Underrated reasons to be thankful V
That your dog, while she appears to love you only because she’s been adapted by evolution to appear to love you, really does love you. That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have, and thus complex life can persist in a universe with increasing entropy. That if we wanted to, we surely could figure out which of the 300-ish strains of rhinovirus are circulating in a given area at a given time and rapidly vaccinate people to stop it and thereby finally “cure” the common cold, a
dynomight · Nov 2025 · lists That your dog, while she appears to love you only because she’s been adapted by evolution to appear to love you, really does love you. That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several b
related reading
- Underrated reasons to be thankfuldynomight.net
- What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?davidgraeber.org
- What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?thebaffler.com
- Thou Art Godshatter — LessWronglesswrong.com
- Meditations On Molochslatestarcodexabridged.com
- 100 Tips for a Better Life — LessWronglesswrong.com
- Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
- The Algernon Argument · Gwern.netgwern.net
- Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn't you?owlposting.com
- Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun — LessWronglesswrong.com
- nickbostrom.com/evolutionary-optimality.pdfnickbostrom.com
- Mailbag #2 — Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com