Toggle’s Law

There was a Tumblr post going around last year that I rather liked.  It was tongue in cheek, a joke about applying the Gaia hypothesis to human evolution and concluding that humanity was Gaia’s way of clearing its buildup of subsurface hydrocarbons.  Just a fun bit of climate change gallows humor, but it sorta stuck with me.

The Gaia hypothesis as such is more ‘fun story’ than solid science, but in a weaker and more rigorous form it can sometimes get taken fairly seriously.  Less “the Earth is a giant organism” and more “feedback mechanisms in a complex biosphere seem to stabilize the system more often than they destabilize it.”  Probably you could rephrase the statement in statistical mechanics terms and show how it’s necessary or obvious?  But anyway, I started to think about human intelligence in those terms and I think actually it’s somewhat true in an interesting way.

Many of the tools to which we owe civilization (wood, coal, oil) basically come down to a proficiency in finding big reservoirs of complex organic molecules and exploiting the energy gradient.  And those reservoirs in turn tend to get big because brains are better at finding those particular reservoirs than is ‘mere’ natural selection.  Consider coal.  We had a big potential energy source literally just lying around for several hundred million years, which is biology’s favorite thing ever, but it turns out that the easiest way to turn that in to more biology was through the intermediary of intelligence, rather than (as one might naively expect) a super fancy microbe or something.

The other thing that wood, coal, and oil have in common is that they’re biogenic.  That is, they have their origin in a biological system.  It’s rather fascinating, actually: biogenic, but not bioavailable.  There’s an analogy to encryption.  It seems that for any given biological process, there’s a nonzero chance that it moves carbon from an ‘accessible’ state to an ‘encrypted’ state that can’t be readily processed back into the larger dynamic ecosystem.  Maybe permanently, maybe just a really long wait on evolutionary timescales.

Add these together, and you get the observation that life tends to hide energy from itself on geologic time, creating barriers that are (in some fraction of cases) far more tractable to cognition than they are to natural selection.  What’s more, it seems pretty likely that this is a fully general situation.  In the spirit of wildly overconfident aristocrat-scholars from the Enlightenment, I’m going to declare this an immutable law of nature and name it after myself.  Toggle’s Law may be stated thusly: In a mature biosphere, the marginal utility of intelligence must increase with time.

As usual, all bets are off once civilization kicks in; I kept trying to think of how to incorporate humans into this, but I think it’s worth giving up the generality for the sake of pith.  I’m also phrasing it for maximum optimism, emphasizing the ways in which this trend creates pressures towards minds and advanced thinking.  The pessimistic version would be more entropic, something like “in a closed biosphere, the fraction of bioavailable nutrients will tend towards zero.”  But even in the total absence of higher intelligence, probably that’s slow enough that something else will sterilize your planet first (e.g. the death of your star).

That morbid digression aside, I find Toggle’s Law to be rather cheerful.  It’s nice to think about the ways in which the cosmos might be quietly seeding the worlds with little toys and playgrounds, like a patient teacher waiting for its students to finally hit that moment of understanding.

Human civilization is just a symbiotic relationship between organic and inorganic matter to reduce a built up concentration of energy.

Chemosynthesis, photosynthesis, predation, decaying wood, burning fossil fuels: a side effect of life is the storage of waste energy in a way that is currently hard to exploit, but life also tries to exploit stored energy. We aren’t an exception to this cycle.

uranium deposits and asteroid mining are hopefully two things we’ll take full advantage of before the bacteria do.

Look I'm going to be really upset if Coronavirus starts mining asteroids before we do

#WEAPONIZEDCANCER

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Bad: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, but nobody picks up on it for various implausible reasons.

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

“Literally everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose,” said the woman sitting across from me in our candlelit dinner. “The superheroes know it. The villains know it. The guy on the street knows it. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon know it. The Enquirer doesn’t break the mask code when they print your picture because they don’t even bother mentioning who you are. If I need to have conversations with you pretending not to know that Bruce is the ‘Goose, we’re going to be the only two people on the planet pretending that.”

