I mean, if you were trying to escape a mind-trap, wouldn’t you be inclined to try to move straight away from it? Unless they somehow manage to figure out a better escape trajectory, it seems natural that trying to escape would make it worse.

It’s like a biological finger trap set for species that aren’t particularly renown for their problem solving.

Holy shit, no wonder the insect biomass has reduced so much. Imagine how many insects we trap for entire nights with just something as simple as a streetlight. Forget about a few weeks of highway construction with flood lights at night. I’d imagine that causes a lot of them to starve, or just fail to mate, or exposes them to predation. Poor things.

Yet another atrocity caused by the ignorance and callousness of humanity. We have so much potential but we are just a fucking wrecking ball right now, creating concentrated suffering literally just for a little extra comfort and convenience. It’s so gross.

We really need to figure out how to do something to give back to the rest of this planet and start to turn things the other way. Not just to save our own asses, but because right now our species is absolutely monstrous. We have potential, sure, but we really need to get over our greed and cruelty like, yesterday.

That poor pig. :(

Here’s the actual article this one is a lazy rewrite of.

https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-have-nearly-300-facial-expressions

I think morality is largely a matter of frame of reference. When humans look at morality, more often than not they’re not looking to completely redesign the society they live in, but to act morally within that context. There are going to be parts of that context that are more or less taken for granted, and while it may be more moral to investigate and seek to change these cultural and environmental conditions, that’s not the only avenue for moral behavior.

Someone who lives in the context of their culture and does their best to help others within that context rather than by seeking to eradicate the conditions that cause the suffering may still be argued to be acting in a positive way morally. It may be that snuffing out the root cause of a particular plight is outside of their reach, while lending assistance to those who suffer from it is much more achievable. Especially if they would ostensibly support such a change, it’s hard to find major fault for not setting their sights high enough or risking enough on a presumed positive outcome.

So if I were looking for moral actors in other species, I’d start by looking for instances of aberrations from more or less species-wide behaviors that lean toward the cruel side. I don’t think looking to the behavior as a species as a whole is necessarily the place to start.

Frankly, I don’t think that humans should typically be viewed as remotely ‘moral’ on a species-wide level when considering their collective behaviors. We’ve turned torture and oppression into a science in a way that other species don’t come anywhere close to. We’ve created cultures that focus the entirety of their energy on consolidating power as much as humanly possible, favoring parasitizing laborers and artisans to extract as much value as possible with no regard for the creations of human hands of the needs of human bodies and minds.

The idea of a human judging any species on this planet on a moral basis is absurd.

We only just noticed that Europa is probably a good candidate for life and it’s been in our back yard forever. Saying we have no evidence for life in the universe is like saying that someone with vision too blurry to read signs sees no evidence of life across the street. Like, okay, but that doesn’t really tell us much of anything.

Our sky scanning is also looking for radio waves, which is probably not a great candidate for finding advanced life outside of our own neighborhood.

I feel like their argument against it probably needs a little unpacking.

It seems a little disingenuous to me to only examine a model where carbon emissions don’t decrease and then attribute the result to the shield. If the shield is used in addition to reducing our carbon output we’d presumably be cooling things off in both the short and long term.

The result of failing to reduce our carbon emissions is already projected to be essentially apocalyptic in scope. The rest of the planet might luck out if our own actions reduce us to a population that we’re physically incapable of continuing to output enough carbon to keep warming it, but human civilization certainly doesn’t seem like it can survive keeping it up at the very least.

If we do get it together push against the wishes of the greediest humans and act as responsible stewards of the planet, it would be smart to try to save as much as possible. If a solar shield can help protect our biodiversity and the stability of our civilization while we get our collective shit together, that’s fantastic. It may even bring with it a sense of urgency and collective responsibility to fix the problem before anything happens to our buffer.

I get the arguments about the rapidity of change if the shield fails and the difficulty of animals migrating much more quickly, but if something doesn’t give soon they’re not going to have much of anywhere to migrate anyway.

At what point does the potential benefit of the shield outweigh the risk?

If I’m falling out of an airplane and my chute is kinda lopsided or whatever in a way that might strangle me if i don’t get my head out of the way, am I just going to let myself hit the ground instead? Or am I going to take the shot I’ve got and make the most of it?

We’re in freefall and the ground is down there somewhere, rapidly coming up to make friends. We need something now.

If this is it I say we take it. And we let it be the act that prompts us to be responsible with our planet.

I honestly don’t know much about typical Japanese eating habits, but could this be more about what they’re eating instead of those carbs?

Like, if it’s anything like the US I wouldn’t be surprised to see numbers like this simply because the non-carb food is probably mostly meat in the case of men and mostly veggies in the case of women. I don’t really have numbers on percent of meat versus veggies in a diet on average by gender, but there certainly seems to at least be some culturally imposed presumptions of men gruffly devouring steaks and women laughing at salad.

If most of your diet is meat and you cut back on carbs only to eat yet more meat, you’re probably not going to be as healthy as someone who eats a ton of veggies. Likewise, replacing vegetables with carbs probably sucks for your health.

Some things have become impossible to search for because of this. Like, i was curious if there might have been fossils found in pre-technological eras and if maybe they were related to the presumption of some mythological creature, but the moment I start trying to search anything about it every single link is some creationist insisting that humans and dinosaurs lived together a few centuries ago or something.

The Internet has become a bit polluted.

There was some German study a few years back that found that the insect biomass in the air had declined by 75% in the span of a decade. As someone else mentioned, the windshield splatter effect speaks to that issue being much wider spread.

With a major food source gone on top of the pressures of climate change itself, that’s not going to look great for birds.

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I think it’s a mistake to too firmly attach aggression to one specific behavioral origin, which I believe is what the study is getting at to begin with. There are certainly forms of aggression that are rooted in defensive behaviors that aren’t well thought out, as well as deliberate and methodical forms of aggression. It’s certainly a misapprehension to assume that all aggression is a result of being unable to control oneself, which does have some implications for how we should be dealing with it.

If, for example, we look at every abuser through the assumption that they simply can’t control themselves rather than that they’ve got a maladaptive way of viewing the world and interacting with others that leads them to use aggression in order to exercise control, we’re likely going to take the wrong steps to try to change that situation.