Most of his guests are quite intelligent. His style generally works well with people who have expertise in something or are just generally deep thinkers. He also picks interesting guests that people are generally aware of (sometimes). The mainstream guests are the by far the worst interviews, the PG one being a great example.
To add on to this, unbridled capitalism also leads to more goods and services affordable for the average consumer. This makes the idea of taking a lower paying job appealing because you can still live a fairly comfortable life.
Is it unbridled that accomplishes that? Before regulations and unions people worked more hours per week, even children, and were exploited to a criminal degree. Mostly the profits went to capital owners. Collective assets like the environment suffered. Progress was certainly made and highly visible, yet at great cost.
> more goods and services affordable for the average consumer
The one key missing ingredient for this is competition. Without competition there is just a monopoly/cartel, leading to rent seeking behavior and products/services with too low quality and too high prices.
A classic armchair response. DNA has complementary nucleotides (AT,GC) that facilitates its pairing. Base 3 wouldn’t work in that sense. Also, you can’t forget about the genetic code. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/q-bio/0605036.pdf for interesting thoughts. Remember, evolutionary biology is a field and people think about these questions!
This is pretty smug for someone who seems to have managed to miss the point entirely. Yes, DNA has certain features that require a base 4 system. That is not necessarily true of all possible systems with DNA-equivalent function, which is the point this whole thread is making.
How have I missed the point? The answer that nature cannot engineer and can't start de novo are trivially true statements that provide no actual insight into the question. I fully agree the original question itself is a deep one. A quick literature search is more productive than pontificating with weak analogies. See https://www.math.unl.edu/~bdeng1/Papers/DengDNAreplication.p... for what seems to be an interesting analysis regarding base number and DNA replication rate.
> that provide no actual insight into the question
Mind elaborating on that?
Because there is no biochemical reason why DNA could not have incorporated, say, a third pairing pair, so while base-3 (which I don't specifically mention in my post btw.) wouldn't work, base 6 or 8 would have been possible. "Unnatural Base Pairs" are even known to work in laboratory settings.
There is also no biochemical reason why base2 life wouldn't work. Expand the reading frame of the translation machinery to 5 instead of three, and you have enough coding space for polypeptides.
My answer adresses the question completely, because the only reason behind these "decisions" is an ancient system that simply got "frozen", and now cannot change any more.
> There is also no biochemical reason why base2 life wouldn't work.
are you sure about that? are you sure there's no weird effects that might destabilize very long sequences of 2-nucleotide DNA? or on how wide DNA-binding domains have to be to cope with reduced information density, and how that might sterically hinder smaller arrangements of proteins?
> My answer adresses the question completely, because the only reason behind these "decisions" is an ancient system that simply got "frozen", and now cannot change any more.
your answer is just a hypothesis, not a proof. these things can be studied (by studying abiogenesis in-vitro), and it's not certain these decisions were "flash frozen" like you describe. 2-, 4-, and 6- nucleotide coding systems might have coexisted in the RNA world, and 4- could have won out for some reason.
Yes, I am sure about that, because I used to study Biology before going into IT. And we had a lovely lecture in which we used to discuss theoretical setups for lifeforms at a molecular level.
2 nucleotide DNA isn't necessarily less stable. AT-rich domains have less bindings, but if stablity is the issue, use CG instead (3 bindings)...although that is also a compromise, because then opening DNA for transcription gets more difficult.
> your answer is just a hypothesis, not a proof.
My answer is what we observe in evolutionary biology.
I have given an example outside of the molecular world for a reason. There is no real advantage to the inversion of the neural architecture in Chordata, it just didn't matter when the neural tube formation mechanisms came to be. Now, with mammals having huge brains and complex sensory organs, the warts in that design show.
The proof for that is easy to come by, (also a reason btw. why the neural inversion is my favorite example for this): Look an any Protostomia. Their neural system isn't inverted. Consequently, Squids don't have a visual blind spot.
your example of the blind spot is quite elegant and convincing. I think it's partly so convincing because there's a large fossil record and diverse phylogenetic tree, with many gaps covered. conversely, we're missing direct evidence for the pre-LUCA era, and what we have is bottlenecked. this makes me more skeptical.
for instance, I've seen arguments that the codon mapping, and even the particular set of protein- coding amino acids, that we ended up with was arbitrary, but I've also read papers arguing that the amino acids include a sort of spanning set of different structural scaffolds with different polarity that happen to mesh well with DNA, and that the particular choices of codons were influenced by how the RNA t-acyl transferases arose, etc.
so, I'm still unconvinced, but I find this area fascinating to read about.
Idk enough about this discussion to argue it, but his hypothesis does not imply your second point couldn't be true.
> your answer is just a hypothesis, not a proof. these things can be studied (by studying abiogenesis in-vitro), and it's not certain these decisions were "flash frozen" like you describe. 2-, 4-, and 6- nucleotide coding systems might have coexisted in the RNA world, and 4- could have won out for some reason.
His hypothesis is, at least in part, “4- won for some reasons for which we have no explanation, and it stayed that way for some reason [that we may or may not know].” I suppose the reason would be that 4- was somehow better suited for the particular use-case at the time.
Of course there’s a ton of interesting details to discuss to discover, and whether if multiple systems coexisted is one of many fascinating things to discuss, and his response never said otherwise.
agreed, if you have a theory, you should do your best to disprove it. OP was more interested in the aesthetic of their theory as opposed to whether it was true or not.
It depends what you use the tool for. You can use tool for menial tasks while doing something highly creatives. Tools inherently don't make us dumber. The choice is always lies with the individual.
There is a fundamental difference between the two examples. There are strong social pressures to join social media. Opting out of social media could lead to a less rich social life, especially for younger people. Thus, there is perceivably a large opportunity cost to abstaining from social media, unlike McDonalds. I think millenials underestimate how much social media has completely changed the social fabric for the up and coming generations.
Only way to truly learn biology imo is to read and do experiments. The feedback loop between those two things is what actually gives someone real intuition.
Well put. I ultimately view observational studies as hypothesis generators that can spur research into more targeted questions all the way down to the biochemical level.
On average yes, but I tend to agree that the 'jock' tech worker is an archetype that didn't exist 20 years ago. Tech is no longer counterculture and has become a more high status profession in the eyes of the public. This is probably good for short term productivity but bad for long term innovation. I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.
> I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.
This is generally because low status or "unsexy" confers sufficient time to tinker, make recoverable mistakes and polish until the innovation gains traction. High status or "sexy" attracts all the wrong kinds of attention that brings all the wrong kinds of pressure that steals away that time.
I think it's more because prominent strains of Hollywood/American pop-culture valorizes the low status underdog who succeeds and shits on people who are already high status. We can pretend we are insulated from American cultural norms but we are not.
I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.
> I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.
Point. They definitely aren't more likely to succeed. I do contend they are however, afforded a small opportunity to work on their idea in obscurity until it reaches that stage it can gain traction. And in the meantime, position their chess pieces for the inevitable entry of the avaricious, high-status people looking for a kill at the low-status people's expense.
That is, low-status can be deployed as camouflage to deflect attention away from the gathering of resources and information to choose the time, place and terms to start the fight for maintaining control over anything that gains traction.
Same experience, I never met another tech person that fits the bro stereotype? most of my colleagues are like people on h1b. My idea of a bro is like those frat guys with the popped collars years ago.
Some of this other stuff just sounds like over excited college kids, like adderal and stuff?