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything - never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

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i was reading about the myth of prometheus today when the phrase "new liver, same eagles" popped into my mind, so i'm keeping that in mind for the next time someone asks me how it's going

periodic reordering of the alphabet on the basis of polled letter popularity

the alphabet is now sorted based on activity in your feed,

wait, better idea: feed is sorted alphabetically

that would just lead to a million posts beginning with aaaaaaaaaaaaah

You don't get it, we're not sorting the posts, but the entire feed letter-by-letter.

The fact that Sherlock Holmes in the books canonically doesn’t believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun is friggin wild

this is perhaps the single greatest example of the level of shit Watson has to put up with on a regular basis

So is it just me, or does every new owner of Tumblr getting announced feel like we’re getting a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?

I love when this app just closes itself on me like you’re right thank you

My exploding galaxy brain take is that part of the political weirdness of the moment is that very large numbers of young men don’t want to be traditionally masculine anymore but the mainstream left massively values traditional masculinity and sees deviation from it as shameful and inexplicable.

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I absolutely refuse to believe this many people on tumblr were “the smart kid” in school

the trouble is that most of tumblr is Weirdness Georg. 

unless you live in a big city, american high schools tend towards the small side; american primary schools even more so. if you’re going to a high school that only has maybe 400 students (and you’re mostly in classes with people in the same age, cutting that number down even more), there’s not gonna be that much competition for the role of ‘the smart kid’ to begin with.

then you count out the kids that do not want to be in school, the kids that have no real interest in academic subjects, the kids that don’t want to seem smart because that means they have high expectations, and so on.

and then you factor in that a disproportionate amount of tumblr users aren’t exactly neurotypical- and factor in that, often, autism makes kids look like “little professors” when they’re very young, and autistic kids are much more book-smart than their peers til they hit late adolescence and everyone else catches up.

like… disbelieve it all you want, but when you’ve got a very big weird fish in a very small pond, it doesn’t matter what that fish would be if you threw it in the ocean.  

I question the empirical claim about school size.  Most Americans who don’t live in big cities live in suburbs, not small towns.  My high school in Massachusetts was about 1,000 students.  My kids’ high school in Virginia is significantly bigger than that.  Both are suburban, not urban.

And lo, the Department of Education backs me up:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/overview/table05.asp

(Side note - my HS graduating class had a bizarre bimodal distribution of ability with a large number of delinquents and a large number of exceptionally gifted people.  Psychologically, apparently being a smart kid is very different when you are surrounded by other smart kids - I really can’t relate to the smart kid complaints that other people make on Tumblr.  And I got to my [extremely competitive] university only to discover that the average student was less impressive than the average student in my high school honors classes.)

I’m not convinced that “the smart kid” means “the actual smartest kid in school,” though. I think a more accurate reading would be something along the lines of “kid who didn’t run into any contemporaries conspicuously smarter than them in school on a regular basis,” which could probably describe about the top 5-10% of any given school in terms of academic ability.

Or even "kid who's defining trait was their smartness", so the smart kid who also got along with everyone else, was good at sports, and was generally a spectacular but typical kid wouldn't be "the smart kid".

nobody on GBBO – not even the judges!!! – seems to know the difference between macaroons and macarons and that drives me absolutely batty

so I’m not part of the problem:

macaroons (double o) are chewy coconut cookies, sometimes also including almonds or condensed milk. they look like this. macarons (single o) are a meringue sandwich cookies, often rendered in a variety of bright colors. they look like this. 

Also not to be confused with Macron, who is the president of France and should not be eaten.

