, Geoffrey Hinton is changing his mind to reach a world-model that looks similar to the one I…...

8+ mon, 2+ week ago  (991+ words) Friends in technical safety tell me that evolution is a dumb and slow algorithm. Like, if you'd run an optimisation algorithm on a computer, why not pick one that's more sophisticated? Even just stochastic gradient descent? Surely, 'AGI' could design…...

9+ mon, 2+ day ago  (228+ words) "TESCREAL" reads as basically a slur to me, and I suspect to most people who know its history. Noted. I did not have this association myself, but got such feedback from some people." I believe you wanted to write "Salmon…...

9+ mon, 2+ week ago  (364+ words) These may have had some influence on our genome, especially if the selection pressure was strong, but even 50kya is only 1/6th of our temporal range. And this isn't one of those cases where there is a single oldest claimed instance which…...

10+ mon, 3+ week ago  (1656+ words) I have received credible reports from the Department of Redundancy Department that this long post is long'over 4000 words, in point of fact. The main results of our survey can be summarized as follows: (1) There was no general agreement among the…...