Army brats and peak human performance
I don't watch sports: not the superbowl, and not the Olympics. I did, however, just read a fascinating academic paper: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance by Arne Gallich, Michael Barth, David Z. Hambrick, and Brooke N. Macnamara. Bottom line: if we broadly classify human achievement into three buckets: normal, exceptional, and extreme then, in general, about 90% of the people who fit into the extreme category in adulthood did not fit into the exceptional bucket as youths.
From their summary:
The present literature review synthesizes findings on the development of more than 34,000 adult international top performers in different domains, including Nobel laureates, the most renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world's best chess players. The available evidence suggests a common pattern across domains with three major features. (i) Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time. For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. (ii) Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance. (iii) The pattern of predictors that distinguishes among the highest levels of adult performance is different from the pattern of predictors of early performance. Higher early performance in a domain is associated with larger amounts of discipline-specific practice, smaller amounts of multidisciplinary practice, and faster early discipline specific performance progress. By contrast, across high levels of adult performance, world-class performance in a domain is associated with smaller amounts of discipline-specific practice, larger amounts of early multidisciplinary practice, and more gradual early discipline-specific performance progress. These predictor effects are closely correlated with one another, suggesting a robust pattern.
I did not review either the studies or the data they were working from, but assumed the findings to be real because the analysis seems consistent. Assuming the conclusions are right, there is one obvious lesson here for parents who want their kids to reach their fullest potential: do not push them to focus on one activity or become captive to one set of coaches; but work to ensure, instead, that they're exposed to as much variety as may be possible within some broad performance stream.
Evolution, AI, and Aliens
Evolution can be thought as the process of adaptation to adversity - so once life gets started and the most basic elements of digestion, circulation, and growth get sorted out, further change will be dictated by the challenges it faces. Imagine, therefore, a very primitive life form that just floats around in some kind of primordial soup drawing energy and materials from what it bumps into - think of it as a rod shaped clam like the monster in Star Trek Voyager's "Bliss" episode - and then imagine the nutrient flux around it weakening. In this situation the two extremal choices are rooting versus motility. Organisms that choose rooting implicitly also choose endurance while those opting for mobility need to develop a sensory system to direct that. Pretty obvious, right? except there's a consequence people ignore: the original organism is really the tissues surrounding a digestive system through which it obtains energy from its environment - and that puts the tissue surrounding the digestive system at the absolute top of the evolutionary hierarchy.
As a result what we think of as the brain in mobile forms like worms, birds, or us, is really just a sensory co-processor delegated the job of protecting the body while finding inputs for the stomach and is, correspondingly, always subservient to the needs of the core organism built around that digestive system. This is why a magpie with a brain smaller than a pea can seem seem very intelligent (because it's not doing what you think it is) and also why AI, no matter how smart or independent it gets, will never replace human intelligence - again, because it's doing a very different job for, ultimately, a very different set of masters.
(Note that I am assuming human intelligence as the standard - but, in fact, this is probably wrong. Ours is a highly specialized adaptation and a true artificial general intelligence would not have our limitations. In other words, if the definition of intelligence is tied to the ability to recognize and extend pattern matches with the least possible information, then the machines are going to have a better claim to generality than we do. )
But.. there's a corollary: since the laws of physics are probably the same everywhere, we're going to meet aliens who are just like us: bipedal, "brain" closely attached to the primary sensory cluster, aggressive, and highly adaptive. Why? because what drove us out of the primordial soup, out of the trees, and now out of the atmosphere is adversity - and that process driver is almost certainly universal.
Trump's Golden Battleships
From a war fighting perspective these would be dangerously useless - expensive to build, expensive to operate, and easy targets. From a war avoidance perspective, however, these could be invaluable - ultimate, in your face, symbols of power, prestige, and (oddly enough) restraint.
Climate change
I regularly read The Manhattan Contrarian. He recently did a series about the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for the judiciary, from which he drew a long quotation and from which I then took the bit below:
However, researchers can also use a mechanistic approach to attribution, whereby they seek to examine how climate change has influenced one or more physical characteristics of an event or process. Mechanistic studies can provide insights on, for example, the change in magnitude or severity of an extreme event that can be attributed to climate change. In the rainfall example above, a mechanistic approach might look at the weather system that produced the heavy rain and describe how one part of climate change that we understand well - e.g., the warming of the atmosphere and its resulting increase in the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold contributed to the event.
He describes the bit from which this is drawn as "a torrent of meaningless verbiage." In contrast I think (and Kincaid et al agree), that it's quite well written but the key issue here is that the Contrarian missed the forest for the trees in completely failing to notice the absolute shibboleth for liberal delusion embedded in the passage.
There is a very normal, very human, problem in science (or any other area of experience, like systems management) in that we neither notice nor question the things we are completely sure of - no matter how wrong they are. In this case the authors write: "how one part of climate change that we understand well - e.g., the warming of the atmosphere and its resulting increase in the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold" and so conflate the scientific fact that warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air, with their belief that the atmosphere is warming - which it isn't.
I know it isn't because, about six years ago, I tested the warming hypothesis in a simple way you can easily duplicate for yourself. Weather occurs in the troposphere and warm air expands; so, if the earth were warming, the troposphere should show a long term trend toward a combination of expansion and higher pressure. The NOAA Archive offers radiosonde data back to about 1905 with arguably usable worldwide coverage from the end of WWII on. Since the data shows neither a consistent increase in tropospheric depth, nor one in tropospheric pressure, there can have been no consistent warming.
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