IM LAUGHING SO HARD I DIDNT THINK SEXUAL DESIRE WAS A REAL THING LIKE I ALWAYS SAW PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY WANTED SEX BUT I THOUGHT THEY WERE JOKING OR EXAGGERATING OR SOMETHING THATS WHY IT WAS SO HARD FOR ME TO REALIZE I WAS ACE BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT WENT WITHOUT SAYING SEX ISNT THAT IMPORTANT IM 19 YEARS OLD I CANT STOP LAUGHING LITERALLY 99% OF THE POPULATION EXPERIENCES SEXUAL DESIRE AND I THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE

This is pretty much the definition of being an ace person, tbh, and I’m so glad.

#I thought it was an exaggeration for literal years (via sonickitty)

this is literally the #that sounds fake but okay meme im dying

#ME#I THOUGHT SEXUAL ATTRACTION WAS RARE#AKA#HOW TO FIND OUT YOU’RE DEMI (via @miseryauthoress)

Honestly, every single cheating plotline never made sense because “but why do you have to have sex with them? just don’t??”

^^^^ Every single cheating plot line ever I was like: What is so hard about keeping your pants on what is your problem??

…do you have any idea how hard it is to do literary criticism that will get published when your reaction to at least 75% of character motivations is this makes no sense whatsoever why do they even care? 

When people ask you why you don’t date someone just to try, and when you answer that well you’re not interested in that person, they explain that usually you don’t like the person at first, but you might fall in love after having dated a little while

and you’re just?????? but what?????????? is the point of dating someone if you don’t like them?????????????? 

what do you mean the point is making out and sex????????? why would i want to do that with someone i don’t already like?????????

I have literally experienced all of these.

my realizations laid out before me. xD;;;

this is adjacent to the Bi Realization of like “oh my god… there are people who… only like… ONE gender??? like, at all? Ever?!?!!?”

Yeah like I know baby boomers who talk like this and you can kind of just tell they don’t have the words and the self acceptance to realize this sorta thing is what’s happening

A lot of these problems would go away if our society and upbringing didn’t heavily over-emphasize the practice of trying to understand other people’s experiences by analogy to our own. If there were more focus on listening to people and accepting that people’s experience can differ from our own, a lot of this stuff might be easier for people to understand. And this could help people with rare or minority sexual and romantic orientations to realize these orientations (and have them be respected by others too!)

reminds me of people who can’t smell not realising for ages. I think i read a story of someone who couldn’t smell but would still make fun of their sister for having smelly feet, because they thought that’s what you say about feet and didn’t realise there was an actual unpleasant sensation that came with it.

*What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?* on SSC is probably where you read it, although the story is originally from a Quora answer.

The accuracy and precision is unparalleled 

Opposite vibe

My favorite part about the second gif is the tiny little head shake she does before drinking. It conveys so much internal disappointment.

Was anyone going to tell me that the warhammer lore is super interesting

Or was i supposed to find out from wanting to play total war three kingdoms and not being able to afford it so getting a cheaper total war game.

(i’ve just started a campaign as the lizardmen in total war: warhammer 2 and already i’m super into the society dynamics. Seems to be aztec inspired by the names and the crown, but also got some of the khajiit stuff of having lots of different body types (and also mental abilities) that gradually vary rather than just ‘human level and then big jump down to animal level’ like we do now, but makes me wonder about when other species of humans were still around.)

Is Warhammer Fantasy actually super interesting? I never read much of it; I was only into 40k. I saw there were various concepts that carried over, but it just seemed… I dunno, it didn’t grab me.

But was it secretly super cool this whole time? Does it have the same bombast as 40k? Or is it more straightforward and less over-the-top?

I don’t know anything about warhammer i just got into it. The stuff about the society i found interesting as premises, i don’t know how fleshed out/ well it’s going to end up.

I also just now learned that warhammer 40k and warhammer fantasy are different things. is the blood for the blood god stuff in 40k or this fantasy? or is that something else entirely?

Most everything you would've heard about Warhammer is 40k unless you specifically went looking for Warhammer Fantasy. Anyway, the lore on Orks is very entertaining and you should read it.

lesbians who prefer to use he/him pronouns are valid - for example, God

There is something unspeakably powerful about this post it carries an energy