Contriving

The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when one of his underlings come in and tells him they've found a new policty to massively increase their profits. This new policy will harm the environment. The CEO says "I don't care about the environment, let's make some money!"

82% of people say the CEO intentionally harmed the environment.

Now, take the same scenario, wrote in the exact same way except replacing the word "harm" with "help"…only 23% of people will say the CEO intentionally helped the environment.

This is called the Knobe Effect, named for the experimental philosopher Josuha Knobe.


Happy Endings was an amazing sitcom and its early demise was a travesty.



I like counterfactuals and I'm interested in guns(*) so this is a post about a gun counterfactual.

In the US, it's common for gun supporters to say they don't support any sort of gun regulation because of the 2nd Amendment. I suspect many of these people only support the 2nd Amendment because it supports what they already want to be true. Would these people suddenly get rid of their guns tomorrow if it was discovered that without a doubt the 2nd Amendment was faked and the real text meant to drastically restrict gun ownership?

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(*) I like shooting guns. I think they're neat pieces of machinery. I like action movies where people shoot guns (and this means by near-necessity I like action movies where people get shot by guns, though it's a little uncomfortable to admit that).

I'm also fully supportive of effective gun control measures. I'd gladly give up rights to gun ownership because it seems to me the evidence is clear enough that it would save a lot of innocent lives if done correctly. 

Reshared post from +Rajini Rao

Eye See You: Moving Retina in Jumping Spiders

⦿ Jumping spiders (Salticidae) don't use a web to catch prey. Instead they locate, stalk and mount a jumping ambush when they are 1-2 cm away. To do this, they need to detect and then evaluate objects so they don't confuse a potential mate as prey! Fortunately, jumping spiders have among the sharpest vision among invertebrates.

⦿ Unlike insects, spiders don't have compound eyes. Instead their 8 "simple" eyes point forward (for high focus) and sideways (to detect motion). Strategically, this is similar to the division of labor in our eyes: we detect peripheral vision at the edges of our retina with low resolution but wide field of view, and sharp images at the fovea in the center of the retina, which is packed with a high density of vision receptors, but has a limited field of view. Since the spider's large central eyes are set close together and have a limited field of view, they must be moved to point the fovea towards the object. How do they do this?

⦿ Involuntary leg movements are triggered by stimuli from the lateral eyes to reposition the body. However, the spider cannot swivel its whole eyeball as we do, because the lens is built into the carapace, or outer skeleton. Instead, a set of six muscles moves the retina: up and down, sideways and rotationally, while the lens stays fixed. In a transparent spider, you can see the unusual movements of the retina in the tube-like principle eyes. Just one more addition to the cuteness quotient of these tiny spiders! 

REF: M.F. Land (1969) Movements of the retinae of jumping spiders (Salticidae: Dendryphantinae) in response to visual stimuli. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/51/2/471.full.pdf

Video Source: Yellow amycine jumping spider from Ecuador, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvN_ex95IcE

GIF Source: http://gph.is/1n7n4aR



People who get anxious about robots and AI taking jobs are usually worrying about the wrong thing.

The thing to worry about is how to structure our society to best distribute the vast amounts of leisure time and resources freed by automation, not how to STOP THE ROBOTS.

Of course, in the USA, I don't expect the Republican party to fully grasp and understand the huge opportunity here until way too late. I'm only slightly more confident in the Democratic party.

(as an aside: a few years ago I posted a quote in image form from…someone at world bank maybe? addressing this very issue, but Google, who should be excellent at this, makes searching your own posts extremely difficult)

People who watch porn have more gender egalitarian attitudes than those who do not watch porn according to 24,000 men and women surveyed between 1975 and 2010.

For some reason Google+ doesn't want to make the regular link to this paper, that includes the page title, summary, and images…so just click this link: http://goo.gl/KFXTEJ

Why cryonics makes sense to those who sign up.