chaosCruiser

Thanks. The number is already a bit overwhelming. Hopefully, I’ll get better at handling that feeling.

Yes, but what if they’re also infuriating enough. I have very mixed feelings about that number.

Oh, the sports games. Those are a special breed! I think it was NHL 95 or something when I realized that they are pumping these games every year and hardly anything changes in between. Always made me wonder who pays for this trash. Just walk to the nearest game store, buy a used 4 year old NHL of FIFA game, and you’re all set for a long time.

I don’t know how that would work nowadays since steam games are a thing. I guess you just wait for the -90% discount and buy the NHL/FIFA 2019 or whatever.

My thoughts exactly. Since the 2010s EA has been going down the dark path of lootboxes and micro transactions, so there’s literally nothing left to save any more. I’m sure they’re going to find new and profitable ways to enshittify the company even further, but it’s been just total shit for such a long time already that nothing will change the general stench.

And so it begins…

The era of global web comes to an end and we enter the age of fragmented local webs.

Biology is actually heading in a very good direction now that DNA sequencing is cheap, proteomix is being established and so on. Psychologists aren't so lucky with their fuzzy fMRI images and extra fuzzy terms and largely opinion based models. At the moment, the complexity of the human mind is just overwhelming and psychologists are struggling to produce even the simplest qualitative results.

While biology can't really categorize species in a consistent manner, at least we know what the basic building blocks are. In psychology, all you have is a collection of conflicting opinions about what the basic blocs could be. Check back in a 100 years and pretty much everything has been redefined several times. I can imagine it's a bit like what happened with taxonomy once we started sequencing everything.

We can’t even give a solid definition of what life is, let alone how to divide that into species in a reliable and consistent way. Biology is a really messy science and strict definitions just don’t cut it. There are always exceptions and edge cases that violate the rules we come up with. So yes, this applies to all life, not just eukaryotes. Bonus points for those who can name situations where we’ve tried to classify complex things and failed to come up with anything that works perfectly.

Biology is just far too complex for simple rules like that. Whatever appealing definitions you come up with are always rough and inaccurate. If you expect a biology definition to always work in every situation, you’re going to be disappointed. This isn’t the kind of simple matter where simple definitions are possible. Spoiler: there are many.

The whole idea of a species is flawed, but not useless. Treat it accordingly.

Humans just love to put things into neat and tidy boxes even though reality is messy and complex. Real life just will never fit perfectly into a box you define, unless you make the box as big as the universe. Broad definitions like that aren’t very appealing to humans, so they prefer narrower definitions instead. This approach comes with a problem - edge cases.

The concepts of a species is one of these problematic definitions. It’s too narrow to work perfectly, but it’s still useful as rule of thumb sort of idea.

Humans have made countless definitions that are expected to squeeze a kraken sized complexity into a tiny cardboard box. It’s never going to work perfectly, but it can still work well enough to be useful. I suggest you treat the whole idea a of a species as a fuzzy concept without any exact borders. As soon as you treat it as an exact thing, you will run into problems.

What is or isn’t alive? What belongs into this particular species? It’s a but fuzzy, and the closer you get to the edges, the fuzzier it gets. Don’t expect to find any clarity there. Instead, you can expect strict definitions to fail in places like that.

A good rule of thumb in statistics is that a sample size of about 30 will give you some idea of the standard deviation. Anything less than that, and your analysis is on shaky ground. In logistics terms, all you need to get started is just one truck load of anti-vaxxers.

It’s still in its infancy. Give it a few centuries. Back in the 1400s physics was still full of opinions rather than theories backed up by empirical experiments. Economics hasn’t even figured out what the elementary particles or fundamental forces really are or how to measure them. That’s why all the models are pretty vague and qualitative at the moment.

Economics is a messy science where you’re constantly dealing with messy data. There are always several variables at play, and their countless interactions make interpretations super tricky. You can’t really make controlled double blind experiments to isolate the effect of a specific variable.

With observational incident reports you can only get a list of symptoms and a very rough range of exposure. If you want something more detailed than that, you need a proper LD50 study.