Maybe, but there's a human element that can make things worse too. Take prostate cancer as an example. Most men die with prostate cancer. Most men don't die _from_ prostate cancer. It isn't usually aggressive enough to matter. Most people aren't zen enough to accept that though, so just knowing that you have cancer can add stress to your life with measurably bad health impacts from the resulting hormonal changes (reduced immune function, impaired sleep, increased clotting tendency, slower wound healing, etc).
I'm not the person you're asking, but I also have an MS in math and the same opinions.
Most mathematicians see N as fundamental -- something any alien race would certainly stumble on and use as a building block for more intricate processes. I think that position is likely but not guaranteed.
N itself is already a strange beast. It arises as some sort of "completion" [0] -- an abstraction that isn't practically useful or instantiatable, only existing to make logic and computations nice. The seeming simplicity and unpredictability of primes is a weird artifact of supposedly an object designed for counting. Most subsets of N can't even be named or described in any language in finite space. Weirder still, there are uncountable objects behaving like N for all practical purposes (see first-order Peano arithmetic).
I would then have a position something along the lines of counting being fundamental but N being a convenient, messy abstraction. It's a computational tool like any of the others.
Even that though isn't a given. What says that counting is the thing an alien race would develop first, or that they wouldn't immediately abandon it for something more befitting of their understanding of reality when they advanced enough to realize the problems? As some candidate alternative substrates for building mathematics, consider:
C: This is untested (probably untestable), but perhaps C showing up everywhere in quantum mechanics isn't as strange as we think. Maybe the universe is fundamentally wavelike, and discreteness is what we perceive when waves interfere. N crops up as a projection of C onto simple boundary conditions, not as a fundamental property of the universe itself, but as an approximate way of describing some part of the universe sometimes.
Computation: Humans are input/output machines. It doesn't make sense to talk about numbers we'll physically never be able to talk about. If naturals are fundamental, why do they have so many encodings? Why do you have to specify which encoding you're using when doing proofs using N? Primes being hard to analyze makes perfect sense when you view N as a residue of some computation; you're asking how the grammatical structure of a computer program changes under multiplication of _programs_. The other paradoxes and strange behaviors of N only crop up when you start building nontrivial computations, which also makes perfect sense; of course complicated programs are complicated.
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My actual position is closer to the idea that none of it is natural, including N. It's the Russian roulette of tooling, with 99 chambers loaded in the forward direction to tackle almost any problem you care about and 1 jammed in pointing straight down at your foot when you look too closely at second-order implications and how everything ties together. Mathematical structures are real patterns in logical space, but "fundamental" is a category error. There's no objective hierarchy, just different computational/conceptual trade-offs depending on what you're trying to do.
[0] When people talk about N being fundamental, they often talk about the idea of counting and discrete objects being fundamental. You don't need N for that though; you need the first hundred, thousand, however many things. You only need N when talking about arbitrary counting processes, a set big enough to definitely describe all possible ways a person might count. You could probably get away with naturals up to 10^1000 or something as an arbitrary, finite primitive sufficient for talking about any physical, discrete process, but we've instead gone for the abstraction of a "completion" conjuring up a limiting set of all possible discrete sets.
N pretty much is "arbitrary-length information theory". As soon as you leave the realm of the finite, you end up with N. I'm not convinced that any alien civilization could get very far mathematically or computationally without reinventing N somewhere, even if unintentionally (e.g, how does one state the halting problem).
I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth the size with American steel could handle.
> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior?
I really wonder what you're comparing with.
Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.
Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.
The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.
And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.
Yes, I should have been more clear there: they could catch up in volume but it will require a different mindset if they want to become a net exporter of such items.
IIRC, violent crime is increased in people pre-disposed to it when they use outlets and substitutes (consuming violent media, etc). That might not translate to pedophilia, but my prior would be that such content existing does cause more CSA to happen.
That's incorrect. There have been studies on this. In a few cases seeing depictions of violence causes an urge to act violently, but in the majority of people predisposed to violence it causes a reduction in that impulse, so on average there's a reduction.
The same has been shown to be the case with depictions of sexual abuse. For some it leads the person to go out and do it. For the majority of those predisposed to be sexual predators it "satisfies" them, and they end up causing less harm.
Presumably the same applies to pedophiles. I remember reading a study on this that suggested this to be the case, but the sample size was small so the statistical significance was weak.
This review [0] is a bit reductionist and overconfident with some of its adjacent claims, but it includes a decent overview of the studies we've done on the topic and references those for further reading. The effect is weak enough at a societal level that it mostly doesn't make sense to consider (and those effect directions are not supportive of your claim of overall reduction if you want to interpret them as strong enough to matter), but when restricted to groups pre-disposed to violence you do see a meaningful increase in violent behaviors.
This was part of the training materials of one bus driver I knew. When people continually take that gap and you continually have to back off, it only adds a negligible amount of time to the commute.
They have qualitatively different sounds and, without significant training or a bit of luck, a break as you transition between those qualitatively different sounds. Even if not a laryngial mode, is it not worth giving that observation a name?
How did that work mechanically though? At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data, even if we only suspected they might possibly not be an adult -- no A/B tests, no ML, no ad targeting, no nada. Did leadership design a system where those sorts of things would happen anyway? Were there just enough rogue teams to cause problems?
For business, government, and religion: achieving scale and centralization necessarily leads to corrupt outcomes. This is also where Marx’s legitimate criticisms of capitalism turn into a solution which is essentially its doppelgänger, a scaled system of corruption with absolute authority with the rhetorical veneer of democracy.
Not just a test set, but enough of a set to search through and compare against. Several pages of in-depth writing isn't anywhere near sufficient, even when limiting the search space to ~10k people.
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